Page 3 of The Jasad Crown (The Scorched Throne #2)

CHAPTER TWO

ARIN

W hen the High Counselor finally lay still, Arin walked to the door and rapped twice. On cue, Vaun and Jeru slipped into Arin’s chambers. The door quickly closed behind them.

Jeru took a step forward. Vaun matched it. Jeru bowed, and Vaun bowed lower. Their hostility toward each other had devolved into what Arin could reasonably call a children’s game.

So long as they did what they were told, their tantrums hardly signified. Arin lifted an ink-spattered map he’d ruined in a burst of frustration last night and began to tear it into even strips.

“Arrange him in his bed within the Citadel. The swelling should disappear within the next hour. You will say he was unwell when he took to bed. He drank a tonic to help him sleep, sold to him by an unlicensed street merchant. Death came for him in the night. An unfortunate reaction to the benign tonic.” Arin handed them an empty bottle the size of his thumb. “The tonic.”

His guardsmen curled the High Counselor into as small a shape as they could manage. All the harm and pain this man had caused, and he was little more than gray flesh, stuffed into a sack of grain for inconspicuous transport to the other end of the Citadel.

“Go through his belongings before his wife does,” Arin said. “Anything of note, anything he kept hidden, bring to me.” Eyeing the droplets of sweat drying on Rodan’s side of the table, Arin gestured to his ruined furniture. “Have someone see to replacing this table and rug.”

The guards bowed. They turned to the door, Jeru reaching for the handle, when Arin spoke again. “I’d like you to stay a moment, Jeru.”

His youngest guard swallowed. Vaun shouldered the sack and shut the door, leaving Jeru waiting stiffly in Arin’s chambers.

Arin pushed aside the curtain separating the front room from the rest of his chambers.

Jeru followed him into the cramped space, watching silently as Arin pulled out the keys for the thick steel door behind the curtain.

The locks fell open one by one. At the very bottom, a tiny bottle slipped from where Arin had affixed it beneath the last lock, falling into Arin’s waiting palm.

If spilled, its contents would burn through skin and bone—the last defense against an intruder if they somehow managed to find all six of Arin’s keys.

His father would call it excessive; Arin preferred thorough. It would be a much less onerous affair to identify the culprit if half their foot was melted off.

The chains fell from the door in a clanking symphony of metal.

They crossed Arin’s bedroom, the large bed consuming the majority of a space originally intended as an antechamber.

Arin had had his bed moved here from the main chambers shortly after Soraya’s assassination attempt.

He was at his most vulnerable asleep—it defied logic for his bed to be accessible behind one single door.

At the last door, Jeru waited while Arin repeated the process of opening it. An old exchange flitted through Arin’s mind as he worked through the last of his wheel of locks.

“Caution is an area where I am prone to excess,” Arin admitted. “My faith in my guards has taken a beating.”

She grinned. “You? Paranoid? Steady me, sire, I may keel from my mount.”

Arin didn’t realize he’d gone still, key halfway inserted into the last chain, until Jeru cleared his throat. “My liege?”

The key cut into Arin’s tightening fist.

Jeru wanted to talk about it. About her . Arin had caught him and Wes exchanging furious whispers outside his door the morning after the Victor’s Ball. It seemed they had been too worked up to remember Arin’s unusually sensitive hearing.

“The Heir does not need your coddling,” Wes had snapped. “He can handle his own affairs.”

“He has no one to confide in, Wes! No friends, no siblings.” Jeru was the youngest guardsman at twenty-two, and he had been raised in a close-knit family that discussed their problems.

Wes, who was thrown into a military compound at fifteen and had no connection with his family beyond the percentage of his earnings he sent them once a month, snorted. “He has plenty of people to talk to.”

“You know as well as I do the only person he ever let come close enough to confide in was Sylv—”

Arin had chosen that moment to interrupt, startling the guardsmen apart.

“Sire?” Jeru’s tentative touch on Arin’s shoulder jolted him back to the present, and Arin drew away from the guard, pushing open the door.

“By Hirun’s glory…” Jeru whispered, raised brows threatening to disappear into his curly hair.

Maps covered every inch of the room. Precious maps, maps Arin traded from Orbanian khawaga, collected in Omalian markets and smoke-filled Lukubi gambling houses. Maps he’d been gifted as a child from diplomats visiting from Jasad.

On the ground, an entire armory lay organized in twenty-seven neat rows.

