Page 46 of The Jasad Crown (The Scorched Throne #2)

I was observing Maia struggle to empty a sack of sand and wondering if she had used her magic for anything other than knocking me unconscious on the cliffside when the end of Rory’s cane prodded my hip. “Stop dawdling and come with me,” he ordered. “I told you we needed to speak.”

I rolled my eyes and followed Rory to his apothecary. He stepped under the awning and surveyed our surroundings. When he was assured we were alone, he slammed his cane into the pane of his shop’s window.

The wood cracked, and Rory hit it again. “What are you doing ?” I exclaimed. The chemicals must have finally cooked his head.

Rory reached into the hole and withdrew a package coated in dust and specks of hardened clay.

Sweat glistened on the chemist’s forehead. “I found this while we were preparing to evacuate. If I had known I still had it—if I had even suspected—” Rory cut himself off and thrust the package toward me. “Here.”

I evaluated Rory as I tore the wrapping. What if he was legitimately ill? He distrusted healers—an irony that flew straight over his head—and I wagered he would rather dwindle into death than allow those “ham-fisted crooks” to treat him.

The wrapping finally fell away. “A book?” Leather-bound and thick, it had the semblance of a journal kept by a politician obsessed with the sound of their own opinions or a poet with more whimsy than talent.

I had read through plenty of the first under Hanim’s tutelage.

“It may be an unfamiliar concept to you, but you do this remarkable trick with books where you open them .”

I snorted. He was in perfect health. I would probably die before he did.

I flipped the cover. The script was slanted, written with a balanced hand.

After many years of research and reflection, I have found only one absolute truth to share: time is the enemy of knowledge.

A poet, then. Great. I paused to raise a brow at Rory. “I think we should discuss reading preferences.”

Rory beseeched the skies for patience.

It is important to understand that when I undertook the study of magic, my interest was of a purely scholarly nature. I had little inclination toward its political relevance, nor was I in possession of any overruling opinion as to the merit of its existence. All I wanted was to learn.

But the pursuit of knowledge never takes the straight path, and I could not have predicted what waited around the bend.

Reader, I urge you to read these records thoroughly and with an open mind. Discard your preconceived notions. Fight your instincts to deny a narrative that does not suit the world you know.

For the truly enlightened among us are those who understand that the realities we build were already built for us.

I dropped the book with a strangled gasp. It landed at my feet, still open to the same page. The same sentence. The impossible sentence.

Shivers raced up and down my arms, connecting at the peak of my stiff spine.

Those words were nearly identical to the ones I had said to Arin in the training tunnels. They were too specific, too exact.

Pressure built behind my temples. Whose mouth had I stolen these words from? What memory had I suppressed this time?

I crouched in front of the book and tried to focus my burning gaze on the page.

At the bottom, in tiny script, was the author’s name.

Emre Faluk, Heir of Omal.

My father.

I lifted my head. I looked at Rory as if seeing him for the first time.

“You never answered me,” I whispered. “When I asked you how you recognized me. You didn’t say.”

“I wanted to find the right time. A fool’s excuse, I know.

The time is always right, and it is the rest of us who are wrong.

” The sigh Rory released shrank him in half, seeming to rattle his very bones.

“The name I held before Mahair was Rusheed Osman. Royal healer and personal physician of the Faluk family.”

My head spun. Physician to the Omal royal family? Rory?

I wiped my features clean. He could be lying. I had no way to verify the account. “You knew my father?”

“Knew him?” Rory stared off at a point beyond my shoulder, the scar of an old grief bleeding behind his eyes.

“I held your father the day he was born, and I held him the day he died. I loved that boy.” A choked laugh.

“He was permanently confined to his books, determined to chase the most obscure and pointless pieces of knowledge the world had to offer. His father despaired of him, but his mother doted on him. Queen Hanan was happy if Emre was happy, and it did not take much to make your father happy.”

