The Jasad Heir — Chapter no 25

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The soldiers carried the bodies of their fallen into Orban after dusk.

Wes and Jeru took me straight to the Champions’ Pavilion. Five homes built a quarter of a mile from one another formed a loose semicircle. Every home had a kitchen, a washroom, and two sleeping quarters. The royals stayed in King Murib’s castle. The Pavilion was prepared for the Champions every three years and housed Orban’s grain stores the rest of the time.

Unlike Lukubis, Orbanians rejected all extravagance. Early in the Alcalah’s history, they had tried to force the Champions to stay in tents.

Moss had completely obscured the fifth house. Vines draped around the former dwelling of the Jasadi Champion. The home was a blight upon the Champion’s Pavilion to some, an uncomfortable reminder for others.

Guards from Omal and Lukub swarmed in the tight circle around the Pavilion. The Nizahl soldiers split from us, joining the ranks. Soraya’s attempt to kill me during the Banquet had clearly motivated Arin to restructure my protections. I passed no fewer than twenty soldiers plastered to the front of the house. Soraya and the others would need to evade layers of security to get to me.

Inside the Nizahl Champion’s home, I hung up the garments I would need for the next few days. Sefa had created a spectacular gown for the Victor’s Ball. The elite celebration for the winning Champion took place the evening after the third trial.

Would I have the chance to wear this gown? Any one of these trials could be my last. Though they claimed death was not the standard in the Alcalah, previous years indicated otherwise.

Something shattered outside. Before I could think, I was putting the wall at my back and crouching behind the wardrobe. My hand found my heart.

One, two. I’m alive. Three, four. I’m safe. Five, six. I won’t let them catch me.

“Sorry!” came Jeru’s faraway shout. I exhaled roughly, collapsing from my crouch. The Mufsid woman, Soraya, the Urabi. The slew of near-death encounters was finally catching up to me. Was I destined to spend my life waiting for the next net to sweep me away?

I counted my heartbeats, finally moving from behind the wardrobe by number sixty-seven. Sefa and Marek entered shortly after with trays for supper. They were stationed with the rest of the Champions’ traveling staff, so I wouldn’t see them again until after the first trial. Assuming I survived, of course.

I could barely listen to their conversation. “I think I should sleep,” I said, interrupting Marek’s tirade about Jeru’s lack of hand-eye coordination.

Apparently the shatter had been Marek’s favorite cup.

Sefa’s forehead puckered. “Marek, give us a moment.”

I settled back against the hard mattress. I already missed the Ivory Palace’s luxuriously soft pillows and bed of feathers. “Sefa, if you are going to give me another speech about adventure—”

“It isn’t by choice.”

I stopped fussing with the atrocity Orban called a pillow. Sefa spoke with uncharacteristic solemnity. “What isn’t?”

“I overheard you at the Meridian Pass. You told Arin he was cruel by

choice, but Sylvia, it isn’t choice.”

How Nizahlan of her to say.

My thoughts must have revealed themselves in my scowl. She huffed. “I went to school with the Heir. We were years apart, and I rarely saw him.

But everyone at the school had a key parent in the Citadel, and children listen. The Heir was never uninjured. His mother was a nervous woman, obsessed with protecting her son, so none of us understood how he managed to keep breaking bones. I heard from a friend of a friend’s brother that at ten years old, Arin had recovered from his very first stab wound.”

“First stab wound?” I asked faintly. Rovial’s blessed beard, what was happening in the walls of the Citadel? “Who?”

“Assassins, maybe? We could only speculate.” Sefa sighed. “A painful past is no excuse. I would never defend the Nizahl Heir to you. But I wanted you to know, because… the way he looks at you sometimes. Like you are a cliff with a fatal fall, and each day you move him closer to its edge.”

“He believes in magic-madness. Jasadis will never be people to him. He will always think it is only a matter of time.”

But as I said it, a different conversation rose to my memory.

We build our reality on the foundation our world sets for us.

