Page 100 of The Jasad Crown (The Scorched Throne #2)

With Nizahl’s armies, there would be nothing she couldn’t conquer. She wouldn’t need to limit her expansions to Essam Woods. She would never be forced to rely on a treatise like the Zinish Accords for support again.

Vaida lowered her gaze when Arin dropped the second glove, still walking toward her at a measured pace.

She laughed. “I think this is the first time I have seen you bare those hands of yours since we were children. Shall I commemorate the occasion by testing how quickly those fingers will snap between my Hound’s teeth? ”

“I do not want to do this.” Arin stopped before reaching her. “Baira cursed the Sultanas when she left behind that ring. The Awaleen were capricious and cruel—their gifts have always come with consequences.”

Ruby thorns pushed out from Vaida’s eyebrows, thin and sharp like the obelisk at the front of the Ivory Palace.

Red lips stretched into a smile. “No gift comes freely, Arin. Besides, now we can both be cursed. Silver hair for you, ruby eyes for me. It’s exactly what we dreamed about as children, remember? ”

Arin did remember. He remembered being ten years old and hiding from Sorn in the servants’ stairwell.

He couldn’t tolerate listening to the Orban Heir babble about hunting for one more minute, and Arin had yet to master the art of politely freezing out a conversation.

Vaida had tracked him down and spent the next two hours making shadow creatures with her fingers to entertain him, regaling Arin with made-up stories of their adventures.

In exchange, he’d taken her for a walk around the Citadel’s gardens and carried the basket while she filled it with her favorite flowers.

He remembered letting her rub a tincture of pomegranate and beetroot into his hair at the brilliant age of eleven because she had cried that he had the hair of an old man and she didn’t want to be stuck with Sorn when Arin died.

He remembered Vaida finding him the hour before his mother’s funeral and forcing him to misbutton his coat.

“You look too prim, darling. The vultures need a spectacle,” she’d whispered. “They want to feed. Give them something obvious to peck at, and they won’t dig much deeper.”

A year later, he had ordered thousands of her favorite blossoms sent to the Ivory Palace after her own mother’s funeral.

Vaida was his first friend, and his very favorite foe.

“Here’s what will happen when I touch you, Vaida.” Arin stepped toward her, folding his hands behind his back. The handle of the dagger tucked into his waistband bumped into his wrist.

“Every ounce of the decayed relic magic Baira infected you with will drain from you and into my father’s scepter.

The Hounds will wither and disappear. I will take you into a dungeon beneath the Citadel to await a tribunal for violating the Zinish Accords.

You have no friends among the kingdoms. King Murib and the Omal intermediary council will find you guilty.

They will sentence you to death, and I will bury you in the gardens of the Ivory Palace.

The head of your council or your designated inheritor will be seated on your throne, breaking the chain of Baira’s descendants. ”

Another step. Vaida watched him, her hulking Ruby Hound snarling behind her shoulder. A scream rent the air, abruptly silenced with a crunch.

Vaida’s lips pursed in delicate amusement. “All from a single touch? My, my.”

“The alternative is this: you allow me to drain the curse and I allow you to go home,” Arin continued as though she hadn’t spoken. “You will sit on the tribunal sentencing my father. You can be his judge and his executioner through the formal procedures.”

“I want your father’s throne and his head, Arin.” Vaida beamed. “I will have a tapestry of his robes commissioned to hang over Lukub’s gates.”

“I can give you his head and his robes.”

It earned Arin a pause and a bewildered blink. Vaida knew Arin would not lie to her—not even in a moment like this.

“I want Nizahl.”

Arin’s gaze moved over the torches mounted across the stone walls around the Citadel. The mist circling over the kingdom had dissipated, and the moon hung low over the massacre raging within the Citadel’s borders.

“I cannot give you Nizahl.”

“Make it one of your choices.” She crossed the final steps toward Arin, her Hound’s nostrils flaring. It bared its teeth as Vaida played with Arin’s collar. “The other two don’t suit.”

