Page 61 of The Jasad Crown (The Scorched Throne #2)
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
MAREK
H undreds of recruits poured into the compound, a hush of exhaustion silencing any conversation other than which rooms would get first turn at the baths.
Buoyant with dreams of collapsing for a long night of uninterrupted sleep, Marek released a groan fit to rattle every window in the Ravening compound when he opened the door to find someone sitting on the edge of his bed, his hand freezing halfway inside Marek’s stash of sugar-coated pistachio squares.
Outraged, Marek momentarily forgot he was addressing a guardsman of the Heir. “It took me two weeks to save enough for those! How many did you take?”
Jeru paused, then proceeded to lower the bag to the ground and shift it under Marek’s bed. “Not many.” A guilty beat. “I’ll replace them.”
“Right.” And afterward Marek would grow wings and fly.
Collapsing onto the rickety chair by the door, Marek kicked his boots out in a sprawl. “Are you not concerned your Commander might notice your repeated visits to the Ravening compound?”
Jeru pushed a couple of rebellious curls from his brow. Troubled grooves had formed in the young guardsman’s forehead. “The Heir has too much demand on his time to notice my movements.”
Marek snorted, unfastening the clasp of his gunk-stained coat. “Your liege would notice a mosquito in a storm. Unless he lost his touch?”
Jeru’s face hardened. “What did you find at the Shinawy household?”
Dania’s dusty bones, what was it about that tombs-damned Heir? The guards, Sefa, even Sylvia had fallen victim to his thrall. Marek didn’t understand it. When Arin of Nizahl looked at him, Marek’s insides tried to evacuate through his shoes.
“Have you found Sefa?” Marek answered Jeru’s question with one of his own.
It would be fair of Jeru to ignore Marek, but Jeru was cursed with the tragic trait of being entirely too nice.
“I have reason to believe she’s in Lukub.”
Marek sat up straight, his coat dropping into a forgotten heap on the ground.
Every ounce of exhaustion in his body evaporated.
“Where?” If he took a horse tonight, he could be across the eastern border of Lukub in three days’ time.
The compound was swimming with new recruits; Sulor hadn’t noticed Marek arrive while tallying the wagons, so the section leader shouldn’t notice him escape.
If he did—well, it wouldn’t be the first time Marek had evaded Nizahl soldiers.
“Her last known location was the Ivory Palace.”
“The—” Marek stopped short. “What? Sefa would never go anywhere near the Ivory Palace. Sultana Vaida is more twisted than the Nizahl Heir. She’d pluck out Sefa’s tongue to use as a hairbrush if it suited her.”
Marek leaned forward in his chair, clasping his hands between his spread knees. The inside of his mouth tasted vaguely of the bosomat the soldiers had been passing around the back of the carriage. “What reason do you have to believe she is in Lukub?”
Jeru scooted backward on the bed and braced his back against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. His boots dangled over the side in a way Marek would’ve typically found entertaining. “Does it matter?”
Marek’s wash of excitement ebbed, and it salted its retreat with a bone-deep dread.
“That depends. How badly do you want to see what I found at the Shinawy household?”
In another context, Marek might experience a stroke of guilt for putting such strain on the guardsman’s face. For Sefa, Marek would put Rovial’s tomb itself onto the man.
“There is a… man. Heilan Huz. He has spent the last month yowling about how the Sultana stole his lap girl. The girl he described matches Sefa, down to her mannerisms.”
The blood drained out of Marek’s face. He stared at Jeru, unable to articulate a response. Afraid, in fact, to open his mouth and vomit directly onto the uniformed guardsman.
“Lap girl?” was the best he managed to produce.
“Keep your head. The man is older than the mountains. High nobles in Lukub like to preen with pretty girls on their arms, particularly during festivals hosted at the Ivory Palace. It seems likely he took Sefa to the Ivory Palace, the Sultana kept her, and Huz is sore that the Sultana stole something he viewed as his.”
Sweet Sirauk. Marek didn’t know what was worse: the idea of Sefa relying on the generosity of lecherous high nobles to stay alive or the idea of Vaida imprisoning her in the Ivory Palace.
“But she is alive.” He could not make it a question. It couldn’t be a question.
“As far as I know,” Jeru said. He studied Marek’s rigid posture. “Breathe, Lazur. This is good news.”
Swiping the rancid pile of fabric masquerading as his coat, Marek fished around the pockets.
He tossed a cuff link at Jeru. “I found this in the Shinawy matriarch’s wardrobe, buried behind her massacre of goose-feather gowns.
