Excerpt: THE JASAD CROWN by Sara Hashem
In the thrilling conclusion to the Egyptian-inspired Scorched Throne duology, a fugitive queen must risk everything and everyone she loves for the chance to restore her lost kingdom of Jasad.
Read an excerpt from The Jasad Crown (US), available now, below!
CHAPTER ONE
ARIN
Arin firmly believed an attempt on one’s life was the highest form of flattery.
Becoming a threat by the very virtue of your existence, inspiring the sort of mad dedication that drives men to murder… what could be more of an accomplishment?
His father endured at least two dozen assassination attempts a month—more than the rest of the rulers combined.
Arin had waited impatiently for his turn. On the eve of his tenth birthday, it came.
A commotion had erupted outside his chambers, and Arin followed it into the hall. His guards had shouted for him to return to his room, occupied trying to hold back the intruder.
Preposterous—as if Arin were some fragile bird in a glass cage. Only cowards hid.
Besides, he had waited for this. Planned for it. At ten, Arin had begun to grasp the role he played in his kingdom. The power he stood to inherit. The fact that someone had come to the Citadel seeking to kill him meant others had begun to realize his power, too.
Later, he’d learn the assassin was one of fifteen sent to infiltrate the Citadel on the eve of the Champions’ Banquet, which was being held in Nizahl that year. The others were apprehended before they ever reached the Citadel’s grounds.
When the assassin spotted the Nizahl Heir, a manic light had brightened in his eyes. He darted around the guards and reared his arm back.
The knife flew.
Arin could have avoided it. Unlike his graceless guards, Arin could measure exactly what movements he needed to avoid injury. One twist to the right, a collapse of his right knee, and he would have been out of harm’s way.
Except, Arin didn’t want to avoid the knife.
Arin knew his flaws—they were frequently recited to him. Cold, heartless, stubborn. Arin’s mother called his shortcomings by kinder names than Arin’s tutors. To Isra, his shortcomings were a keen regard for precision. A personal standard that demanded nothing short of perfection.
But his worst flaw, universally agreed upon by all, was Arin’s curiosity. Once a question blossomed in the Heir’s mind, he could not rest until he found an answer. His curiosity eclipsed everything—his sense, his reason, his very sanity.
So Arin stood still for the knife. He pulled his arm over his chest, drawing his shoulder over the fatal points of entry. The knife cleaved into him. The suddenness of the impact temporarily whitened the world.
Arin had screamed. He barely registered the guards jumping onto the assassin or the heavy thud of bodies hitting the ground. His arm hurt. Everything hurt terribly.
The next time he had opened his eyes, he was in his own bed, the wound hidden beneath a thick bandage. His mother was fast asleep next to him.
“You scared her,” Rawain said. He stood in front of Arin’s window. “You know I detest when she cries.”
Tear tracks had indeed dried on Isra’s cheeks. Arin moved to wipe them away and stopped when Rawain glanced over. The Supreme disliked it when Arin showed his mother affection or let her fuss over him.
Without ever being told, Arin understood that Rawain did not love her.
Arin withdrew his touch, because loving his mother meant losing a little bit more of his father.
“You let him hurt you,” Rawain said, staring out the window again. His hands were clasped around his scepter, fingers tight above the glass orb. Arin did not have to peer closely to make out the raven’s wings, the black feathers unfurling above the two swords clashing at its feet. The symbol of Nizahl, cast in exquisite gems at the head of his father’s scepter, always seemed alive enough to glare at Arin.
His heart pounded. “I did not let—”
“Arin,” Rawain interjected lightly. Too lightly. “What is my first rule?”
An all-too-familiar weight pressed down on Arin. He fought to breathe through it. “I am not lying, my liege.”
“One last chance.” Rawain turned, moving from the window to hover over Arin’s bedside. Terror closed Arin’s throat, the slow suffocation rendered infinitely worse beneath his father’s knowing gaze. The raven’s beady glare pierced into him. “Why did you let him hurt you?”
Resignation settled like a shroud over Arin. Punishment was inevitable. The only variable Arin could control now was its severity. Telling the truth would mean months of grueling training and the confiscation of his books and maps.
But lying would sentence Arin to the Capsule.