Sefa patted the spot next to my hand and left. I lay on the slab of torture King Murib saw fit to call a bed and gave myself to thought, an activity I generally took great lengths to avoid. My mind was not a place to stop for the sights, but Soraya’s speech about mirrors and memories continued to plague me. She had lied about so much. I should know better than to believe anything she said.

A rap came at my door. I recognized the cautious knock and sat up.

“Enter.”

I waved Arin inside when he lingered at the threshold, and he closed the door behind him. We regarded one another for an endless beat, each gauging the atmosphere. I pushed what Sefa had told me out of my head. I wished it mattered, but it didn’t. I could not judge an Arin I had never met.

This version was the sole Arin at my disposal, and it alone would stand trial in my eyes.

He spoke first. “I should have told you I was expecting the ambush. I knew the lines of your loyalty, and I chose to push them anyway.”

I narrowed my eyes. Was he apologizing? To me?

“My soldiers would not have killed them. They are instructed to take them to Nizahl for trial.”

“Please,” I said. “I respect you too much to think you could ever be so foolish as to believe those are two separate fates.”

I couldn’t bring myself to stoke the same flames of fury back to life.

This night might very well be my last, and I didn’t want to spend it as angry as I spent the rest of my days. An apology was more than I could have expected. “I’m sorry about Ren.” Despite my dislike of the guardsman, he had been loyal to Arin.

“Me too.” Arin shut his eyes for a second. I wondered if he was seeing the other soldiers Soraya had killed. Adding Ren to the tally of his failures.

“I am not sorry about interfering. You cannot ask me to actively assist you in capturing Jasadis. My only part in this is to compete in the Alcalah.”

Arin’s brow furrowed. “I didn’t ask you to assist. It was meant to proceed without your involvement.”

My lips parted, winded from the blow. He had expected me to do what I did best: stand idly by. Maybe I would have, had the arrows not put Marek and Sefa at risk. Most people feared what they were capable of doing, but I… I was starting to fear what I was capable of ignoring.

“So you aren’t angry anymore?”

He lifted a shoulder. “The power you displayed will encourage the Urabi to utilize every resource to capture you. When they come again, I’ll be ready.”

He didn’t elaborate, and I did not ask him to. No matter what the voice inside me urged, this was not my battle. I wouldn’t let it be.

“Sylvia.” There was a strange note in the way he said my name. “You helped me in the Pass. The magic might have driven me from my mind if you had not stopped it.”

“Arin.” I said his name the same. “You are more miserly with your gratitude than with your praise. Just say thank you.”

Arin gifted me one of his rare smiles. My stomach clenched, and it took an inordinate amount of time to tear my gaze from his mouth. He should know better than to share his smiles with me. I should know better than to

crave them.

“Thank you,” he said softly.

Rarely did fortune place me in an advantageous position, and I would not see the opportunity wasted. I hadn’t forgotten Arin’s agonized state in

the Pass.

“How can you sense magic?”

In Arin’s world, information was a transaction. He did not gift it freely, and he certainly never wasted it. The price for this information was prohibitively high. I had nothing to barter for it. I hadn’t possessed an ulterior motive for helping him in the Pass, but Arin would sleep better if he thought I helped in anticipation of this moment. Just another material exchange removed from the vagaries of emotion.

He nodded to himself, as though he had been prepared for my question.

“I will satisfy your curiosity, Suraira.”

He lowered himself to the chair across the bed. With the moon casting half his face in shadow, his back straight and gloved hands curled over the arms of the chair, he was an artist’s dream.

“As Heirs, we inherit the enemies and debts of our father. I am my

father’s sole child. I represented an invaluable emotional currency for his enemies. The Citadel was well protected, and my mother rarely left my side.” Arin turned his cheek to the window. His eyes dissolved in the moonlight, swirling in its colors. “When I was two years old, my father executed a Jasadi merchant found guilty of enchanting the weapons of Nizahlan dissidents in the lower villages. There was an outcry from Malik Niyar and Malika Palia. They had wanted him punished in Jasad. Two weeks later, a musrira misted past our guards and into my bedroom.”

