I walked past the young version, coming to a halt at the foot of a wide bed. I caged my breath. Beneath the covers, a teenage Arin slept. I watched him breathe, shaken by the vulnerability in his youthful features.
“He likes to think I’m the one who made him so cold,” Soraya said, climbing beside him. Her fingers passed through his cheek, and I wanted to break them one by one. “He was already such a challenge. Paranoid, distrustful. Constantly looking for a reason to doubt. He didn’t trust kind gestures, and he interacted with life at arm’s length.”
She grinned at me with a spark of the mischief that earned my devotion in the first place. “If anybody was going to bring a mountain to its knees, it would be you, amari. Arin of Nizahl falls in love with the Jasad Heir. Ha! And he thought my deceit was bad. No wonder he has shuttered his heart so tightly: the damned thing keeps leading him astray.”
“I did not deceive him,” I said. “When we met, I was not the Jasad Heir. I was an Omalian villager, barely even a Jasadi. I didn’t intend to become—to start—”
The other Soraya finished brushing her hair. She put the brush on the vanity.
“To start caring?” Soraya finished. “Yes, Hanim does an excellent job of excising that particular failing. It doesn’t matter. Arin doesn’t consider betrayal the way we do. To him, it is the fury of being outmaneuvered. Of miscalculating.” The other Soraya straddled Arin over the covers, gazing down at his peaceful face. His unscarred face.
Meanwhile, Soraya’s magic was weakening. The room’s colors faded in and out, and her skin had a sallow cast.
On the bed, a blade materialized in the other Soraya’s grip. With a shaky breath, she slashed down, toward Arin’s throat. The Nizahl Heir’s eyes flew open. He twisted, changing the dagger’s trajectory. Blood curved up his jaw, forming the line of the Commander’s infamous scar.
Arin flung Soraya into the wall. She collapsed into a heap on the floor. Arin staggered to the door as a young Wes burst in with a flurry of guards, alerted by the thud. Wes moved just in time to catch Arin as he dropped to the ground.
Among them was Vaun. He held a thick cloth to Arin’s profusely bleeding gash, eyes swinging to the door as a writhing Soraya was dragged out. The Supreme ran in, and just as the room warped, I could have sworn the colors in his scepter began to swirl.
We slammed into the white room. Soraya doubled over. “I suppose this is goodbye. I need to preserve enough magic to fight him off.” Her eyes glimmered a faint gold and silver. “I love you, amari. I hope you remember that when death joins us again someday.”
I lunged, and this time, I succeeded in tackling her to the ground. She shoved me off, and I chuckled as the gold and silver in her eyes whirled faster. Trying to whisk herself away, was she?
“You can’t leave, Soraya. My magic may not work out there, but we are in its domain now,” I said. Her grand scheme to thwart my cuff’s protections by pouring her magic into the trial’s elixirs had forgotten that putting magic into my body wasn’t the problem. I stood up, baring my teeth in a deranged smile. “My cuffs, you see, have this vexing habit of trapping magic inside me.”
Soraya’s doe-eyed regret vanished. The walls around us crumpled like a fragile autumn leaf, scattering us in a million directions.
Depositing us on the frozen surface of a lake.
Shadow figures swayed on the distant shore. Watching me. Waiting. I’d been here before.
“Not if you die before my magic does.” She flickered in and out, the struggle of holding me to the dream and battling Arin’s effects apparent.
I skimmed the top of my head, probing along the edges of my crown. My silver gown rippled onto the lake. The embroidery on my skirt came alive, and the caged kitmer paced in the folds of fabric, its catlike body stretching in agitation.
Soraya had sent me into my most recurrent nightmare.
“I wanted more time for you,” Niphran said. Regal and melancholy, the heart of Jasad made flesh. “More peace. More love. A chance to thrive in the world before it collapsed around you.
“Then again,” she continued, donning an expression of bemused awe, “I suppose you have, haven’t you? Oh, if my mother and father could see us now. The daughter in love with the shy, bookish Omal Heir, and the granddaughter in love with the Nizahl Commander. Which do you think is worse?” Her trilling laughter didn’t reach her eyes. Fire licked at her dress, orange tendrils climbing up her immobilized form.
I turned in a circle. There had to be a way out. Every spell had seams, corners you could slip your fingers beneath and yank. Better yet, where was Soraya? I’d use her head to break the ice. “I am not in love with the Nizahl Heir.”