“I wanted to know how it would feel,” Arin said. He knotted his fingers into the blanket, ignoring the pull on his arm. “The injury.”
“You’ve been injured by many knives in your training.”
“Never stabbed.” Arin swallowed. “I wanted to see if I could survive it.”
A heavily ringed hand settled on Arin’s throat. His father’s finger ghosted over Arin’s pulse. It beat sickly fast, betraying its owner.
“Do you think if you put yourself in the path of what you fear and let it hurt you, you will somehow be stronger for it? That you will know your limits better?” Rawain’s hand moved to Arin’s arm.
Without hesitation, he dug his thumb into Arin’s bandage.
Pain roared through him, and Arin barely remembered to trap his gasp behind his teeth. He couldn’t risk waking his mother. Rawain did not tolerate her interruptions when he was teaching his Heir a lesson, and Arin hated it when she was punished because of him. “Those who survive longest never put themselves in a position to be hurt. They see the threat coming and they step aside.”
Red leaked beneath the bandage. His father pressed harder. Arin tasted blood. He had bitten into his own tongue.
“You are my sole Heir. You will inherit my kingdom, my throne, and my enemies. How can I trust you if you cannot command your impulses or quash these infernal curiosities? How, Arin?”
Black dots swam in Arin’s vision, and only then did Rawain withdraw his hand. He wiped his thumb on his robes. “Your lessons resume at dawn.”
His mother woke two hours later and fought with the servants who came to dress Arin for his training. “Can’t you see he’s hurt? He cannot train today. He is only a child! Please, he’s in pain.” The servants moved around her while she wept, ignoring her attempts to hold them off.
And Arin, who still felt the imprint of his father’s thumb, had found himself disgusted by her tears.
She put herself in a position to be hurt, he thought, suddenly and without much emotion. She loves me too much. She will see the threat coming and stand perfectly still, if only to let me live a minute more.
Arin put his hand on the bandage and pressed.
The pain grew, and grew, and grew.
He would become familiar with this pain. He would learn to think through it.
And then he would never see it coming and stand still again.
Rain pattered against the window, obscuring the sight of a sleeping Nizahl from its watchful Heir.
The stormy evening possessed every hallmark of nights his mother called sieges of the Awaleen. The wind picked up, its mournful howl cutting through the stone walls. Arin could almost hear his mother’s phantom sigh, the tap of her thin fingers against the shaking glass. Sleep is the space between life and death. A space where anything can happen, she would say, in the faraway tone Arin had grown to fear. The Awaleen have dwelled in their dreams for centuries. Look at the sky, Arin, and tell me you cannot see them in the clouds.
In her last few years, she had developed a habit of speaking such nonsense where others could hear. Persistent superstition was a relic she carried over from her village in Nazeef, and his father hated any reminders of Isra’s lowborn origins.
A crackle of lightning washed Arin in shades of blue. If the Awaleen truly slept, down there in their eternal tombs, then their sleep knew only nightmares.
A knock came at the door. Arin smoothed a palm over his vest, dispelling the phantom of his mother. He had plans with the living to oversee.
“Enter.” Arin didn’t move from the window as the door creaked open behind him.
“Your Highness. You summoned?”
“Have a seat, Counselor Rodan.”
Arin turned from the window. The High Counselor bowed deeply, gaze meeting Arin’s for a brief instant before darting away. Rodan moved to the chair nearest to the door and hesitated. The seat would be close to the head of the table—within Arin’s reach. Executing a shuffle unbecoming of anyone above the age of five, the High Counselor instead chose a chair at the center of the table.
As though Arin would ever expend the effort to physically assault him. There weren’t enough gloves in the world. The entire episode had taken less than a minute, but it told Arin what he needed to know.
It didn’t end there. When Arin lowered himself into his chair, the High Counselor flinched. Flinched.
“Peculiar weather tonight.” Rodan picked at his thumb, seemingly indifferent to the blood crusted in the hinges of his nail. The thought of replacing his table because the High Counselor bled on it irritated Arin to distraction.
Arin’s silence only further aggravated the High Counselor. Over the years, Arin had found silence a most effective tool for excavating the inner workings of someone’s mind. To some, silence scraped and clawed and screamed. Others settled in it, content to float on its ebb.
