Page 29 of The Jasad Crown (The Scorched Throne #2)

We grappled. I tightened my knees around Arin’s hips as he twisted on top of me. As soon as he raised the knife, I dug my fingers into the bandages at his side until he gasped. Blood stained my nails.

“Sorry, I’m sorry—” I grabbed his wrist, knocking it into the ground by my head, but he wouldn’t drop the knife. His other fist drove into my side, and the pain shot me straight into a coughing fit.

Bastard. I grabbed a handful of his hair and yanked him close.

I had a hard head—a useful detail Hanim uncovered during her long tenure of torture. Arin learned about it in the training tunnels, and I paid him another reminder by smashing my forehead against his.

I recovered quickly and used his momentary disorientation to throw my weight forward, flipping us once again. I leaned over him and clasped his wrist, grinding it into the floor. His fingers wouldn’t unclench.

“Let go, you stubborn fool! You’re bleeding and I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Don’t want to hurt me?” The growled words, the first he’d spoken, caught me off guard. Strands of silver hair slipped over his forehead, catching on the blood newly flowing from his temple.

He heaved with the effort of speaking with me atop his torn chest, sweat shining on his collarbone. But he’d stopped resisting. He wasn’t trying to buck me off or pursue any of the vulnerabilities my position above him granted.

I looked at the trail of dried blood along his cheek and thought of the way I’d found him sitting. Hunched and drawn.

“I didn’t know about Galim’s Bend.”

Lightning cracked through the impenetrable frost in his eyes, brightly furious.

“Arin, I would never have released Al Anqa’a. You know I wouldn’t.”

“I know nothing about you,” he said, harsh and low. “Essiya.”

Uttered with contempt, clearly meant to injure, my name in his mouth had the opposite effect.

Hearing it filled me with a shapeless wonder.

I didn’t have to battle the instinct to correct him or grimace at the sound.

It didn’t feel like an ill-fitting piece of clothing someone else had chosen for me. I wanted him to say it again.

Our shroud of secrets had fallen, and we knew each other truly for the first time.

“Be careful how you address a Queen,” I whispered, legs tightening around his waist as I leaned forward, “little Heir.”

He went still, and I realized my mistake in shifting forward. Arin’s free hand—the one I’d pinned against his body, between my knees—came loose. In seconds, I went airborne, a powerful shove sending me halfway across the room.

By the time I hit the ground and rolled to my feet, Arin was stalking toward me. I darted behind the table and threw an inkwell at his head. He dodged, so I started hurling everything within reach. Bandages, clothes, scrolls, and books rained on Arin. He batted them aside without slowing.

Physically, Arin was unimpeachable. Every muscle on his finely honed body had earned its way there through hard labor, wrapping around a broad and powerful frame.

The Commander of Nizahl had trained since childhood, and his ironclad will made it so nothing beyond death would slow his blade or alter his aim.

Even now, with so much blood leaking from his bandages, he would keep coming until one of us was in pieces.

To know Arin of Nizahl was to know the real force—and the real vulnerability—lived beyond his body.

I blurted the words that had been circling in my head since the Aada meeting. “The fortress fell before the messenger did!”

It was a gamble. A match tossed in a dark well. I grabbed a bottle and held it between us like a sword, waiting for him to cross the last of the distance.

Instead, a miracle happened.

Arin paused.

I had never encountered anyone whose mind worked like Arin’s. Once cut with curiosity, it would not heal. Any uncertainty would fester, spreading like poison, consuming him.

Ignoring the ache behind my ribs, I reached for his weakness, and I dug my fingers deep.

“Haven’t you asked yourself how it was that the Jasad fortress, which had stood for centuries, fell within hours of the Blood Summit?

How four armies were already in place to strike as soon as the fortress fell?

” The questions tripped over one another, rushing to liberation.

These doubts I had bottled for years, finally shared with the one person who would be as tortured by them as me.

