Page 26 of The Jasad Crown (The Scorched Throne #2)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SYLVIA
N amsa delayed me, waiting until the others had vanished into the mountain before she spoke.
“They are gathering for the Aada in there.” She inclined her head toward the entrance. “They’ll be expecting you.”
“What more is there to discuss?” I brushed a crusted strand of my hair away from my mouth.
I hadn’t had a chance to wash up since last night.
Thanks to my luxurious soak in the brine and sediment of Suhna Sea, I could pick up a curl and crack it between my fingers.
“Nobody listened to me earlier. Any tidy scheme you might’ve had before won’t survive Galim’s Bend.
In hours, Felix will have soldiers posted up to his hairy nostrils.
Orban will likely declare a curfew and arrest anyone out past the hour.
Who knows what Lukub will do? Vaida might start throwing anyone whose name ends with an a into the Traitors’ Wells. ”
“It was a mistake to authorize the attack without your input. Don’t give us an opportunity to repeat it. Come listen to what we have to share with you, Essiya.”
I could spend an eternity plummeting through the depths of her audacity without reaching the bottom.
“I repeat: I went to your Aada this morning. I waved my arms, I shouted, I begged them to find a way to reverse this disaster Efra set into motion. Now you want me to come back and listen to another doomed plan?”
“It isn’t doomed. We—”
“Go to your Aada, Namsa.” I tried to maneuver around her. “If you decide to invade the Omal palace, let me know what time we ride to our deaths.”
A lightly muscled arm thrust itself in my path. “Leadership comes to you naturally. Why do you insist on walking away from it?”
I tipped my head to the stars and sternly advised myself against hurling Namsa into the lake.
Leadership couldn’t be more unnatural to me.
I was short-tempered and impatient, and I firmly believed compromises were an empty solace for the unwittingly defeated.
Toss in the voices in my head, the unpredictable magic, and the random hallucinations?
They would be better off flinging my crown into the sea.
“He will win,” she said.
The stars winked.
“You can anticipate problems we cannot. You know how these rulers think. He showed you maps of their palaces, trained you in the ways of their courts. Before the Alcalah, you were already a formidable force, but now?” Namsa’s laugh floated, disembodied, over the dark mountains.
“Arin of Nizahl created his own worst enemy.”
Sefa’s soft voice swallowed Namsa’s, as though whispered from the clouds. The way he looks at you sometimes. Like you are a cliff with a fatal fall, and each day you move him closer to its edge.
A shudder entirely unrelated to the cold worked its way down my spine, and I forced my gaze back to the mountains. To Namsa.
He may have created his own worst enemy , I wanted to say, but I am my own worst enemy, too.
“I will sit in on the meeting,” I said. “But do not expect me to do more than observe.”
“My, my!” I raised my hands over my head and clapped. “If the goal is to expedite your own gruesome murders, I must say—you have all applied yourselves to the extreme.”
The members of the Aada regarded me with varying levels of indignation. Thick cushions covered the ground, arranged in a loose semicircle around the room. The aim behind removing the table and chairs was supposedly to strip away barriers to communication. Or, in my hands, potential weapons.
“Queen Hanan does not care a whit about me. Felix could pulverize me into soil for their gardens, and she wouldn’t stop to smell the flowers growing from my carcass.”
Dust motes drifted across the speechless room. After a minute, Lateef cleared his throat. “Your… vivid… objection is noted, Mawlati. We understand your doubt, but we have reason to believe Queen Hanan may be easier to persuade than you think.”
The urge to draw out the knife hidden in my boot and stab it into the nearest hard surface nearly overwhelmed me.
Hours we had spent in this fashion. Hours , while my hair took on a texture akin to burnt bread and the members of the Aada exerted themselves to incinerate every last one of my nerves.
I took solace in my putrid smell. In this coffin of a room, they were probably choking on it.
“Reason, reason, reason.” I drew my wrist across my nose, wiping the layer of dust settling above my lip.
Awaleen below, but I was tired. “A reason you refuse to share, but continue to cite as a valid rebuttal to any of the points I raise. Tell me, then: Why am I here? You do not treat me honestly, you will not hear my counsel, and you expect me to join you in a pointless death based on a trust you will not return.”
Lateef and Namsa glanced at each other. On the other side of the room, the three Aada members I didn’t know avoided my eyes.
“Oh, just tell her!” Maia burst. She pushed off the wall she’d been slouching against and strode over to Lateef. She held out her hand. “She’s right. How can we ask her to trust us when we will not do the same?”