Save for a bottle of talwith and two glasses, the table lay empty. Arin uncorked the bottle. In each glass, he poured two fingers’ worth of the lavender liquid. Rodan watched the bottle, wiping his knuckles across his chin. A smear of blood from his thumbnail caught on his whiskered jaw.
When Arin placed both glasses in front of Rodan, the High Counselor blinked. “None for you, my liege?”
“I have had more than my fair share as of late,” Arin said genially. “I presume you’re familiar with talwith?”
The High Counselor regarded the glasses with transparent unease. “The Orbanian beverage. Quite difficult to import to Nizahl, isn’t it?”
Her teasing voice cut across Arin’s thoughts like a well-aimed blade. Wait, are you important or something?
Arin’s fingers curled.
“Your Highness?”
Arin sat back in his chair, elbows balanced on the armrests as he folded his hands together. Rodan still hadn’t touched either drink. It always amused Arin how careful fickle men became when it was their own life on the line. “You’ve worked for the Citadel for many years. Since the start of my father’s reign.”
The High Counselor nodded, relieved to be back on familiar footing. “Nearly twenty-four years.”
Arin considered the man sitting at his table with the same level of interest he might afford an insect on the bottom of his boot. He’d rarely had cause to deal with Counselor Rodan in the past. The High Counselor’s role positioned him as an advisor to the Supreme and gave him a seat on the council—powerful privileges, but not ones that made him notable to Arin.
Twenty-four years. Decades Rodan had slithered around the Citadel, privy to the secrets of the most powerful kingdom in the land.
Arin couldn’t fathom it. Nothing about the High Counselor marked him as anything more than another dull, crown-kissing sycophant. Age lined his narrow face, and his hairline’s backward march had reached his ears. He was thin as a stalk of barley. Just as easy to snap.
Utterly unremarkable.
“I see.” Arin tilted his head. “And how many of those twenty-four years did you spend molesting little girls?”
The question hit the High Counselor with the force of an open-palmed slap. His breathing changed, turning shallow and quick. Arin’s vaguely bored expression did not change.
“S-sire, a grave misunderstanding is afoot.” Rodan’s trembling voice steadied. Just as abruptly, the lines carving across his graying skin eased. As closely as Arin was watching, he still couldn’t see them. The signs of his deception.
In any other situation, Arin would be impressed. Long and sustained deceit required a certain finesse. The fidgety man in front of him hardly seemed capable of it.
“I cannot imagine what tales that licentious, traitorous Jasadi spoke, but you must know better than to believe her.”
Arin heard the words the High Counselor didn’t dare say: You should have known better than to believe anything she said. You should have known better. You should have known.
There was a time when the provocation would have evaporated on contact, dispersing against the unyielding wall of Arin’s focus. A time when nobody but Rawain had the right weapons to get under Arin’s skin.
A time before a dark-eyed Jasadi became the fastest blade under which Arin could bleed.
Arin took one breath, long and slow. Anger needed embers to catch—stone against which the flint might strike. The most efficient way to dispose of an inefficient reaction was to keep moving. Crush it underfoot and never look back.
Until five days ago, the strategy had worked. Arin devoted a lifetime to designing the lay of his own mind—crafting every valley and bend.
But now, there were breaches. There was the blade.
Arin reached into his coat and extracted a tiny bottle containing four ivory beads, each roughly the size of a fingernail.
“Why did Sayali Barakat flee your home when she was fourteen?”
A flash of surprise, wiped in an instant. The High Counselor opened his mouth, and Arin lifted a finger. “Think through what you say next. I offer you one chance, and one chance only.”
Rodan’s palms flattened on the table, leaving Arin with no choice but to observe the dirt creased into the other man’s knuckles. “I have nothing to think through, my liege. She is a thief. She abused my kindness and broke her mother’s heart. She stole everything I’d saved for her future to run away with her fair-haired lover.”
One bead rolled from the bottle into Arin’s palm. “Strange. Your wife told a different story.”
Leaning over the table, Arin dropped the bead into the glass on Rodan’s right. It dissolved with a hiss. The two of them watched ivory flecks settle at the bottom of the glass.
Neat. Predictable—like this entire conversation.
