Page 34 of The Jasad Crown (The Scorched Throne #2)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

SYLVIA

I f you don’t try using your magic before we leave, we may as well order everyone in the mountains to line up on this cliff and start leaping into Suhna Sea,” Efra said.

“Interesting idea.” I gestured toward the waves smashing against the side of the mountain. “Perhaps you should provide a demonstration.”

“You two bicker like infants,” Namsa sighed. She adjusted the blanket beneath her, surrounded by the clothes I’d helped her collect from the clothesline earlier in the morning. “I thought I’d managed to avoid child-rearing.”

Efra strolled in a loop around the canyon between our mountain and the next, pacing to the foot of the refrozen lake and back.

“The informant will be here in a matter of hours. If she gives us the news we’re expecting, we will need to mobilize our team toward Omal immediately.

We can’t afford to sit around and coax her sweetly. ”

My nails bit into my palms. Tombs below, but I loathed it when Efra spoke like I was some disagreeable pet and not ten feet and one insult away from incinerating him.

The worst part was he had a point. They were anticipating a report from one of their spies about the kingdoms’ reactions to Galim’s Bend.

It had been a little over three weeks since the cages were opened.

Since our options for sneaking into the Omal palace relied on trade routes staying open and minimal sentries along the border, everyone was on edge, waiting to see whether Queen Hanan would follow Sultana Vaida’s example and shut down access to her kingdom.

Efra had spun us into an impossible situation and then had the sheer gall to accuse me of trying to sabotage the Urabi’s plans by withholding my magic.

“You chose to announce our presence to the kingdoms by releasing centuries-old monsters and destroying an entire village, and you’re surprised the other rulers have taken up defensive positions?” Anger, bitter and wild, thrashed in my belly. “I follow fools in this mountain, don’t I?”

Efra bristled. “How many other options did you leave us with?”

My hands curled at my sides. The chafe of the Urabi’s demands had scraped me bloody, a persistent stone sanding off my skin, and it was only a matter of time before I reacted.

After a minute, my fists loosened. The fury dissipated, muffled beneath the resignation settling around my shoulders.

I hadn’t been taught how to lead. I understood next to nothing about the right way to rule.

What I knew better than anyone was how to obey.

“What would you like my magic to do, Efra?” I asked, toneless. “Choose your trick.”

Namsa frowned, rising to peer at me with concern. Efra did not bat an eye. “Summon the kitmer again.”

“You do not have to do anything you don’t wish to,” Namsa urged.

My smile, cold and bloodless, propelled the Jasadi a step back. Her well-meaning nonsense bothered me more than Efra’s barbs, sometimes. At least he did not dip his blade in honey before swinging it at my head.

“A kitmer,” I repeated. His interest in having me call forth a kitmer bordered on obsession. I had done it exactly once, and it had not been voluntary.

I faced the sea, drawing its stinging air deep into my chest. With the cuffs, my magic had reacted to threats against the people I cared about. To threats against Jasad.

Not a perfect starting point, but as good as any other.

Dropping my chin, braid heavy between the brackets of my shoulders, I thought of the kitmer raging through the Victor’s Ball. The streak of silver and gold as it shot above the Citadel, a beacon in the night sky.

Sefa and Marek could be anywhere. I had no idea if they were alive, if they were safe. They had been perfectly content in Mahair before I upended their lives. I should have stopped them when they decided to follow me into Nizahl. I should have forced them away.

A lazy heat spilled in my veins, thawing the tips of my chilled fingers.

Dawoud would have left Dar al Mansi if it weren’t for me. He would be here with his niece, probably leading the Aada. Taking his tea in the evenings with a piece of cream kunafa or basboosa, despite how I would harangue him about his health.

The heat crawled over my arms.

It was because of me that—

The woman screamed, clawing at the hand I’d wrapped around her throat.

Even though I could turn my chin and kill her where she stood, never having soiled myself with the throb of her slowing pulse beneath my palm or the smell of her choking breath, I enjoyed the sensation of her struggling beneath my grip.

The close and personal view of the life draining from her dumb eyes.

She landed in a heap in the mud. I wiped my hand on my hip.

Hmm. This sight would grieve her husband, but it wouldn’t break him. It would not reduce him to the barest components of a living man.

