The Jasad Heir — Chapter no 30

CHAPTER THIRTY

Night loomed over Dar al Mansi. I eased out from beneath Dawoud’s body. Once night fell, hordes of patrolling guards would attack the remaining creatures in Dar al Mansi.

I stared down at Dawoud’s still face. Supreme Rawain did this. He threw Dawoud into Dar al Mansi for me to slaughter. We were animals to him,

playthings to use and dispose of.

And I was his Champion.

The rage cooled the howling grief in my chest. I bent down, and even without months of training, I wouldn’t have struggled to lift Dawoud in my arms. Though starved and tortured, Dawoud never bowed to Nizahl. Proud until his end, dying like every Jasadi in Dar al Mansi.

But unlike them, he would not dwell in the home of the forgotten.

I carried Dawoud through the stretch of Essam Woods separating Dar al Mansi from the rest of Omal. Lantern light and movement flickered between the trees. The marching patrol.

Essam cleared, and a commotion greeted my entry. The audience seethed on two opposite slopes, craning for a view of the narrow landing between them. They cheered as I walked onto the path, although the ones at the bottom quieted at the sight of the dead man in my arms.

The announcer’s expression scrunched with confusion as I approached. I glanced behind him. Supreme Rawain and the other royals lounged at the front, ringed with guards. I carefully kept my gaze away from Supreme Rawain or his son.

Jeru and Wes broke from the outskirts as the announcer peered down at Dawoud and my state of undress. Al Anqa’a had taken my tunic in its talon, and a large white band covered my breasts, keeping my stomach and shoulders exposed. He cleared his throat. “Do you—uh—”

I gently laid Dawoud in Jeru and Wes’s arms without meeting either of their eyes. They would care for him. See he was taken somewhere the

scavengers could not reach.

I tossed the nisnas’s finger to the ground and pulled the dulhath’s spidery limb from its binding around my thigh.

“A nisnas finger. A dulhath leg. A Jasadi. Three monsters. Three trophies.” I smiled, and the announcer took a step back. “Go ahead. Declare me.”

“Sylvia,” Jeru tried, voice hoarse. I looked at him, and the Nizahl soldier blanched.

The announcer whirled to the gathered masses. “The Nizahl Champion joins the Orban Champion to proceed to the third trial!”

I walked past him, past Jeru and Wes and the dead man in their arms, past the applauding royals. I did not stop to see the satisfaction in Rawain’s gaze or the irritation in Vaun’s. I entered the Champions’ carriage with Diya, and the wheels groaned as the carriage jerked into motion.

We stayed silent until we reached the palace. Diya pulled the quilt from around her shoulders and tossed it into my lap. “Give them nothing to see but the look in your eyes,” she said.

Numb, I pulled the quilt around my shoulders. No servant intercepted me as I entered the palace, and no guard asked questions. I floated up the stairs in a haze. In the stillness of my quarters, I let the quilt spill to the ground.

Does it hurt more when your failures have names? Hanim whispered.

Does it hurt more to put a face to the people you have let down?

The drawers rattled in the bedside table, shooting into the opposite wall.

My cuffs pulsed around raw wrists, but I did not feel the pain.

You could be faced with not a single obstacle and still find an excuse to turn away from your people, she said. Dawoud is dead, your family is dead.

Soraya was never yours. Who do you have left?

The wardrobe flew into the divan, upending cases of meticulously packed gowns. Blankets tore, and the bedframe snapped, taking the bed to the ground. Flames danced over the rug, trailing up the wall.

Dawoud mouthed my name before he drove the dagger into his chest. A name I gagged and buried deep inside me, a name that should have burned to ash with the rest of Jasad.

For so long, I thought Essiya’s name brought death wherever it went.

But hearing Dawoud speak it… I had forgotten what it meant to be real to

someone. I had felt more whole in those few minutes than I had in eleven years. Even if I no longer knew who Essiya was.

The door opened as several pillows exploded, raining feathers on the dancing fire.

My neck prickled, and I turned to see the Nizahl Heir closing the door.

The fire licked over the mattress, casting the room in an orange glow.

Something wet had been steadily dripping from my chin since I entered the palace, and I wiped my cheeks with detached wonder.

