Page 37 of The Jasad Crown
Efra cleared his throat. A single tear had slipped out. My fingernails tore slashes into the heel of my hand. He could enhance my emotions, but could he see the reasons behind them?
I didn’t know the name of the next one. Suddenly, I was at thehead of the stairwell in the Ivory Palace, placing my gloved hand into Arin’s as we descended. I was watching him arrange my clothes by the door so I would be ready in the morning. Holding me as I wept in my burning room in the Omal palace.I am just a man, and the tenderness spreading over him as he hovered over me, the vulnerability in his eyes as I smiled and drew him down for another kiss. His face as the cuffs slid from my wrists and magic ruptured through the Citadel.
“Sad little broken heart.” Efra flattened his palm, and I gasped, freed from the choking misery of missing a man I didn’t dare name.
“There is something back there I don’t recognize.” It sounded like Efra was talking to himself. “Whatisthat?”
The next wave had the opposite effect of the others. Instead of a barrage of intensified emotion, I relaxed. The furrows in my forehead smoothed, and my arms loosened at my sides. Frost chased away the residue of pain in my heart.
The man near the spring watched me with alarm. “Essiya?”
The vein in my palm was glowing again. I tilted my head, bemused. I had known this man’s name at some point. I also vaguely remembered he had tried to harm me.
This is for your own good!
I sneered. That voice! I knew it as well as I knew that the name this insect had just spoken wasn’t the right one. I needed to find the voice and finish it once and for all.
Before I had taken a step, the panicked boy swept his hands apart, threads of magic sparking in the space between his fingers. The net flew toward me and melted against my skin.
I coughed and massaged my ribs.
“Impressive,” I said, straightening from my hunch. “Enhancing and diminishing emotions. A nice trick. Unless it extends to physical sensations like hunger, I think you overestimate its value.”
I may as well have spoken in a foreign tongue for the attention Efra paid my remark. “What in the tombs was that?”
“What?”
“What I amplified… I’ve never experienced anything like it. It felt—” Efra passed a shaking hand over his forehead. “Whatever that was inside you, it is completely devoid of any humanity. If I hadn’t pulled my magic back, I think you would have killed me.”
“I wouldn’t have killed you.” But even as I said it, a seed of doubt caught in my teeth. Already, the memory of the strange coldness was retreating. I’d wanted to go somewhere. Find… something.
I shook my head, casting it aside. I had enough real problems without inventing new ones. “The steam addled your limited senses. Make yourself decent and be present at the Aada so we can fix the catastrophe you created.”
I left, Efra’s gaze heavy on my neck, and crushed the seed before it could root.
CHAPTER TWELVE
MAREK
Marek’s lifelong trouble was this: unless someone stopped him, he was liable to find himself on track to be expeditiously murdered.
He turned on the cot, mindful of jostling the soldier sleeping in the bunk below him. Finding himself on the wrong side of a sleep-deprived Nizahl soldier had taught him how to dodge a punch better than any formal training could. His brothers had taken swings at him more times than Marek could count before his parents finally let him have his own bedroom.
Years of stealth informed Marek’s movements as he climbed down the ladder at the end of the bunk. The soldier—Zaid? Zain?—didn’t stir as Marek gathered his shoes from the pile by the door and slipped into the hall.
Marek closed the door behind him and released his breath. He tugged on his shoes.
As he strode past rows of closed doors, vigilant of the sleeping soldiers stacked into rooms that hadn’t known the pleasure of a mop since the dawn of the Awaleen, Marek thought of his family.
Amira, Hani, Binyar, Darin—all of Marek’s older siblings had slept in a clustered, morbid compound just like this one.
Amira died at twenty-one while stopping a riot in Nizahl’s lower villages. Most of Marek’s memories of his sister were foggy,but oh, did he remember her smile. A smile not even their humorless mother could ignore. Despite the two crooked bottom teeth Hani would mercilessly tease her about, Amira never let her smile shrink. “You’re jealous your teeth are plain and boring,” she’d toss back. Marek’s chubby five-year-old fingers often dove toward her mouth in a childish attempt to straighten her teeth and shut Hani up.How dare Hani mock her smile, Marek would think.When I get big and strong, I’ll make all of Hani’s teeth crooked so he can never be mean to Amira again.
Amira never got to see Marek get big and strong. They buried her after Marek’s sixth birthday, and it wouldn’t have mattered if Marek had knocked all of Hani’s teeth out right then, because Hani left his smiles in the grave next to their sister.
Marek walked faster, his chest growing tight. The ghosts of his siblings were everywhere in Nizahl, especially in these Awaleen-damned training compounds. He glanced down at his stolen uniform and felt ill.
The guards stationed at the front of the compound nodded to Marek as he exited into the chilly night. “Water’s hot if you’re angling to beat them to the bath,” one of them said, gesturing across the field to the squat, single-story building surrounded by clotheslines. “Sun’s up in twenty.”