Rodan didn’t take his eyes off the tainted glass. “Time has diminished the truth of her daughter’s treachery. She cannot be relied upon when it comes to Sayali.”
“I am sure Sayali felt similarly.”
Meeting Sefa’s mother had been a strange experience. She’d wasted an hour preparing tea and honey cake, jittery with apologies as she rushed to accommodate Arin and his guardsmen. It was almost, almost a perfect replica of her daughter’s endearing mannerisms. Except where Sefa’s eyes were always warm with mirth, a void tunneled through her mother’s. The rumors of her long-lost daughter appearing with the Nizahl Champion had unsettled her, and as he’d anticipated, Arin’s careful questions rattled the last of her defenses. He finished dissecting the truth from her before his untouched tea went cold.
Arin crossed his legs. “Sayali—Sefa—spent much time in my company. What I know of her is this: she is entirely led by her sense of right and wrong, she hates to be watched while she eats, and the only obstacle interfering with her loyalty to her friend was her fear of you.”
“I can assure you, sire, I would never—”
Counselor Rodan absorbed the impassive set of Arin’s features.
Then, a marvel.
Like a canvas stripped of its paint, the panic drained out of Rodan. In its stead waited a chilling blankness. “Well, here we are.”
Arin’s lips curved in a humorless smile. He considered it a personal victory every time he convinced a beast to show him its teeth.
“You have a choice,” Arin said. “A kinder choice than you deserve, but a fair one.” He nodded to the twin glasses. “Drink from the glass on the right, and your atrocities die with you. Your wife will give you a decent burial, and your name will not be stricken from our records. My father and the other counselors will lay the royal wreath on your headstone. You will have a grave for Sayali to spit on.”
Rodan licked his cracked lips, fixing on the poisoned glass. “And if I drink from the left?”
“A drink from the left is your death delayed. You will live—for a time. But when your death catches up to you, it will not be gentle. I am a creative man, Counselor, with limited opportunities to properly express it. Your killers will arrive with instructions to exact horrors upon you that your very worst nightmares cannot fathom. Those who bother to mourn you will remember you as a traitor and thief who stole from the Citadel and vanished. And when you eventually die, it will be with tears of relief on your lips. What remains of your body will be disassembled, burned, and cast into the river.”
And since Rodan had paid him the courtesy of showing Arin his true face, Arin repaid him in kind. His voice hardened, crystallizing beneath the force of the violence clenched behind his teeth. “Personally, I hope you choose the second. Sayali may have haunted you, but I will hunt you. I will see to it that every shadow in your wake takes my form. Every sound you strain to hear in the night will whisper in my voice. I will feed you your death in doses and enjoy watching it rot you from the inside. The glass on the right, Rodan? That is your one chance at mercy.”
Rodan stared at Arin, frozen.
After a lifetime, a laugh shuddered out of the frail High Counselor. “I warned them, you know. Even as a child, it was clear what you were. What you are.”
This conversation had already taken longer than Arin allotted for, but he supposed he could indulge a dead man. “What am I, Counselor Rodan?”
The High Counselor regarded Arin as one might gaze upon ropes hanging from the gallows. The terror was the first genuine emotion Arin had seen from him tonight.
“Nizahl’s doom,” Rodan whispered. “The end of everything we have built.”
The High Counselor gripped the poisoned glass. “My only regret is dying before I see my prophecy fulfilled.”
Rodan drained the talwith in one pull, slamming the empty glass on the table. “But it won’t be long now, Arin of Nizahl. Your legacy is death, and I am merely the first sacrifice.”
Outside, the rain pummeled the side of the Citadel, pouring over the windows in a dull roar.
Mildly bemused, Arin arched a single brow. “Do not grant yourself such credit, Rodan. If death is my legacy, it was anointed long ago, by adversaries far more worthy than you.”
Rodan went rigid before Arin could be regaled with further pontification. The High Counselor’s chair screeched across the floor as he bent forward, gripping his stomach with a groan.
Reaching for the glass on the left, Arin observed the sweat pouring from Rodan’s shiny head. Drops splattered on the table, which shook beneath the dying High Counselor’s tremors.
Arin took a sip, greeting the burn of the talwith like an old friend. “The night of the Victor’s Ball, I made a decision.”