I frowned, tempted to interrupt. I had begged Dawoud to introduce me to a musrira when I was a child. Most Jasadi magic did not show a preference in how it was expressed or exhibit an affinity toward a particular use. Musriras were one of the rare exceptions. These Jasadis possessed the ability to move through space in spirit. They could vacate their physical forms in a safe place and spirit themselves anywhere they wanted to go. Usr Jasad had been warded to the teeth, but even our most powerful security barriers could not keep out a musrira.

“She cursed me. We believe she intended the curse to kill me, but my mother interrupted halfway through. The curse took only half effect. I woke up three days later with a new attunement to magic. I could sense it, feel it.”

He turned away from the window. A strand of silver hair came loose at his temple. “Temporarily drain it.”

“You said… you once told me my magic felt strong. If it pains you to touch me now, when I can barely use a fraction of it, what would happen if my magic were free?”

Arin raised his chin, unmoved by the question. It must have occurred to him soon after the events in the Relic Room.

“I can’t know for certain what would happen if your full magic was accessible. I might be able to drain it normally. Maybe I’d never reach the bottom of your magic’s well, so to speak, and could only temporarily drain portions of it,” Arin said. “But if you want my strongest theory, I suspect touching you while you can fully express your magic would kill me.”

He offered it calmly, as one might report the presence of rain in the clouds. It took me a minute to gather myself and collect the jaw I’d dropped. “That is quite a theory.” One I doubted had any shred of likelihood. My magic was powerful, but not to the extent that draining it would kill him. That touching me would kill him.

“Anything else?” Arin braced his hands against the arms of his chair, clearly ready to conclude the conversation.

The dreams I had plummeted through after Soraya’s attack. They were

only dreams, but in one of them… “Was your hair black before the curse?”

I might have asked if he licked muddy horse hooves from the shock flickering over his expression. Kapastra’s horned beasts, could there have been a measure of truth to those dreams?

I thought quickly. Arin would want to know how I knew, and “I saw it in my dreams” would not serve me well.

“Sefa told me she heard a rumor at the school you attended together.”

The tension relaxed fractionally. He was still suspicious, but my answer must have been acceptable enough for the time being. “I see.” He stood abruptly, straightening the lines of his coat. “You should sleep. I will come escort you to the trial tomorrow.”

A resounding end to the conversation, then. My questions about the full scope of his curse lingered, but he had given me plenty to consider.

“Of course. Yes. I will see you in the morning.” A wave of inexplicable sorrow crested over me. For better or worse, tomorrow would usher in the beginning of the end. End of Essiya, and maybe the true start of Sylvia. I covered by dipping into an exaggerated bow. “Good night.”

Arin studied me. My smirk faded. I had worn a thousand faces in my twenty years. Fooled friends and enemies with my false names and empty smiles. But sometimes, like now, Arin gazed at me a certain way, and I thought he saw it. My true face, hidden beneath the debris.

I wondered what it looked like.

I wondered why in a world ripe with monsters and magic, only he could

see me so clearly.

“Good night, Suraira.”

They summoned the Champions at midday. We had two hours from then to reach the cliffside on the other end of the forest. The first three Champions

to cross Ayume Forest and climb to the top of the bluff would move to the second trial. I followed the rest of the Champions down the damp, winding tunnel. Each step added a fresh wave of anxiety. The tunnel would take us to the edge of Ayume.

Slightly ahead, Diya walked with her shoulders pulled back. Water droplets clung to her shorn hair. Timur and Mehti spoke in low tones, and I stared at the back of Timur’s head until he glanced over. He waved, pointing at Mehti with a coconspiratorial eye roll. I smiled back.

The Lukub Champion would die today.

Someone cleared their throat pointedly. Diya slowed to match my pace.

“Do you think they have an alliance?” She nodded at Timur and Mehti.