Namsa leaned back with a slight smirk. She shrugged at Lateef. “You know where I stand.”
“Why should we trust her? She—”
“Be silent, Efra.” Lateef scowled. “You have become unbearable since the Malika arrived. If you intend to drown yourself in childish petulance, do not drag us down with you.”
I wouldn’t laugh. I absolutely would not laugh at the affronted look on Efra’s contemptible face.
Properly chastened, Efra huffed, but did not speak again.
A bundle of parchment rolled together with twine dropped into Maia’s hand. “Give it to the Malika,” Lateef sighed. To me, he said, “Dawoud brought this to Namsa six years ago. He recovered it from a high-ranking general in Nizahl’s army in the first month of the siege.”
I dragged a lantern closer to my lap as Maia handed me the bundle. The current state of my vision did not easily lend itself to reading, and it blurred double at the tiny script squeezed onto the pages.
Already dreading the headache this would shepherd my way, I sifted through the bundle. The damaged edges of the parchment crackled beneath my fingers. If Dawoud had taken this in the first month of the Jasad War, then it was nearly half my age. “What am I looking at?”
Namsa threw her arm over the back of Lateef’s cushion, one leg spread and the other bent at the knee. She was different in these meetings. Cockier. Namsa in the Aada was a relaxed woman of thirty, and I barely recognized her.
“Reason,” she said.
I sighed. Relaxed or not, she was still Namsa.
Settling back, I lifted the first parchment and forced myself to focus on the tidy blocks of script.
I have been lied to. We have all been lied to. Should these pages be found beyond my possession, know this—they have killed me, and they will eventually kill you, too.
The fortress fell before the messenger did.
Rawain knew the fortress would fall. He knew what the messenger would say.
We rode for Jasad two days before the fortress fell—before the slaughter at the Summit.
It is my belief that Supreme Rawain of Nizahl, to whom I have pledged my loyalty and led regiments of men to their death, worked in league with Sultana Bisai of Lukub and King Murib of Orban to orchestrate the events precipitating the Jasad War.
No—this is not a war.
This is a siege.
I straightened, gripping the parchment with too much force. My pulse juddered to life, a pounding drumbeat of disbelief rolling through my body.
The others stayed silent as I read. My hands shook harder with each page I flipped.
The author described how the armies of Orban, Lukub, and Nizahl were sent out before the messenger at the Blood Summit had delivered the news of Niphran’s death.
Before the massacre supposedly launched by Malik Niyar and Malika Palia against the other rulers.
It had been planned all along, from who would die at the Summit to when the strike against Jasad should come.
The only kingdom that had refused to ride against Jasad was Omal.
Queen Hanan and King Toran despise the Jasad throne as much—if not more—than the other rulers, but they refused to ride against the kingdom of their granddaughter without grave cause.
King Toran is dead. His son, Emre, was killed in Jasad a decade ago. Supreme Rawain has stripped Queen Hanan of everything she loves and left her with one option only: war.
The author went on to detail his confusion about how the kingdoms had facilitated the destruction of the fortress; who did they have inside Jasad who could destroy a centuries-old magical barricade? Niphran was the Qayida at the time—could her death have led to the fortress’s fall?
I glanced at the watching Jasadis and wondered if they knew what Hanim had done to them. What she had tricked Soraya and the Mufsids into doing.
Sentence by sentence, the knot in my stomach grew. Here was the validation for what I had known all along. My grandparents weren’t responsible for the Blood Summit. In this, if in little else, their conscience had been clear.
But this document failed to answer the only question that mattered. How could Supreme Rawain, a man without an ounce of magic in his blood, summon enough magic to destroy the Summit and kill the two most powerful Jasadis in the land?
The last page was brief.
Rawain is searching for something. He will not stop until he finds it. Magic may have been the face of this war, but it is not the heart.
A scrawled signature followed.
Binyar Lazur, First General of the Southern Regiment of Nizahl.
I dropped the parchment. I knew that name.
I had lived with this man’s brother. Fought for him. Listened at his side while he confessed why he fled Nizahl at fourteen, changing his name and severing his ties with what was left of his family.
My last brother, Binyar, rose in the ranks quickly under Supreme Rawain. He was among those chosen to lead the siege on Jasad’s fortress after the Blood Summit. He never returned.
The Nizahl general who’d written down his doubts and safeguarded them with Dawoud. Who pieced together Rawain’s lies and never returned from the battlefield.
It was Marek’s brother.