Five days ago, a wing of the Citadel burned.
Five days ago, the Malika of Jasad stepped forward in Sylvia the village apprentice’s skin.
Five days ago, Arin strangled Sultana Vaida until blood broke in her eyes. One more second, and the ruler of Lukub would have been dead in his hands.
Control. For others, it was a pillar. Something steadfast to hold them up, to hide behind when the pressure became too much.
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, Arin gestured 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. About her. 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—”
Arin had chosen that moment to interrupt, startling the guardsmen apart.
“Sire?” Jeru’s tentative touch on Arin’s shoulder jolted him back to the present, and Arin drew away from the guard, pushing open the door.
“By Hirun’s glory…” Jeru whispered, raised brows threatening to disappear into his curly hair.
Maps covered every inch of the room. Precious maps, maps Arin traded from Orbanian khawaga, collected in Omalian markets and smoke-filled Lukubi gambling houses. Maps he’d been gifted as a child from diplomats visiting from Jasad.
On the ground, an entire armory lay organized in twenty-seven neat rows.
“Sire…” Jeru trailed off, raking over the hundreds of blades Arin had sharpened to a deadly gleam; the arrowheads he had stacked into bundles of fifteen, each triangular point perfectly matched to the one beside it. “Were the Citadel’s blacksmiths unable to accommodate you?”
“They are working on another assignment for me,” Arin said.
Arin could predict each revolution of Jeru’s mind as he worked through the sight before him. It would have taken weeks to fix and organize this many weapons. Arin had done it in days, which meant Arin was not sleeping. In one room, Arin destroyed maps in a flare of temper. In another, he fixated on the precise edge of weapons older than the Heir himself.
Jeru opened his mouth. The question shaped on his tongue.
Before it could fall, Arin supplied one of his own.
“Where are Sefa and Marek?”
It worked. Chagrin flushed over Jeru, and he bowed his head, addressing his shoes. “No one has seen or heard from them, sire. I am still waiting on word from the soldiers I sent to Mahair, but I suspect they will return empty-handed.”
Arin’s palm flattened against the map to prevent it from curling. “Have I made myself less than clear, Jeru?”
“I’ll find them, my liege, I swear it. I plan to extend the search into Essam Woods.”
“You shouldn’t have waited this long to extend your search.”
The guard continued to study the ground. The stubborn angle of his chin reminded Arin of the day he’d found Jeru, head lowered in preparation for the executioner’s sword.
Jeru and Wes believed Arin saved Jeru and began the nimwa system out of a desire to see the lower villages at least as well fed as they were well punished. A sign of Arin’s mercy.
Perhaps. Arin liked to think he would have inevitably interceded to save Jeru from his idiocy, regardless of the potential he saw in the young man.
But in that moment, Arin saved Jeru because he saw something more rare than reckless courage and renegade justice: conviction.
“This week, the council will meet to discuss ending the conscription pardon on the lower villages.”
Jeru went white.
“If they see fit to end it, young soldiers will flood our training compounds, and many will not come willingly.”
“Sire—”
“Five days.” The words were a condemnation. “Five days ago, I asked you to bring me Marek and Sefa. Each day the Jasad Queen evades our capture is another day closer to war. Five days, and you have nothing.”
“Sylvia sent them—”
“Sylvia doesn’t exist.” Rage buckled in the void where Arin had thrust it, straining against its chains. “There is only the Jasad Heir.” A dry curl of his lips. “The Jasad Malika.”
Jeru swallowed. “My apologies. The Jasad Malika used her magic to send Sefa and Marek away during the Victor’s Ball, sire. They could be anywhere.”
The Jasad Malika. Oh, it was enough to make him wish he remembered how to laugh.
When Arin thought of the former Jasad Queen, a murky image of Malika Palia surfaced. He’d met the former Malika once as a child. She’d carried an air of authority that could not be taught, brimming with poise and power.
