Page 102 of The Jasad Crown (The Scorched Throne #2)

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 stolen hearts 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 here to 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.”

We stood in Hirun, trailing the tips of our fingers over the rushing current, and listened to the world’s heartbeat.

“Why ‘Jasad’?” Dania asked. She stood on top of the hill, hands on her hips.

Surveying our newly claimed corner of the world with the efficiency and tactical analysis she never quite managed to suppress.

There was not yet much to see. The meadow stretched around us in endless green hills, not a sign of life to be seen.

“A bit ambiguous, is it not? Morbid, even.”

We plucked a cracked date from a bed of burs. Ants spilled out from the tender inside of the fruit, fleeing over our fingers and along our wrist.

We pressed the ruined date into the soil beneath the tree and whispered a promise to it.

“Ambiguity is not morbid. Ambiguity is a question, and our existence is the answer,” we said. “Yes, Jasad means body. Yes, it also means corpse. What this kingdom becomes—whether it breathes or suffocates, lives or dies—is a question only it can answer.”

Dania rolled her eyes. “Not sufficiently dramatic enough for you to say you like the way the word sounds?”

We caressed the fresh dirt over the buried date and laughed. “I also like the way it sounds.”

Breathe, little date. Breathe, and I will build a world for you.

Thunder growled over the horizon. Blue light forked through the sky, striking the earth like the flick of a serpent’s tongue.

We closed our eyes and smelled burning. Hundreds of miles away, a hut had caught fire. The entire village was in flames.

We tried again to command the rain to fall, and again we crashed into a barrier.

Kapastra had locked the sky after her villages had flooded thanks to Dania’s attempt to lift the drought from her own kingdom.

A drought we had punished her with only after her callous mistake killed hundreds of our children in the south.

Their screams rang in our ears as if we stood in the center of the burning village.

We sank to our knees, covering our face with our hands and rocking.

Helpless to do more than feel the panic of mothers reaching into their children’s beds splintering our chest, howling alongside the farmers fighting to herd their sheep away from the blazing fence.

Their farm, their pride and joy, their life’s work.

The roof caved, and their hearts caved with it.

Donkeys and mules choked the only safe passage out of the village, and a child fell beneath the rampaging hooves.

Each bone she broke fractured in our own body.

We sobbed until hands found our shoulders, shaking us.

“Rovial, what is it? What’s wrong?”

What was wrong?

What was wrong ?

We placed the thinnest wall between ourself and the collapsing village. A wall just thin enough for us to find the strength to shove off Kapastra’s hands and glare through bleary eyes.

“Get out of my kingdom,” we snarled.

A date fell on our shoulder.

With a hand against the trunk, we tipped the tree over and set the exposed roots on fire.

“I heard you made a man,” we said, leaning against Baira’s door. She jumped, and in the distance, half of a mountain splintered and slid into the open sea.

The surprise in her eyes cooled to stiff disdain. “I am not in the habit of making men these days.”

“True. Breaking them is more your style.”

“What are you doing in Lukub? I told you. I am on Dania’s side in this war of yours.”

“Lukub. Lukub, Lukub.” We toyed with a carved stone chip, smirking at the inscription.

Another discarded lover fancying themselves a poet.

Pathetic and lost, like everything Baira touched.

“Tell me, did Dania give you an earful about what you decided to name your kingdom, or was that judgment reserved for me alone?”

We stepped forward, tossing aside the chip.

It landed on a pile of leathery skin Baira’s weavers must have forgotten to collect.

By tomorrow, the carefully flayed flesh would be sewn into the tapestry at the front of the Ivory Palace.

A parting gift for the families of traitors; were they so inclined, they could visit the tapestry and identify which patch of skin belonged to their loved one.

A howl turned Baira’s head. A second and third joined it. The mournful howls became a symphony, twisting through her kingdom.

Baira shoved the drapes apart, throwing open the door to her balcony. “What did you do to my Hounds?” she gasped, frantically scanning the moon-drenched expanse of Essam Woods. “I can feel—what did you do ?”

We followed her to the balcony and stepped onto the ledge. “Worry less about the Hounds and more about your subjects in their proximity. Flesh tears much easier than ruby.”

Baira’s nails bit into her scalp as she shook her head back and forth.

“Why? Why?”

“Our magic is one, remember?” The kitmer sailed toward us, sparks of our kingdom’s colors trailing behind it.

The smile faded from our face. “When you stripped the magic out of that man, I felt it. I felt you corrupt the very nature of what we are. Whatever you have created, it is a threat to the essence of our world, and it must be fixed. That man—what is he? Lukubi, Omalian? I would like to do him the honor of burying him in his home.”

Ruby and ivory bloomed vicious petals in Baira’s eyes.

“Then you will not have to travel far,” Baira spat.

“The man you call a corruption was a Jasadi before we took his magic. Before we made him a King . Fareed will be the first to rule a kingdom that isn’t loyal to our blood, isn’t beholden to our magic. He will fight against you.”

We leaned close to our sister’s face, wiping the opaque red tears dripping down her cheeks. “My beautiful Baira,” we whispered. “Make a King? You could barely make a shiny dog.”

We stepped off the ledge, landing on the soft neck of our kitmer. Wind rushed through our hair as it climbed higher, taking us home.

Behind us, Baira’s scream joined her Hounds’.

We stepped onto the bridge and crossed our arms. Dania had insisted on this meeting spot, claiming it served as neutral territory between our kingdom and Kapastra’s.

She had some manner of mischief planned. She wouldn’t be Dania if she didn’t. But what?

We screamed as our siblings tore us apart. Baira broke our bones, wrenching us into pieces on the bridge, and Dania plunged her arm into our chest. Kapastra’s hands clutched our skull, holding us prisoner to the endless agony.

“Hurry!” Baira shrieked.

Dania’s fingers grazed our magic at its very core. Her hand closed around it, and her screams of agony joined ours.

“Don’t do this!” we pleaded. “Sisters, please!”

“You will find us again,” Kapastra whispered, blue-and-white eyes gazing down at us with the implacable wrath of the heavens. “At least, what remains of you will.”

They tore our magic from our destroyed body and cast it down into the river flowing beneath the bridge. We collided with the surface of the water, and the sky fractured into gold-and-silver fire as the rest of our limbs were reduced to ash.

We flowed into Hirun and searched for home.

We are a young girl who loves to cup bees from her growing hive. By the time she is twelve, our power has grown too much, and she burns her hives with the same torch she laid upon her sleeping parents’ hut.

She is executed, and we return to the river once more.

Once every hundred years, when the river slows, we are reborn. Sometimes we stay for twelve years, like the first girl, and sometimes we stay for twenty, like the young man who slaughtered his village with the monsters he created.

The story always ends the same. The wrong choices. The scourge of our magic on their mind.

We consume them, and we return to the river once more.

We are a green-eyed girl in a modest town, the pride of our family’s life.

We—

For the second time, reality disappeared.