Page 82 of The Jasad Crown (The Scorched Throne #2)

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

ESSIYA

T he sight of Rawain’s scepter tossed on a cushion in the middle of the floor, Rawain’s severed hand still attached, had done wonders to improve my mood.

I huffed, darkly amused. Well, at least I understood how Arin had managed to persuade them to bring him into the mountain. Stealing the Supreme’s scepter was a convincing argument on its own, but paired with his hand still in its cuff?

“He lies about having Jasadi blood. We would have known. Someone would have seen him perform magic as a child,” Efra argued. They’d been going in circles for hours. I’d told them what Arin said about Hanim and watched the implosion from afar.

“When would we have seen him use magic, Efra? The Malika said it was stripped from him at two years old.” Maia had firmly situated herself on Arin’s side.

Namsa gnawed on her lip. “What about his sensitivity to magic? It isn’t natural, and we know it could not have been a musrira.”

“Curses were more of a Lukubi specialty,” Lateef agreed. “Sustaining them is arduous work, and it requires the caster to expend magic throughout the lifetime of the curse. A failed curse would have killed the musrira and her victim.”

They went round and round. I should have been part of the conversation, analyzing theories alongside them. I shouldn’t have been sitting in the corner like a child, clutching my stomach as I sank through the sands of a different crisis.

Hanim’s son. Her son .

I tried to see the resemblances, and to my distress, they came readily. The silky fall of her hair, the sharp cut of his jaw. His tendency to fixate. Her strategic mind.

I thought of the dreams I’d had after Soraya stabbed me in the Ivory Palace. Isra blocking Rawain’s path in the nursery, where a black-haired baby slept in his bassinet.

He won’t survive it. Please, Rawain, you have to wait.

What do you care what happens to my son?

He is mine just as he is yours.

I kneaded my knuckles into my chin, willing myself not to emit the sounds brewing inside me. Hysteria would help nobody.

I killed Arin’s mother.

Lateef cleared his throat. “Mawlati, do you remember when you asked me the difference between draining magic and transferring it?”

Focus. I had to focus. Arin’s life hinged on my success in this room. If I disintegrated, my authority went with me.

I forced myself to think through the fog. “You said the only person capable of sensing and draining magic was Fareed. You said the Awaleen gave him that ability to protect the kingdoms against abuses of magic.”

“Exactly!” Lateef said, and I couldn’t help a small smile at the pleased note in his voice.

“I regret my phrasing—it was not entirely accurate. You see, the Awaleen didn’t give Fareed an ability so much as they took one away.

They stripped out his magic and anchored it to his weapons, so that any magic he drained would flow into the two swords we know to be Nizahl’s symbol.

In short, they turned Fareed into a conduit. ”

I stared at Lateef. “Are you trying to say Rawain stripped out Arin’s magic and used it as a funnel to pull magic into some sword?”

“Not a sword.”

Everyone’s heads swiveled to the scepter.

“How?” Namsa rasped. “Only the Awaleen can create a conduit without killing the intended target.”

Arin’s aggravated admission to Wes the day I had manifested in Essam. He had to have been talking about the magic mines.

I cannot figure out where they are. I have spent days scouring my maps, but I would have felt them. I should have felt them.

“If Rawain bartered for mined magic from Jasad, and if Nizahl had stored enough of it from their centuries of the trade…” I looked at Lateef. “Could it have been enough power to create a conduit without killing him?”

Lateef blanched. “I… it is possible. Only if the subject was very young.”

I wouldn’t have survived if he waited until I was four.

Arin was a conduit. Which meant he had not only brought us his father’s scepter—he had brought us the source of his magic.

“The Silver Serpent’s lineage is of no consequence,” Efra interrupted.

“We have four days until we leave for Jasad. His presence ensures our route will be compromised, since every Nizahl soldier under the sun will be out searching for him. Not only is he too dangerous for his fate to be left to chance, but he cut off the Supreme’s hand and stole the scepter.

He will be branded as a traitor to his crown. They’ll want to execute him.”

I inhaled sharply. Execute him? Surely, Arin would be able to make Nizahl’s council understand why he had acted against the Supreme. What Rawain had done violated every tenet of Nizahl’s laws.

