Page 195 of The Jasad Crown

And he would never allow it to happen again.

Arin kissed her.

CHAPTER SEVENTY

ESSIYA

Iknew better. I knew better, but I didn’t care.

My hands knotted in his vest, drawing him tight against my body. Arin kissed me with scorching ferocity, like a man brought back from the brink. His hand gripped my hip with bruising force, the other sliding over the braid lying against the back of my neck.

The first time Arin kissed me, I had lost myself. I had wanted nothing more than to abandon my mind, to cast aside my worries and fears and find peace against him.

The last time he kissed me, I found myself.

I became aware of the sounds around me. The dampness seeping into my shoes. The ache in my lower back. I breathed in the smell of the river lingering on him, nearly overpowering the scent of ink and rain he could never quite shake. I felt… Ifelt. The sand in my tired eyes; the pitch in my ears; the anger of watching the Nizahl soldiers march onto Janub Aya; the guilt of killing them so viciously; the anguish of fearing that Arin had only pretended to believe me and all along he had planned to pick up his father’s mantle; the terror of watching the mist fall.

The scream of grief bottled inside me, because Marek was dead. Marek was dead.

As my magic drained, something inside me gasped back to life. Resurfacing from its slow and steady suffocation, howling back topower. Every heart beating inside Jasad echoed behind my own. The land murmured, weary and low, then seemed to realize I was listening. I was finally listening, so it started shouting.

Arin drew back, leaving his forehead pressed against mine.

“I thought I would be too late.” He gripped my shoulders, my arms, my waist. Reassuring himself.

As soon as he finished, he collapsed.

I moved instantly, catching his head seconds before it could bash against a cropping of rocks. His skin had taken on a blue tint I’d never seen on anything living. I dragged him away from the rocks, terror turning my grip rough. “Arin? Arin?”

I glanced around for help, but the battle still raged around us. The Jasadis had been beaten back almost all the way to the tree line, and I forced myself not to look at the bodies strewn over the dirt. Some of the Nizahl soldiers were glancing around in confusion, and I followed their gazes to Jeru, who was chasing the soldiers on horseback and waving a Nizahl flag, bellowing for their attention. Niseeba screeched above us, looping around the scorch marks of her dead siblings.

I raised a shaking wrist to Arin’s nose and waited. When a puff of warm air ghosted over my skin, the relief was too much. It was all too much. Each death pierced me through, an embroidery of agony with me as its needle. Each scream rang double in my head. The clouds complained about the sand in the air, the trees sobbed for water, and the earth I’d scorched with the kitmers—itshrieked, over and over, blade of grass by blade of grass.

My magic had eroded me nearly to the core. I felt it in every bone, every breath. I could no sooner disentangle myself from it than I could rearrange my organs. Carved into my skull were the memories of a thousand lifetimes. People I had been, places I had seen, lives I had ended. My magic roiled with it, a furious storm slamming into the thin barrier I had erected between us.

I did not have magic-madness. Iwasmagic-madness. Every single person since Rovial had had my magic. Rovial’s magic.

I sobbed, shaking Arin’s shoulder. “Wake up. Wake up so you can laugh with me.”

The Nizahl Heir stirred, and the relief nearly killed me. Air rushed out of my desiccating lungs, and I looked for the other wayward piece of my heart. I couldn’t risk leaving him to find Sefa, but I didn’t need to. I could move to Sefa as I had once moved to Arin, leaving my physical body behind. It was as simple as closing my eyes and opening them next to her.

A shadow stretched over the kneeling girl, a pair of boots stopping by Marek’s body. She stared at the shadow through a glassy, unseeing gaze. Rocking back and forth, her bloodied hand pressed to Marek’s wound and another curved around his pale cheek.

Tears shimmered in Jeru’s eyes as he knelt beside Sefa. “Sefa, I am so sorry. I am so sorry, but we have to go.”

Sefa kept rocking.

Jeru reached for her, and Sefa recoiled violently. “No! I won’t leave him. Don’t you understand, I’ve never left him? I’ve never left him!”

The ache in Jeru’s face surprised me. His voice was ragged. “You never left. I know you never left, and so does he. But Marek isn’t here anymore, Sefa.”

Sefa fought Jeru with an exceptional ferocity when he picked her up, but he was a soldier and she was a grief-shattered girl. “Put me back!” she screamed, writhing like a snake caught in a trap. “I won’t leave him!”

“You will not die beside him!” Jeru roared, and Sefa finally went still. The guardsman didn’t stop walking, didn’t look at Sefa. I walked beside them, quiet as the wind and as insubstantial. Jeru headed toward Arin. My body remained bowed over the Heir’s, and I quickened my step, eager to rejoin it. “Do you understand what he went through to find you again? What he endured to keep you safe?He needs you to bury him. He needs you alive to remember him, to honor him.”

“You don’t understand,” she whispered. Jeru tensed, and we both glanced at her tear-stricken face. “What life is left? I can’t mourn him longer than I loved him. I am not strong enough for this.”

“Nobody is,” Jeru said. “You do it anyway.”

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