Page 76 of The Jasad Crown (The Scorched Throne #2)

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

ARIN

T he ice clinked around Arin’s empty glass as he watched the door.

It had been approximately two hours and seventeen minutes since he’d returned from Lukub.

Twenty of those minutes had been spent sitting inside the empty carriage and staring at the Citadel.

The tower that had been home to generations of Nizahl’s most powerful, to those bestowed with the sacred duty to protect the kingdoms from the horrors of misused magic.

Supremes and their Commanders, fathers and sons, lineage upon lineage dating back to Fareed himself.

All a lie. An elaborate degradation of every value, every commandment, every principle Arin had been taught to uphold.

In the darkness of his chambers, Arin filled his glass and waited. Not much longer, now.

The knock came as the last drop of talwith slid down Arin’s throat.

“Enter,” he said.

Outside the window, the clouds shifted. Moonlight spilled into the room, its bluish hue illuminating the haggard guardsmen shuffling into Arin’s chambers.

“Sweet Sirauk,” Jeru whispered, taking in the wreckage of Arin’s room with wide eyes. The top of Arin’s bed had been shredded to slivers. Long scorch marks had eaten away at the carpet. The cabinet had been upended, ancient weapons and glass scattered on the windowsill and ground.

If Arin hadn’t opted to open the talwith, he might have started testing his weapons on the furniture in the ancillary rooms.

Vaun had gone stock-still, having noticed the object sitting center on Arin’s map table. The blood drained out of his face.

Jeru followed the trail of destruction to the map table and promptly blanched.

“Is that…” Jeru choked off, his fist flying to the hollow under his throat. He might as well vomit all over the carpet—it wasn’t as though Arin cared anymore.

Wes’s head stared at them from the center of the map table. Clouded gray eyes gazed into the distance, fixed on a point none of them could follow.

“I found him there,” Arin said. He crossed his legs, balancing the empty glass on top of his knee. “A message from my father, I imagine.”

“Why—why would the Supreme kill Wes?” Jeru had turned a fascinating shade of yellow.

A silly question, but Arin indulged it nonetheless.

“I asked Wes to follow my father.” Arin rolled the glass between his palms. “How familiar are you with magic mining, Jeru?”

“Not very, my lord.” The guardsman was visibly struggling to speak, his attention split between Arin and the disembodied head of his colleague.

Jeru was a good man. A decent man Arin should have left alone, far from the reaches of the Citadel. From the reaches of Arin.

“Most texts will tell you that magic mining is a profane practice and the reason the Blood Summit was called. What they won’t tell you is how magic mining dates back hundreds of years.

They’ll neglect to mention that the rulers—all of them—had been mining their people’s magic for their own use long before their favorite resource began to decline, and then they decided to trade it.

An entrepreneurial sort, our ancestors.”

Arin’s eyes had gone dry and stiff, but he couldn’t close them. Each time he blinked, and the world went blessedly black, Arin would forget what awaited him on the other side. And each time he opened his eyes and remembered, it became more and more difficult to convince himself to do it again.

Only three more tasks left. Three more tasks, and he could stay in the dark as long as he wanted.

“Eventually, the other kingdoms lost their magic, and Jasad became the sole miner left. Perfect leverage for the throne to act with impunity—who would stop them? Who would get up from that bargaining table when they had become reliant on mined magic to sustain them through hard winters and endless rebellions?” Arin’s lips twisted into a rueful smile.

“But Jasad’s magic weakened with every generation, and it was simply a matter of time until Jasad stopped coming to the negotiation table and started hoarding.

They had turned their thoughts to their own border.

What would happen to the fortress when magic eventually left Jasad?

The fortress was the only obstacle between them and the kingdoms they had spent their entire reign toying with. ”

Arin flicked the bottle to the ground and stood, ambling around the map table to stand with his back against the window. A thick, opaque slime had soaked into the maps beneath Wes’s head. The names of Nizahl’s provinces had bled into one another to form a meaningless streak of ink.

