Page 56 of The Jasad Crown (The Scorched Throne #2)

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

SYLVIA

I coughed myself awake, rolling to my side as water surged out of my throat. Pain pounded between my temples. My entire body vibrated, shaking like a freshly gonged bell.

As soon as I could breathe, I crawled away from the waves lapping at my legs. I raised an arm and squinted into the sun.

Wait. The sun? I’d been flying through the clouds with Arin and the kitmers, markedly missing any trace of the sun. Besides, this was too clear, too blazing, for the season.

“Arin!” I called, staggering out of the water. Why was I at a seashore? The closest shore of Suhna Sea was in Jasad, hundreds of miles away. Questions beat impatient fists against the inside of my skull. “Niseeba, Ingaz!”

I whirled toward the sea, heart pounding as I searched the endless stretch of blue. Waves splashed at my legs, unnaturally warm. His leg was still restrained when we fell. What if he hadn’t been able to free himself in time?

“Arin!” I screamed his name, shoving clumps of my drenched hair out of my face. I scrambled for my magic, but it was nowhere to be found. Not absent because it was ignoring me or waiting for the right opportunity, but gone . I couldn’t feel it at all.

“Your companion left.”

I went still. Without turning around, I slipped my fingers into my waistband and withdrew my dagger.

“Now, now. If you kill me, who will help you escape?” asked a singing voice. “Don’t you want to know how to leave the Mirayah?”

I twisted around, blade high and knee crooked to pounce.

My teeth came together, hard. The creature had assumed the general shape of a man, but it was the furthest thing from human.

Features crafted by an uninspired hand sat above its thick neck—a set of colorless eyes, an upturned nose, a thin mouth.

Either laziness or weakness had caused it to forgo the more intricate details—eyebrows, the hollows under the eyes, the ridge between forehead and nose.

What did the details matter when you could shed your skin between one breath and the next?

“Dulhath.” I tightened my grip on the dagger. “You’re the one that escaped from Galim’s Bend.”

“Jasadi,” the dulhath shot back. “I presume the same Jasadi everyone’s been making such a fuss about.”

“You said you saw my companion leave. Where?”

The dulhath shrugged, gesturing farther down the shoreline.

“He dropped into the water somewhere down there and spent time pacing around, bellowing a name and searching the water. I wasn’t sure for what until I saw you roll onto the sand.

Essiya, I presume? He seems quite badly hurt, poor thing—I don’t see how he makes it back without something else finding him first.”

The knot in my chest loosened. Arin was alive. He was alive and strong enough to search for me, which meant he was not too injured to tear apart anything in this tombs-cursed realm that tried to hurt him.

“I don’t have my magic here,” I warned. “There is nothing for you to eat.”

“Ah, but you’re wrong, sweet Essiya. The Mirayah does not strip away your magic—it merely renders it…” The dulhath cocked its head back and forth, as if sampling different words. “Ineffective.”

The dulhath took a step toward me, lips white and contorted into an eerie grin.

“I could indulge myself now and suck the magic out of your marrow. It won’t be nearly as tasty or nutritious, but it would slake my hunger.

What I am offering you is a fair fight. I will show you out of the Mirayah, and you fight me with that”—he gestured blandly toward my dagger—“instead of your magic.”

How stupid did he think I was? Dulhaths were notorious liars, single-minded in their pursuit for their next meal. He would lie with his last breath if it meant he had a chance at my magic.

“As soon as we leave the Mirayah, you’ll be able to transform.” My waterlogged boots sloshed as I advanced higher up the shore, my dagger aloft. “The last one of you I killed became a giant three-headed spider and tried to impale me on one of its legs.”

The dulhath tracked me with his colorless eyes.

Poorly masquerading as human or not, dulhaths were an ancient and terrifying predator.

They had devoured the magic of Kings, feasted on entire villages and schools.

With magic gone from everyone but Jasadis, the dulhaths had lived on the edge of starvation for over a century.

They would do anything, say anything, to eat.

“Is that a no?”

“A resounding one.”

“Shame,” the dulhath sighed. “Imagine how delicious your magic might have tasted outside the Mirayah.”

Movement from the corner of my eye drew my attention higher up the beach, where craggy slopes of sand flattened into soil at the edge of the woods.

Figures stepped out from between the trees.