How could the Jasad Queen be a mouthy crook who would sooner wrestle a rabid bear than hold her temper for ten minutes? The Jasad Malika couldn’t be vicious and loud and unreasonably confident in her comedic skills—
“Lukub has closed its borders.” Arin spoke over his own thoughts, an action he was loath to have grown accustomed to. “Orban has collected dozens of Jasadis under the guise of other crimes and executed them. The khawaga have taken the crisis as an opportunity to pillage any village they see fit. Felix’s raids…” Arin exhaled softly, collecting his fury before it could unravel. “That imbecile is indiscriminately raiding his own lower villages. The last report said seventy accused Jasadis had been murdered—by his own men or by the people around them, who fear potential Jasadi presence will invite the Omalian forces down upon them.”
It hadn’t come as a surprise to Arin, who had already taken steps to account for the recklessness of the other kingdoms. Nizahl soldiers were threaded throughout Essam, planted at strategic trade routes, and holding vigil from Nizahlan strongholds at the nexus of each kingdom. Not to find the Urabi, whose intelligence Arin valued much higher than that of his fellow rulers, but to ensure the other three kingdoms did not engage in any action too catastrophic for Arin to fix.
Little had he known catastrophe was the very first item on their agenda.
Jeru cleared his throat. “I will leave no stone unturned, sire.”
“Stop turning stones,” Arin said. “Start throwing them.”
Before the guard could answer, Arin pushed out the words souring in his throat. “If the council votes for conscription, you will need to ride against any town that resists.”
Jeru turned his eyes down, but not before Arin caught the spill of pain. Arin understood what he was asking of his guardsman. His family had lived in the lower villages for generations, only lifted out of poverty thanks to Jeru’s position with the Heir. Arin’s orders would see him enter his former home on royal horseback, a sword in hand, fighting against the people he’d almost died to protect.
“It is not certain yet,” Arin added. If Arin had his way, it wouldn’t even be close. “If I fail, can you be trusted in this charge?”
Thunder cracked outside as Arin waited. This was the moment he’d foreseen when he took a mud-streaked village boy and dressed him in the Citadel’s uniform. A crossroads of duty.
When Jeru faced Arin again, his features were resolute. “I won’t fail you again, my lord.”
“Good.” Arin turned to his maps. “Now get out.”
The Citadel’s library was useless.
With a groan, Arin flipped the cover of The Marvelous and Macabre Histories of the Awaleen shut and pushed it aside.
Piles of books lined the table, several left open on pages he had deemed worth a second glance. He rubbed the pads of his fingers, where dust had settled into his calluses. Hours and hours of poring over these books had so far yielded nothing but a faint headache and a guttering candle.
Arin set his elbows on the table and pressed his knuckles to his temples. His gloves were folded beside the latest four-hundred-page waste of his night. None of the books he spent his evenings leafing through discussed Jasad or the Jasad War beyond a few paltry, self-censoring lines.
He had also spent hours searching for verified accounts of magic-madness over the last several centuries. When it became a recognized affliction, how it presented in different kinds of magic, how quickly it accelerated. And once again—nothing.
Arin stood, scraping his chair back, and picked up the book to return to its shelf. It would serve a better purpose as kindling for his hearth. He studied the rest of the row, frown deepening into a scowl. So many spines were cracked with age, lines running over the leather like rings around a tree. How could such a wealth of information exist at his fingertips, but so much of it contain nothing of actual use?
Returning to his seat, Arin poured another glass of talwith, the thud of the bottle echoing in the spacious library. When he flipped the cover for the next book, Arin stopped short.
The Slow Death of Rovial: A History of Magic-Madness Then and Since.
Arin set aside his glass, drawing the book toward him. It sounded entirely too good to be true. There were only fifty pages in the entire text, and all of them were in Resar.
By the time Arin finished reading, black smoke curled from the candle by his elbow. Long shadows slipped across the walls, trailing over the shelves like curious ghosts. Dust motes swirled above the pools of moonlight spilling through the open window.
Arin wished he knew the author. The person responsible for a work of such scholarship deserved recognition—they deserved a name. They had managed to condense a lifetime of study into a text a fifth the size of the intellectually destitute tomes Arin had been reading all week.
He flipped through his notes, cross-checking them against the text to make sure he’d captured the right details.
Every hundred years, one notable case of magic-madness emerges. Every time, in every century, it was a Jasadi whose magic would drive them to madness.