It seemed more likely Mehti had trapped Timur in conversation, and the Lukub Champion’s politeness kept him captive. “Why? Are you suggesting you and I form one?”

Diya scoffed. “What value could an alliance with you provide?”

“Now, Diya. How did you know insults were the way to my heart?”

Instead of a snide retort, Diya pinched her nose. “Do you smell that?”

She glared at Timur. “It’s coming from the Lukubi.”

I snorted. Her antipathy for everything Lukub had no bounds. From the gloom ahead, five narrow sets of steps ended the tunnel. Five steps for five Champions. Everywhere we went, Jasad followed.

Diya took the steps to my right, Mehti to my left.

“May we share the Awaleen’s fortitude and see each other again in joy,”

Timur said. I prodded around the thin canvas covering the opening, rising to the top step. The other Champions copied my position, palms pressed to the canvas.

“For Baira!” Timur bellowed, and leapt through the canvas. A beam of sunlight poured into the tunnel from the new opening.

“For Kapastra!” Mehti shouted, vanishing after him.

Dania and I glanced at each other in silent understanding. I peeled a corner of the canvas back and peeked around. When I couldn’t find any animals or waiting threats, I nodded at Diya. “Would you like to dramatically fling yourself first, or shall I?”

“I hope Ayume has a taste for empty air,” she said. “It will find plenty between their ears.” Diya pulled her knees to her chest and drew herself through the opening.

I tightened my stomach and vaulted up. The sun blazed overhead, stinging my cheeks. The cheerful conditions clashed with the smell assaulting my nose. Sweet decay with a rotten edge. I had doused many a cloth with an identical-smelling substance during my route, including the one I used to put Zeinab’s mother to sleep.

Ayume’s assault began with its very air.

We were permitted to bring only a small dagger with us. Holding my breath, I pulled mine free and cut a large triangle from the bottom of my tunic. I tied two of the ends behind my head, covering my nose and mouth with the makeshift mask. The protection it afforded would dwindle the longer I remained in the forest. Rationing my breaths was critical.

The landscape was identical to the drawings I’d looked through my first week. The hill sloped into a lake running along the perimeter of the trees.

The forest stretched like a roll of darkness, dense and lethally quiet. Beyond it, the clouds cut around our ultimate goal: the cliff.

I took a step down and nearly lost my footing. The hill was steep, covered in loose dirt and sediment. I tried to squint past the sun’s glare to study the dimensions of the lake. If it stretched too widely at this juncture, I’d need to double back. Any error would waste precious time and put me closer to traipsing Ayume in the dark, the effects of the sour-smelling air dulling my senses.

Stabbing my dagger into the soil for leverage, I hiked down the slope in stops and starts. The sun cast dazzling white diamonds on the lake’s surface.

Spiderlike eddies traveled into the main body of water, the lake’s glittering surface disappearing between the trees.

My reflection stared nervously up at me. After the Urabi’s attack in Essam, I had practiced climbing the rope against the river’s current for a week. Forced my body to push forward despite Hirun’s indomitable insistence to the contrary. I heard Arin’s stern warning as if told in the present. Dark magic is embedded in Ayume, and nowhere more so than in its lake. The lake is a void, with water more viscous than sand. Under no circumstance should you allow the water to submerge you completely. Keep your head aloft. Let yourself sink, and the lake will never release you.

If not for the scarcity of daylight, I could circle the lake and forgo crossing it completely. The Alcalah tested more than an ability to finish; a Champion’s physical prowess came second to their ability to balance

choices. Discernment, Arin called it. Filling my chest with the tainted air, I sealed my lips shut and waded into the lake. The water was shockingly cold, and it sucked at my legs, coaxing me deeper. I twined my hands behind my neck and lifted my chin. The water hugged my waist, lapping higher with each step.

When the water reached my shoulders, the ground disappeared below me. I lowered my arms and kicked, paddling through the tar-like water. The weight of the lake was a rebellion against logic, and my lungs burned for air before I was halfway across. Something long and slippery wrapped itself around my thigh, winding around my leg. It flitted away, but not before terror filled the limited capacity of my chest.