The symbol in the center—is that what you’re looking for?
Orbanians flew that symbol on their banners during the Siege of Six Dawns, right? ”
Pilfering through Mira’s belongings after bedding her was not one of Marek’s proudest moments, but it also was not among his worst. The cuff link had been the only inconsistent item in Mira’s heaving wardrobe.
The leather cuff link bore three suns, the spheres overlapping in the shape of a ram’s head.
Three smaller suns gathered at the nexus where the spheres connected, as though giving the ram three eyes at its forehead.
“Yes.” There was a hard look in Jeru’s eyes as he traced the symbol.
“You should bathe and prepare yourself for travel. Fifteen hundred recruits will be leaving for the southern border of Lukub by dawn.” Jeru tucked the cuff link into his pocket, laying an absent hand on his sword.
“I should warn you—Sefa may not be in the Ivory Palace. She might have escaped Huz while she was at the palace and fled elsewhere.”
“By the mist-damned bridge, I hope she did,” Marek said fervently. “She would be safer on the streets than in the Ivory Palace. She knows how to survive as a vagrant, but a royal court? Sultana Vaida’s court?”
A shudder slid through him.
“By the mist-damned bridge?” Jeru repeated, a hint of a smile breaking through the somber set of his features. “You sound Nizahlan.”
There was a time when hearing that would have sent Marek into a panic.
It summoned the whispers of his family, echoing their vile voices in his ear.
In Nizahl, he was a failure. The son who fled.
Threw the Lazur legacy into the dirt the minute he laid violent hands on the High Counselor, and for what?
A girl who will not marry you, Caleb, who has no father and no name to speak of.
Your brothers and sister died so you might be given this chance.
So you could saunter to greatness the way you saunter through everything in life, even if this greatness is wasted in hands more familiar with the shape of a woman than the weight of a sword.
Is this who Amira, Binyar, and Hani left behind? Is—
Marek stood abruptly. It had been a long time since he allowed his parents to linger in his thoughts.
A violet raven stared at Marek from Jeru’s lapel. The swords clashing beneath it were stitched with a bright silvery thread Marek had never seen anywhere other than on Nizahlan-made clothes.
“I sound Nizahlan because I am Nizahlan,” Marek said. “Even if sometimes I wish it were otherwise.”
His parents might not be happy to have lost the tally of another hero child to bury, but his siblings—the only family he had cared about—would never have wanted Marek to follow them into the ground.
He was not the Lazur who fled; he was the Lazur who lived.
“I understand,” Jeru said, and he sounded like he meant it. “Go ready yourself, Marek. We leave for Lukub at dawn.”
Marek had been dropped into this compound with the clothes on his back. He had approximately three belongings, and most of them were edible. “Readying himself” would consist of bathing and trying not to think about what Sefa might have endured at the Ivory Palace.
“What do you need with the cuff link? Livening up His Highness’s uniform?” Marek asked. With his imminent—and by the grace of the Awaleen, permanent—departure from the guardsman looming, Marek could afford a little curiosity.
The cuff link crumpled beneath Jeru’s tightening fist. “Not exactly.”
Several hundred men, half of whom would have stuck a sword through your ear if you tried to remove them from their bed so soon after their return from Galim’s Bend, gathered at Fareed Mill to watch a guardsman of the Commander prepare to engage in combat to the death with Sulor, their least favorite section leader.
“Does anyone know what’s happening?” Zane muttered, rubbing his giant knuckles into his eyes.
At roughly six foot eight, Zane was the largest recruit in the compound, and also the reason Marek had escaped Galim’s Bend without becoming a midday treat for a nisnas.
Zane had lifted Marek off the ground like he weighed less than a sack of flour and kicked the nisnas clear across the road with his boot.
Were Marek a different man, his ego might have suffered a blow, but those different men were probably busy dissolving in nisnas toxins.
It wasn’t Marek who answered, but the recruit next to him, a reed-thin noble from Almerour.
Marek had only spoken to him a handful of times—Almerour was two towns over from where his parents lived, and though the odds of a boy four years his junior recognizing a Lazur were slim, Marek kept his distance.
“His Highness’s guardsman issued an arrest for Sulor to be tried for his crime in the high courts of the Citadel.
Apparently, our fearless Sulor has been taking bribes from noble families in the eastern quarter to reroute patrols in Nazeef, Tower Row, and Mandara. ”
Zane and Marek pinned Almerour with matching stares of confusion. “Reroute patrols? Why?”