Page 53 of The Jasad Crown (The Scorched Throne #2)

Sylvia yanked the dagger out of the dirt without taking her eyes off him and tucked it into her boot. “Still fond of throwing knives, are you?”

“Only when my target is so very good at catching them.”

Arin flipped his sword to block her blow, the clang of metal music between them.

Asserting enough force against her sword to keep it raised, he marched her against the wall and pinned her sword beneath his own.

Caught between the wall and the weight of Arin’s broadsword, she strained to maneuver from the trap.

“How many times have I taught you to avoid this hold?” Arin’s voice cooled into deepest winter. “Do you think because your eyes glow a little now, you have no reason to keep with your training?”

Arms lifted above their heads, inches apart, they glared at each other.

“By the end of this, you will call me Mawlati with a smile,” Sylvia vowed.

A thrill tumbled through Arin. He had forgotten this feeling, this reckless abandon only she engendered—as though the rest of the world was nothing more than noise at the back of his head and true reality began and ended in the space she occupied.

“Prove it,” he enunciated, lips less than a breath from the crown of her hair.

Suddenly, the swords clanged into the wall as Sylvia slid down and threw her weight against Arin’s waist, taking them both to the ground. Before they landed, she slammed her fist into his stomach and tried to grab the sword.

Not bad.

Not good enough, either.

Arin swung, slamming the broadsword’s metal hilt against her temple. She twisted in time to avoid the brunt of the blow, but it still dizzied her long enough for Arin to throw her off him.

A horse galloped past them, its rider slumped forward with an axe between his shoulder blades.

Sylvia wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. “Is this all you have to offer me, Silver Serpent?”

She rolled out of the way of his dagger. In the two seconds it took Arin to shift back, she’d hurled a handful of pebbles and dirt directly into his eyes and lunged.

They grappled on the ground without any sort of finesse.

Blows flew, blood flowing between them until it became difficult to tell who it belonged to.

If Arin had seen his recruits fighting like this, he would have called them undisciplined children and ordered them to spend a week digging in the Wickalla.

Arin never put his hands on anything without a clear plan, without strategy.

She had dragged him into something raw and brutal, and if Arin weren’t viscerally aware of what might happen if any of her bare skin accidentally brushed his, he would relish every minute of it.

But one slip of their gloves, the wrong tear in her clothes… Arin couldn’t risk it.

She slammed her fist into his jaw, knocking his head so hard into the ground it echoed in Arin’s knees.

He spat out red. “I am not one for pointless musings, Suraira, but I am starting to wonder if whoever built my skull built it for the express purpose of surviving you.”

Arin’s eyes flared open as gloved fingers raked through his hair, gathering it at the nape of his neck.

Sylvia crouched above him, and he would have regretted the split in her full lips or the blood dripping from her nose if she hadn’t paid him the same.

If they couldn’t truly touch each other, this approximation of it…

the intimacy of this violence between them almost sufficed.

It almost satisfied the hunger that sparked at the base of Arin’s spine as she pushed a lock of his hair away from the seeping wound near his cheekbone and murmured, “Just your skull?” Her hair had come loose around her, black curls spilling around her strong shoulders, and she leveled a dagger against Arin’s heart. “Not the rest of you?”

Arin dug his fingers in the dirt and reminded himself what would happen if he twisted out from under her and pinned her to the earth. If he kissed the infuriating smirk off her face and let her tear into him a different way, unravel him in pleasure instead of pain.

All of me is written in your name , he wanted to say.

The earth rumbled beneath Arin, and a shadow blotted out the sun.

He saw the metal glint before he saw the soldier wielding it.

Arin whipped off the ground, tossing Sylvia behind him just as an Omalian soldier hurled a dagger straight at her.

It tore across Arin’s thigh and landed, wet with his blood, beside a startled Sylvia.

Arin didn’t feel the cut. He didn’t even glance down to see how deep it had sliced.

If it had met its mark, it would have killed her.

A strange fog descended over him, cooling his injuries to a pleasant numbness.

Picking up the soldier’s dagger, Arin wiped it against his vest and stood.

He walked toward the soldier unhurriedly, avoiding the frenetic swings of the incompetent fool’s sword.

Imagine—a foul urchin of an Omalian soldier felling Sylvia of Jasad.

Killing her while she was distracted. Killing her while she was quite literally in Arin’s arms.

Essiya, not Sylvia. Essiya, who has never been safe—will never be safe—because she is the Malika of Jasad. Sylvia would have run the moment you walked into Mahair, but Essiya stayed. Essiya fought, and she will keep fighting until there is nothing left of her.