Have you forgotten our first lesson? Panic erases all skill, any training.

Keep your head and do what needs to be done, Hanim commanded.

I tipped my chin back, keeping my face pointed to the sun as the water swallowed my neck. The water hardened. My legs slogged uselessly against the resistance. The lake caressed my cheeks, sliding at my lower lip.

Is this how Fairel had woken up after the horses trampled her legs?

Fairel, who had only wanted to protect Nadia’s chairs. She would never join the young women balancing pots on their heads as they ambled through Mahair. She would never chase the ducks escaping Yuli’s farm or scale Essam’s trees. Fairel would lead a full life, because her spirit demanded nothing less, but it was not the life she would have had if not for Felix of Omal.

Pain pricked in my deadened arms. Magic flooded my body, and I gasped as sensation returned to my limbs. The water loosened around me, becoming malleable again. I swam, relishing the sharp discomfort of the cuffs, and nearly wept when I made contact with solid ground. I staggered from the lake. Any attempts to save my breath flew away as I panted like a dog in an Orbanian summer.

I needed to find Timur. The sun sank lower in the sky, casting long shadows from the trees. It had passed like minutes, but I must have been in the lake close to an hour.

As soon as I got to my feet, a shrieking bird dove toward me. I shielded my face as it tore into my sleeve, clawing my arm. I slashed my dagger at it and ran into the trees, leaping over bushes with vines writhing like serpents.

Leaves sharper than glass rained around me. Timur should have finished

crossing the lake already, unless he tried to cross at a wider juncture of the lake. If Mehti and Diya reached the bluff before me, Timur would lose his chance at the second trial. Without my interference, he could not cry sabotage to Vaida. He would not die in Ayume.

I tore away a branch clinging to my vest, straining to hear the other Champions. A flock of birds screamed as they flew into the bladed leaves.

Bloody feathers floated into my field of vision, and I stumbled over an eddy of water divorced from the lake. A rabbit lay sideways in the shallow pool, enveloped in the void but for a single, open eye.

The battle of Ayume had warped this territory into a sick mimicry of nature. Dania’s twisted magic saturated the very pores of Ayume. The Orbanian forest survived as a relic, a living massacre, kept sentient by the blood of Kapastra’s fallen soldiers surging through the forest’s veins.

I lost track of time as I cut through the forest. When the trees thinned, I unfurled my clenched fingers from around my dagger and panted. The white cliffside loomed ahead, its edge a crooked line along the sky. Sunset threatened on the horizon. Had any of the other Champions already reached it? Had they climbed the bluff?

I pressed the cloth closer to my mouth, sipping the air and running my gaze over the vast line of Ayume. Where were they?

“You finished first.”

I wheeled around. Timur tossed a rock from hand to hand. Sweat shimmered on his forehead, and his words came sluggishly. He had inhaled too much of the toxic air.

“I wish you hadn’t. I wish Her Majesty had been wrong, just this one time.”

Essiya, back away, Hanim said suddenly, urgent. Get away from him.

“What do you mean?” I asked. Behind my back, I pulled my dagger free and planted my thumb on the base. “Are you all right, Timur?”

I already understood. Had I not been embroiled in the muck of my conscience, the possibility would have been glaringly obvious. Vaida needed her Champion to win. I remained her biggest obstacle. If I would not concede defeat, I would be stopped.

“What did she offer you?” The sky clung to the vanishing sun as twilight painted orange streaks over the horizon. “Wealth? Protection?” I recalled our conversation in the courtyard. “Is she threatening your family?”

Timur’s brawny arms trembled. He coughed, spitting a bloody wad to the ground. “My sister is dying. The supplies the chemists need to make the cure are limited, and we do not have the means to pay them ourselves.

Sultana Vaida—she promised, she said if I made certain you lost the Alcalah, Maram would be taken care of.”