“You’ll have to forgive some speculation on my part,” Arin said, resting his forearms on the raised edge of the table.

“The details… blur. My father is an industrious man, as we all know, and he saw an opportunity in the Qayida of Jasad. A woman named Hanim Werda, renowned for her brutality in battle and her disdain for the Jasad crown. Hanim was also the leader of the Mufsids. Yes, those same rebels my father had executed before I could get anything useful out of them. As the story goes, she and my father conspired for years to overthrow the Malik and Malika, but Hanim was caught and exiled.”

Jeru approached the map table, gazing at Wes’s head like it might animate if only Jeru hoped hard enough. Vaun hadn’t moved an inch since he first entered.

Walking through the ruination of his entire existence was strangely relaxing to Arin.

He wasn’t wandering in the mist anymore, each new unexplainable piece of information striking like a fist in the dark.

The sun had finally risen, burning the skies clear, and Arin could see again. He could see everything.

“After they killed Niphran, the Mufsids sacked Usr Jasad and tried to reinforce the enchantment on the fortress. I suppose they were nervous someone might take issue with them raiding Jasad and killing the Heir. In any case, the enchantment had the opposite effect. The fortress collapsed. On the other side, waiting to charge, were our armies. Two days before the Blood Summit. Two weeks before the rest of the kingdoms sent their armies marching into Jasad alongside ours.”

“How?” Jeru croaked. “How did the Supreme know?”

Arin snapped his fingers, startling the guardsmen. “Excellent question, Jeru! How did my father know? He was away at the Blood Summit, ever so tragically fighting for his life as the Malik and Malika slaughtered hundreds of royals.

“Traitors are a fascinating sort,” Arin continued.

He settled his gaze upon his unmoving guardsman.

“Hanim betrayed her own kingdom out of a misguided belief that my father, the same man who allowed her exile and abandoned her to Essam, would put her on the Jasad throne. After all, she had given him a half-Jasadi Heir who could lay claim to both the Nizahl and Jasad crown—there was no need for war, was there? No need to decide magic was the core of all evil while you collected it for yourself in the shadows.”

Distracted, Arin grazed his thumb over the curling corner of the map. It wouldn’t straighten, so Arin tore it off. Goodbye, Dar al Mansi!

“Half-Jasadi…” Vaun spoke for the first time, and Arin remembered he was there. “Sire, you cannot mean to say… But you don’t have magic.”

“No, I don’t,” Arin mused. “I can drain it. I can sense it. But I have none of it myself. Odd, isn’t it?

A musrira’s curse fails and, instead of killing me, conveniently allows the Nizahl Commander to detect and extract the very same thing he was trained to destroy.

Where had my magic gone? How had it been taken?

I tormented myself with the questions until I realized I was asking the wrong ones. ”

Mining magic, draining it. Same thief in a different hat. What matters is not what is taken, but where it goes.

“As I said, my father is an ambitious man. Like the Malik and Malika, he too foresaw the end of magic coming. The destruction of a resource all the kingdoms had long relied on. Mining magic was a short-term solution. The procedure is catastrophically fatal, and you can only extract someone’s magic once.

But what if you had a tool capable of draining magic slowly, siphoning it across a person’s entire lifetime?

A spigot you could shove into a river and—”

Arin stripped off his gloves. The lanternlight flicked warm colors over the pale canvas of his skin. “Drain with a single touch.”

“Sire, it isn’t possible,” Vaun said, dismissing Jeru’s attempt to nudge him away from the map table. “Your father would never expose his Heir to the horrors of magic-madness.”

Arin settled his gaze on Vaun. “You know so much about what my father would and wouldn’t do, Vaun. It is thanks to you that the last piece of this puzzle presented itself to me.”

Reaching into the pocket of his vest, Arin locked his shoulders beneath the crushing weight of every misstep that had led him here. If he had dismissed Vaun from the Citadel after the Alcalah. If he hadn’t told Wes to pursue his father.

