Page 68 of The Jasad Crown

Even though I could turn my chin and kill her where she stood, never having soiled myself with the throb of her slowing pulse beneath my palm or the smell of her choking breath, I enjoyed the sensation of her struggling beneath my grip. The close and personal view of the life draining from her dumb eyes.

She landed in a heap in the mud. I wiped my hand on my hip.

Hmm. This sight would grieve her husband, but it wouldn’t break him. It would not reduce him to the barest components of a living man.

I cocked my head, and cracks formed along the youthful bronze skin. Her flesh began to peel in thick, fat strips. Layer after layer, curling into spirals as it landedin the dirt, until the meat barely clung to her exposed ribs, and the panels of her skin were splayed open like flipped shutters.

I left her face untouched. The effect would be lost if he couldn’t recognize the pile of flesh and blood lying in his farm, after all.

I washed my hands in the creek and smiled at the gold and silver veins webbing out of the corners of my eyes.

Too late, I realized that the heat of my magic had enveloped me, trapping me in a burning seal. To withhold it was to suffocate in it.

The face reflected in the creek—it wasn’t my face, but I recognized it. It had been one of the hallucinations from the waterfall. The woman with green eyes.

The ground shook. Pieces of the cliffside tumbled into the sea. I heard Efra and Namsa cry out as though from a great distance.

Threads of silver and gold spun between my fingers, crackling with power. I dropped to my knees, my hands sliding into the dirt. In seconds, the colors flowed from my skin and poured into the earth. Mist rose from the ground like steam from a boiling pot, coalescing into a rapidly swirling cloud of magic.

“Step back!” I shouted to Namsa and Efra.

I shielded my head as the mist spun faster. Awaleen below, my first significant act of magic as Malika, and it was going to blow apart the mountain. What had I been thinking, listening to Efra? He was no better than a little boy kicking his heels to see a vicious animal. He didn’t consider the consequences—

The mist erupted.

Namsa wheezed, bent over double as she shook with laughter. She hadn’t stopped in the last twenty minutes, and I was beginning to worry she had suffered a mental collapse. Every time she glanced at Efra, she’d begin howling anew.

In Namsa’s defense, Efra’s expression after the baby kitmer had hopped out of the cloud of magic would reduce the most disciplined stoic into hysterics. A kitmer barely taller than my knee, staggering under the weight of its own wings, wasn’t the majestic beast he’d imagined.

He had asked me to try again, and I obeyed. I tried ten more times, and each attempt brought forth another miniature kitmer. Two with fluffy golden wings and silver beaks; one with alarmingly sharp feathers; several more with misshapen horns curving in different directions behind their heads.

All of them had my eyes.

Your beautiful kitmer eyes, Niphran would always say.Dark and deep as the vastest sea.

A shiver ran through me. Had I given these kitmers my eyes, or had the resemblance always been so uncanny?

The sun sank, casting the surface of Suhna Sea in shimmering reds and golds.

“Do you think they would bite the children?” Maia asked from my right, her sudden appearance startling an undignified squeak out of me. “They would be so excited to play with them.”

The kitmers hopped around the cliffside, showing no sign of fading out like their predecessor. One pecked at Maia’s ankle, and she patted its scaly head. “Best to give it some time, I think,” Maia said.

“Yara is here,” Maia added, almost as an afterthought. “The informant.”

I inhaled. “Did she say anything?”

Maia shook her head. “I came to get you first. The rest of the Aada will be assembling. Is Namsa all right?”

One of the kitmers wandered toward Efra, and he scrambled away when it hopped closer. For someone scared of a bird half his size, he managed to call upon a shocking amount of indignance. “Is this it?”he demanded, stabbing a finger at the flock of small kitmers. “This is the limit of your lauded magic?”

Efra almost died, then.

The moment came and passed. The sun barely sank an inch. Namsa hadn’t finished wiping the tears from her cheeks. Maia had just bent down to rub the beak of a fatally feathered kitmer.

But the moment stretched, cords of my magic arching tight. My magic wanted him dead. If I had ordered it, Efra’s heart would have beat its last, and he would have fallen dead to the ground.

Like the woman in the vision.

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