Page 107 of The Jasad Crown (The Scorched Throne #2)

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

ESSIYA

I s this normal? Did we sleep this long the first time?”

“Stop slapping her, Dania. She’ll wake up and set us on fire.”

“Again,” a familiar voice groused.

I grabbed the hand resting on my arm. My eyes flashed open. They shrieked, skittering away from me like roaches under a freshly lit lamp.

I sat up, massaging my scalp and squinting. When I had my vision after Soraya stabbed me, I’d stood amid four thrones cast in darkness and suspended over a gushing river. I had expected to land somewhere grim and dark, suited toward an eternal mind brimming with regret.

Instead, I was in Essam. Lush trees around us, their branches heavy with leaves unmarked by disease or pestilence. The rotten egg smell of Hirun had disappeared, replaced by a faint lilac fragrance. The slivers of sky I could make out above the trees were clear blue.

A frog leapt onto my knee, and I needed no further evidence.

This Essam was not my Essam. A frog would never approach me in the real Essam. They had learned better.

Dania, Baira, and Kapastra stood a distance from me, watching with expressions ranging from mild distrust to naked hope. My magic’s memories and my own bled together, my awe and confusion, its rage and regret, churning in the sea of history between us.

I leaned against the tree and petted the frog’s head, crossing my ankles together. “So, what do we do for fun down here?”

Surprisingly, it was Kapastra who took the first step. She slid to the ground next to me. “This, mostly. We roam and we remember. Between the three of us, we have amassed quite a storage of memories to relive.”

I glanced around Essam and laughed. Of course—this was my memory. My sisters had been long entombed by the time the woods looked like this. “I see.”

“Sometimes, we can hear what happens in our kingdoms,” Baira offered, coming to join Kapastra on the ground. It was startling to see Baira again and realize how closely she resembled Vaida.

It was strange. Half of me had started shrieking as soon as I opened my eyes to the Awalas of our kingdoms, overwhelmed at encountering the most powerful figures to ever exist in my time or any.

The other half saw three agitating siblings.

“Why did you come here, Rovial?” Dania remained rooted to the spot. “Why now?”

“It seemed like a good time.” I rubbed the heel of my hand against my heart. “Rovial is gone. I have his memories, but they are piled against thousands of others. They belong to my magic, but Essiya belongs to me.”

“You are your magic.”

“Would you calm down, Dania?” Kapastra snapped. “She just had seven thousand years’ worth of memories shoved into her head.”

Good to know several millennia’s worth of sleep had not done much to improve everyone’s temper.

Dania rolled her eyes. “Fine.”

“Don’t listen to Dania,” Baira said in her lilting, breathy voice. “She felt incredibly guilty for killing you. We all did. We kept hoping your memories would catch up to your magic someday.”

“Hoping and fearing,” Kapastra corrected. “But you seem less intent on murder and destruction, which is a relief.”

Dania scuffed her foot on the dirt. Perhaps it was not too terrible of a blend, my magic’s memories and my own.

Through the former, I saw a petulant little sister too prideful to admit her guilt.

Through the latter, I saw one of the young wards in the keep, standing outside my door to confess their theft of my sesame seed candies.

“I have too many grudges in this life to keep track of the ones from previous lives,” I said. “Besides, I vaguely remember planning to kill you at the time.”

Dania settled on the grass with a sigh. “Fair enough.”

The tension broken, the Awalas regaled me with stories of their lives in eternal slumber and peppered me with questions about their kingdoms. They already knew about the faded magic, but the political turmoil of the last century or so had gone largely unnoticed.

They were, in a word, displeased.

“You could have done a little more killing while you were up there,” Kapastra complained. “Nobody would have mourned a tin-brained buffoon like Felix.”

“I killed him eventually,” I reassured her.

Even as I spoke about my life, I could feel it receding, drawing away like a tide recalled to sea.

It would have scared me more had I not just recovered an ocean’s worth of lost memories. The tide would always return.

I told them about the Alcalah and Dawoud. About Arin and the kitmer. Speaking of him was like chewing glass, and I quickly skipped to waking up in the mountains.

“Fareed was handsome,” Kapastra said at one point. “If his descendant looks anything like him, I wouldn’t mind my magic sending him into minor catatonia for a kiss.”

Baira threw a handful of torn grass into Kapastra’s face. “Stop. It is obvious thinking of her lost lover hurts her.”

Dania and I wrinkled our noses in unison. Lover , she mouthed, and I shoved her shoulder, the two of us exchanging a grin.

“I suppose there’s no way we can ever go back?” I asked mildly. “Dania, the last time I saw you, you were talking to Kapastra about a prophecy.”

My sisters glanced at one another. A delicate wariness descended over them.

“We came down here to protect our kingdoms from the dangers of what unchecked power could create.” Dania’s speech was too measured to be anything other than rehearsed, and I wondered how frequently they had recited it to one another.

“While we ruled, we plunged our kingdoms into war after war. We cannot die, nor can we be killed. The people in our care mattered less and less, because eventually they would die. Their lifetime of misery was a blink of an eye for us. At the time, entombing ourselves seemed to be the only solution.”

My chest constricted. “But not now?”

“Our kingdoms don’t have magic anymore,” Baira said softly. “They are barren in the one resource we carry in excess.”

“The only way we can rejoin their world is if our magic is equal to theirs and not greater,” Kapastra said.

The frog on my knee leapt off with an offended huff as I curled my legs into my chest. “What do you mean?”

“We would drain our magic—”

“Absolutely not.” I barely recognized the chilling rage in my voice. “You will not separate me from my magic again. It’s mine .”

Baira raised placating hands. “We aren’t taking away your magic. We would just… give it a boundary. Right now, our magic knows no limits. It is a fountain with no basin.”

“A well without a bottom,” I mused.

Kapastra jumped in. “But Dania thinks we can pump magic back into our kingdoms. Drain the excess out of ourselves and funnel it back into our people.”

“You mean transferring our magic?” The fortress. Raya.

“Exactly.”

“Overspending magic is what devoured my humanity the first time,” I pointed out.

“We do not intend to spend it. Consider it… repurposing. It won’t regenerate. In either case, if it proves a flawed strategy, it isn’t as though we are in a position to harm anyone.”

“How long would it take?” I asked. “I want—I don’t want to emerge when everyone I love is dead.”

Too many already are , I almost added.

At the hurt look on Baira’s face, I quickly amended, “Everyone mortal, I mean.”

“I cannot offer you a definitive date,” Dania said. “But we have no other demands on our time here. We can easily devote the whole of our days toward accomplishing this.”

“It is only a theory,” Kapastra said.

“Excellent,” I said. “I love a good theory.”

I burst into tears.

My sisters immediately crowded around me.

Dania wrapped her arms around my shoulders, leaning her head against mine.

Baira pulled my palm to her cheek and drew soothing circles on the back of my hand.

Kapastra, who hated touch as much as I once had, patted my knee and attempted to distract me by asking questions in various dead languages.

I wasn’t alone. I might not be where I wanted to be, but I was not alone.

“Tell us about everyone you love,” Dania murmured, drawing a curl away from the warpath of my tears. “Tell us about the lives of Sylvia and Essiya.”

“We have plenty of time,” Baira added.

I laughed, wiping my eyes with the heels of my hands.

“You can show us, too, if you’d like,” Kapastra said. My most somber sister gestured at the scene around us. “We can help you remember this time.”

And they did.