“My fight is not with you, melancholy prince,” Cyrus said, breathing heavily as he took a step back. “You need not die tonight. You need not leave your empire without a sovereign.”
Kamran stilled at that, at the realization that his grandfather was truly dead. That Ardunia was his now.
To rule as king.
He cried out as he advanced, lunging at Cyrus who parried, then brought his blade down with crushing force. Kamran dropped to one knee to meet this blow, but his sword arm, which had been badly burned by the flames, could not withstand the force for long.
His sword clattered to the floor.
Cyrus withdrew, his chest heaving, and lifted his blade above his head to deliver what was no doubt the finishing blow.
Kamran closed his eyes. He made peace with his fate in that moment, accepting that he would die, and that he would die defending his king. His grandfather.
“No!” he heard someone scream.
Kamran heard the mad dash of boots pounding the marble floors and looked up, startled, hardly daring to believe his eyes. Alizeh was rushing wildly toward him, shoving people aside.
“Don’t!” Kamran shouted. “The fire—”
Forty
ALIZEH RAN STRAIGHT THROUGH THE inferno without care, her diaphanous gown going up in flames, and which she beat down quickly with her bare hands. She looked at Kamran, her heart seizing in her chest, sparing what moments she had to see that he was alive, to make certain he wasn’t too badly injured.
He was only staring at her in wonder.
A broad strip of his right arm was bleeding profusely—had been burned straight through his clothes. The rest of the outfit was damaged beyond repair, singed more in some places than others, but he appeared otherwise okay, save a few nasty scrapes he’d collected in the match. Still, he seemed oblivious to his injuries, even to the gash across his forehead, the blood dripping slowly down his temple.
The crowd, which had previously gone silent with shock, suddenly began whispering, gasping aloud their heartache and disbelief.
Alizeh turned on the Tulanian king.
She charged up to him in a singed gown and sooty skin and yanked the sword from his frozen hand, tossing it to the floor, where it landed with a clatter. The young king was staring at her now like she was some unfathomable sea monster, come to swallow him whole.
“How dare you,” she cried. “You horrible cretin. You useless monster. How could you—”
“How—how did you—” He was still staring at her, gaping. “How did you walk through the fire like that? Why are you not—burning?”
“You despicable, wretched man,” she said angrily. “You know who I am, but you don’t know what I am?”
“No.”
She slapped him, hard, across the face, the potent force of her strength sending him reeling. The southern king reared back, colliding with a column against which he both knocked his head and braced himself. It was a moment before he looked up again, and when he did, Alizeh saw that his mouth was full of blood, which he spit out onto the floor.
Then he laughed.
“Damn the devil to hell,” he said softly. “He didn’t tell me you were a Jinn.”
Alizeh startled. “Who?”
“Our mutual friend.”
“Hazan?”
“Hazan?” The copper-headed king laughed at that, wiped a bit of blood from his mouth. “Hazan? Of course not Hazan.” To Kamran, he said, “Pay attention, King, for it seems even your friends have betrayed you.”
Alizeh swung around to meet Kamran’s eyes just in time to see the way he looked at her—the flash of shock, the pain of betrayal—before he shuttered closed, withdrew inward.
His eyes went almost inhumanly dark.
She wanted to go to him, to explain—
Kamran exchanged a look with a guard, scores of which now swarmed the ballroom, and Hazan, soon revealed to be the sole person trying to flee the crush, was seized not moments later, his arms bound painfully behind his back. The silence of the room was momentarily deafening; Hazan’s protests piercing the quiet as he was dragged away.
Alizeh was gripped then by a violent terror.
With agonizing slowness, she felt a tapestry of truth form around her; disparate threads of understanding braiding together to illustrate an answer to a question she’d long misunderstood.
Of course not Hazan.
Hazan had never planned this fate for her. Hazan had been kind and trustworthy; he’d truly cared for her well-being. But this—this was all a cruel trick, was it not?
She’d been deceived by the devil himself.