Page 120 of The Jasad Crown

It cost Arin to set aside the death-of-the-royal-bloodline theory. It took a hammer to the ground beneath his feet, and through the cracks, Arin saw flashes of the dangerous sinkhole waiting just beyond the surface.

If it wasn’t the death of the royal family that caused the fortress to collapse, then the enchantment must have failed.

The enchantment sustaining the fortress around Jasad was the kingdom’s best-guarded secret. The only information he’d been able to find vaguely mentioned the ceremony to refresh the fortress every year. The Qayid or Qayida would recite the enchantment to renew the original magic cast by Qayida Hend thousands of years ago.

Arin traced it back again.

Niphran was Qayida when the fortress fell. She had been Qayida once before, but her parents had stripped her of the honor when they exiled her to Bakir Tower. Niyar and Palia reinstated her sometime around Arin’s fourteenth birthday. He remembered the date because his father had accepted an invitation to the festival and left for Jasad the week before. Isra had insisted on staying behind for Arin’s birthday, and she had snuck him out of the Citadel to visit the preserved ruins in Ukaz. She’d stuffed his hair under a knit cap and waited patiently whenever Arin’s attention snagged on a strange pattern in the carvings or a collection of stones he’d read stories about.

Two years later, she had left for the Blood Summit, and Arin had spent his birthday alone in his chambers, designing the statue that would stand above his mother’s tomb in the Citadel’s gardens.

Arin’s fingers curled. He wanted to rise and cast these pages into the flames. Not every question needed a satisfactory answer. Plenty of people were content with uncertainty; they lived and died without expending themselves to understand anything beyond the corner of the world they occupied.

They would not stand directly over the sinkhole and pushdown.

But Arin could no more halt the turn of his own mind than Essiya could halt the call of her magic.

I bet the Mufsid blamed Hanim for the fortress falling. Richly ironic, if you ask me. Hanim didn’t sack Usr Jasad. She might have written the false enchantment, but who read it?

Arin stood, tossing the parchment toward the armchair. The pages fluttered to the ground as he started to pace.

Even if Arin posited that reading the wrong enchantment could destroy a fortress thousands of years old, it didn’t explain how Nizahl would have known beforehand. According to Binyar, Nizahl’s armies were already marching for Jasad. Thousands of soldiers had been waiting behind the fortress when it fell. How could his father have known the wrong enchantment would be read for the first time in Jasad’s history?

Hanim was their leader for a time, you know. Before her exile for conspiring with your father against the Jasad crown.

The cracks above the sinkhole widened. A warning to stop, to step back from the precipice.

But the pieces had begun moving of their own volition, racing into place.

How can you sense magic?

Why would Hanim tell Rawain that she’d given the Mufsids the wrong enchantment? Assuming Rawain and Hanim had conspired together when Rawain was the Nizahl Heir, Rawain had already resoundingly betrayed Hanim by the time he became Supreme. The Qayida may have been monstrous, but she was no fool. She would never risk the fortress unless she stood to gain something immeasurable. Something she had tried to claim through Essiya, the last living Heir.

Jasad’s throne.

What had reassured her in the Supreme’s word after he had aided her exile and turned his back on her once before?

A piece quaked at the center of the frame. On it, Arin saw Isra’s face. He saw the lower village girl plucked from obscurity to marry the Nizahl Commander, the son born too soon after the wedding.

Was your hair black before the curse?

Arin braced himself on the wall as the room spun.

Hanim had to have believed Rawain meant to lay claim to Jasad’s throne instead of destroying it. Something had convinced her Rawain would put her on the newly taken throne.

I met your mother at the Blood Summit. Isra knew she was going to die. She walked into that Summit knowing what Rawain planned to do.

To risk the fortress, it would have been more than mere alliance. More than promises. It would have needed to be the same claim she had sought through Essiya.

The strongest claim to a crown was blood. Rawain’s son would have become Heir to Jasad and Nizahl.

Rawain’s son… and Hanim’s.

The sinkhole yawned open, and Arin disappeared.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

SYLVIA

---