“Did you think I was making a request, Salim?” my father snapped, before Sikander’s fists could go to work.
I wished I could have honestly said that little barbs like that didn’t hurt, but they did, even after all these years. I gritted my teeth, biting back a hundred angry responses in favor of the only one that mattered.
“What I think, Father,” I said, lingering on that word, reminding him of the relationship he had so often denied, “is that if you are going to leave me here in this province to die, you could at least let me choose a bodyguard I can trust.”
My father had been on the verge of shouting something at me, but he suddenly reared back in shock and confusion. He exchanged quizzical glances with Sikander, who seemed as befuddled by my words as my father was. When my father spoke, his voice was tinged with astonishment as he asked, “You really think you can’t trust Sikander?”
I looked at the man in question, who seemed genuinely surprised—and annoyed—that I doubted his loyalty. Once upon a time, I’d never have dared do any such thing. When I was little, he had held my hand wherever we went. He had led me through the markets of the city, making sure I never got lost or hurt. He had threatened with death any who had dared to look at me cross-eyed. He had driven the monsters from my bedchambers, and the fear from stormy nights. But then, one day, when I was seven, I’d worn a pretty green peshwaz that had belonged to my cousin Sidra, and she’d told the harem servitors, who had told my father. And after that day, nothing was ever the same again.
“How can I trust with my safety the man who spent most of my life beating me bloody simply for existing?” I asked, my voice colder and more measured than I would have thought possible, given the roiling emotions straining against the walls of my chest. “How can I trust his hands to keep me safe, when all I’ve ever known from them is pain?”
My questions were met with a deafening silence. I’d half expected my father to mock me, to deride my effeminacy all over again, to tell me how richly deserved those beatings had been, but instead he just stood there, slack-jawed, like he’d genuinely forgotten all the reasons I’d had for running away from home at the age of thirteen. And Sikander, he looked down at his hands, as I’d known he would, and saw them balled up and ready to strike. All that self-righteous anger went out of him like a deflating bellows, leaving his muscular chest hollowed and his massive shoulders slumped.
“If I’m going to have a captain for my guards, I want it to be a man who has never beaten me, Father,” I continued. “I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”
My father stood there in silence, and for a moment, I thought that I had won. But then the familiar excuses came. “Everything Sikander did, he did at my command.”
“I know,” I replied, looking right into my father’s eyes, letting him see what I knew. My own father had hated me so much that he’d tried to have my soul beaten out of my body when I was too young to understand, let alone fight back.
“What you need doesn’t matter,” my father said, so dismissively that it made my blood boil. “What I need is a strong man to lead the soldiers here. They will not follow a whore—especially not one who was supposed to be a prince.”
“Forgive me, Father,” I said, managing to keep my voice steady even though my body was trembling with emotion, “but did you intend for Sikander to be my bodyguard or my jailer?”
“You are the subahdar of Zindh, but Sikander will command the men I leave behind,” my father replied, which told me all too clearly whom he had intended to leave in charge.
“A subahdar with no troops is no subahdar,” I hissed.
“Sikander will command the soldiers, and I will hear no more about it, especially not here in front of my men.” He nodded to the soldiers, who were still sitting in rigid rows on the backs of their zahhaks. I didn’t know how much they could hear of our conversation, but however much they heard was almost certainly too much. My effeminacy was no longer a closely guarded secret in the Nizami court. Everyone knew what I was. But having heard a rumor and seeing me argue with my father while clad in a peshwaz and dupatta were two very different things. If his men lost confidence in him as a leader because of me, the results would be disastrous for both of us. That was why he was leaving Sikander here. Because I was too much of a disgrace for any soldier to obey.
“For once in your life, just do as you’re told, Razia,” my father growled before I could reply.
I understood the points he was making, but I couldn’t give in to them, not if I wanted to have a chance here. “I am the subahdar of Zindh, Father. If you insist on leaving Sikander here, then I must insist on his oath to follow my orders, not the other way around.”
“He will command the troops, but he will obey you in everything,” my father assured me. It surprised me that he gave in so easily. He nodded to Sikander. “Won’t you?”
“I will, your majesty,” Sikander said. He turned and bowed to me in the perfunctory way he always had back in Nizam, the gesture one of necessity rather than respect. “I swear that I will obey your
