Page 142 of The Jasad Crown

A silly question, but Arin indulged it nonetheless.

“I asked Wes to follow my father.” Arin rolled the glass between his palms. “How familiar are you with magic mining, Jeru?”

“Not very, my lord.” The guardsman was visibly struggling to speak, his attention split between Arin and the disembodied head of his colleague.

Jeru was a good man. A decent man Arin should have left alone, far from the reaches of the Citadel. From the reaches of Arin.

“Most texts will tell you that magic mining is a profane practice and the reason the Blood Summit was called. What they won’t tell you is how magic mining dates back hundreds of years. They’ll neglect to mention that the rulers—all of them—had been miningtheir people’s magic for their own use long before their favorite resource began to decline, and then they decided to trade it. An entrepreneurial sort, our ancestors.”

Arin’s eyes had gone dry and stiff, but he couldn’t close them. Each time he blinked, and the world went blessedly black, Arin would forget what awaited him on the other side. And each time he opened his eyes and remembered, it became more and more difficult to convince himself to do it again.

Only three more tasks left. Three more tasks, and he could stay in the dark as long as he wanted.

“Eventually, the other kingdoms lost their magic, and Jasad became the sole miner left. Perfect leverage for the throne to act with impunity—who would stop them? Who would get up from that bargaining table when they had become reliant on mined magic to sustain them through hard winters and endless rebellions?” Arin’s lips twisted into a rueful smile. “But Jasad’s magic weakened with every generation, and it was simply a matter of time until Jasad stopped coming to the negotiation table and started hoarding. They had turned their thoughts to their own border. What would happen to the fortress when magic eventually left Jasad? The fortress was the only obstacle between them and the kingdoms they had spent their entire reign toying with.”

Arin flicked the bottle to the ground and stood, ambling around the map table to stand with his back against the window. A thick, opaque slime had soaked into the maps beneath Wes’s head. The names of Nizahl’s provinces had bled into one another to form a meaningless streak of ink.

“You’ll have to forgive some speculation on my part,” Arin said, resting his forearms on the raised edge of the table. “The details… blur. My father is an industrious man, as we all know, and he saw an opportunity in the Qayida of Jasad. A woman named Hanim Werda, renowned for her brutality in battle and her disdain for theJasad crown. Hanim was also the leader of the Mufsids. Yes, those same rebels my father had executed before I could get anything useful out of them. As the story goes, she and my father conspired for years to overthrow the Malik and Malika, but Hanim was caught and exiled.”

Jeru approached the map table, gazing at Wes’s head like it might animate if only Jeru hoped hard enough. Vaun hadn’t moved an inch since he first entered.

Walking through the ruination of his entire existence was strangely relaxing to Arin. He wasn’t wandering in the mist anymore, each new unexplainable piece of information striking like a fist in the dark. The sun had finally risen, burning the skies clear, and Arin could see again. He could see everything.

“After they killed Niphran, the Mufsids sacked Usr Jasad and tried to reinforce the enchantment on the fortress. I suppose they were nervous someone might take issue with them raiding Jasad and killing the Heir. In any case, the enchantment had the opposite effect. The fortress collapsed. On the other side, waiting to charge, were our armies. Two days before the Blood Summit. Two weeks before the rest of the kingdoms sent their armies marching into Jasad alongside ours.”

“How?” Jeru croaked. “How did the Supreme know?”

Arin snapped his fingers, startling the guardsmen. “Excellent question, Jeru! How did my father know? He was away at the Blood Summit, ever so tragically fighting for his life as the Malik and Malika slaughtered hundreds of royals.

“Traitors are a fascinating sort,” Arin continued. He settled his gaze upon his unmoving guardsman. “Hanim betrayed her own kingdom out of a misguided belief that my father, the same man who allowed her exile and abandoned her to Essam, would put her on the Jasad throne. After all, she had given him a half-Jasadi Heir who could lay claim to both the Nizahl and Jasad crown—therewas no need for war, was there? No need to decide magic was the core of all evil while you collected it for yourself in the shadows.”

Distracted, Arin grazed his thumb over the curling corner of the map. It wouldn’t straighten, so Arin tore it off. Goodbye, Dar al Mansi!

“Half-Jasadi…” Vaun spoke for the first time, and Arin remembered he was there. “Sire, you cannot mean to say… But you don’t have magic.”

“No, I don’t,” Arin mused. “I can drain it. I can sense it. But I have none of it myself. Odd, isn’t it? A musrira’s curse fails and, instead of killing me, conveniently allows the Nizahl Commander to detect and extract the very same thing he was trained to destroy. Where had my magic gone? How had it been taken? I tormented myself with the questions until I realized I was asking the wrong ones.”

Mining magic, draining it. Same thief in a different hat. What matters is not what is taken, but where it goes.

“As I said, my father is an ambitious man. Like the Malik and Malika, he too foresaw the end of magic coming. The destruction of a resource all the kingdoms had long relied on. Mining magic was a short-term solution. The procedure is catastrophically fatal, and you can only extract someone’s magic once. But what if you had a tool capable of draining magic slowly, siphoning it across a person’s entire lifetime? A spigot you could shove into a river and—”

Arin stripped off his gloves. The lanternlight flicked warm colors over the pale canvas of his skin. “Drain with a single touch.”

“Sire, it isn’t possible,” Vaun said, dismissing Jeru’s attempt to nudge him away from the map table. “Your father would never expose his Heir to the horrors of magic-madness.”

Arin settled his gaze on Vaun. “You know so much about what my father would and wouldn’t do, Vaun. It is thanks to you that the last piece of this puzzle presented itself to me.”

Reaching into the pocket of his vest, Arin locked his shouldersbeneath the crushing weight of every misstep that had led him here. If he had dismissed Vaun from the Citadel after the Alcalah. If he hadn’t told Wes to pursue his father.

If he had looked up from his carefully charted maps long enough to see that the world on paper was nothing like the world around him.

“You have been a guardsman for so long, you have forgotten how to be a soldier. You forgot a rule we teach the recruits in their first week.” The same rule Arin had revealed to Sylvia as they stood in a cabin with a dead Nizahl soldier between them. For her, it had been a handful of black curls in the soldier’s pocket. Wes had been much more helpful.

Arin extended his palm. Sitting in its center, a raven’s head had been embossed onto a pin with the letterV. Jeru had an identical pin tucked under the lapel of his uniform with the first letter of his name.

“When defeat becomes a possibility, what are our soldiers trained to do?”

It was Jeru who answered, grief slowly mottling into rage. “Collect evidence of their killer.”

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