For all the devastation she had wrought, Vaida was not a fighter. She never learned that it wasn’t the weapon she should fear, but the opponent wielding it. That battles were not won by the number of Ruby Hounds or shiny spears, but by the fate of a single mistake.

When Arin had the swords and arrows forged, he had also requested the sigil be engraved into a single dagger. A dagger he would only be able to use if he stood close enough to the Sultana to share breath.

When it slid into her chest, it seemed to take Vaida an eternity to understand what had happened.

“This wasn’t one of your options,” she said in a small voice. “You tricked me.”

A flurry of arrows cleaved into the Hound rearing over Arin. Arin ducked out the path of its flailing paw. The ground shook as it slammed into the ground beside them. Vaida’s eyes moved from the dagger to Arin. Swaying, she grabbed Arin’s arm as he released the hilt.

“If you die, the Hounds die with you.” He caught her as she slumped into him, lowering her gently to the ground. “It was not an option I wanted to exercise.”

Vaida coughed. “Sneaky.”

Blood lined the seam of her lips. Arin didn’t resist when she tugged him close. “Would you really have given me Rawain’s head?”

Arin carefully pulled a blade of grass from Vaida’s hair. “Yes.”

Vaida withdrew the dagger from her chest. Blood flowered beneath the silk over her heart. “Do you think I will meet Baira when I die?”

Arin knelt beside her.

“Lie to me, Arin,” she whispered. “Just this one time. I want to imagine it.”

So while the Hounds from the Ivory Palace to the Citadel began to die, Arin wove Vaida a story of a reunion with her Awala, as vivid and distracting as the stories she would create for him in their secret stairwell.

As the Nizahl soldiers surged forward against the Hounds and the flagging Lukubi forces, Arin listened to Vaida’s breathing turn shallow.

“I’m scared,” Vaida whimpered. Crimson tears poured over the ruby studs embedded in her temples. “Arin, I’m scared.”

The ache in Arin’s chest spread through the rest of him. He laid down beside Vaida, his shoulder pressed to hers. “The night before your twenty-fourth birthday, you came to the Citadel and asked me a question.”

“I did?” Soft and lethargic.

“You asked me what I would do if I hadn’t been born Arin of Nizahl. Who I would want to be.”

“I must have been drunk.”

“I told you I couldn’t imagine a reality where I am not who I am.”

She tipped her head to the left, half-lidded gaze unfocused as it settled on him. “A vexing answer, as usual.”

Arin chuckled. “Yes, and I have since reconsidered. Do you remember what you said?”

Her eyes slipped shut. “Mm.”

“You said, ‘I would have been a flower.’”

Vaida’s lips twitched. Arin thought she might have been trying to smile. “Definitely drunk,” she whispered.

“You can still have a life. A good life,” Arin said. “Take my hand before the rest of the magic dies. If there is enough left, drawing it out might heal some of the damage.”

It seemed to take unspeakable effort for Vaida to open her eyes again. Faintly, so faint Arin could barely catch it, she said, “But your options.”

Arin had watched so much end in the last month of his life. So much destruction. What compelled Arin to say what he did next was as much mercy as it was spite. Spite for the forces responsible for leading them to this battlefield, for the control they had tried to wrest away from Arin.

“There is a fourth option, Vaida. A future you choose. A future where no one will ever know if you died on this field or if you were pulled back to the Mirayah, because your body will disappear with the Hounds. A future you get to build in a realm as intelligent as you are, where your power is limited only by what you can imagine.”

A roar of victory swept over the field as the Citadel’s siren finally fell quiet. The Hounds had fallen. A breeze blew Arin’s hair from its tie. The kitmer who had carried him out of Mahair and watched over him in the Gibal circled overhead. Niseeba landed on the ledge of a balcony and waited.

Maybe Arin wouldn’t need Ehal to reach Jasad in time.

The Sultana’s last breaths misted in the air between them.

“Always with your pretty words,” Vaida sighed, slim shoulders melting into the grass. Blood drenched the front of her dress. “Okay, Arin. Take… my hand.”

It might be too late. It was probably too late.

Arin closed his hand around Vaida’s anyway.