Page 104 of The Jasad Crown (The Scorched Throne #2)

CHAPTER SEVENTY

ESSIYA

I knew better. I knew better, but I didn’t care.

My hands knotted in his vest, drawing him tight against my body. Arin kissed me with scorching ferocity, like a man brought back from the brink. His hand gripped my hip with bruising force, the other sliding over the braid lying against the back of my neck.

The first time Arin kissed me, I had lost myself. I had wanted nothing more than to abandon my mind, to cast aside my worries and fears and find peace against him.

The last time he kissed me, I found myself.

I became aware of the sounds around me. The dampness seeping into my shoes.

The ache in my lower back. I breathed in the smell of the river lingering on him, nearly overpowering the scent of ink and rain he could never quite shake.

I felt… I felt . The sand in my tired eyes; the pitch in my ears; the anger of watching the Nizahl soldiers march onto Janub Aya; the guilt of killing them so viciously; the anguish of fearing that Arin had only pretended to believe me and all along he had planned to pick up his father’s mantle; the terror of watching the mist fall.

The scream of grief bottled inside me, because Marek was dead. Marek was dead.

As my magic drained, something inside me gasped back to life.

Resurfacing from its slow and steady suffocation, howling back to power.

Every heart beating inside Jasad echoed behind my own.

The land murmured, weary and low, then seemed to realize I was listening.

I was finally listening, so it started shouting.

Arin drew back, leaving his forehead pressed against mine.

“I thought I would be too late.” He gripped my shoulders, my arms, my waist. Reassuring himself.

As soon as he finished, he collapsed.

I moved instantly, catching his head seconds before it could bash against a cropping of rocks. His skin had taken on a blue tint I’d never seen on anything living. I dragged him away from the rocks, terror turning my grip rough. “Arin? Arin?”

I glanced around for help, but the battle still raged around us.

The Jasadis had been beaten back almost all the way to the tree line, and I forced myself not to look at the bodies strewn over the dirt.

Some of the Nizahl soldiers were glancing around in confusion, and I followed their gazes to Jeru, who was chasing the soldiers on horseback and waving a Nizahl flag, bellowing for their attention.

Niseeba screeched above us, looping around the scorch marks of her dead siblings.

I raised a shaking wrist to Arin’s nose and waited.

When a puff of warm air ghosted over my skin, the relief was too much.

It was all too much. Each death pierced me through, an embroidery of agony with me as its needle.

Each scream rang double in my head. The clouds complained about the sand in the air, the trees sobbed for water, and the earth I’d scorched with the kitmers—it shrieked , over and over, blade of grass by blade of grass.

My magic had eroded me nearly to the core.

I felt it in every bone, every breath. I could no sooner disentangle myself from it than I could rearrange my organs.

Carved into my skull were the memories of a thousand lifetimes.

People I had been, places I had seen, lives I had ended.

My magic roiled with it, a furious storm slamming into the thin barrier I had erected between us.

I did not have magic-madness. I was magic-madness. Every single person since Rovial had had my magic. Rovial’s magic.

I sobbed, shaking Arin’s shoulder. “Wake up. Wake up so you can laugh with me.”

The Nizahl Heir stirred, and the relief nearly killed me.

Air rushed out of my desiccating lungs, and I looked for the other wayward piece of my heart.

I couldn’t risk leaving him to find Sefa, but I didn’t need to.

I could move to Sefa as I had once moved to Arin, leaving my physical body behind.

It was as simple as closing my eyes and opening them next to her.

A shadow stretched over the kneeling girl, a pair of boots stopping by Marek’s body. She stared at the shadow through a glassy, unseeing gaze. Rocking back and forth, her bloodied hand pressed to Marek’s wound and another curved around his pale cheek.

Tears shimmered in Jeru’s eyes as he knelt beside Sefa. “Sefa, I am so sorry. I am so sorry, but we have to go.”

Sefa kept rocking.

Jeru reached for her, and Sefa recoiled violently. “No! I won’t leave him. Don’t you understand, I’ve never left him? I’ve never left him!”

The ache in Jeru’s face surprised me. His voice was ragged. “You never left. I know you never left, and so does he. But Marek isn’t here anymore, Sefa.”

Sefa fought Jeru with an exceptional ferocity when he picked her up, but he was a soldier and she was a grief-shattered girl. “Put me back!” she screamed, writhing like a snake caught in a trap. “I won’t leave him!”

“You will not die beside him!” Jeru roared, and Sefa finally went still.

The guardsman didn’t stop walking, didn’t look at Sefa.

I walked beside them, quiet as the wind and as insubstantial.

Jeru headed toward Arin. My body remained bowed over the Heir’s, and I quickened my step, eager to rejoin it.

“Do you understand what he went through to find you again? What he endured to keep you safe? He needs you to bury him. He needs you alive to remember him, to honor him.”

“You don’t understand,” she whispered. Jeru tensed, and we both glanced at her tear-stricken face. “What life is left? I can’t mourn him longer than I loved him. I am not strong enough for this.”

“Nobody is,” Jeru said. “You do it anyway.”

As soon as Jeru dropped to the ground beside Arin, setting Sefa down, I slid back into my body.

My sudden motion startled Jeru in the middle of checking Arin’s breathing. He was slightly less blue, but my stomach still twisted with unease at his pallor. I brushed his hair with the back of my hand.