Five, ten, fifteen men spilled out like flies from rotted fruit.

Tattered uniforms clung to their bulky frames.

Soldiers’ uniforms, Omal’s colors… but these weren’t the standard Omalian uniform.

I should know—I had just seen a horde of men in those uniforms ride into Mahair.

Vacant gazes latched on to me. They lumbered in no great hurry, and why should they? I was trapped between them, the water, and the dulhath.

Trapped without my magic.

As they closed in, I went stone-still at the sight of three circles on the collar of those strange, outdated uniforms.

Two circles at the top, one circle at the bottom, the edges of each overlapping to form a ram’s head. In the space where the circles connected were three clear horizontal dots.

These uniforms weren’t simply out of fashion. They hadn’t been worn in hundreds of years.

“Poor creatures,” the dulhath clucked. “They have been in the Mirayah ever since the Siege of Six Dawns. Not a clue who they were or what happened to them.”

The Omalian soldiers who’d borne the brunt of Orban’s offensive spell… the ones who had turned on their brethren and begun to eat them alive as a result of Orban’s forbidden wartime tactic.

Awaleen below, what kind of magic ruled this realm? How ancient were the creatures inhabiting it?

I rapidly weighed my options. Use the dagger to cut down as many of the Omalian soldiers as I could before they swarmed me, or throw the dagger at the dulhath and forfeit the single weapon at my disposal for the slim chance of killing the smarmy little toad.

The knife cut through the air and plunged into the dulhath’s shoulder.

I have been many things in this life, but wise wasn’t usually one of them.

The dulhath rocked on his heels. A snarl tore across his face, and before I could move, the Omalian soldiers converged upon me.

I thrashed as countless arms pinned me to the ground, clawing and biting at any extremity that came within reach. I tried to gather sand to throw in the dulhath’s eyes as he crouched over me, but a soldier jabbed his knee onto my wrist and pressed his forearm to my throat.

The dulhath plucked a strand of hair from my cheek and twisted it around his finger. “Don’t worry. You won’t feel any pain. By the time it’s their turn to eat what’s left of you, you will be long dead.”

I tried to spit on his sorry attempt at a face, but the soldier’s arm was a boulder on my windpipe. The dulhath trailed a curved nail over the inside of my arm and lifted my hand to his face. He ran his nose over my palm, inhaling deeply. “What a true treat you are, Essiya.”

His lips curled back, revealing the bladed tip of his black tongue. With a gooey squelch, it split into seven wet slivers, each tip sharper than an arrow and likely capable of winnowing through skin and bone.

Dania’s bloody axe, I was going to be eaten. Five years living in Essam and slaying every beast Hanim could conjure only to die in the Mirayah. Jasad would fall because their Malika had gotten herself digested in a place that shouldn’t exist.

The tongues sprang toward my arm, and I shut my eyes, bracing for agony.

It never came.

I snapped my eyes open to the dulhath gurgling, clawing at his neck as Arin’s blade slid across his throat. With a fist in the dulhath’s thin hair, Arin slammed the blade into each of the dulhath’s eyes before cutting his tongues at the root, silencing the creature’s screams.

Sizzling blood splattered over me and the soldiers. They shot toward Arin as the dulhath’s body dropped to the sand, dead at last.

The Nizahl Heir put distance between us, drawing the mutated soldiers away from me. His hair had dried in dark silver waves, falling around the bruises matting the side of his face. Arin picked up the dagger I’d thrown at the dulhath and wiped it clean with the edge of his coat.

Get up and help him , I shouted at my prone limbs. The soldiers streamed toward Arin, leaving me behind like a forgotten pet, but I could not bring myself to do more than sit up in the sand.

I wanted to see him fight. I wanted to see what it looked like when Arin of Nizahl didn’t hold back.

At first, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. The soldiers seemed to drop around him untouched, hitting the ground without getting up again. He was barely moving, but they were falling.

Until the next wave of soldiers swarmed him, and I realized they weren’t keeling over on their own.

Arin struck at a preternatural speed, a blade in each hand, slicing the soldiers at critical points—the pulse at their neck, their throat, the lower right of their belly.

One of them threw himself at Arin, knocking him back a step and dislodging one of his daggers.

I scrambled to my feet, but Arin had already hurled the soldier like a javelin, knocking him into three other attackers.