Page 167 of The Jasad Crown

What was he thinking? Arin of Nizahl, subject tomywill? My whims? It was stupidly dangerous. He knew about the veins. He knew what would happen if I survived raising the fortress.

“Do you accept?” Arin asked.

“I—I—”

The figures shifted around us, their silhouettes blending intoa shroud of darkness whirling around me and Arin, separating us from the Jasadis. They wanted this. They wanted to claim the Heir as they had claimed Raya.

I lowered the sword and exhaled.

“I accept.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

ESSIYA

The following three days were the best I had spent in the Gibal.

Sefa fussed over me in ways I would never allow from anyone else. How much I ate, what I wore, how long I had slept. The attention from Namsa or Maia would have fallen falsely, even if its roots were true. My purpose to the Urabi was first and foremost a weapon. You might clean your blade and sheathe it lovingly for years, but once it cracked, you would be a fool to do anything other than melt it down and forge a new one.

Sefa asked because she’d been burdened with the unfortunate defect of caring about me. Cracks and all.

In the evenings, Marek and Sefa joined me on the cliffside while the Urabi prepared for our departure from the Gibal. I enjoyed watching my kitmers circle the sun as it set over Suhna Sea, their silver wings dappling the horizon with the fiery colors of Jasad. Marek regaled us with tales of his time in Nizahl’s Ravening compound. Zane, the kind giant who rescued Marek from a nisnas, possessed a love of beans that had resulted in gratuitous amounts of flatulence; he also prevented Marek from throwing himself on the Lukubi guards who arrested Sefa. Almerour, whose real name he had forgotten, wouldn’t know how to aim a spear if you brought the target to the end of his nose, but he could apparently talk about the history of the kingdoms until everyone in the bunks fell asleep.

Sefa spoke about Lukub only once. Quiet and subdued, she told us about saving the Sultana, about realizing her options were to either die looking for us or to finish what she and I had started during the Alcalah. When she spoke of Vaida, her tone tightened with discomfort, as though she knew what Marek and I were thinking. As though we might hold her in judgment for showing kindness to a woman who manipulated her; think less of her for enjoying an adventure with someone who threatened to cut out her tongue and had her thrown in the Traitors’ Wells.

When it was my turn to close the gaps of my time since the Victor’s Ball, the seams of my story were loose and uneven. I couldn’t tell them about standing in the waterfall while hallucinations danced around me. Nor about Raya’s glowing eyes, swirling with Jasadi magic. Killing Felix and signing my death sentence in the same motion. The constant cacophony of my magic, an ever-growing pressure within my veins.

Neither I nor Arin had forgotten what awaited me when I left these mountains.

Since the moment he had declared himself to my service, Arin had been a force of unrelenting, unstoppable action. Every Jasadi with unusual magic had been accounted for, and Arin had divided the Urabi into groups. Half of them pursued tasks aimed at preventing the war, and the other half prepared to win it. The only task he had assigned both sides was the scepter.

“He thinks using it to raise the fortress will keep me from using my magic,” I explained to Sefa and Marek.

“Do you disagree?” Marek watched me closely.

“I have less faith in Rawain’s sense of moderation. I suspect he used the magic in his possession frequently and generously, and there will not be much waiting for us inside his ugly scepter.”

Every order Arin issued, he did so under my name. He taught the Urabi how to swing a sword or dispatch an armed opponent. Headvised what kinds of food would survive a long campaign toward Jasad and what would perish. No details evaded his inspection, and no question chafed him into irritation. We were more organized, more purposeful, than we had been since my first day at the Gibal, and he attributed it all to me.

An outright lie, of course. Leadership exhausted me. I was a performer on a stage, and I had memorized my steps, but I took no joy in the motions. The rhythm of it did not flow naturally through me. And more and more frequently, I simply wanted to sit down and catch my breath. Wipe the sweat from my brow and rub my aching feet.

What drained me, revitalized him.

On my worse days, I wondered whether Arin was right, and I had resigned myself to death to hide the fact that I was still Sylvia. I was still the girl who wanted to run, who would watch this mountain burn and turn her back on the flames. Death meant I would atone for my past, but it also meant I could never fail in the future. I would not need to sit on a throne I hated or break beneath a crown I could not carry. This escape—this one permanent escape—was the only place I could run where failure would not trail behind me like a chain around my ankle.

There were moments when I thought Arin knew. When he entered our chambers after I had just settled into sleep, the brush of leather as he moved my hair from my cheek. He would sit at my side, motionless for the first time since his burst of activity in the morning, and I wondered if even in the dark he could see right through me.

Do you think surrendering to your magic is bravery? Do you think it will atone for your past?

But he never mentioned atonement again, and I avoided discussing anything that might summon that hollow emptiness back to his eyes. It had vanished after his first night in the Gibal, but I doubted it had disappeared entirely.

Arin’s mind was a maze with no beginning or end. The scepter,the preparations—they were merely passages toward his ultimate plan. The scepter would not be enough to raise the fortress. The Urabi would never be trained to the same level as an army of Nizahl soldiers, not even new recruits. He had a destination at the end of this maze, and for whatever reason, he didn’t want me to know where it led.

But he kept my secret, so I kept his.

Arin paced around the table, his brow furrowed nearly to his nose. He shuffled four documents to the right. A pause. Two documents returned to the left.

“Is he going to talk anytime soon?” Namsa mumbled, draining the last of her yansoon. “I would ideally like to sleep before sunrise.”

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