“What about the riches awarded to the Victor? Surely such wealth could produce a cure for your sister.”

Timur was already shaking his head. “There isn’t time. There is one vial of the cure available now, and if you do not continue to the second trial, my sister will have it by this evening.”

I wanted to throw the leaves of Ayume at Vaida, slice her layers of artifice and manipulation bare and toss what remained for the carrion- eaters.

“She created the problem, and now she bargains to fix it! Royals weave traps for the likes of us. They watch while we squirm and expect gratitude when they deign to release a select few from their web. I was a chemist’s apprentice in Omal. The foremost chemist in the entire kingdom. I can help your sister, Timur. We will make more vials. You do not have to carry out Vaida’s will.”

“Knowing you are in a trap does not make it any easier to escape.”

Timur’s eyes brightened with unshed tears. He shifted to the side, revealing a cavity in the gray boulders behind him. He hurled the rock into the cave.

“Forgive me, Sylvia.”

Three sets of indigo eyes materialized from the cave, and a guttural growl shook the earth.

At one point in time, the three nightmares emerging from the cave were probably average mutts. The mangy dogs Fairel loved, the ones most often covered in soot, found nosing through Mahair’s smoldering garbage. Ayume had layered its evil over these dogs. Black drool dripped from jaws the size of boulders. Claws protruded from misshapen paws, and long, pointed teeth mashed together. They did not spare Timur a glance, but fixated on me.

“Diya smelled it,” I realized. The dogs fanned into a semicircle around me. I hadn’t thought much of it, reducing her comment to another dig against Lukubis. “You doused yourself in an odor before we entered the tunnels. It’s keeping them away from you.”

I ripped my gaze from the dogs long enough to snarl at Timur. “Follow

me, Timur. Guarantee your mission is done, because if I survive, I will see your sister dead before any illness can.”

The dogs howled, leaping. I tore into the trees. The lake’s eddies extended into the forest. If I could find a branch of the lake deep enough to drown three dogs, I would be safe.

Timur crashed through the bushes behind me. The sun kissed the sky goodbye, the last fingers of light vanishing in the rush of evening.

The instincts I honed from the blindfolded runs in Essam sharpened with my spite. Arin prepared me to succeed when every condition demanded otherwise. I would not be ended by a pack of dogs in Orban.

My muscles became lethargic as I drew in gulps of air. The dogs nipped at my heels, their shrill barking grating against my ears.

“Essiya, come down from there! You’ll hurt yourself!”

I barely kept from tripping over an overgrown root. “Dawoud?” I cried out.

The voices echoed around me. Ayume or my magic? Why do you do that? Always pull away? the wind asked in Fairel’s voice.

Every limb in my body burned. I wanted to collapse, to rest for just one moment in the soft soil. I hooked to the right. Behind a cluster of abandoned nests, a leg of the lake appeared.

A few moments more and I would have reached it. But in my eagerness, I ventured too close to an emaciated bush. A branch wrapped around my ankle, nearly sending me to the ground. I yanked, and the branch tightened.

I tried to climb the tree behind the bush and cut my palm open against the spiked bark. I was caught fast.

The dogs burst from the right, Timur close behind. Their muzzles opened in a macabre grin, and Timur turned his head. “Goodbye, Sylvia.”

My cuffs heated. “If you are going to kill me,” I seethed, “have the

decency to look me in the eye.”

I snapped my fingers.

The dogs froze mid-leap, their hateful indigo eyes leveled on mine. My magic ripped the branch from my ankle, but my body’s suffering affected my magic, too. I stumbled with the release and caught myself on the tree.

“Y-you,” Timur panted. He collapsed to his knees, the effect of chasing me apparent in his drooping features. The air would put him to sleep long before he could reach the cliffside, let alone climb it. “Jasadi.”

