“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?