“Do you know that I can’t remember the last time I cried? Maybe six, seven years ago.” Cracks spidered in the mirror. The glass burst, raining shards over the destroyed wardrobe. I caught a tear from the corner of my eye and examined it thoughtfully. “They just keep coming.”

“Do you intend to bring down the Omal palace, then?” Arin asked conversationally, as though the objects hurtling around the room were nothing more consequential than overexcited dust motes.

“Oh, I’m not greedy. Just this half of it will do.” The triangular head of the window toppled in a rupture of white concrete.

An advantage of living with the Nizahl Heir for months was how familiar I had become with the tiniest shifts in his inscrutable expression.

“What was his name?”

Everything on my side of the room rose into the air and hurled into the

opposite wall.

“Be quiet,” I growled.

Arin could not anchor me this time. I would not let him break the blessed emptiness again.

Arin dusted wooden shards from his coat. His boots extinguished the flames beneath them as he approached. “Who was he to you?”

“I’m warning you.” Instead of flourishing with my outrage, my magic started to splutter.

Arin trapped me against the wall, his arms bracketing the sides of my head. All I could see was pale blue, steady and unwavering. “He will be taken to Jasad,” Arin said. I clutched my chest, shaking my head. “They will prepare him for burial in the Jasadi custom.”

“Stop, stop,” I cried out. I shoved at his shoulders.

“He will be buried in a spot where the grass still grows.” Arin’s voice filtered into my head. A firm, cauterizing force cutting a path through the

wound. “A fig tree will be planted to mark his memory.”

My cuffs slackened even as the chasm inside me yawned wider. I tried to block the sight, but it unfolded before me anyway. Dawoud washed by gentle hands and wrapped in white linens. The death rites gently whispered in Resar. A fig tree blooming beside him every spring.

Arin caught me as I slid down the wall. The Nizahl Heir pulled me into his chest as sobs racked my body, easing us to the ground. I sobbed like I hadn’t since the Blood Summit, when my first life ended. Pressed against the son of the man who had taken everything.

“I am not a butcher.” I wept into Arin’s throat. “I am not an axe to be swung in any direction I am pointed. He deserved better than this. He deserved better than me.”

Everyone in that village deserved better. Supreme Rawain harming Jasadis came as no surprise, but their own Heir? I killed and buried Hanim to avoid this fate.

Arin didn’t reply. Solid arms tightened around me. He was real. Arin was real, Dawoud was real, and I was nothing more than a ghost inside the body of a coward.

Gloved hands framed my face, drawing me back. Arin’s ironclad composure faltered as he searched my tearstained face. There was a wildness to him I had never seen before. “Look at me, Suraira.” A fierce defiance radiated from the Nizahl Heir. “You don’t have to do this. Run.

Take a horse and get as far away as you can.”

I blinked. “Wh-what?”

“I won’t come after you. I have hidden holdings in every kingdom.

Throughout Essam Woods. They’re yours. Take them. Be free.” Arin’s grip was tight enough to hurt, belying his words.

I searched his face. Which one of us had lost their mind?

“A donkey kicked in the head six times wouldn’t suggest such an unreasonable course of action. Are you mocking me?”

Arin looked at me until it started to hurt. A covered thumb slid across my cheekbone. “What appeal can reason have in the face of your tears?”

I stared at him. The silky locks of silver hair falling around his ears. His death-defying scar. The shape of his mouth. A mouth I had watched speak terror in the eyes of men and spin the axis of destiny to his unyielding will.

A lethal, poisonous mouth. One that curved upward under my heavy gaze.

Why was the Summit called? Before it was the impetus for the Jasad War, before it was the Blood Summit—why did the kingdoms assemble?

“The Malik and Malika of Jasad were magic miners.”

We both froze. I pressed the tips of my fingers to my lips, not daring to believe they had shaped themselves around such horrible words. Words that could get me gagged and imprisoned almost as fast as my magic.

“Your magic is powerful, Essiya. Gedo Niyar and Teta Palia might try to take some of it. Tell them no. Fight them if you must.” Niphran smoothed my curls away from my face, heaving with the effort of being out of bed. “I am going to tell you a long-lost story, but you cannot ever share it with anyone. Not Dawoud. Not Soraya.”