The author had tracked the cases over the last five thousand years. The earlier legends were recorded through carvings in Essam’s trees, and some of the pages were sparse where a particular story had been passed down orally in lower villages, since the communities were either not literate or avoided keeping records in fear of the higher courts.
The first known case after Rovial was a girl named Lena. A welder’s daughter who loved to chase the cats around her village until she turned thirteen, when they found Lena covered in scratches after hanging every cat in the village from her favorite tree. When they located the remains of the woman who tried to save the cats, her body had been turned inside out. The next morning, they caught Lena in the middle of skinning the dogs. The villagers killed her and burned her body.
The following century, a nineteen-year-old named Rath was imprisoned for putting a horde of Ruby Hounds under his thrall and compelling them to slaughter everyone in the Ivory Palace. The Sultana managed to regain control of her Hounds eventually, but it stood as one of the largest massacres to ever occur in a royal court.
They only managed to keep Rath imprisoned for two hours—his magic, which should have been temporarily drained from such an expenditure, tore apart the guards. It also wound up destroying the entire dungeon and burying Rath beneath the debris.
The stories continued, each more gruesome than the next. Only three variables remained constant: the magic-mad Jasadis were typically young when they were executed, they carried a staggeringly high quantity of magic, and nobody seemed to notice the signs of their sanity slipping away until it was too late.
Two of them, three hundred years apart, had disappeared into the Mirayah, never to be seen again. Arin had needed to stop and reference a different text when he saw the long-forgotten name. The Mirayah was a void for magical monstrosities—a shifting realm buried in Essam where the rules of magic did not apply, where beasts fled after the purge of Essam and escaped criminals sought refuge. Few who found the Mirayah were ever seen again. After magic had passed from the kingdoms, it seemed reasonable to assume the Mirayah had disappeared along with it.
Arin rubbed his eyes and stood, stretching his bones until they popped. He moved to the only window in the library. He took a deep breath, filling his chest with fresh air, and forced his circling thoughts to settle.
Beyond the three towering iron gates protecting the Citadel, the wilderness of Essam Woods waited with a predatory anticipation. Magic may have run dry in the rest of the kingdoms, but Essam… Essam had played host to countless wars between the Awaleen. To bloodshed and magical atrocities Arin’s generous imagination could never stretch far enough to accommodate. If the Mirayah had existed, it wouldn’t have faded like the magic of Lukub, Orban, and Omal. It would not have weakened like Jasad’s.
Like a parasite, the Mirayah would sustain itself on the bleeding magic of the woods. It would be the eyes of Essam, staring back at Arin every night as he fought not to saddle his horse and ride into its waiting teeth. Its voice, whispering blood-tipped promises in his ear.
Arin couldn’t shake the feeling that if he struck out on his own, he’d find her.
Arin exhaled harshly, his breath misting the window. He hated this—hated fighting a force that could not be reasoned with, that refused to surrender any ground in Arin’s mind. He would give anything to reach inside his chest and tear out the rot of her. To close his eyes without seeing her face.
Unusual cruelty is your specialty, she had said once, her tone accusatory and full of spite. And maybe she was right, but one thing Arin knew: He would never have done this to her. He would never have let her step toward this precipice with a lie wrapped around her neck. He would never have watched her willingly drop herself over the edge.
Arin took a handkerchief and wiped his breath from the window. Easier for the woods to keep watch.
Lighting another candle, Arin opened the book again.
Held deep in a mountain refuge, Sylvia has been captured by the Urabi, who believe the Jasad Heir can return their homeland to its former power. But after years of denying her legacy and a forbidden alliance with Jasad’s greatest enemy, Sylvia must win the Urabi’s trust while struggling to hide the dangerous side effects her magic is having on her mind.
In a rival kingdom, Arin must maneuver carefully between his father’s desire to put down the brewing rebellion and the sacred edicts Arin is sworn to uphold. He is determined to find Sylvia before it’s too late, but Arin’s search unravels secrets that threaten the very core of his beliefs about his family and the destruction of Jasad.
War is inevitable, but Sylvia cannot abandon her people again. The Urabi plan to raise the Jasadi fortress, and it will either kill Sylvia or destroy the humanity she’s fought so hard to protect. For the first time in her life Sylvia doesn’t just want to survive. She wants to win.
The fugitive queen is ready to reign.
