“He laid hands on a captive. His intentions are irrelevant.”
My teeth dug deep enough into my lower lip to draw blood. “Stop calling me a captive. I am here by choice.”
“I thought it would make it easier for you. Thinking of yourself as a captive might remove some of the guilt of betraying your own kind. Or is guilt beyond you?”
He thought he could prod at my loyalties, but I had none. Not anymore. Where loyalty might have existed lived only an echoing regret. Niyar’s ashen face as he bid me to flee, Palia’s scream behind me. My mother, assassinated alone in her tower. The bodies I had never buried.
Loyalty meant nothing when it was for the dead.
Arin continued, “Then again, perhaps it is a sign of your shrewdness that you care so little. Jasad was always damned. A kingdom so mired in treachery is the architect of its own ruin.” He bowed over the map, bracing his weight on his knuckles.
Mired in treachery? Now I was sure he wanted a reaction. Jasad was the only kingdom without twisted court politics and double-dealing deceptions.
I turned to face him. This was the closest we had been without someone actively bleeding. I would be happy to rectify that.
“No one follows your edicts. Why would they? Your father controls the courts, and the soldiers know any Jasadi they capture will be put to death immediately. Jasadis are guilty by existence.”
The scar curving beneath his jaw caught the lamplight. “Do you deny your nature?”
Disgust suffused my words. “What nature? If you mean my tendency to violence, it is no greater than yours.”
To my shock, a small smile curved the corner of his lips. “Perhaps. But there will never come a day where my nature will overcome my mind. There is no magic in my veins that will turn poisonous and drive me to madness.”
I shook my head. What was I doing, wasting my breath reasoning with Supreme Rawain’s son? Rawain was hardly the first Supreme to work against Jasad—he was just the most successful. Jasadi magic had been hated and feared for centuries, and it was only a matter of time until they devised a reason to invade strong enough to overpower their guilt. The Blood Summit killed a dozen royals, including Supreme Rawain’s wife—Arin’s mother.
He would never suspect what I knew to be true. Arin would never believe his father was behind the deaths at the Blood Summit.
“For someone so convinced of his own brilliance, you do seem to neglect quite a glaring flaw.”
He stayed quiet. Refusing to engage me. I didn’t care.
“You think your mind is a blank slate, where you can build your own networks of information from scratch, through pure logic and reason. You ignore that each child enters a completely unique world, founded on different truths. We build our reality on the foundation our world sets for us. You entered a world where magic is corrosive and Jasadis are inherently evil. I entered one where turning a shoe into a dove made my mother laugh. Have you considered, in that infinite mind of yours, that the truly brilliant people are the ones who understand the realities we build were already built for us?”
My muscles locked in anticipation. Had I spoken with such impertinence to any other Heirs or royals, I would be on my knees with a sword at my jugular. Even my grandfather would have belted my hands, or at the very least banished me to my quarters.
Arin, expression thoughtful, poured the lavender liquid from the pitcher into a chalice and passed it. “Here.”
With a sizable helping of bewilderment, I accepted the chalice. Better than a sword. I sniffed the drink. The smell burned my nose, far stronger than any ale in Mahair’s taverns. Under Arin’s watchful gaze, I tipped the chalice into my mouth, swallowing with a grimace. Ugh. Eating dirt after a fresh rain would probably taste better.
“You are not what I was expecting,” Arin said. He drained his chalice and set it aside carelessly. It dawned on me, embarrassingly slow: this was not his first drink of the night. Each of these drinks was likely as strong as three ales. Even in a diminished state of reason, the man possessed more restraint than the entirety of the kingdom combined.
I hated him for more reasons than I could ever name. But his restraint—it infuriated me beyond sense. How do you predict the patterns of a river that never floods, never ebbs or flows?
Hanim’s years of discipline had failed to corral my reactive nature. What training must he have endured to become this way?
Arin reached around me. I recoiled, acutely aware of his bare hands. But he only unfurled a new map, smoothing it over the first. I pulled in a breath. Was it—