Page 91 of The Jasad Crown

So far, my father’s journal consisted of countless pages of poetic nonsense about the magic in my mother’s eyes, the gnats over Hirun on warm summer nights, the mist on Sirauk. If he had meant to speak in some sort of riddle, it was lost on me. Fiddling with the shape and structure of words to unlock a deeper meaning had never been my strong suit. I could lie my way through a den of thieves and gut a beast three times my size, but ask me to sit around and poke at lines on a page? I would rather fashion myself a necklace out of live leeches.

Namsa had joined me and Lateef three pages ago, dropping onto the other side of the bed and closing her eyes. “I’m waiting for Kenzie and Medhat to fall asleep,” she’d said. “If I have to listen to them pretend to bicker for another hour, I’ll rip both their tongues out.”

Lateef muttered something about a lack of emotional intelligence while Namsa buried her face in the pillow.

I flipped Emre’s journal to the back cover and opened to the last page. It was always easier to understand a story when you knew how it would end.

Sentences clustered together, squeezed tight onto the page. He must have realized he was running out of space to record a worthwhile thought after wasting so much ink simpering. I skimmed, one leg swinging idly off the side of the bed as I read.

In the center of the page, the sight of my name stopped me cold.

Essiya isn’t safe. Niphran, Dawoud, Rusheed, please. If I am killed, whoever finds this journal must send my daughter out of Usr Jasad before it is too late.

Jasadi magic is running out. In two generations or less, it will vanish. Like the rest of the kingdoms, they will still carry the ability to wield magic, but the source will be gone. Palia and Niyar know it, and they are draining the southern wilayahs with impunity to fortify themselves against the inevitable future. It is not just about strengthening the nobles or trading their stolen magic with the other kingdoms.

When magic fades from Jasad forever, what happens to the fortress?

Palia and Niyar do not believe me. I told them what the Nizahl Heir truly is. I begged them to listen, but they will not cross Rawain. The boy is not a threat to them now, not while the fortress still stands. If they drain enough magic to protect the fortress for the coming generations, the Nizahl Heir will eventually die, and the fortress can fall without the horror of what waits behind it. In a sense, it is comforting to know their brutality toward the southern wilayahs is not mere greed. They do want to protect their kingdom—even if it is at the expense of its people.

The boy cannot be saved. What has been done to him cannot be undone by any mortal means. Killing him is the only choice left.

Rawain created the ultimate weapon against magic. They are fools to think he will not use the child against us. The only question is when.

I leaned back. He’d crammed all of that on thelast page?

My thumbnail scraped the cramped lines of ink while my mind raced. So Palia and Niyar weren’t just draining the southern wilayahs’ magic to enrich the northern wilayahs’ nobles. A threat on the other side of the fortress scared them so much that they hoarded the magic they mined to ensure the fortress would withstand the weakening of our magic.

A threat so terrifying to my gentle, bookish father that he demanded they kill it—kill a six-year-old Arin.

What had he told my grandparents that they ignored? It had to have been about Arin’s ability to drain magic. But Arin’s ability was limited by touch, and nobody whose magic he drained wound up dead. Compared to magic mining, what danger could some inopportune side effect of a musrira’s curse pose to the Jasad throne?

I chewed my lip, a headache whispering at the back of my skull. I flipped through the rest of the journal, but if it wasn’t agonizingly sappy poetry, it was a page full of numbers and mathematical figures completely unrelated to the passage before it.

Damn it to the tombs, why couldn’t anyone in this land speak in a straight line? I couldn’t just receive terrible news, no, I had to spend hours deciphering it first.

At my wit’s end, I stormed over to Lateef and held out Emre’s journal, opened to the last page. “Read this.”

Without missing a beat, Namsa rolled off the bed and moved to read over Lateef’s shoulder. The curiosity must have been killing her.

“I don’t understand. The Nizahl Heir would have been six at the time of this writing, possibly even younger,” Namsa said, a harshness to her voice I hadn’t heard in weeks. She swiped angrily at the corner of her eye, and a pang of guilt shot through me. Of course reading about my grandparents draining the southern wilayahs would hit her harder. Nearly every member of the Urabi had come from the wilayahs Palia and Niyar treated like their personal treasury. “What was your father so afraid of?”

“It’s true, isn’t it?” Lateef closed the journal, hurriedly passing it back to me as though it were contaminated. “About the Commander’s ability to drain magic with a touch. We had heard rumors, but I thought… Even after I saw it with Al Anqa’a, some part of me still didn’t believe it.”

“It shouldn’t be possible,” Namsa murmured. “The only person capable of sensing magic so acutely, of draining it, was Fareed.”

“Fareed, the founder of Nizahl?” My brows tried to disappear into my hairline. Fareed had lived in the time of the Awaleen.

“Yes, but he could only drain and sense magic because Dania, Baira, and Kapastra needed him to safeguard against abuses of magic between the kingdoms. How would an Heir hundreds of generations later have the same ability?”

“A musrira tried to kill him. He said it was the side effect of her failed curse,” I said, dumbfounded.

Namsa and Lateef glanced at each other. “It is… possible,” Lateef said.

“Be honest.” Namsa elbowed him. “Mawlati, the amount of power a musrira would need to not only infiltrate the Citadel but to then craft a curse so deadly that it imbues the Nizahl Heir with a lifelong side effect… if such a musrira existed, she would not have failed. He would have died.”

A shiver traveled down my spine. “I don’t understand. Are you saying Arin’s abilities and magic mining are connected?”

Lateef had clearly missed his evenings regaling the children with his long and winding stories, because he eagerly grabbed hold of the question. “To understand the difference, you must first understand the basic composition of our biology. All of us—Lukubis, Orbanians, Omalians, Jasadis, most Nizahlans—we were born with a pool of magic built into us. A well, you could say.”

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