Page 48 of The Jasad Crown (The Scorched Throne #2)

“Engage in some intellectual exercise, Namsa,” Lateef chided.

“Transferring magic is distinct from draining or magic mining, you see. Magic came to this land through transference. When the Awaleen tried to give their progeny magic directly, it killed many—brutally. Their magic was too powerful for our bodies to contain on its own, so they carved a separate space for it.”

“The wells,” Namsa said.

“Precisely. The wells store our magic, and they have limits. Caps to how much magic we can expend and wield at any given time. Once the Awaleen gave us this function, their next step was to sow magic into their population’s blood.”

I dropped to the edge of the bed, tugging on the ends of my fingers in an old habit Soraya had tried to break.

“Magic is carried in the blood, which is why it can be passed down from generation to generation. The well acts as a cap to prevent anyone from drawing too much magic from their blood at once. Transferring magic requires magic in the blood and the well to siphon the magic safely?”

Lateef grinned. “Yes. All of us have the well, but only Jasadis still have magic in their blood. As you can imagine, nobody is capable of infusing magic into someone’s blood. If someone tried to transfer their magic into a dry well, they would risk killing themselves as well as their target.”

Interesting, but not entirely related to my original question. “Why does magic mining kill its victims while Arin can drain them without any physical harm?”

“When you mine someone’s magic, you don’t just drain the well—you strip it out completely.

Imagine this: You stand waist-deep in Hirun on the other side of a dam.

Once the dam is torn away and the water bursts toward you, you must collect as much water as you can before you’re swept away in the current.

It’s a craft, magic mining. The instant they strip out the wells—the spaces in our bodies meant to safeguard against magic ripping us apart—they have to drain as much of the magic as possible before the gush of magic annihilates the victim’s body and kills them. ”

I remembered the glass bones of Soraya’s father, the hollow cavern of his face and his mangled limbs. To think he had lived through even a moment of that process—had experienced the agony of his magic tearing free inside him just so someone could scoop handfuls before it completely killed him—

I ground my teeth together. My grandparents were dead. I couldn’t do anything about their past actions except mitigate the harm they left behind.

“I think what the Heir does is different.” Namsa spoke up.

“What he drains is the reserve of magic. So when he touches someone, he is only draining what we have in our well at any given time. Right now, I am at full power—he could drain me down to nothing, and I would need two days to completely recover. When I recovered, he could drain it again. In a sense, magic mining tears out the base of our powers, whereas the Heir only siphons the output.”

“You don’t think a musrira could have given him this ability?” I checked.

The Urabi shook their heads in unison.

Unhelpful. If it wasn’t a musrira or the Awaleen, what had brought about Arin’s ability?

In the vision I saw after Soraya stabbed me, Isra had clutched a black-haired baby while she begged Rawain to wait until he was older.

Wait until he was older to do what? Rawain didn’t have magic.

Arin’s talents were perfectly suited to Rawain’s scheme against Jasad, but how could Rawain have caused it?

“I do think we are forgetting the most important question,” Lateef said. He reached for the bridge of his nose, pushing up invisible spectacles. “Once the magic is drained, whether by mining or otherwise, where does it go?”

The question bloomed like a toxic cloud between us, staining our fingers when we reached out to touch it.

Where does the magic go?

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. Right now, Wes was following the Supreme to determine the answer to that question. “But it won’t be long until we find out.”

I sat on the floor watching the flames flicker in the hearth, my palm heavy over my heart, and wondered which kind of madness was worse.

Was it the erosion? The slow and steady pressure of a wave breaking against a boulder, both bound to the other by forces beyond their control. Feeling every scrape, every piece of you the tide carried away.

Perhaps it was the instant death. A mind lost with a single stroke, tearing it from its tether to reality. You wouldn’t know you had gone mad, because you did not remember an existence before it.

I rubbed the vein on my palm. A tiny silver web snaked out from its center. It had appeared after I stopped the arrow aimed for Medhat, feathering out to the tip of my thumb.

“You frown any harder and you’ll carve your chin right off,” Raya said.

I didn’t turn as she settled on the carpet beside me, our backs propped against the armchair.

“Odd, seeing you without Marek or Sefa. When the Nizahl Heir declared you Champion and took you from Mahair, I knew it was only a matter of time until those two followed. I swear on the mists of Sirauk itself, they were gone by supper.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. They stung, reminding me of how long it had been since I last rested them in sleep. The darkness blanketed me, and in its confines I found my voice.

“You should go to sleep,” I murmured. “The battle could be upon us at any minute.”

“The same could be said for you.”

“I don’t need rest to fight capably, especially against some pathetic Omalian soldiers. I will do what needs to be done, no matter how fit I feel for it.”

“Tombs below, that tongue of yours has only grown longer,” Raya huffed. “You think you have the world figured out now because someone gave you a royal title and a shiny bit of jewelry? A crown can sit on an empty head just as easily as any other, girl.”

