Page 65 of The Jasad Crown (The Scorched Throne #2)

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

SYLVIA

A pparently, all it took to infiltrate the Omal palace was a good glamor and a competent understanding of its layout.

Nobody had glanced twice at the servant entering through the kitchen doors at dusk, her head bent low over a pail of chicken feed. She had frizzy brown hair, dull green eyes, and a small mole on her chin.

As soon as I stepped out of view of the guards, I dropped the pail near a couple of children enthusiastically tearing chunks of bread into a long dish.

A boy staggered past me with a giant bowl of milk, grains of sugar pebbled around the bowl’s rim.

He poured it over the bread. Laughing shrieks bounced between the children as hot droplets of milk sprayed their curious little faces.

I swiped an empty tray from the counter and stepped over the puddle. I had loved om Ali when I was younger. I hoped the children remembered to add nuts.

The only soldiers I had seen so far had been strewn around the upper towns. Omal and Nizahl soldiers, which had entertained me greatly. Arin wouldn’t casually waste Nizahl soldiers on Omal’s upper towns. Felix must have irritated him enough for Arin to deliver his bloodless version of a backhand.

A guard glanced at me as I walked into the main lobby, tray balanced on my shoulder. He thrust out a hand when I tried to move around him. “Keep an eye out for the men,” he said. “The court drank its weight in ale at dinner. Anything they can drag into their lap, they will.”

Typical. I offered a short nod, hoping he wasn’t expecting more of a response. Sefa and Marek had once said I spoke without any sort of accent, but how would they know? Apparently, they’d had a Nizahlan inflection the entire time. We had just been three silly chickens clucking in a circle.

The guard stepped aside, and I went on my way. The court was indeed drunk, and the sounds of laughter and raised voices set my teeth on edge. The lower villagers were dying at the hands of the Omal Heir while his court sat here celebrating.

Much as I would have liked to see how many of them I could maim before the guards noticed, time wouldn’t allow me my pleasures. Every minute I wasted was another death. Another opportunity for the Urabi to lose hope that I would find them.

The overpowering scent of eucalyptus and cinnamon perfumed the halls.

In an ancillary chamber reserved for the young ladies of the court, dreamy swirls had been painted in a pattern reminiscent of leaves dancing in the wind.

Pillowy furniture responsible for the murder of at least a thousand ducks per cushion filled the room.

Gauzy silk drapes twisted to resemble white and blue clouds swayed from the ceiling.

Markedly absent were any young ladies, who had likely received the same warning I had about the wastrels. Another stroke of fortune.

Every day during our training, Arin would have a guardsman bring a new map to my rooms. My preparation for the Alcalah had included memorizing every hall, hovel, and hole in the palaces we’d be visiting. My success in the trials, he’d said, only mattered if I survived to compete in them.

I counted the blue whorls of paint in the right corner of the room until I reached number seven. Right where the paint curled in, a divot the size of my thumb broke the pattern. At the exact spot Arin’s maps had said it would.

I hooked my thumb in the divot and tugged. A click sounded on the other side of the wall. With a groan, the outline of a door appeared against the paint. Wiping the dust from my nose, I shouldered it open.

Ah, lovely—another inhumanely narrow stairway designed by someone with a vendetta against functional spines. I tossed the tray to the ground, the crash muffled by the thick white carpet.

I shut the door behind me, pitching the stairwell into darkness. I climbed, counting each step. One hundred fifty-four was how many it would take to reach Queen Hanan’s wing. One hundred fifty-three to find my grandmother.

One hundred fifty-two until I either gained her army or lost mine.

I lost count after eighty. My shoulders stung from scraping against the spiked surface of the stone walls.

I tripped on every other step. The pitch black of the stairwell conspired with the limited air to fray the nerves I’d been holding steady since I left the Mirayah.

I rationed my breaths, careful not to pull so much that the dust ignited a coughing fit.

My magic hummed, but I didn’t dare listen. When the others used their magic, their biggest concern was how long it would take to replenish. How much they could use before they became temporarily defenseless.

I didn’t have that issue. I had never scraped the bottom of my well. For all its problems, my magic answered my call, even if not always in the ways I intended.

If I thought about it too long, the irony would plow me over.

