“Then you know why I must go to Ahura,” I replied. “Lakshmi is eleven. She’s the same age I was when . . .” My voice caught in my throat as fear and rage rose up to close off my windpipe. The thought of Karim touching her . . . I just couldn’t bear it. It made me squeeze my fists with an impotent rage that needed to find an outlet or I thought I might explode.
“We’ll get her,” Arjun assured me, his warm hand landing on my shoulder. The strength I felt in his fingers helped me to relax a little. With Arjun here, and Haider, and Tamara, and Hina, and Saskshi too, we would be able to save her.
“Then we should move,” I said. “There’s not much time. It’s an eight-hour flight to Ahura, and if we don’t leave now, then we won’t make it before sunrise, I don’t think.”
“With thunder zahhaks, flying flat-out, we can make it in six,” Haider corrected. “I can lead you there. Ahura was a Safavian island until recently, after all.”
“Then lead on, your highness,” I replied, nodding to Roshanak, the thunder zahhak who had been staring at me the whole time, waiting for me to pet her, no doubt wondering why I was spending so much of my time lavishing my attention on human men.
I was surprised when Haider shook his head. “We can’t just go flying in there. I left it earlier today, having watched to see what forces Ahmed Shah could bring to bear, and the news isn’t good. He has at least a dozen fire zahhaks from Jesera in addition to the dozen or so acid zahhaks.”
“Twenty-four?” Tamara gasped, having stood by listening this whole time. “There’s no way we could defeat so many, Razia, and he would chase after you.”
“If we can’t defeat them, then we’re all dead,” Sakshi reminded her. “Razia killed Karim’s mother with a cannon. We captured their fortresses. They won’t let this stand. Lakshmi will be executed and Sikander too, and then we’ll all be next. We have no choice but to fight, whatever the odds.”
Hina sighed, having stood by with her Zindhi comrades, listening to all this. “If only our river zahhaks had breath like a thunder zahhak or a fire zahhak, we’d have them outnumbered.”
“Maybe we can,” I said, the plan having formed in my mind the moment I saw Sunil Kalani shooting arrows at the Mahisagari guardsmen from his animal’s back.
“What do you mean?” Hina asked.
“It’s nonsense,” Sunil Kalani muttered. “She’s not a sorceress.”
“It’s not nonsense!” boomed a deep voice standing near the fire zahhaks. We all looked over to see Udai Agnivansha, maharaja of Bikampur, striding toward us. “It means the girl has a plan, fool! And when Razia Khanum has a plan, you listen.”
My cheeks burned, but I couldn’t suppress a smile all the same, my heart swelling with pride. I bowed my head. “Thank you for coming to me in my time of need, your majesty.”
“You’re family,” he replied, putting a big, weather-beaten hand on my shoulder. “Now, what’s this plan of yours to gift a fire zahhak’s breath to a river zahhak?”
“It’s right there, your majesty,” I replied, nodding to one of the swivel guns that was leaning up against a tree, its barrel cast to resemble the neck and head of a fire zahhak, its beak yawning wide to spew flames. “Those swivel guns can be reloaded from the breech, they weigh less than Lakshmi or Nuri, and Hina says that a river zahhak can fly with a small passenger. So, instead of passengers, what if we put those cannons on the fronts of the river zahhaks’ saddles?”
Hina’s hazel eyes went wide with wonder. “That might work . . .”
But Sunil Kalani shook his head. “You’d never hit anything with it, your majesty. Combat in the air happens too quickly. We’ve tried it with our rifles for years. We know it doesn’t work.”
“But the cannon is different, Sunil,” Hina told him. “It shoots a spray of musket balls, a pattern the size of a man. You don’t have to aim exactly—if you just point it in the right direction, a whole swath of sky will be filled with a pound of lead.”
“But you can’t fly and aim at the same time,” Sunil protested. “We’ve tried this!”
“Sunil is right, your majesty,” Sanghar agreed, though he sounded reluctant to admit it. “You’d never be able to maneuver against the enemy and draw a bead on them, especially not with something as heavy as a cannon.”
“So we don’t let it move,” I said, drawing confused looks. Of course they were confused, they’d never flown thunder zahhaks or fire zahhaks before, they didn’t understand how it worked.
Sakshi did. She exclaimed, “Of course! You treat it just like a thunder zahhak!”
Hina cocked her head, surprised that Sakshi could see what she didn’t, despite her many more years of experience on the back of a zahhak. “I don’t understand . . .”
“When you dogfight with a zahhak, you don’t aim their neck to shoot at an enemy, you aim the whole zahhak,” I explained. “You fly at the enemy and only when you’re pointed at them do you shoot. If you put the cannon in a fixed position, so that it always shot its pattern straight ahead, say at a distance of a hundred yards in front of your zahhak’s nose, then all you would have to do is point the zahhak at your opponent and pull the trigger.”
Hina, Sanghar, and Sunil all stared at one another, mulling that over. It was Hina who asked, “Well?”
Sunil shrugged, but Sanghar said, “It could work, your majesty.”
“Well, there’s one way to find out,” Hina declared. She walked over to the cannon, picked it up, and brought it to her zahhak. When nobody else moved, she snapped, “Well, don’t just stand there, help me get this thing mounted properly!”
While dozens of Zindhi men
