Page 5 of The Jasad Crown

For Arin, control was a cliff.

One step too far, and everything that made him who he was shattered on the rocks below. One step too far, and a beast would rise from his remains. Arin had fought his entire life to remain on the right side of the cliff. To turn his sights away from the temptation of what waited just beyond the edge of his control.

White spittle foamed between the High Counselor’s lips. Rodan toppled from his chair with a clatter, clipping his head against the table leg. His body seized in rapid tremors. A wet patch spread over his groin.

“My people will not suffer another war while the likes of you walk freely in the heart of the Citadel. While I live, those in Nizahl’s court must prove every day that they deserve their place. Power hoarded where it doesn’t belong is power borrowed, and I intend to collect on the debt.”

In the wild, savagery was survival. It took only what it needed when it needed it and did not ask for more. But behind the walls of the Nizahl royal court, savagery was an art. As a baker might measure out ingredients for the perfect dish, so Arin measured each move he made. He bided his time. He gathered information.

And when he struck, he struck to kill.

CHAPTER TWO

ARIN

When the High Counselor finally lay still, Arin walked to the door and rapped twice. On cue, Vaun and Jeru slipped into Arin’s chambers. The door quickly closed behind them.

Jeru took a step forward. Vaun matched it. Jeru bowed, and Vaun bowed lower. Their hostility toward each other had devolved into what Arin could reasonably call a children’s game.

So long as they did what they were told, their tantrums hardly signified. Arin lifted an ink-spattered map he’d ruined in a burst of frustration last night and began to tear it into even strips.

“Arrange him in his bed within the Citadel. The swelling should disappear within the next hour. You will say he was unwell when he took to bed. He drank a tonic to help him sleep, sold to him by an unlicensed street merchant. Death came for him in the night. An unfortunate reaction to the benign tonic.” Arin handed them an empty bottle the size of his thumb. “The tonic.”

His guardsmen curled the High Counselor into as small a shape as they could manage. All the harm and pain this man had caused, and he was little more than gray flesh, stuffed into a sack of grain for inconspicuous transport to the other end of the Citadel.

“Go through his belongings before his wife does,” Arin said. “Anything of note, anything he kept hidden, bring to me.” Eyeing the droplets of sweat drying on Rodan’s side of the table, Aringestured to his ruined furniture. “Have someone see to replacing this table and rug.”

The guards bowed. They turned to the door, Jeru reaching for the handle, when Arin spoke again. “I’d like you to stay a moment, Jeru.”

His youngest guard swallowed. Vaun shouldered the sack and shut the door, leaving Jeru waiting stiffly in Arin’s chambers.

Arin pushed aside the curtain separating the front room from the rest of his chambers. Jeru followed him into the cramped space, watching silently as Arin pulled out the keys for the thick steel door behind the curtain. The locks fell open one by one. At the very bottom, a tiny bottle slipped from where Arin had affixed it beneath the last lock, falling into Arin’s waiting palm. If spilled, its contents would burn through skin and bone—the last defense against an intruder if they somehow managed to find all six of Arin’s keys.

His father would call it excessive; Arin preferred thorough. It would be a much less onerous affair to identify the culprit if half their foot was melted off.

The chains fell from the door in a clanking symphony of metal.

They crossed Arin’s bedroom, the large bed consuming the majority of a space originally intended as an antechamber. Arin had had his bed moved here from the main chambers shortly after Soraya’s assassination attempt. He was at his most vulnerable asleep—it defied logic for his bed to be accessible behind one single door.

At the last door, Jeru waited while Arin repeated the process of opening it. An old exchange flitted through Arin’s mind as he worked through the last of his wheel of locks.

“Caution is an area where I am prone to excess,” Arin admitted. “My faith in my guards has taken a beating.”

She grinned. “You? Paranoid? Steady me, sire, I may keel from my mount.”

Arin didn’t realize he’d gone still, key halfway inserted into the last chain, until Jeru cleared his throat. “My liege?”

The key cut into Arin’s tightening fist.

Jeru wanted to talk about it. Abouther. Arin had caught him and Wes exchanging furious whispers outside his door the morning after the Victor’s Ball. It seemed they had been too worked up to remember Arin’s unusually sensitive hearing.

“The Heir does not need your coddling,” Wes had snapped. “He can handle his own affairs.”

“He has no one to confide in, Wes! No friends, no siblings.” Jeru was the youngest guardsman at twenty-two, and he had been raised in a close-knit family that discussed their problems.

Wes, who was thrown into a military compound at fifteen and had no connection with his family beyond the percentage of his earnings he sent them once a month, snorted. “He has plenty of people to talk to.”

“You know as well as I do the only person he ever let come close enough to confide in was Sylv—”

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