I blinked, finally glancing at Raya. She arched her stubbed brows into a disapproving slant.

“I didn’t even get the jewelry,” I said. “You are speaking to the first ever crownless Queen.”

We stared at each other for a long minute.

I laughed first, and then Raya was slinging her arm over my shoulders and tucking me against her side. I curled against her, laughing so hard that it took me a while to realize I was also sobbing, and even longer to figure out I wasn’t laughing at all.

Raya rocked me like I was one of the new orphans rescued to the keep, weeping uncontrollably at the memory of a life lost.

“I don’t want to die.”

The arm around me tightened. “You will not die, Sylvia.”

“I am not Sylvia.” I wanted to be. I wanted to be her so badly.

“Be Essiya with your Jasadis, be powerful and fearless for them. Tonight you are Sylvia, and you are home, and you are allowed to be afraid.”

Raya didn’t understand.

If Queen Hanan does not reinstate me as her Heir, I will have to raise the fortress.

If I raise the fortress, I will either burn alive or the magic will consume me. Should it be the latter, I will go mad, and every Jasadi who rallied behind me will be trapped behind the fortress with a mad Malika.

My magic has its own memory that I do not understand.

What if Arin was right about magic-madness?

“When I was seventeen, I begged my mother to let me marry the butcher’s boy,” Raya said suddenly.

She stretched her slippers toward the hearth, and I lifted my head from her damp shoulder to peer up at her.

As far as any of us knew, Raya had never taken a husband.

“I had already made a name for myself as the best seamstress in our village, and I did not see the need to wait around for a wealthier suitor when I pocketed more coin than most of the men around me. I wanted to marry for love, and I loved Baheeg. He was… sweet, you understand, in a way boys as big and strong as him rarely are. He would talk about helping me open my own store, how I could work next door to him after he inherited the shop from his father. Finally, when it became clear to everyone in our village where my heart lay, my mother relented. She said I could marry Baheeg, but never to come crying to her if the ring on his finger changed him from a man to a beast.”

Riveted, I watched the fire with her, as though the rest of the tale might manifest in the flames. “Did it?”

“I don’t know. I never married him. A week before we were set to be joined as man and wife, I went to deliver a gown to one of my patrons and found her house empty.

Clothes gone, furniture stripped, kitchen bare.

The only thing left was a bundle on the carpet, shaking its tiny fists and bellowing red murder. ”

“She abandoned her baby?” Though I hadn’t imagined every single girl in the keep had wound up here by having a set of dead parents, it still shocked me to think of someone willingly casting aside their child, let alone an infant.

Raya hummed. “Happened all the time, and not just in our parts. Pregnant girls come into a village, make up a tale about a dead husband, and stay long enough to dispose of the infant before they go back to wherever they came from. Sad state of it, really. Anyway, I took the child home—what else could I do? Leave it for the vagrants? Baheeg and my mother were furious, trying to force me to give her up to the Omalian patrol, but I refused. I liked the squalling, red-faced little thing. I would have a home and food to eat soon enough, why shouldn’t I share it with this child?

When it became clear I wouldn’t be parted from her, Baheeg ended our engagement and told me to enjoy life as a spinster.

No man would come near a woman ‘loaded with the cast-off spawn of whores.’”

“I hope you told him you wouldn’t spit on his face if he was on fire,” I said emphatically.

“I didn’t have your way with words.” She chuckled. “That’s the problem when you’re young. Sometimes you mistake stupid for sweet.”

“What happened to the baby?”

“Ah, she was the light of my life. I would wear dresses to the shop so I could bundle her on my lap while I worked. When she was three, I took her to her first Alcalah festival.” Raya rubbed my arm absently.

“The sickness came out of nowhere. One day she was writing out her letters on the kitchen table, and the next I was laying her to rest beside my mother.”

My heart squeezed. “Oh, Raya—”

“It was a long time ago,” Raya said. “I left our village and came to Mahair, and I opened the keep. I made raising you girls my life’s work, and it is the best life I could have asked for.

Could I have been happy with Baheeg and the life we imagined for ourselves?

Maybe. Maybe. But I will never know. Life does not allow you opportunities to travel down every path, to see the outcome of every choice.

You can spend your entire existence frozen in one spot, squinting into the future, or you can decide to move. Pick a path and never look back.”

I wiped my dripping nose. “What if I know where every path leads?”

“Are you a prophet, girl?”

“No, but—”

“Then all you have are suspicions and worries, just like everyone else.”

I huffed a laugh. Leave it to Raya to imply a possible descent into madness and a war capable of ripping apart the four remaining kingdoms were boring .

Eventually, as I absorbed the warmth from the hearth and Raya’s steady presence, my breathing evened out. I slumped into her lap.

She stroked my curls, gathering them away from my face. When sleep finally caught me, I surrendered with ease.