Magic mining was a myth. A story so dangerous, so potent with the potential to unleash chaos, that even uttering the words was once cause for punishment. Time had washed it from importance, made it so the only ones who recalled the myth were long dead and forgotten. Or insane women locked in Bakir Tower.

My nails cut into my palms. The mirrors in my head were shattering.

Unlocking my memories in pieces, disjointed shards I would bloody myself putting together. Fairel broke the first one, and they had not stopped since.

How many more were left?

I muffled my gasp as Arin yanked me into him. My arms went around his back. He was shaking.

“You little liar,” he whispered. Choked and low. “You maddening Jasadi girl, I cherish your tongue too much to see it cut out of your head. Never speak those words to me or anyone else again. Do you understand?”

He pulled me away and shook my arms. My teeth clacked together.

Urgency hardened in his voice. “Tell me you understand!”

My eyes were wide. I had singlehandedly sent the least reactive man in

the kingdoms into a panic.

“I understand.”

He released me. I sat back on my heels, putting distance between us.

Dawoud hung over my thoughts like a black shroud. I couldn’t think past him long enough to study the pieces of the mirror that had propelled Arin into such a state.

We stared at each other for a charged moment. I wanted to press for answers, but the vehemence of his reaction had rattled me. What did Arin

know?

I had a fondness for my tongue, so my investigation would be done far away from the Nizahl Heir.

I spoke too loudly, eager to scrub the shaken look off Arin’s face. “They haven’t attacked yet. The Mufsids or Urabi, even Soraya. What if they bide their time until after the Alcalah, after your soldiers are gone?”

Arin closed his eyes for the briefest second. When he opened them, any evidence of uncertainty or tension was gone. “About that.” Arin helped me to my feet, and I glanced around the wreckage of the room. No mortal strength alone could have wrought such damage, and everything was too fractured to be put together again. It reeked of magic.

Arin came to the same conclusion. He kicked a merrily flaming splinter of the wardrobe into the fallen pillows. They ignited, fire leaping to the mattress. He would probably alert the Omalian servants after the ash clouds hid the debris. He might say a lantern or candle fell over, and the servants would believe him, because he was Arin of Nizahl, and the Commander did

not set fires in foreign rooms.

“Another theory?”

“Better.” Arin found a salvageable tunic from the wardrobe and passed it to me. “A plan.”

A fleet of carriages painted in a spectrum of colors surrounded the Omal palace in the new morning’s dawn. The exodus to Nizahl for the third trial had begun, with several contingents leaving directly after the second trial.

Among them Vaun and Supreme Rawain, the latter of whom needed to greet the Citadel’s guests as they entered Nizahl.

In the spiteful cold, I hopped from foot to foot beside two tan carriages.

Sorn, the Orban Heir, had patted his vivid green and brown carriage and asked Arin if Nizahl’s colors did not suit his taste. To which Arin had responded, “If I am to be ambushed on the road, it will not be because of the paint on my carriage.” Even Diya had suppressed a smirk at Sorn’s embarrassment.

“There is a market coming up soon,” I said. My breath puffed out in wisps of white. I drew my cloak closer. Sefa scowled at the moth-eaten collar. I had been given dozens of luxurious cloaks to wear, and she did not like how I still clung to my raggedy one. “Help Rory set up a booth. Make sure it’s by the fountain, or he will pitch a fit.”

“Ah.” Sefa glanced at Marek.

He sighed. “Sylvia, we are coming with you.”

I squinted, waiting for his expression to fracture with humor. “What a peculiar jest.”

“It is not a jest. We’re coming. His Highness caught us outside yesterday, before we had even entered the palace,” Sefa said. “We waited for you to ask us to go with you. Why haven’t you?”

“Why?” I sputtered. “Dania’s sacred skirts, have your wits tumbled free of your heads? The High Counselor is in Nizahl. Marek is wanted for assault and avoiding conscription. Under no circumstances are you entering

Nizahl!”

“Actually,” Marek said. “We are.”

I spun around, checking we were in front of the Omal palace and not in some bizarre dream. “Marek, you have been fighting this since the beginning! I know His Highness can be extremely persuasive, but we can accomplish what we need without you. If this is about last night’s… episode, it is unlikely to repeat itself, and you needn’t—”

“Damn it to the tombs, Sylvia, you do not need to bear everything alone!” Marek ran a hand through his hair. “Why is it so unbelievable that we would come without being dragged by the ear?”

