I swallowed against the bile rising up in my throat, and tried my best to keep my face impassive. Showing him fear now would be a mistake. “Well,” I forced myself to ask, my voice far calmer and more collected than I felt, “what are you waiting for, then? This is the best chance you’ve had in years, and Sikander looks desperate to put his sword to work.”
My father shook his head, but the expression of disgust didn’t leave his face. “No,” he said, “that would be too easy. After what you did, killing my subahdar, slaughtering his army and his zahhaks, humiliating me in front of my enemies, I have something far worse planned for you.”
My heart skipped a beat as I wondered if I hadn’t underestimated my father’s anger. Was he going to torture me, then? Why the ruse of making me a subahdar if a slow death had been his goal all along? Why bring me here and sit me beside his throne like he intended to follow through on his promises?
I arched an eyebrow, hoping I looked intrigued rather than terrified, and asked, “Oh? What is my fate to be, then?”
“You’re going to clean up your mess,” he answered, and I had to fight back a sigh of relief. He gestured to the palace around us, to the dirty pits that were half-filled with rainwater. “Did you think being made the subahdar of Zindh was a reward?”
“Far from it, Father,” I replied, as I’d been thinking of nothing these last few weeks but the struggles I would face here, and I was sure there would be plenty more waiting for me that I hadn’t considered. “But you didn’t leave me much choice, did you?”
He smirked. “No. And now that you are a princess”—his tongue lingered on the word like it was a curse—“you’ll find that you have precious few choices left, Razia.” My name was pure poison in his mouth, but it was the implied threat that caught my attention—the threat of being under his thumb for the rest of my life.
“You’ll need a bigger army than the one you’ve brought if you expect me to confine myself to the zenana like a fire-worshipper’s wife, Father,” I warned him, as there was no way I was going to let him force me to hide myself away in the women’s quarters, seeing the world only through jali screens, forced to issue my orders through servants and handmaidens. If that was to be my fate, I would go back to Bikampur, where at least I would be safe and happy.
My father stroked his mustache, his eyes flickering over my face, still taking my measure. “You’ve changed.”
Those weren’t the words I’d expected to hear from him, and I felt my cheeks burn, but not from embarrassment. From pride. Changing myself was what I’d wanted most when I’d left Nizam four and a half years ago.
“I have,” I agreed, because whatever my faults, I wasn’t the scared little prince I’d been when he’d known me, not anymore. My time in Bikampur had forged me into something altogether different.
“All the same, you’re going to have your work cut out for you here,” he informed me, his tone becoming more businesslike, less scornful. It was a familiar pattern. Back home he’d always alternated between rage at my effeminacy and seriousness about the practical lessons he had to impart.
“I can see that,” I muttered, nodding to the empty stone pits ringing the courtyard, to the complete lack of any servants save his soldiers. This place looked more like a ruin than a palace.
“If I were you, I’d waste less time worrying over the beauty of your palace and more time worrying over the state of your province,” he snapped.
It was just the kind of unfair thing he’d always said to me back home, twisting my words to make me sound like some effeminate moron. “If you have reports from scouts and from zamindars on the state of the province that are so urgent, why waste all this time with empty threats and tired insults, Father?”
“Do you even know anything about Zindh?” he demanded.
My spine stiffened and my jaw clenched. Somehow, I’d let myself forget these little tests of his. My whole childhood he’d made me parrot facts and figures from every province in the empire. He’d made me recite the history of Lahanur and the religious practices of Vanga, and woe be to me if I made the slightest error. But the anger left as quickly as it came. Those lessons had saved my life, had given me the power to claw my way out of the sewer and back into the skies. God help me, I was actually grateful to the man.
But even if I had changed, he hadn’t—or at least not as much. He was still waiting for me to parrot those facts, to prove that I understood the province he had given me to rule.
I crossed my arms over my chest, letting him see how annoyed I was at being treated like a child, but I gave him what he wanted, the summary that my tutor would have demanded from me. “Zindh is the most difficult province in the empire to protect. Safavia and Khuzdar threaten its western border, Durrania its northern one, and Registan lies directly to the east, to say nothing of the fact that it is completely open to attack by sea on its southern coastline where it borders Mahisagar. Worse, it is one of the wealthiest provinces in the empire owing to the indigo trade, but one of the least populated owing to the deserts that surround it, making its defense even more difficult.”
“That’s half the picture,” my father agreed, my understanding of matters having tamed his temper somewhat, “but the internal affairs of