The girl who’d grin at him with blood smeared in the cracks of her teeth and the ruler who’d tear kingdoms apart for her people. One and the same.

Without thinking, Arin stabbed the dagger into the hollow of the soldier’s throat and dragged it down: over the ridge of his breastbone, through the soft fat of his belly, and into the sponge of his pelvis.

The handle juddered in his grip as it severed muscle from bone.

Innards spilled over Arin’s gloves, dirtying his sleeves, but he didn’t care.

They do not get to take her from me.

It repeated in Arin’s head, a mantra ringing louder by the second.

He gutted the soldier, and for a brief moment, it was the woman who raised the whip against a blindfolded Essiya on the other end of his dagger.

Qayida Hanim whose bloodcurdling screams ripped through the air, Qayida Hanim whose eyes glazed over with the first frost of death.

The soldier dropped to his knees. When the body pitched forward, head cracking against Arin’s boot, it once again belonged to an Omalian soldier.

Red rivers poured from the corpse, watering the thin patch of weeds beneath it. The dagger dropped from Arin’s hold, landing in the puddle.

When he turned, she was fixed in the same spot on the ground. For the first time since the battle had started, she looked afraid. “Oh.”

“He could have killed you.”

Without removing her gaze from his, Essiya climbed to her feet. A fundamental shift had taken place, but Arin hadn’t calmed enough to identify it yet.

“And?” Instead of anger, Essiya’s voice roughened with frustration and something akin to grief. “Were you upset at losing the opportunity to do it yourself?”

“You will not die at the hands of a cowardly soldier who strikes at you from behind.”

“So you eviscerated him over the nature of the attack?” She scrubbed her forehead with the heels of her hands. “You once taught me that the only true honor in the world lies with the dead, because survivors strike first and repent second.”

Arin stiffened. Beyond her, the tide had turned against the Omalian soldiers.

Arin hadn’t doubted it would—a horde of butchers in uniform was no match for a handful of disciplined and well-trained soldiers.

Buoyed by the prospect of victory, the villagers stopped retreating.

As Arin watched, Nizahl soldiers, Jasadi rebels, and Omalian villagers marched toward Felix’s fleet, who had begun to edge toward Mahair’s outer wall.

When was the last time the kingdoms had stood as one, aligned under a common cause?

Essiya raised trembling hands, open palms pointed toward Arin. “The Supreme is lying to you.”

Arin’s teeth came together, and it took a concentrated effort to unlock his jaw. “As you keep saying.”

“You keep not hearing it. Arin, he is lying about—”

“My father has been lying since the day he learned how to sound out letters,” Arin said. “If we stood here and reviewed them from start to finish, we would disintegrate alongside your village.”

“Excellent! If you know he’s lying, then why are you still fighting me?” she demanded.

Arin ran a hand through his hair, heedless of the blood dried into the grooves of his glove.

Heedless of anything other than the pounding in his head, the aggravation gnawing at his bones with hooked teeth.

He should never have opened the door to this kind of conversation with her—never allowed her hazy accusations to cross the threshold of his mind.

She was a flame sparking on the kindling of his doubt and breathing small suspicions into an incoherent blaze.

“The Supreme might have lied about the Blood Summit. He may have lied about who was party to the Malik and Malika’s magic mining.

” Arin exhaled, a tranquilizing frost settling over the inferno in his chest. Her way was not his: Arin did not need to set himself on fire to see through the dark.

He would move through it, step by step, assured of where his foot would land before he raised it.

“But he did not lie about magic-madness. Every atrocity, every massive loss of life—it has been at the hands of magic-madness.”

“How many cases have there been in all of history?” she snapped. “One or two hundred since the entombment?”

“One case every century since the entombment.”

Essiya stared at him, shell-shocked. “That is… what, a little over seventy? Are you telling me seventy people went magic-mad, and you decided the whole of magic was to blame?”

“Ask me how many deaths each case caused. How much carnage.”

Essiya didn’t react, her gaze unfocused past his shoulder. “Magic-madness is your foundational truth, isn’t it?” she murmured, barely audible. Another without the privilege of Arin’s hearing would have missed it. “Is it what Rawain built everything else on top of?”

Arin’s skin tingled just as plumes of gold and silver shot through her eyes. They swirled into a deadly pool.

He cocked his head. She knew her magic would pass through him. Even if she exerted enough of it to hurt him on the way through, it would be a waste of her energy. She would need all her strength to evade him.

As if reading his mind, she said, “You may be immune to magic.” Pebbles knocked against Arin’s boot as the ground trembled. Gold and silver whirled faster. “But the world around you is not.”