“You reckless fools. We can execute Arin’s plan without you! I will be all right.”

“We go back to Mahair with you or not at all,” Sefa snapped. She lowered her voice, glancing around surreptitiously. “We bought glamors from a vagrant in Orban who says he paid a Jasadi to enchant them.”

I threw my arms up. “Glamors will not hold long against people closely acquainted with your true faces.” The High Counselor, for example.

“Which is why the Commander’s instructions are to send us into the lower villages. Marek is from the military towns and my mother is a noble, so there will not be a risk of recognition in Nizahl’s southern provinces.”

Arin exited the palace, his guards in tow. He nodded at Felix and

exchanged a few words with Queen Hanan. My cousin and paternal grandmother watched him walk toward us. Felix’s dark glare delighted me.

He had been effectively neutered. He would not attack me in Arin’s own kingdom, and after the debacle with the dolls, Vaida would not trust Felix to pour water into a cup. All his hopes for retribution rested on the outcome of the third trial.

My gaze crossed Queen Hanan’s. I searched for the features of a father I had never known in the older woman’s face. The perpetually weary look in the Omal Queen’s eyes flickered. Her brows furrowed. I quickly looked away.

Reaching the carriage, Arin took in my thunderous expression and glanced at my companions.

“I did not force them,” he said, guessing the source of my ire. “Jeru, ready the horses. We will take the southern route. Tell the soldiers to keep within our radius, but not to converge on the path. Sefa and Marek, your carriage will go ahead of us.”

“Wait, I have—” My objections were drowned out by the flurry of activity as riders leapt to their horses, and the thirty Nizahl soldiers began a procession from the palace.

“He didn’t call you the boy!” Sefa said in a loud whisper, hopping into the carriage. Marek followed her with an eye roll.

Swearing, I shoved into the carriage. I wouldn’t have an opportunity to speak to Marek and Sefa until we stopped at the first cabin. By then, it would be too late to change anything.

The sun rose in the east, a palm of blushing light unfurling behind the Omal palace. We rode past the crystalline gates. Their contours gleamed in the nascent morning.

“You knew they would come if you said it was for me,” I accused an hour into the ride. We had finally rumbled into Essam Woods. The sight of gnarled trees threatened to catapult me into reliving last night’s hike with Dawoud in my arms. I swallowed, fighting the instinct to shove the memory aside. An instinct as natural to me as breathing. He deserved to be remembered, even if it made me wish I had died with him.

We are who we come from. Dawoud was Jasad to me. He was love and warmth and free compassion. I anchored his memory, fixing it to the inhospitable soil of my mind, and some piece of me sighed in relief.

“I did not ask.” Arin had spread his parchment around as soon as the carriage lurched out of the palace, making meticulous marks every here and there. “I relayed my intention to draw out the groups and told them they were free to decide their course.”

The plan had formed in the madness of our last evening in Omal.

Instead of waiting for the Mufsids, Urabi, or Soraya to move first, Arin intended to lure them out during the third trial. The guards would spread rumors about the Orban Champion’s declining health, which would spread among the soldiers, who would spread it through the upper towns. Sefa and Marek would ride into the lower villages with a few disguised soldiers, pretending to be beleaguered organizers for the Alcalah. They would drink in various taverns, and under the guise of inebriation, complain about the weak security the third trial offered compared to Omal and Orban.

With Diya’s supposedly failing health increasing my likelihood of becoming Victor, and therefore being assigned personal guards for the rest of my days, the groups would see their window of opportunity closing. Sefa and Marek maligning the protections around the third trial would provide further incentive to attack.

“Wouldn’t the groups suspect something was amiss? If they have managed to evade you this long, I struggle to believe a hefty amount of trickery is what will move them to act,” I had said.

“Oh, they will almost certainly see through the ploy.” Arin had deftly buttoned his coat, observing the servants rushing between the fountain and my burning room. “But none of them will be willing to risk that another might take the bait and succeed in catching you first.”

The trip to Nizahl passed in a blur of arguments and cold cabin rooms.