If he had looked up from his carefully charted maps long enough to see that the world on paper was nothing like the world around him.

“You have been a guardsman for so long, you have forgotten how to be a soldier. You forgot a rule we teach the recruits in their first week.” The same rule Arin had revealed to Sylvia as they stood in a cabin with a dead Nizahl soldier between them.

For her, it had been a handful of black curls in the soldier’s pocket. Wes had been much more helpful.

Arin extended his palm. Sitting in its center, a raven’s head had been embossed onto a pin with the letter V . Jeru had an identical pin tucked under the lapel of his uniform with the first letter of his name.

“When defeat becomes a possibility, what are our soldiers trained to do?”

It was Jeru who answered, grief slowly mottling into rage. “Collect evidence of their killer.”

“I found this under Wes’s tongue.” Arin flipped the pin between two fingers. “It was a wasted effort, Vaun. He had already sent the letter. All you did was cost me the only loyal guardsman I had left.”

Vaun raised his chin, meeting Arin’s gaze without flinching. “I will not apologize for protecting you and this kingdom as I always have. As I always will. The Supreme gave me an order, and I obeyed.”

Protecting him. It would be laughable if it weren’t close to the truth.

The two of them had grown up alongside each other.

Vaun had been Arin’s shadow since they were children, a steady and reliable presence in a court of shifting faces.

It struck Arin, in these last moments of Vaun’s life, that he barely remembered whether Vaun had had a family before coming to the Citadel.

Vaun’s existence had always been an appendage to Arin’s.

“You filthy traitor!” Jeru spat. “You killed the Heir’s guardsman! Your—he was your superior!”

An infected appendage put the entire body at risk. Arin should have recognized those first signs of rot back in the tunnels. He should have been strong enough to pick up the knife and sever it at the root.

“As you know, there is no formal court procedure for royal guardsmen. You are mine to punish as I see fit, up to and including forfeit of your life.” Arin gently laid the pin by Wes’s head. “Pick up your sword, Vaun.”

The guardsman straightened his shoulders, tucking his hands behind his back. “I will not fight you, my liege.”

“Sire, I am happy to stand in your stead.” Fury vibrated from Jeru’s every pore.

He was wild with anger and devastation, which meant it would take Vaun little effort to catch him in a mistake and cut him down.

Skill was only half the component of success.

The other was focus, and Jeru currently had none.

Arin came around the table and brushed Jeru to the side. “Your sword, Vaun. I will not repeat myself a third time.”

Vaun didn’t move, and Jeru swore. “Fight him, you coward,” Jeru hissed. “Or do you only hurt those who cannot see you coming?”

Steel whispered against leather as Arin’s sword slid free of its sheath.

It took one lie for you to lose faith in me. Tell me, Your Highness: How many will it take until you lose faith in your father?

She had asked the wrong question.

Vaun swallowed. “Sire—”

Arin’s sword split through Vaun’s chest before it could expand with more air to waste on the next word.

The next lie. The sword went through Vaun’s back and into the cabinet behind him.

Arin pushed the hilt through the resistance of bone and oak.

When the hilt scraped the front of Vaun’s uniform, Arin didn’t immediately release it.

Vaun slumped over the sword in his chest, pinned to the side of the wardrobe like a bird caught by a powerful arrow.

Tears welled in Vaun’s eyes as he raised his head.

She should have asked him how many lies it would take for Arin to lose faith in himself.

For twenty years, Vaun had stood by Arin’s side. Up until the end, he had thought he was serving on behalf of Nizahl. On behalf of his rulers. The crown had consumed Vaun, so Arin paid him the mercy of holding his eyes as the last of Vaun’s life drained out of them.

Arin released the sword and gave the dead guardsman his back.

“Tell my father to meet me in his study,” Arin told Jeru.

Two tasks left.