I had access to a seemingly unlimited amount of magic, but I couldn’t use it.

Even an act as small as lighting my way through this awful corridor would produce another vein.

It would break another mirror in the shadow of my mind, pierce me with the shard of an unexplainable memory.

All magic has rules. Consequences. We just need to figure out what hers are.

I paused, propping my arm against the wall and resting my sweaty forehead in the nook of my elbow. Namsa and the rest of the Aada hadn’t abandoned their inquiry into my magic. They were not an easily dissuaded group of people, the Urabi.

They had made a conscious decision to ignore it.

Every time my magic overwhelmed me, Efra felt it. He felt the numbness winding through me like a toxin, even if he didn’t know what precipitated it. Even if he couldn’t hear the voice behind it.

They knew what it meant for my magic to disconnect me from myself, even temporarily.

This was a race: my mind against my magic.

They needed my magic too much to advise me against using it.

Still, I knew they didn’t want to watch me destroyed—otherwise, they would have suggested raising the fortress during Nuzret Kamel as our first and only option.

Instead, we were risking everything to appeal to Queen Hanan.

An effort doomed to fail even before I slipped Binyar Lazur’s confession into Arin’s coat.

I continued my trek, a light palm on the wall to track the curving stairwell.

How ardently would Efra have advocated against me if he knew that I had handed over one of our most critical tools to Arin of Nizahl?

Not just Efra—they would all be furious.

The Commander of Nizahl, the enemy of magic.

A lost cause. A waste of a resource to appeal to someone who viewed magic as the scourge of the earth.

And maybe they were right. I was making my own gamble. Arin’s unwavering commitment to logic and truth versus his loathing for magic.

No, I wouldn’t call it a gamble. A gamble implied equal odds. It suggested that one outcome was just as likely as the other.

You lied to your father.

This was a theory.

When I finally stumbled out of the stairwell, a fine layer of dirt coated me from neck to knee.

I didn’t bother dusting it off. The grime fit perfectly with my new role as bedraggled orphan crawling to her grandmother’s knee for a morsel of mercy.

Before I had taken more than a step around the corner, the edge of a frame bumped against my sleeve. I glanced up at the portrait and recoiled.

After several minutes of reeling in my jaw from its drop to the palace kitchen, I took a step closer to the monstrosity.

This portrait hadn’t been there the last time I visited. Not only would it have been impossible to miss, but it would have guaranteed Arin’s discovery of my true identity.

In the portrait, Queen Hanan and the late King Toran stood side by side, holding hands.

Lustrous waves of black hair fell to Queen Hanan’s waist, and mirth danced in brown eyes long since gone dull.

King Toran, my grandfather, towered over her.

I blinked at his fluffy, silver-streaked beard and thick eyebrows, one of which was arched in stern contemplation.

At least I knew where my height came from.

Sitting on the throne, one knee crooked to the side and the other straight forward, was Emre.

He had the same wavy black hair as his mother, falling over his forehead and around his ears in a messy thicket.

Spectacles perched at the top of his wide nose, and he gripped the arm of the throne as though it might eject him at any moment.

Balanced on one knee, an arm wrapped around her middle, the child version of myself aimed a gummy smile at the artist.

I stepped closer, studying the minute paint strokes as though I could glare them out of existence. They had drawn me at around six or seven, kicking my legs cheerfully on my father’s lap. My curls were free and voluminous, tightly coiled as they had only been when I was young.

My father on the throne, his child on his knee.

An impossible tableau. A work of fiction.

My father had seen me as a newborn and then died in the woods.

I hadn’t visited Omal a single time until I fled there after killing Hanim—Gedo Niyar and Teta Palia had forbidden me from accompanying them on any diplomatic trips to the kingdom.

Had Queen Hanan commissioned this to fulfill some sick fantasy? To create a universe where she and her husband hadn’t happily disinherited me after Emre died?

A sick foreboding twisted through my gut. This portrait would have sent Felix into a rage. It suggested a claim. Legitimacy.

It was an act of defiance against her nephew.

A shadow fell over me. A hard grip caught my shoulder, spinning me around.

“Who—”

My dagger split through the side of his throat, severing everything but his spinal cord. Blood sprayed in a wide arc across the painting.