“He’s alive. Keep him that way,” I commanded.

I turned to Sefa and took her face in my hands. She barely reacted, still and unresponsive once again.

“He died,” she said, and I was not sure who she was speaking to. “He wasn’t supposed to die before me. He wasn’t supposed to die because of me.”

I doubted she would hear me now, but I hoped the words would linger somewhere in her subconscious. Somewhere she could retrieve them when the time came.

“I love you, Sefa.” I wanted to cry, but I didn’t quite remember how. “I love you, Sayali. I love you, whoever you will be next. You don’t deserve this, but you will survive it.”

I grabbed the scepter and rose to my feet.

Battles still raged around us, but it had begun to slow.

More and more Nizahl soldiers were joining the group of confused, uncertain soldiers dropping their weapons to their sides.

Most of the Jasadis had drained through their magic stores, turning the fighting mundane.

It was nearly over.

The fortress lingered at half the height of its predecessor, but it was still too high to climb. Too high for him to scale.

The mist around Sirauk hadn’t returned, but I could feel the chill of it grazing the back of my neck.

Not long now.

“When he comes after me, stop him,” I told Jeru.

“What do you—”

The mist crawled, and I disappeared.

When I materialized on the bridge, I was dressed in a long abaya striped with silver and gold, fastened at my middle with a pin in the shape of a kitmer.

I supposed my magic understood we’d need to be well-dressed for this particular reunion.

Ugh, still with the my magic . As though it was a stray cat I’d found and reluctantly taken in, something separate and discordant from myself.

My magic was me. The hallucinations, the visions—all me. Each life we’d lived, stacked in thin layers on top of this last one.

Time’s brutality had spared Sirauk Bridge, leaving it as endless and ethereal as the day I had died on it. Rot had not dared approach the perpetually damp wooden planks beneath my feet, nor had rain weathered the thick ropes on either side. Beneath it lay darkness and the quiet hum of Hirun River.

I placed my hand on the fortress. It vibrated, jubilant at my touch.

Inside me, dread turned leaden.

I remembered my magic’s previous lives as one might remember a childhood story.

The details had blurred, but the endings were always the same.

The madness that caused Dania, Baira, and Kapastra to kill Rovial and cast themselves into an eternal slumber would catch up to my mortal mind and consume it.

Thousands had died at the hands of my magic-madness, entire populations wiped clean.

Even now, the barrier between me and complete surrender shivered beneath my magic’s onslaught, fine cracks forming on its surface.

I pressed my fingers to my lips, holding back a wholly inappropriate laugh.

I hadn’t wanted the responsibility of being the Jasad Heir, and all along, I had had the magic of the Jasad Awal ?

If I hadn’t grown up with the cuffs suppressing my magic, I might very well have gone mad before I reached adolescence, like most of the others.

They hadn’t had the chance to remember who they were before the magic ripped through their minds.

They hadn’t had a beautiful conduit siphoning away the worst of its effects.

What had the creature protecting Vaida’s ring said that night in the Omal palace? Nearly there. They tried again and again, but your choices never changed. Who knew this one would meet with success?

She may as well have spelled ROVIAL in large letters on my forehead.

A drop of blood hit my chin. I wiped my nose with a scowl. My magic had been restrained for fourteen years. Surely, another couple of minutes did not merit such a tantrum.

Once the barrier in my mind cracked, I would go mad. The damage I would unleash would be rivaled only by Rovial’s, and this time, Arin’s abilities would not be enough to pull me back from the brink.

Without that knowledge, I would have walked straight through the fortress to Sefa and Arin.

I would have let myself dream of keeping this life, of seeing it through to the end.

Arin had come for me, which meant Nizahl would stand beside Jasad.

None of the kingdoms could harm us with Nizahl at our side.

I could walk through this fortress and find Arin. We could have a life together. A future.

He and Sefa wouldn’t be alone.

In the measure of monster or man, what tips the scales?

Lives unfinished flitted through my mind’s eye, playing before me like the last vision of the dying.

Rovial, the mad Awal. Essiya, the cruel Heir.

And Sylvia. My first and favorite lie.

The tide of my magic broke through a portion of the barrier, and I forced myself to swim.

To keep my head above water and remember it all.

Fairel’s laugh. The smell of Rory’s favorite mint tea brewing on a foggy morning.

Sefa’s dazed giggles when she’d been working on a project for five hours straight without blinking.

Marek’s endless chatter whenever I grew moody and sullen, too stubborn to leave me alone and too restless to stay quiet.

And the memories that hurt. The memories my magic had kicked to the corner and lit ablaze.

We—I—had loved my siblings once. I had loved them before I knew what the word meant or how fatal its corruption could be.

I had loved Dania’s inability to go anywhere without her axe dangling from her hand or her waist. Kapastra’s obsession with shining each individual scale on the newborn rochelyas and giving them names more fitting for an inappropriate suitor, like Amar Arba’tashar and Helywa.

And Baira… nobody could tell a story like Baira.

Everyone in this age remembered her for her beauty and her skills of deception, but the Lukub Awala had so much more to offer.

She could turn a walk from one tree to the next into the grandest of adventures, whisk you into action with nothing more than the turn of a phrase.

And I…

I am what remains.

I opened my eyes, and the fortress had risen to its full height.

Standing on the other side of it, barely holding himself upright, was Arin.