Part of me insisted I leave Timur to sleep. The scent repelling the dogs could not last long, and they would eat him alive. The same grisly fate he reserved for me. With my magic warm inside my failing body, I forced the images of Sefa and Marek to replace the dogs. I ignored the evil roiling in this forest and surrounded myself with the meticulous jars of Rory’s shop and the warmth of Raya’s keep. These were the exceptions to my grief, rage, fear rule, but their effect on my magic was the same.

“I will grant you a kinder end than the one you planned for me.”

I snapped my fingers. A boulder cracked against the side of Timur’s head, and his wide eyes went blank. One of the dogs’ paws quivered. I would not be able to hold my magic for long.

Skirting the dogs, I groped for a pulse at Timur’s throat and groaned when one fluttered against my fingers. A dog’s forked tail swished.

I stripped Timur’s coat from his shoulders and put it on. There should have been enough of the scent left to keep the dogs from following me. I summoned the last traces of my receding magic and pushed my palm outward.

Timur’s unconscious form floated, drifting past the dogs and over the bush. My arm shook with the effort of holding my magic. He needed to be lowered at the correct angle, or this endeavor was a wasted mercy.

The heat left my cuffs, and Timur’s body dropped like a stone. He did not splash on impact. The water crept over him hungrily, inch by inch. The lake swallowed the Lukub Champion with a sigh. The rippling surface went smooth. Another life digested in the belly of Ayume.

Stumbling in the direction of the cliff, the world tilted and spun. I clenched my fists and whimpered at the resulting stab of pain from my right palm. A sticky wetness ran down my sleeve. I lifted my arm, narrowly avoiding another snaking branch.

Amber-colored sludge was stuck to the center of my palm, trickling over my cuff. The skin beneath bubbled with pink drops of blood.

Arin’s warning. In the future, avoid touching the trees while you run.

Even the sap in Ayume can kill you.

“May you fester eternally in your tomb, Dania,” I spat.

Apprenticing under Rory did not come without its cursed knowledge.

Though Rory created cures in areas where few solutions existed, even he rarely bothered with venom. From the pain radiating up my arm, I judged I

had less than twenty minutes before the sap immobilized my entire body.

A rope dangled from the bluff, the frayed end brushing my shoulder. The sheer rock face sneered down at me. The cliff cut into the night sky like a blade of darkness. I pressed my forehead to the crumbling stone and closed my eyes. Already, the fingers of my right hand hurt to fold. If my arm quit halfway up the climb, I might be able to dangle from the rope long enough for the air to finish its task and send me to sleep. At least then I would not be conscious when I plummeted to my death.

I tossed off Timur’s coat and hoisted myself onto the rope. Bending my legs, I pushed off the cliff and used the swing’s momentum to begin the climb. I clutched the rope with one hand at the bottom, one on top. I wrapped the knuckles of my bottom hand in the rope for leverage while the top one pulled me upward—an old trick of Hanim’s to prevent sliding. The pattern held; I pushed off the side of the cliff and climbed a foot, swapping the bottom hand every few minutes. I tried to think of Fairel or Rory, Sefa or Marek. Anything to invigorate my magic. But my arms ached, and my eyes struggled to stay open. The sap pumped its poison through me, competing with the fatigue to see which could kill me first.

Instead of anyone dear to me, I thought of Soraya.

I had adored her so completely. Wept over her death long after the tears for my grandparents dried. She had loved me, too. But the hate… the hate that poisoned worse than any sap, that rotted Soraya and left behind the woman who stabbed me in Lukub.

A sudden wind batted me to the side. The rope catapulted me into the bluff. I hit the rocks and lost my grip, sliding down for a dizzying few seconds before I caught myself again. The friction from the rope tore my palms open, coating my forearms in blood.

Swaying gently, I tried to gauge how much left there was to climb.

“You’re not even halfway there,” a little girl said from my right. I jolted, the rope fibers digging into my raw hands. The little girl dangled from a second rope, peering at me with distaste.

It’s not real, Hanim said. It’s the forest’s magic.

“I am not the forest’s magic. I’m yours,” she griped. “Hurry. You have

moments left.”

