Page 72 of The Jasad Crown
Magic-madness was not real.
I exhaled shakily.
I was not losing my humanity like Rovial.
The fear, once ignited, started dripping in the back of my mind. Staining each thought, bleeding my world red.
The bands around my lungs tightened. I tried to remind myself that there was an array of possible explanations for the veins. I barely understood anything about magic, let alone a magic that had been trapped beneath my cuffs for most of its existence. For all I knew, I was terrified of nothing more than a cosmetic quirk.
I curled against the ground, drawing the blanket over my head. My breathing, already slowing, stopped.
Magic-madness wasn’t an option I could calmly think through and plan for. This was not a reality I could navigate even in theory.
In the cover of dark, it was much easier to notice the pinch of magic at the back of my skull.
I shoved my head out from under the blanket in time to see the room disappear.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
SEFA
Nothing good could come out of joining the Sultana in a midnight excursion through the streets of Lukub, yet here Sefa was—fully dressed and incredibly disturbed.
The chill nipped at Sefa’s bare cheeks. The stories of Lukub’s nocturnal proclivities had clearly been exaggerated. The street stretched empty before them, devoid of any signs of movement beyond the lanternlight dripping its shadows over the pale stone roads. Domed two-story buildings lined the sides of the street, reminding Sefa of eggs arranged in a basket. They passed one dome with red stripes, the bottom faded into strips of paint peeling onto the grass. Emerald tiles swirled across the sides of the dome beside it.
Vaida strolled along the empty road in a tight cotton sheath, her fingers curled around the sides of her white cloak. The hood was pulled over her braids and drawn low over her forehead. Without her signature ruby-red lip paint and kohl, the Sultana looked startlingly young.
She had taken off all her rings except one.Theone. The ring Sefa had begun to fixate on with worrying regularity, the ring that never left Vaida’s finger no matter how frequently Sefa checked.
The Sultana’s ensemble had clearly been chosen with anonymity in mind, and Sefa fought to stifle her amusement. A lionwould have more luck masquerading as a ladybug. If someone took one good look at Vaida’s face, the ruse would be over in an instant.
“You never mentioned you were a seamstress,” Vaida said, speaking for the first time since she’d had a servant wake Sefa in the dead of night and summon her to the carriage.
Sefa nearly tripped over her own boots. Fear breathed fire over her skin, and she itched to press the backs of her hands against her cheeks to push back the blood rising to her face.
“Your Majesty?” was all Sefa could think to squeak.
“My servants speak of the gowns you’ve been working on in your chambers. Are they for me?”
The half-finished gowns in her room. Relief slackened the muscles in Sefa’s stomach. “They are not worthy of you, Sultana,” Sefa said. “Just a silly task I busy myself with when sleep fails me. A distraction.”
“I see. Has serving me been so awful that you need a daily distraction?” The Sultana’s bottom lip quivered.
“Of course not!”
“Good.” Like the tide sweeping away letters spelled into the sand, her pout faded into boredom. “What do you need distracting from, then?”
Baira’s blessed beauty. Every hair on Sefa’s body stood on end.
Emotions weren’t meant to be so… fleeting. They didn’t have clean lines and discernible edges. But the Sultana tried on emotions like hats, modeling them for the occasion, and cast them aside with an ease that chilled Sefa to her bones.
“My own head,” Sefa answered. She could hardly reveal how much the servants loathed her. How they went quiet when she entered the room or plated her food on dirty dishes. Given Sefa’s entire role in the Ivory Palace was to gather information for the Sultana, the animosity of the staff wasn’t a mark in Sefa’s favor.
“Hmm,” Vaida said. The noncommittal sound stoppered any further discussion, and Sefa gratefully sank into the silence.
Over the past several weeks, Sefa had thought she was getting better at predicting Vaida. Giggling could either mean someone’s imminent destruction was upon them, or she had just made a joke only a ten-year-old would find amusing. If her sigh lasted longer than five seconds, anyone in her immediate vicinity needed to evacuate.
The most consistent habit was the Sultana’s fixation with her appearance. She spent several hours a day under the attention of experts; Sefa had witnessed everything from leeches to hot wax entering the Sultana’s chambers.