I was afraid to breathe and miss a word. If he was lying—if Rory was leading me by my nose on some merry tale—

My grandparents had never spoken of my father. Neither had Niphran, beyond an incoherent sentence or two during her fits. Emre was a mystery I had made peace with leaving unsolved, and the entire time… the entire time, Rory had known him better than anyone.

“When he fell in love with your mother, he became like a man possessed. He would have laid down his life to please her. But your mother wasn’t like him.

She was a warrior, an Heir, slotted to be the future Qayida.

Emre could offer her little in the world of warfare and combat, and he had no magic.

So he threw himself into the one way he might support your mother: a study of magic.

How it might be strengthened, manipulated, transformed.

I don’t know if he wanted to find a way to draw magic into himself or merely to enhance Niphran’s. ”

I exhaled slowly to conceal my dawning comprehension. Emre was not merely researching magic; if he had wanted to aid my mother, he would have been researching magic mining.

Niphran could roar astride the biggest horse in the kingdom, swing a sword three times her size, and kill someone without dislodging a strand of hair from the neat bun at the nape of her neck.

She was more likely to use a book as firewood than to crack one open.

Emre would have had to know pretentious drivel about magical history and long-forgotten artifacts would not earn her respect.

But a solution to her parents’ profane practices? A way to rectify the harm they had done and prevent its repetition?

“When he learned she was pregnant with you, everything changed,” Rory continued, unaware of my racing thoughts.

“Niphran could feel your power, and it terrified her beyond measure. Emre applied what he had learned about magic to try to understand yours, but it defied reason. Your parents were planning to take you and flee Jasad as soon as you were born.”

“But my grandparents killed him,” I said tonelessly. This part of the story never changed. “And Niphran went mad.” Rory didn’t need to know Niphran’s madness had been a result of Hanim and Soraya’s yearslong poisoning. The spindle of this tale kept turning, and the threads were already too tangled.

Rory nodded. “I retired from my post after the Omal Heir’s death and came here.

But I still cared about Queen Hanan, and long journeys took a toll on her health.

Before the Blood Summit, I would join her on those trips.

Several of which were to Usr Jasad, where I had the dubious pleasure of watching a peculiar little girl climbing trees in the courtyard and sending the palace staff into hysterics.

” Rory cocked his head. “Ten years later, she wound up at my door, covered in blood.”

I clutched the journal to my chest. I knew this history—had vividly and brutally lived it—but hearing it alongside the truth of Rory’s identity shook me. Of all the places I could have gone, all the doors I could have darkened, why Rory’s? It couldn’t have been a coincidence.

After I killed Hanim, I had barely been alive myself. I had walked without seeing, focused solely on putting one foot in front of the other. I could have wound up anywhere. Mahair hadn’t been the closest village, not by several miles.

I thought of the Sareekh. My magic had destroyed the protective bubble because it knew my best chance of survival was on the other side. Could it have led me to Rory? Had it wielded some control even behind the cuffs and guided me to the only person capable of keeping me safe?

My heart plummeted into my stomach. The appearances to Arin—they always happened near the peak of my panic. My magic had been whisking me away to the one person who could pull me back from the edge.

Terror raced through me.

You speak as though your magic has a will of its own.

I tightened my grip on the journal. “Thank you for this,” I said. I didn’t own anything belonging to my parents. I escaped the Blood Summit with the clothes on my back, and the war had scorched the rest to the ground. “Rusheed.”

“My pleasure, Essiya.” He tapped the top of the book. “He would be proud of you, you know. You’re like him. Passionate. Committed. Reckless for the people you love.”

I crooked a sardonic smile at the chemist. Such sweet nonsense.

“We both know Emre would be horrified by me. He was a bookish royal incapable of so much as swatting a fly. He would have expected a daughter who read poetry in a garden and played with frogs instead of serving them to you in buckets.” I traced the edge of the journal with dirt-crusted fingers.

“I am his blood, but I am no one’s daughter. ”