Sefa picked up on the tension and fell quiet. Her gaze darted between Arin and me. “Apologies. We didn’t mean to interrupt.”
Marek, however, had the instincts of a goat flea. He raised a blond brow in our direction and drawled, “Lovers’ spat?”
Later, I would recall how Arin blanched. How those two words seemed to deal him a debilitating blow. I would consider whether Marek’s foolishness wasn’t its own kind of intuition. In the moment, all I saw was Arin flipping his wrist and throwing the dagger.
It would have cut straight through Sefa’s heart. Clean and efficient. She’d be dead before her body hit the mat.
Before the blade could find its mark, a powerful wave of nausea knocked me to my knees, and the world froze.
I pressed the back of my shaking hand to my mouth, struggling to keep my breakfast. All of them were unnaturally still. The dagger’s tip had frozen two inches from Sefa’s chest.
Supporting myself against the wall, I staggered to my feet. There was no predicting how long my magic would hold. Marek’s features had frozen with the dawning of horror, Sefa’s with irritation. Still stuck on Marek’s asinine comment, completely unaware that two inches of empty air was all that stood between her and death’s door.
I wrapped my hand around the dagger and tugged. To my relief, it came away in my grip. With the immediate threat eliminated, my rage seethed forth.
I swung around. Arin was pinned in place, arm still poised in midair.
“I should kill you where you stand,” I snarled. I balanced the tip of the dagger at the underside of his chin. “Bleed you dry right here.”
Arin and I had reached an impasse. I didn’t dream of running him through with my sword nearly as often. On occasion, when he was contemplative or pretended to ignore me, I even tolerated his company. Killing my friend on a whim? What was the sense in it?
The tip of the dagger pushed deeper into his skin. “You aimed at Sefa,” I murmured. “Not Marek.”
Four weeks ago, my will might not have overpowered the urge to drive this dagger through the back of his head. Today, it was a narrow victory.
“Another test.” The raw quality of my laugh scraped my ears. “Safer to wager my magic would intervene for Sefa than Marek.”
Arin’s gaze slid to mine. Had my magic even affected him? His dangerous mood hadn’t changed, and I steeled my nerves against the urge to retreat.
“What if you were wrong? What if you had miscalculated?”
“Pointless questions are best left to the poets,” Arin said. He forced me a step backward. I locked my jaw, glaring up at him.
Motion in my periphery signaled a newly animated Marek and Sefa. Arin struck in a burst of movement, slamming the heel of his hand against the inside of my wrist and sending the dagger flying.
The Nizahl Heir’s eyes were shards of lethal promise. “Point a dagger at me again, and it will be your last.”
The fragile peace Arin and I had fostered disappeared.
To my consternation, his gamble paid off. Now that he knew my magic reacted to threats against Sefa or Marek, he found creative ways to ensure I felt genuine fear for them every session. He had Vaun take them for a walk to Essam, and my magic hurled a spade into the board. Another session, he described exactly how a tribunal would condemn Sefa for assaulting the High Counselor, and the methods they might choose to put her to death. I managed to levitate one of the war chests. Only for a second, while magic burned my cuffs and fear for Sefa tightened my gut.
Today, the war chest flew across the room, cracking against the image of Niyar. It flickered, revealing the white wall behind the animated painting, before re-forming.
Instead of rejoicing in this development, Arin seemed to grow grimmer. “Are you eating?”
I was thrown. “Yes?” Though the quality of food had improved from the milky wheat nonsense of the first week, the guards’ talent for cooking had not improved with it. I had used Wes’s bread as a weapon the other day.
“Jasadi magic is a well that replenishes at unpredictable speeds. If you reach the bottom of your well too quickly, you might be left powerless until it refills. You are scraping stone.”
“I’m moving the chests.” The rest was irrelevant. I had been weak and weary before. I could work through it.
I thought of Marek’s body strung across the Citadel’s gates. The pulse at my wrists didn’t sting this time. The weapons Arin arranged on top of the chest hovered in the air for a millisecond, then flew into the wall on the far side of the center with deadly accuracy.