“Essiya,” I breathed.

“Essiya,” she returned. “Or Sylvia, I suppose, which is not the name I

would have chosen. You named us after Soraya’s mother. Little odd, isn’t it?” The girl spun around on the rope. “Why are you keeping me trapped?

We are going to die.”

“I’m not keeping you—” I coughed, clenching my knees around the rope to keep from sliding farther down. “There are cuffs blocking my magic.”

Essiya snorted. She twisted, hanging upside down. “Would you use me without the cuffs? You never do in your dreams. We just watch our mother

and everyone burn.”

“Of course I would.”

“I think,” Essiya barreled on, and Rovial’s tainted tomb, had I really been such a nuisance as a child? “I think even if your magic was free, and you had every advantage to reclaim our kingdom, you still wouldn’t save Jasad. You are content to live on the outskirts of other people’s land, a vagrant in all but name. You blame Hanim for hardening your heart, but she is dead. Your heart belongs to you again, and you refuse to give it over to Jasad. That is why Soraya wants us dead.”

I noticed belatedly my cuffs were vises around my wrists. My magic spread over my skin, numbing the worst of the poison’s effects. I resumed my climb.

“You are bold for a hallucination,” I snapped. “There are others capable of leading Jasad better than I could. What do I have other than a royal name?”

Essiya kept pace, climbing as I did. My hands were little more than raw meat, but the tingle of my magic prevented the agony from stalling my ascent.

“What else do you need?” Essiya countered. “The Mufsids and Urabi combined do not have a tenth of the power you have. Yet they fight. The Jasadis hiding in Lukub, Orban, Omal, even Nizahl—they fight. Power is a choice, Sylvia. When you choose who you are willing to fight for, you choose who you are.”

“Even if I do not win? Even if I am an insignificant wave in an ocean of resistance? There is every chance I can live a peaceful, mundane life as Sylvia. Nothing is guaranteed for Essiya. Not a good life, not victory, nothing.” The jutting lip of the cliff’s peak came into view. I grunted, tightening my stomach as I swung toward the cliffside. I kicked the hard

surface, sending rocks tumbling below. “I should give up certainty, give up Sylvia, for a legion of faceless Jasadis?”

I reached for the edge of the cliff, missing by inches. One more swing, one more pull. A light touch at my wrist startled me from my destination.

Essiya materialized in front of me, and we clung to the same rope. Kitmer- black eyes bored into mine. “All your choices require sacrifice. The question is, what are you willing to lose?”

Essiya released the rope, falling into the gloom. My magic slowed with her disappearance, and a cry tumbled from my lips at the renewed sensation in my palms. With a guttural shout, I hauled myself up the last foot, hooking my arm over the cliff’s edge. I plunged the dagger into the dirt and dragged myself onto solid land. As soon as my knees were on the earth, I crawled away from the sheer drop and discarded the dagger. My blood left smears on the hilt.

A beat. I exhaled, tearing the cloth from behind my head. My magic receded more, exposing me to a riot of agony.

Countless lanterns seared into my eyes. Thousands of faces moved in my periphery, but none the one I wanted. The gathered masses gaped at me.

“The Nizahl Champion joins the Orban and Omal Champions in the

second trial!” the announcer boomed.

The crowd exploded.

The cheering was muted, the spectators’ colors reduced to moving dots on a rapidly darkening landscape. A tall figure appeared from the frenzied dots. “Sylvia?” Arin called. His low voice was the best sound I had ever heard. The Commander swore. “Get the canvas!”

I stitched together the words I needed and held up my palm. “Sap,” I croaked. “For twenty minutes.”

The last of my magic dissipated, and I sagged into Arin’s chest. The Nizahl Heir’s arms went around me, and I distantly registered that he was shouting, but I had ceased to care. He was warm and strong, and he smelled like the rain that never fell in Ayume.

I breathed Arin in, my head slumping over the crook of his arm as Ayume’s air finally put me to sleep.

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