Page 46 of The Jasad Crown

The Silver Serpent’s traitorous whore.Had they watched us the night of the Victor’s Ball?

They couldn’t have. My cuffs had resisted magic, including the strongest of tracking spells. Any Visionist trying to conjure an image of me would have run straight into their barricade.

I rubbed my wrists. I never thought their nakedness would leave me so bereft.

“Not any, no.” Maia yawned, her trimmed nails tapping lightly against her upper lip. “It is not a reliable science.”

Still, three Visionists? Not to mention Maia’s mysterious specialty and Efra’s annoying one. Who knew how many others among the Urabi had unique magic?

Arin was wrong. He’d thought the Urabi targeted Jasadis at random unless they were competing with the Mufsids for someone who’d held an important post in Jasad. He couldn’t have known the Urabi were targeting rare and unusual magic. Maia still hadn’t specified exactly what her specialty was, just that it included an ability to sever a consciousness without hurting the recipient.

I scanned the assembled Urabi and wondered how many other exceptional types of magic dwelled in our midst. It stirred a strange pride in my chest. Even after the siege, even after ten years of persecution—nobody could tamp out the spark that left Jasadis with magic and the other kingdoms barren. Our magic lived through Rovial’s sacrifice, and it had adapted new ways to survive in an environment hostile to its existence.

With the pride came a rush of dread. The Mufsids had been determined to prevent the Urabi from gaining power. Both groups must have been tracking Jasadis with specialized magic, which explained why the Mufsids never allowed those who refused recruitment to live past the rejection. “How many Jasadis did the Mufsids kill?”

Namsa and Maia glanced around me at each other. Namsa massaged the corner of her jaw. “Too many.”

“You must have been relieved when the Nizahl Commander captured the bulk of their operation.”

She glanced at me sharply. “They are ours to punish. A common enemy does not make Nizahl our friend.”

Maia nodded. “And it bodes very ill for us that they haven’t been executed yet.”

At my quizzical glance, she continued, “Our spies alerted us that none of the Mufsids have been killed or made to stand trial. Either the Commander and the Supreme cannot see eye to eye on how to proceed, or they want something from the Mufsids.”

“Our location, our spies, and our numbers,” Namsa said. “The Mufsids are useless to Nizahl dead.”

The three Visionists locked hands in the center of the lake. I became poignantly aware of the fragile shell of ice supporting their weight. With a chill, I realized why the tableau looked so familiar. My old nightmare had featured Niphran burning on a lake just like this one while I stood helplessly by.

“Where is your coat?” Maia asked, wincing sympathetically at my chattering teeth. “I thought you went to fetch it.”

“I got lost finding my way back to my room,” I sighed, the lie blooming easily between my lips. I raised a finger and drew a zigzag in the air, my nose scrunching in slight embarrassment. “Just wandered around the halls until I circled back out. I have an awful sense of direction.”

Maia giggled, launching into a story about her first week in the mountains and how she’d walked in on a naked couple chasing each other in the Geneina. I listened with one ear, relieved neither she nor Namsa had questioned my story.

It was partially true. I had entered the mountain and gotten temporarily turned around. But I possessed a keen sense of direction—I would’ve been an embarrassment of a crook and a Champion otherwise. Once I’d found my room, I spent ages pacing, panic ravaging through me.

Sefa and Marek could still be in Nizahl. I had no idea where I’d sent them during the Victor’s Ball.

Arin was in Nizahl.

As soon as I thought his name, the world had vanished. I’d found myself on a gloomy garden path, penned in by rosebushes on either side. Then Arin had turned the corner, blade expertly tucked under his thumb for quick slashing.

I had known as soon as I saw him that this was no dream. No imagination of mine could conjure the complexity of the reaction that twisted across his face at the sight of me. The rough plea in his voice when he said,Don’t.The way he’d looked almost resigned when he asked if he was going mad. At the end, before Wes arrived, he’d hardened into the man I remembered from the Relic Room. From our first days of training. As though everything that happened in between was the real hallucination, and our only lingering truth was the promise of violence.

I had tried to warn him. Whether or not he believed me… we were about to find out.

Part of me recognized that the others would consider this a betrayal. I couldn’t care less. They hadn’t batted an eye when Efra decided to let me drown as some demented test of magic, leaving me to either climb up the side of a cliff or become a morning treat for the waiting monsters. They had also agreed and executed a release of the Alcalah’s monsters—monsters onlyIhad faced—into the poorest string of villages in Nizahl, where they were housed.

“It isn’t our problem Nizahl saw fit to harbor those creatures beneath active villages,” Efra had said. “They knew the risk of storing them there.”

“Those cages were built centuries ago,” I’d snapped. “Long before a village formed on top of them.”

The Visionists broke apart, arms extended on either side. In a single, uniform line, they stepped backward. A crack formed in the spot where they had stood and raced toward the Visionists, ice collapsing in its wake. I glanced at Namsa in alarm, but none of the Urabi seemed to share my concern.

By the time the Visionists were back on solid ground, the rest of the ice had collapsed. The lake churned, and a whirlpool formed at the spot where the Visionists had stood, funneling the lake down until we were staring at a dry, empty canyon.

The ground quaked. With a dull roar, the water shot upward, a pillar rising high above our heads, and unrolled itself like a scroll beneath an impatient palm. In a blink, the sloshing surface solidified into the scene at Galim’s Bend.

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