“If my grandparents had planned to attack the Blood Summit, why would they bring me? Why would news of Niphran’s death—the daughter they threw to rot in Bakir Tower, whose lover they murdered—affect them so greatly that their magic would react to destroy the entire Summit? ”

I took a cautious step toward his motionless form, bottle still raised between us. He tracked me closely, flinty gaze never leaving mine.

He was listening.

“Think of how cleanly it happened,” I urged, and it was reckless to speak like this, drawing unseeingly from a well of my own suspicions.

I didn’t dare mention Binyar or his confession, but otherwise, I didn’t know what I would say next.

A wrong move, a misstep, and the cage of his curiosity might break.

“Magic-madness has been a discredited theory for over a hundred years. Your own kingdom cast it aside as unsubstantiated fearmongering. Your father is patient, I will grant him that. He spent decades slowly shifting Nizahl from the kingdom created by the Awaleen to arbitrate magic to a kingdom galvanized to destroy it.”

Invoking Rawain was risky, and I feared the worst when Arin took a single, precise step forward. The bottom of the bottle pressed against his sternum. He wrapped a hand around the center, but made no move to pull it out of my grasp.

Still silent. Still watching me.

My heart pounded. It would have been less terrifying if he had unsheathed a sword.

My time was running out.

“I met your mother at the Blood Summit,” I said. “Isra knew she was going to die. She walked into that Summit knowing what Rawain planned to do.”

Talwith bottles, one of which I was keeping pressed to Arin’s chest, were crafted to endure rowdy khawaga and treks across trade routes.

Dania’s kingdom of warriors had pooled their talent and created a bottle sturdy enough to survive long campaigns through Essam and fearsome battles.

A bottle that, for all intents and purposes, could outlast time itself.

Arin’s knuckles turned white around the bottle, and the glass shattered.

I barely had a second to process— he broke a talwith bottle with his bare hand —before he was stepping over the puddle of broken glass toward me. My back hit the wall, and I exhaled with ill-timed amusement. Arin’s repertoire of skills should include a singular ability to corner me against walls.

I raised the bottle’s neck, still clasped in my grip, and pressed the jagged ends to the underside of Arin’s chin before he could take another step.

My voice hardened. “I know he is your father. I know what I ask of you.”

I wished I understood less. I’d torn myself apart from the inside out trying to please Hanim’s ghost. To be the Heir and Jasadi she wanted.

I had recoiled from the simplest touch; fought against any tenderness or friendship that might wrap itself around my neck and drag me to the mud.

I’d spent a mere five years in Essam, but neither the scars on my back nor the influence she had cast would ever fully heal.

Arin had never known a day in his life without Rawain.

The Supreme had drawn the constellations of Arin’s world, dictated the parameters of his universe.

Another son would have probably contented himself with living in a predetermined reality.

That son wouldn’t have allowed anything so troublesome as doubt to crack the comfortable foundation upon which he rested.

Though Arin had grown up in the world Rawain devised, Arin had a quality—a miraculous, almost spiteful strength—that was a nightmare for those whose bloody hands built our skies and earth.

Arin wondered.

“It took one lie for you to lose faith in me,” I whispered. “Tell me, Your Highness: How many will it take until you lose faith in your father?”

I dropped the bottle’s neck. It landed at our feet, rolling out of sight.

“Will it be before or after one of us dies at the other’s hand?”

The colors in the room began to fade, the surfaces dipping and swirling. Our time had ended.

“Ask him about the fortress.” My stomach churned, and I fervently hoped I hadn’t just committed a fatal error. In Arin’s hands, a thread of information, no matter how thin, could unravel significantly more than intended.

Still, it was my last chance. A final arrow across the stars.

By most estimates, it was a colossal failure. Arin hadn’t softened. He’d spoken only once.

The Commander blurred, disappearing like a stone dropped in a river, but the feeling I carried away was not despair.

Because I did not lie when I said I knew Arin.

And I knew what it looked like when the Heir’s mind began to twist.