“Sire…” Jeru trailed off, raking over the hundreds of blades Arin had sharpened to a deadly gleam; the arrowheads he had stacked into bundles of fifteen, each triangular point perfectly matched to the one beside it. “Were the Citadel’s blacksmiths unable to accommodate you?”

“They are working on another assignment for me,” Arin said.

Arin could predict each revolution of Jeru’s mind as he worked through the sight before him.

It would have taken weeks to fix and organize this many weapons.

Arin had done it in days, which meant Arin was not sleeping.

In one room, Arin destroyed maps in a flare of temper.

In another, he fixated on the precise edge of weapons older than the Heir himself.

Jeru opened his mouth. The question shaped on his tongue.

Before it could fall, Arin supplied one of his own.

“Where are Sefa and Marek?”

It worked. Chagrin flushed over Jeru, and he bowed his head, addressing his shoes. “No one has seen or heard from them, sire. I am still waiting on word from the soldiers I sent to Mahair, but I suspect they will return empty-handed.”

Arin’s palm flattened against the map to prevent it from curling. “Have I made myself less than clear, Jeru?”

“I’ll find them, my liege, I swear it. I plan to extend the search into Essam Woods.”

“You shouldn’t have waited this long to extend your search.”

The guard continued to study the ground. The stubborn angle of his chin reminded Arin of the day he’d found Jeru, head lowered in preparation for the executioner’s sword.

Jeru and Wes believed Arin saved Jeru and began the nimwa system out of a desire to see the lower villages at least as well fed as they were well punished. A sign of Arin’s mercy.

Perhaps. Arin liked to think he would have inevitably interceded to save Jeru from his idiocy, regardless of the potential he saw in the young man.

But in that moment, Arin saved Jeru because he saw something more rare than reckless courage and renegade justice: conviction.

“This week, the council will meet to discuss ending the conscription pardon on the lower villages.”

Jeru went white.

“If they see fit to end it, young soldiers will flood our training compounds, and many will not come willingly.”

“Sire—”

“Five days.” The words were a condemnation. “Five days ago, I asked you to bring me Marek and Sefa. Each day the Jasad Queen evades our capture is another day closer to war. Five days, and you have nothing.”

“Sylvia sent them—”

“ Sylvia doesn’t exist.” Rage buckled in the void where Arin had thrust it, straining against its chains. “There is only the Jasad Heir.” A dry curl of his lips. “The Jasad Malika .”

Jeru swallowed. “My apologies. The Jasad Malika used her magic to send Sefa and Marek away during the Victor’s Ball, sire. They could be anywhere.”

The Jasad Malika. Oh, it was enough to make him wish he remembered how to laugh.

When Arin thought of the former Jasad Queen, a murky image of Malika Palia surfaced. He’d met the former Malika once as a child. She’d carried an air of authority that could not be taught, brimming with poise and power.

How could the Jasad Queen be a mouthy crook who would sooner wrestle a rabid bear than hold her temper for ten minutes? The Jasad Malika couldn’t be vicious and loud and unreasonably confident in her comedic skills—

“Lukub has closed its borders.” Arin spoke over his own thoughts, an action he was loath to have grown accustomed to.

“Orban has collected dozens of Jasadis under the guise of other crimes and executed them. The khawaga have taken the crisis as an opportunity to pillage any village they see fit. Felix’s raids…

” Arin exhaled softly, collecting his fury before it could unravel.

“That imbecile is indiscriminately raiding his own lower villages. The last report said seventy accused Jasadis had been murdered—by his own men or by the people around them, who fear potential Jasadi presence will invite the Omalian forces down upon them.”

It hadn’t come as a surprise to Arin, who had already taken steps to account for the recklessness of the other kingdoms. Nizahl soldiers were threaded throughout Essam, planted at strategic trade routes, and holding vigil from Nizahlan strongholds at the nexus of each kingdom.

Not to find the Urabi, whose intelligence Arin valued much higher than that of his fellow rulers, but to ensure the other three kingdoms did not engage in any action too catastrophic for Arin to fix.

Little had he known catastrophe was the very first item on their agenda.

Jeru cleared his throat. “I will leave no stone unturned, sire.”

“Stop turning stones,” Arin said. “Start throwing them.”

Before the guard could answer, Arin pushed out the words souring in his throat. “If the council votes for conscription, you will need to ride against any town that resists.”