I cocked my head, and cracks formed along the youthful bronze skin. Her flesh began to peel in thick, fat strips. Layer after layer, curling into spirals as it landed in the dirt, until the meat barely clung to her exposed ribs, and the panels of her skin were splayed open like flipped shutters.

I left her face untouched. The effect would be lost if he couldn’t recognize the pile of flesh and blood lying in his farm, after all.

I washed my hands in the creek and smiled at the gold and silver veins webbing out of the corners of my eyes.

Too late, I realized that the heat of my magic had enveloped me, trapping me in a burning seal. To withhold it was to suffocate in it.

The face reflected in the creek—it wasn’t my face, but I recognized it. It had been one of the hallucinations from the waterfall. The woman with green eyes.

The ground shook. Pieces of the cliffside tumbled into the sea. I heard Efra and Namsa cry out as though from a great distance.

Threads of silver and gold spun between my fingers, crackling with power.

I dropped to my knees, my hands sliding into the dirt.

In seconds, the colors flowed from my skin and poured into the earth.

Mist rose from the ground like steam from a boiling pot, coalescing into a rapidly swirling cloud of magic.

“Step back!” I shouted to Namsa and Efra.

I shielded my head as the mist spun faster.

Awaleen below, my first significant act of magic as Malika, and it was going to blow apart the mountain.

What had I been thinking, listening to Efra?

He was no better than a little boy kicking his heels to see a vicious animal. He didn’t consider the consequences—

The mist erupted.

Namsa wheezed, bent over double as she shook with laughter. She hadn’t stopped in the last twenty minutes, and I was beginning to worry she had suffered a mental collapse. Every time she glanced at Efra, she’d begin howling anew.

In Namsa’s defense, Efra’s expression after the baby kitmer had hopped out of the cloud of magic would reduce the most disciplined stoic into hysterics. A kitmer barely taller than my knee, staggering under the weight of its own wings, wasn’t the majestic beast he’d imagined.

He had asked me to try again, and I obeyed. I tried ten more times, and each attempt brought forth another miniature kitmer. Two with fluffy golden wings and silver beaks; one with alarmingly sharp feathers; several more with misshapen horns curving in different directions behind their heads.

All of them had my eyes.

Your beautiful kitmer eyes , Niphran would always say. Dark and deep as the vastest sea.

A shiver ran through me. Had I given these kitmers my eyes, or had the resemblance always been so uncanny?

The sun sank, casting the surface of Suhna Sea in shimmering reds and golds.

“Do you think they would bite the children?” Maia asked from my right, her sudden appearance startling an undignified squeak out of me. “They would be so excited to play with them.”

The kitmers hopped around the cliffside, showing no sign of fading out like their predecessor. One pecked at Maia’s ankle, and she patted its scaly head. “Best to give it some time, I think,” Maia said.

“Yara is here,” Maia added, almost as an afterthought. “The informant.”

I inhaled. “Did she say anything?”

Maia shook her head. “I came to get you first. The rest of the Aada will be assembling. Is Namsa all right?”

One of the kitmers wandered toward Efra, and he scrambled away when it hopped closer.

For someone scared of a bird half his size, he managed to call upon a shocking amount of indignance.

“Is this it?” he demanded, stabbing a finger at the flock of small kitmers.

“This is the limit of your lauded magic?”

Efra almost died, then.

The moment came and passed. The sun barely sank an inch. Namsa hadn’t finished wiping the tears from her cheeks. Maia had just bent down to rub the beak of a fatally feathered kitmer.

But the moment stretched, cords of my magic arching tight. My magic wanted him dead. If I had ordered it, Efra’s heart would have beat its last, and he would have fallen dead to the ground.

Like the woman in the vision.

What I had seen was impossible. It was me , but not me.

The face reflected in the creek belonged to a stranger, but the things she had done had felt so real.

The way that poor girl had been dissected, left open like an animal pelt to dry in the sun…

I couldn’t have done that, not in my very worst moments.

I could be brutal, and I could be cruel, but I was artless about it.

My rage took the shape of a rabid brute force, too focused on simply making impact to notice or care how it reached its destination.

The detached, musing sort of savagery I’d felt in the vision was beyond my capacity.

At least, I thought it was.

Your mind is a maze of mirrors, reflecting only the memories you choose to save.