Page 192 of The Jasad Crown
“Oh no. Oh no, no, no,no no no—” Sefa’s cries grew incoherent as she crawled to Marek. “No, Marek, please. Please!”
I could almost hear Marek’s heart slow. I felt the effort it took for him to twist his lips into a smile for Sefa. I thought he might have been trying for a joke, perhaps a glib remark about Sefa’s peripheral vision or how blood actually improved this shirt.
Whatever he might have said, it would have been for Sefa. It had always been for Sefa.
But Marek choked, blood pouring from either side of his mouth. Sefa tried to turn him onto his side without jostling the spear, her slim wrists struggling with Marek’s weight, though she’d be more likely to let them break than give up.
When she rolled Marek onto his back again, the once-bright green eyes we had watched dance with humor, eyes that had stolenhearts and frequently broken them, eyes that would scour any room until they found Sefa, were fixed and staring. Dull in a way Marek could never be.
He was gone in less than a minute. My magic could fight back death, but it could not give chase once death had claimed its prize.
I stopped in front of the pair, scepter clenched in my bloodless fist. The last Lazur—gone. The man who never wanted to be a soldier, whose life had twined with Sefa’s and never let go—dead on a battlefield like the rest of his siblings.
The sounds leaving Sefa chilled me to my core. The raw agony of a heart breaking, never to be the same again. An entire life turning to ash in your hands.
A chill swept over my skin. I turned from the sight of Sefa bowed over Marek’s body.
The mist had fallen.
I didn’t look back at Sefa or Marek’s body. I didn’t look at the Jasadis flagging beneath the surge of soldiers closing in on all sides.
I walked toward the bridge, my magic thrashing in resistance inside me, and I began to recite.
I recited the enchantment again, and I did not notice the blood dripping from my nose.
I recited the enchantment a third time, and the pain bursting between my temples was a mere flicker in an inferno.
I recited the enchantment a fourth time, and my veins burst. Gold and silver spilled inside my skin, spreading like a bleeding palm plunged into a river.
Screams erupted behind me as the ground quaked. A stream of gold rippled across an invisible line in the earth and burst upward.
The fortress rose to my waist. I imagined it stretching from hereto Usr Jasad, brilliant and solid and beautiful. The sixth time I recited, I smiled widely, undeterred by the metallic tang of blood in my mouth. More and more figures stepped toward the border and recited with me. The figures from my hallucinations joined hands and stepped toward the fortress.
My magic imploded through every corner of my being. It spiraled in my lungs, settled in my belly. Wrapped its fingers around my heart. It reminded me of losing my cuffs, except my magic’s first freedom had felt far more overwhelming.
The second liberation settled me. Light crawled over the broken shards I’d swept into the back of my mind, and like a beleaguered mother confronting her child’s laziness, began to piece them back together.
It knew exactly how they fit, where they should go. Shard by shard, my magic built me back. For each piece I reclaimed, a figure stepped into the fortress. I watched them dissolve into bolts of silver and streak across the surface of the fortress, glittering trails chasing them through the resin.
When I recited the enchantment a seventh time, the black-haired man from the waterfall was the only one left at my side. He stepped into the fortress and began to break away in fragments of blazing gold, racing across the fortress like shattered stars.
And I remembered.
“Stay with us,” Dania said. Tears glistened in her eyes. “Just until you find your place here.”
We shook our head, cupping our sister’s face. “How will I ever find my place if I stay in your kingdom? I will sink into the comfort I find among you all, and I will never create my own corner in this world.”
A slim arm wove through ours. Attached to it was a face more lovely than the stars we’d abandoned in the heavens, as dark and luminous as the night we’d shaped for them to shine within.
“Let me come with you. We do not even know for certain what awaits you in the east. What magics roam free on that side of Hirun.”
We kissed Baira’s forehead. “What could it do to me? Any magic that roams is a magic of ours, even twisted or decayed or forgotten. It will love me as dearly as you do.”
“So stubborn,” Kapastra sighed. A baby rochelya curled around her shoulders, nestling its flat head against her collarbone. She petted its scaled ear absently. “You know our kingdoms are yours, too. What is of us is of you, Rovial. Our magic is one.”
We smiled.
“I know.”
