Page 160 of The Jasad Crown

The door closed behind him. The coughing had slowed, but Arin’s body was ice cold against mine. What would have happened if he hadn’t been wearing the healer’s bandages? If there hadn’t been magic in place to heal him? Would it have only taken that single touch for my magic to kill him?

Eventually, his body relaxed against mine. I leaned back, arranging his head into my lap. I rolled my sleeve, holding my arm under his nose until a warm puff of air brushed over my skin.

He had saved me—again. I had almost killed him—again.

The Heir came here to die.

We had nine days until Nuzret Kamel. Nine days for me to undo twenty-six years of Supreme Rawain’s poison and prove to Arin thathaving magic was not the end of his world. All he had ever experienced of it was pain and anguish.

I had nine days to show him it could be so much more.

“To reiterate: You want me to jump?” Arin glanced from the waves crashing against the cliff to me, arching a silver brow.

“Not jump. Slide.” I gestured impatiently. “Just hold on.”

I rubbed my temples, feeling like a premiere fool. I had been trying to summon the Sareekh for the last fifteen minutes. So much foryou may call upon me at any hour of need. Even the fish were lying these days.

Arin didn’t know why I had brought him up here, only that I wanted him to see the rest of the mountain. We hadn’t discussed last night.

“If you’re trying to figure out how to push me over the side, I don’t think anyone would stop you,” Arin said.

A joke. He is joking. Don’t react. Do not—

“Including you?” I demanded.

The second brow jumped to join the first, high on his forehead.

I dragged a hand down my face, turning away. I couldn’t stop thinking about what Jeru had implied—the risk Arin had taken by touching me.

Arin caught my arm, spinning me back around. He stared in steadily rising disbelief, holding fast when I tried to wriggle away. “Essiya, I am not going to throw myself off this cliff.”

“No, you would have me do it for you.” I wrenched free. “Is it so horrible, being Jasadi? You would ratherdiethan have magic?”

Arin’s eyes widened. His lips parted, but before he could speak, the ground rumbled beneath us. Salt water misted the air, massive waves slapping against the side of the mountain.

“Took it long enough,” I groused. The sea rippled as water sluicedoff the rising island, the Sareekh’s scales shimmering bloodred under the shafts of sun.

You summoned. Loudly.

I pointed at the Nizahl Heir and thought,I want to show him magic can be beautiful. He knows little of what it can do besides kill and cause chaos. Help me.

I am not your personal amusement.

Please?I channeled it as pathetically as I could.I did not call upon you frivolously. He matters to me.

A long, sullen vibration. I glanced back at Arin. The Nizahl Heir had slid onto his haunches, watching the Sareekh with open-mouthed awe. “This is Sareekh il Ma’a,” he said. Wonder colored his voice. “I read about it when I was a child. The stories… did not do it justice.” He glanced up at me, and I would have dealt with the Sareekh’s attitude a million times over if it meant seeing more of the pure astonishment in his eyes. “Did you summon it?”

I rocked on my feet, strangely shy all of a sudden. “It likes me. I am theoretically allowed to call upon it when I am in need, but we’re having a debate about the circumstances of such need.”

Oh, fine.

Two spindles shot through the air. The cages closed around my and Arin’s middles like bony corsets, hoisting us into the air.

A credit to Arin’s ironclad control—he didn’t shout. He didn’t wrestle. The Sareekh reeled us over the side of the cliff, and Arin’s single admission of stress was in gritting his teeth.

My hair whipped in the wind, and I kicked my legs with childlike glee. The Sareekh’s parted spinal column revealed the bundles of spiky bones, curled into buds beneath a gelatinous layer. They sealed as it drew Arin and I down, leaving only the two extended sets of bone cages.

“Don’t be frightened!” I shouted over the whistling wind.

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