Page 102 of The Jasad Crown
A strange fog descended over him, cooling his injuries to a pleasant numbness. Picking up the soldier’s dagger, Arin wiped it against his vest and stood. He walked toward the soldier unhurriedly, avoiding the frenetic swings of the incompetent fool’s sword. Imagine—a foul urchin of an Omalian soldier felling Sylvia of Jasad. Killing her while she was distracted. Killing her while she was quite literally in Arin’s arms.
Essiya, not Sylvia. Essiya, who has never been safe—will never be safe—because she is the Malika of Jasad. Sylvia would have run the moment you walked into Mahair, but Essiya stayed. Essiya fought, and she will keep fighting until there is nothing left of her.
The girl who’d grin at him with blood smeared in the cracks of her teeth and the ruler who’d tear kingdoms apart for her people. One and the same.
Without thinking, Arin stabbed the dagger into the hollow of the soldier’s throat and dragged it down: over the ridge of his breastbone, through the soft fat of his belly, and into the sponge of his pelvis. The handle juddered in his grip as it severed muscle from bone. Innards spilled over Arin’s gloves, dirtying his sleeves, but he didn’t care.
They do not get to take her from me.
It repeated in Arin’s head, a mantra ringing louder by the second. He gutted the soldier, and for a brief moment, it was the woman who raised the whip against a blindfolded Essiya on the other end of his dagger. Qayida Hanim whose bloodcurdling screams ripped through the air, Qayida Hanim whose eyes glazed over with the first frost of death.
The soldier dropped to his knees. When the body pitched forward, head cracking against Arin’s boot, it once again belonged to an Omalian soldier.
Red rivers poured from the corpse, watering the thin patch of weeds beneath it. The dagger dropped from Arin’s hold, landing in the puddle.
When he turned, she was fixed in the same spot on the ground. For the first time since the battle had started, she looked afraid.“Oh.”
“He could have killed you.”
Without removing her gaze from his, Essiya climbed to her feet. A fundamental shift had taken place, but Arin hadn’t calmed enough to identify it yet.
“And?” Instead of anger, Essiya’s voice roughened with frustration and something akin to grief. “Were you upset at losing the opportunity to do it yourself?”
“You will not die at the hands of a cowardly soldier who strikes at you from behind.”
“So you eviscerated him over the nature of the attack?” She scrubbed her forehead with the heels of her hands. “You once taught me that the only true honor in the world lies with the dead, because survivors strike first and repent second.”
Arin stiffened. Beyond her, the tide had turned against the Omalian soldiers. Arin hadn’t doubted it would—a horde of butchers in uniform was no match for a handful of disciplined and well-trained soldiers. Buoyed by the prospect of victory, the villagers stopped retreating. As Arin watched, Nizahl soldiers, Jasadi rebels, and Omalian villagers marched toward Felix’s fleet, who had begun to edge toward Mahair’s outer wall.
When was the last time the kingdoms had stood as one, aligned under a common cause?
Essiya raised trembling hands, open palms pointed toward Arin. “The Supreme is lying to you.”
Arin’s teeth came together, and it took a concentrated effort to unlock his jaw. “As you keep saying.”
“You keep not hearing it. Arin, he is lying about—”
“My father has been lying since the day he learned how to sound out letters,” Arin said. “If we stood here and reviewed them from start to finish, we would disintegrate alongside your village.”
“Excellent! If you know he’s lying, thenwhyare you still fighting me?” she demanded.
Arin ran a hand through his hair, heedless of the blood dried into the grooves of his glove. Heedless of anything other than the pounding in his head, the aggravation gnawing at his bones with hooked teeth. He should never have opened the door to this kind of conversation with her—never allowed her hazy accusations to cross the threshold of his mind. She was a flame sparking on the kindling of his doubt and breathing small suspicions into an incoherent blaze.
“The Supreme might have lied about the Blood Summit. He may have lied about who was party to the Malik and Malika’s magic mining.” Arin exhaled, a tranquilizing frost settling over the inferno in his chest. Her way was not his: Arin did not need to set himself on fire to see through the dark. He would move through it, step by step, assured of where his foot would land before he raised it. “But he did not lie about magic-madness. Every atrocity, every massive loss of life—it has been at the hands of magic-madness.”
“How many cases have there been in all of history?” she snapped. “One or two hundred since the entombment?”
“One case every century since the entombment.”
Essiya stared at him, shell-shocked. “That is… what, a little over seventy? Are you telling me seventy people went magic-mad, and you decided the whole of magic was to blame?”
“Ask me how many deaths each case caused. How much carnage.”
Essiya didn’t react, her gaze unfocused past his shoulder.“Magic-madness is your foundational truth, isn’t it?” she murmured, barely audible. Another without the privilege of Arin’s hearing would have missed it. “Is it what Rawain built everything else on top of?”
Arin’s skin tingled just as plumes of gold and silver shot through her eyes. They swirled into a deadly pool.
He cocked his head. She knew her magic would pass through him. Even if she exerted enough of it to hurt him on the way through, it would be a waste of her energy. She would need all her strength to evade him.