Sefa hummed every time I tried to talk sense into her. Marek would dip his hands in mud and chase me around the cabin. Idiots, both of them.

We were due in Nizahl today. To distract from my churning dread, I plucked one of Arin’s maps and smoothed it open on my legs. I studied the map for long moments, trying to decipher the unintelligible markings.

“Have you started doodling in your spare time?” I asked, squinting at the downward V shapes and scribbled names. I traced a bridge that might have been Sirauk.

Arin didn’t ask to see the map. “The mountains.”

My forehead furrowed. The carriage’s motion jostled me into the

window. “Which ones?” Hundreds of mountains bordered the kingdoms, theoretically overlooking seas and deserted lands. Theoretically, because fewer than five had completed the journey to and from the mountains. Vast as they were, the most attention the mountains were given on maps was a quick scribble of their general locations.

“All of them,” Arin said. He crossed his ankle over his knee and separated the papers over his triangled lap. Met with my silence, he glanced up.

“You have a map of the mountains?” I asked faintly. “A detailed map?”

Arin’s expression strongly suggested he thought I had knocked my head against the carriage door one too many times. “I have several, but they’re far from finished.”

The fist around my heart squeezed. Acknowledging the Heir’s brilliance came naturally, but at some unidentifiable point, I had grown to admire it.

Forgetting his peerless mind was in service to a pitiless kingdom. “We never stood a chance against you, did we? Rawain’s siege never really ended, because he has you to see it through to the very last Jasadi. Given a thousand fortresses, Jasad would still be doomed.”

Arin’s gaze shuttered. A chilly guardedness that had been gone long enough to make its return startling descended over the Heir.

“I can circumvent much,” Arin said. “But even I might falter at a thousand fortresses.”

A few miles from the Citadel, Ren steered Sefa and Marek’s carriage south.

Only the Champions and the royal guests were permitted to enter the Citadel grounds, and of that exclusive few, none could spend the night inside the Citadel. The royals would lodge in the upper towns for the night, and the trial would be held in the morning. At the conclusion of the Victor’s Ball the following evening, everyone would be required to show a purpose for remaining in the kingdom.

Hospitality did not rank among Nizahl’s limited virtues.

Sefa and Marek would begin their portion of the plan tonight. After

donning their disguises, the pair would sow rumors about the third trial’s security throughout the lower villages. I wanted Sefa and Marek to spend tonight in the Champions’ suites with me, but the rooms were wedged between the second and third gates to the Citadel. Too close to the Nizahl royals and people who might recognize them.

I wouldn’t see them until after the trial. They would wait for me in the carriage during the Victor’s Ball. We would ride out with a brigade of Nizahl soldiers and, if I won, the Victor’s appointed guards.

“We know how to take care of ourselves,” Sefa assured me.

I allowed Marek to pull me into a light hug, pushing my uncooperative arms to pat him on the back. “Trust yourself,” he murmured. When I nudged him loose, his gaze was on Arin’s carriage. “No one else.”

My worry remained long after their carriage disappeared. I reminded myself that they had been crooks and vagrants before coming to Mahair— they would manage a single night. So long as Sefa didn’t stop to help any whimpering puppies and get herself thrown into the back of a wagon, anyway.

One of Arin’s maps flew onto my foot as the carriage heaved to the right. I peered out the window, watching the wilderness of Essam disappear into smooth land.

The soldiers fanned out around us. The first of three looming black gates appeared. They were impossibly tall, disappearing into the hazy mist rolling beneath the moon. A raven forged from glinting steel took flight from between two clashing swords at the helm of the entrance. Nizahl’s symbol split in two as the gate yawned open. My trepidation spiked as we went through the next two gates, and I held my breath as our carriage glided forward.

The Citadel rose ahead of us in a cylindrical spiral of twisting iron and steel. The blade-like peak impaled the sky, as though punishing the clouds for daring to dwell higher. Several metal legs extended from the middle of the main spire, each connecting to one of the Citadel’s seven menacing wings. A spider of destruction poised to spring. Massive violet and black crests shone at the peak of every wing, the seven ravens’ sinister gazes tracking the reckless as they ventured into the maw of the beast.

“Welcome to Nizahl,” Arin said.

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