Page 101 of The Jasad Crown

To her credit, her first strike nearly caught him by surprise. Low and diagonal, a well-met aim would slash him open from right shoulder to left hip. Arin twisted out of the way, and in the same movement, pulled a dagger the size of his longest finger from his coat and threw.

It embedded itself a hairsbreadth away from her foot. She froze, and Arin said, “Your first and only warning. You bend your knees before you swing; it gives you away and instructs me of the direction you intend to pursue.”

Sylvia yanked the dagger out of the dirt without taking her eyes off him and tucked it into her boot. “Still fond of throwing knives, are you?”

“Only when my target is so very good at catching them.”

Arin flipped his sword to block her blow, the clang of metal music between them. Asserting enough force against her sword to keep it raised, he marched her against the wall and pinned her sword beneath his own. Caught between the wall and the weight of Arin’s broadsword, she strained to maneuver from the trap.

“How many times have I taught you to avoid this hold?” Arin’svoice cooled into deepest winter. “Do you think because your eyes glow a little now, you have no reason to keep with your training?”

Arms lifted above their heads, inches apart, they glared at each other.

“By the end of this, you will call me Mawlati with a smile,” Sylvia vowed.

A thrill tumbled through Arin. He had forgotten this feeling, this reckless abandon only she engendered—as though the rest of the world was nothing more than noise at the back of his head and true reality began and ended in the space she occupied.

“Prove it,” he enunciated, lips less than a breath from the crown of her hair.

Suddenly, the swords clanged into the wall as Sylvia slid down and threw her weight against Arin’s waist, taking them both to the ground. Before they landed, she slammed her fist into his stomach and tried to grab the sword.

Not bad.

Not good enough, either.

Arin swung, slamming the broadsword’s metal hilt against her temple. She twisted in time to avoid the brunt of the blow, but it still dizzied her long enough for Arin to throw her off him.

A horse galloped past them, its rider slumped forward with an axe between his shoulder blades.

Sylvia wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. “Is this all you have to offer me, Silver Serpent?”

She rolled out of the way of his dagger. In the two seconds it took Arin to shift back, she’d hurled a handful of pebbles and dirt directly into his eyes and lunged.

They grappled on the ground without any sort of finesse. Blows flew, blood flowing between them until it became difficult to tell who it belonged to. If Arin had seen his recruits fighting like this, he would have called them undisciplined children and ordered themto spend a week digging in the Wickalla. Arin never put his hands on anything without a clear plan, without strategy. She had dragged him into something raw and brutal, and if Arin weren’t viscerally aware of what might happen if any of her bare skin accidentally brushed his, he would relish every minute of it.

But one slip of their gloves, the wrong tear in her clothes… Arin couldn’t risk it.

She slammed her fist into his jaw, knocking his head so hard into the ground it echoed in Arin’s knees.

He spat out red. “I am not one for pointless musings, Suraira, but I am starting to wonder if whoever built my skull built it for the express purpose of surviving you.”

Arin’s eyes flared open as gloved fingers raked through his hair, gathering it at the nape of his neck. Sylvia crouched above him, and he would have regretted the split in her full lips or the blood dripping from her nose if she hadn’t paid him the same. If they couldn’t truly touch each other, this approximation of it… the intimacy of this violence between them almost sufficed. It almost satisfied the hunger that sparked at the base of Arin’s spine as she pushed a lock of his hair away from the seeping wound near his cheekbone and murmured, “Just your skull?” Her hair had come loose around her, black curls spilling around her strong shoulders, and she leveled a dagger against Arin’s heart. “Not the rest of you?”

Arin dug his fingers in the dirt and reminded himself what would happen if he twisted out from under her and pinned her to the earth. If he kissed the infuriating smirk off her face and let her tear into him a different way, unravel him in pleasure instead of pain.

All of me is written in your name, he wanted to say.

The earth rumbled beneath Arin, and a shadow blotted out the sun.

He saw the metal glint before he saw the soldier wielding it.

Arin whipped off the ground, tossing Sylvia behind him just as an Omalian soldier hurled a dagger straight at her.

It tore across Arin’s thigh and landed, wet with his blood, beside a startled Sylvia.

Arin didn’t feel the cut. He didn’t even glance down to see how deep it had sliced.

If it had met its mark, it would have killed her.

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