Page 53 of Every Spiral of Fate (This Woven Kingdom #4)

Fifty-One

“I’VE BEEN MEANING TO GIVE this back to you,” said Cyrus shakily, and as he drew away from her he pressed a familiar, small glass marble into her hand. “Now, more than ever, I fear you might need it.”

Alizeh looked into her hand, then up at him.

It was the nosta.

Her gathered friends, seeing the object in her open palm, made collective sounds of astonishment.

“Is that a nosta?” asked Kamran with palpable awe. “I’ve never seen one in real life.”

“Yes,” said Hazan quietly. “It is.”

“What’s a nosta ?” asked Omid.

Alizeh weighed the little globe in her fist, marveling at the gift.

She listened as if from a distance as Deen explained to the boy that it was a rare magical object, one that discerned truth from lies.

It was already warm, glowing red in Alizeh’s hand, confirming the veracity of the words spoken around her.

She wanted to ask Cyrus how he’d found her lost nosta; she wanted to ask him how he’d even known it was hers; she wanted to ask—

“Why?” she said, meeting his gaze. “Why might I need it now, more than ever?”

“Because,” Cyrus said quietly. “I must tell you a story.”

He stepped back.

His hand had been trembling even as she’d briefly held it, and she could still feel the heat of his palm against her own; her skin prickled with unspent feeling, with the touch of burgeoning magic.

She tucked the nosta into her skirt pocket.

Everyone was staring at Cyrus now, all of them frozen in terrible anticipation. He’d lowered his head; she couldn’t see his eyes. Alizeh felt the dawn of a tremendous fear inside her then, and she studied him with expectant caution.

He took a tremulous breath.

“A hundred years ago,” he said, “Tulan was on the precipice of ruin. You may already know that Tulan is a uniquely rich piece of land, replete with natural resources and dense with magic.” He paused.

“For long stretches of history, the empire was ravaged by enemy nations—torn apart and plundered, its people indentured and oppressed. It had been too small a nation to defend itself against so many devouring forces. In desperation, the first Naran king—my ancestor—made a bad deal with the devil.” Cyrus lifted his head.

“Iblees had promised to save the empire.”

The nosta warmed in her pocket.

Alizeh held steady, the feeling of dread mounting only more within her.

Cyrus told them about the bargain the ancient Tulanian king had struck, how Iblees had sworn to fortify the kingdom with his own army of dark beasts and lesser demons, slaughtering all enemies and securing their borders—

All in exchange for a single favor, unnamed.

This favor could be called in at any time, Cyrus explained, and could only be fulfilled by an heir to the Tulanian throne.

Alizeh gasped; the nosta flared in her pocket.

Quietly, Kamran said, “Do you mean to imply that you”—he hesitated—“that you inherited, through your ancestors, a deal with the devil?”

Cyrus was almost visibly shaking now. “Yes.”

Again, the nosta went hot.

“ No ,” Alizeh said desperately.

Cyrus gave an aborted shout, stricken as he tensed against an unseen force. He looked down at his feet, which appeared to be hardening to stone, rooting him to the ground. “I have little time,” he forced out. “The confession alone will cost me my life—”

Alizeh screamed.

Deen blanched. Omid stepped back. Huda covered her mouth in shock.

Hazan, meanwhile, had gone slack with horror. “Must you confess?” he said. “Is there really no other choice—?”

“I must,” Cyrus said, straining to speak. “For I must warn you. Iblees chose to call in this debt last year. He went to my father first. My older brother second—”

“And are they both dead?” asked Omid, panicking. “Did the devil kill them?”

“My father made the mistake of instinctively refusing the devil,” said Cyrus, who grit his teeth as fresh pain seemed to surge up his ankles, ossifying him by inches as he spoke.

“He was sent almost at once to purgatory, where he remains now, half alive. My older brother abdicated the throne, thinking he might escape the devil by decamping to a distant empire.” He hesitated, swallowing. “The title was left to me.”

“ Good God ,” said Kamran, his chest heaving as he exhaled.

Cyrus fought another cry as the dark magic swept up his calves, hardening his knees. He nearly lost his balance. He was becoming a veritable statue before her, and Alizeh thought her heart might give out.

She tried to go to him then, to run to him, but he held up a hand with difficulty. “Please,” he said, struggling for breath. “These consequences are irreversible. I am already dying. There is nothing to be done—”

“ No ,” she said brokenly. “Cyrus— Please—”

He only shook his head.

He told them of the consequences of reneging on the contract.

He told them of the stakes. He told them of the retribution Iblees had promised upon the people of Tulan and of the bargain he’d struck, the better deal he’d tried to make, the many strange tasks he’d been assigned.

With every confession the dark magic took more of him, fossilizing him inch by agonizing inch, until soon he was half-paralyzed, his chin lifting as he fought to breathe, to animate his lungs.

“I hadn’t known you then,” Cyrus said roughly, looking desperately into Alizeh’s eyes.

“I couldn’t have known the devil’s true intentions.

I’d been a naive, sheltered second son. I was only weeks from taking my vows at the temple and leaving home forever.

I couldn’t have known the timing was suspicious— I couldn’t have known that somewhere, in another empire, you’d finally come of age—”

Alizeh clapped a hand to her mouth, choking back fresh tears. Hazan made a terrible, frightening sound. Kamran looked stunned, searching the landscape in blind horror.

Everyone looked feverish with fear.

Quickly, desperately, Cyrus told them everything then.

He disclosed every awful detail of the last year—every horror, every harrowing experience—and all the while, the nosta burned in Alizeh’s pocket.

She wouldn’t have needed the verification of the magical object to know that Cyrus spoke the truth, but she understood, too, that he was finally giving her the proof she’d so long desired.

Never again would she have to listen to a bad word spoken against him.

Never again would she be without a defense in his honor.

The evidence was in her pocket—and here, transforming before her eyes.

Cyrus had been wrongly condemned, and now everyone knew it.

Their group stood paralyzed before him as he spoke, even as his own body grew only more petrified.

He told them, in halting words, how the devil would soon claim his favor—that the devil would soon inherit his body—and they were transfigured in the wake of this final disclosure, horrified into silence.

All but Alizeh, who fell to her knees on the impossible, silken threads of grass—

And openly wept.

She was so destroyed in the aftermath of his confession that she hardly had breath to speak. “Cyrus,” she gasped through her tears. “Tell me you’ve found a way out—give me a reason to hope—tell me there is a way forward—”

“I tried,” he said, and here, his voice broke.

These two words wrenched a fresh sob from her throat. She felt raw for having received his pain; desperate for being unable to save him; ashamed for ever having doubted him; and she didn’t know what to do.

There was nothing she could do.

Cyrus would soon be dead.

For so long she’d hoped for precisely this kind of admission from him—an admission that might release him, that might deliver him to her unshackled—for she’d already known in her marrow what kind of man she’d married.

It hadn’t mattered to Alizeh that the world disagreed; she bore the evidence of his everyday selflessness, his decency.

Cyrus was worthy and noble and enduring.

There wasn’t a dishonorable bone in his body.

And his words had cleanly severed her.

“I beg you now, with my last breaths, not to cry for me,” Cyrus said to her, his voice catching as he spoke.

“I am unworthy of your tears. I’ve failed my family, my people, and my very humanity.

But there is no greater disgrace upon my soul”—he swallowed with difficulty, his eyes bright with heat—“than knowing that I have failed you.”

“ Cyrus —”

“Forgive me,” he’d rasped, his chest hardening such that he could hardly speak. “Forgive me.”

“Wait—please— Wait —”

Cyrus made a faint choking sound as his throat fossilized, then his mouth.

His blue eyes went gray, deadening in his face.

In frozen horror Alizeh watched as the paralysis fully overtook her husband’s body.

Tears blurred her vision as she bore witness to the effects of this dark magic, her heart coming apart inside her chest. This astonishing, powerful king had turned a sickly shade of pale, his body hardened to granite, and he finally collapsed as might a monolith, hitting the ground with a force the world could not ignore.

When Cyrus fell, the very earth fractured beneath him.

Tremors rocked the strange scene, shattering the gently rolling hills in a deceptively slow, dreamlike collapse.

Sunlight warped; snow trembled; clouds disintegrated.

The diaphanous, woven roses were dissolving like doused sugar; the filmy, gauzy trees evanescing like lost memory.

The gossamer castle that doubtless held her fate was slowly wilting in the distance, the Book of Arya like a small gravestone in her pocket.

It shocked her to discover she didn’t care.

Alizeh couldn’t hear her friends’ cries; she couldn’t see their grief; she couldn’t think of anyone but him.

Alizeh ran to his dead body.

She needed to see for herself that Cyrus was gone, that she’d truly lost him. She’d seen him die with her eyes, but she still felt a faint tether in her soul. She didn’t know whether the chain of the blood oath had been suppressed or else was fading out like a flame—

She bent over him desperately, sobs wracking her body. She took his lifeless face in her hands and begged him to wake up, to come back to her, to tell her he was still in there, somehow—but his skin was cold, his chest did not expand, and his heart made no sound.

And then, violently, he was launched into the sky.