I took a deep breath. Here was where the test came. Where I discovered whether the last two months had earned me any goodwill among my people, or if I would always be the Heir who failed them.

“I think the Nizahl Heir will help us.”

Several heads swung in my direction, not all of them friendly.

“For the last ten years, Arin of Nizahl has been our enemy,” I said.

“Since the moment he took his title at sixteen years old, he has fought against magic. With every fiber of his being, he believed magic led to destruction and death. Magic-madness , they told us. Magic came at the price of sanity. We were destined to repeat the carnage Rovial inflicted on the earth. Our Awal’s curse was our curse.

” I raised a hand to ward off the protest I could already see forming on Efra’s face.

“I do not say this to defend the Nizahl Heir. What he has done, he will carry for the rest of his life. We have lived in terror of his power, of his mind. But here, we have the opportunity to utilize those same terrors against our enemies. The Commander brought us the Supreme’s scepter.

His own father’s hand. Efra just said it himself—if he is caught by Nizahl, he will be found guilty of treason and executed.

He had nothing to gain and everything to lose by coming here, and yet he came.

What if he has come to reclaim his magic?

To join us? Nobody knows the geography of these kingdoms better than him.

The points of weakness in the trade routes we’ve been arguing about for days?

He could probably find them in his sleep. ”

I believed what I was saying, but even as I spoke, a part of me held itself stiff in doubt. By the time Arin made one move, it meant he had already mapped twelve moves ahead. What was his plan for coming here?

“And if we decide he is too great of a threat to be kept alive?” Efra leaned back in his seat, arms crossed. “Would you abide by our decision to execute him?”

You err by giving them a decision to begin with , my magic whispered. This is your kingdom. Your throne.

It showed me a vision of Efra flying back into the wall. His bones breaking in the collision, the unnatural way his arms and legs would fold beneath him as he fell.

Efra pressed two fingers to his temple, derision fading into unease. He’d felt it—the voice’s presence. If only he could hear what it said, what it wanted. He might think twice before suggesting the execution of Arin of Nizahl.

“Of course,” I said.

If they killed him, I would bury this mountain in the sea.

“What if he tricks you?” Maia asked, peering up at me with earnest brown eyes. “What if this is all part of a larger ploy?”

This time, I answered honestly. “Then I will kill him myself.”

When the meeting finally ended, I didn’t head toward the dining hall with the rest of them.

Much as I wanted to change out of these clothes, I couldn’t risk stopping by my room. Marek and Sefa had undoubtably taken vigil there, waiting to pounce on me with questions I had just spent the last four hours answering.

In the empty hall, I stripped off my gloves and wiped my palms on my thighs before sliding them back on. How did Arin tolerate wearing gloves every minute of the day?

I nodded at Shawky, the guard they’d assigned to the cells.

“Mawlati?” Shawky shuffled awkwardly, not moving from the front of the door. “Aren’t you headed to supper?”

I raised a brow. Shawky hadn’t spoken to me once since my arrival. A close friend of Efra, I’d gathered.

“Not yet. I’m checking on the prisoners.”

Shawky stayed in place, scratching his collar with studied nonchalance. “Perhaps it would be best to eat first.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Step aside.”

The guard took too long to move, so I shoved him aside and forced my way into the dimly lit stairwell, descending two steps at a time.

No amount of blinking dispelled the blanket of darkness over the hall, and I kicked myself for forgetting to snag a lantern.

With an impatient flip of my wrist, a flame appeared in my palm.

My chest twinged; Medhat had shown me how to do it.

I reached Jeru’s cell first. The guardsman had his head in his hands, shoulders drawn. I dropped the flame into one of the torches lining the grim corridor, but he didn’t react at the burst of new light.

“Jeru. Are you hurt?” Soft, so as not to startle him.

He raised his head. Tears had carved clean tracks across his dust-covered cheeks. “They didn’t come into my cell. I think they wanted me to listen.”

I lurched back. They?

I bolted down the rest of the empty cells and turned right. At the end of the corridor, I heard, “Someone check for a pulse.”

I couldn’t remember the last time I had run so fast. Maybe the night I killed the Nizahl soldier, when I had run back to Mahair and brought Sefa and Marek to help me bury the body. Possibly not even then.

I skidded to a stop in front of Arin’s cell. Seven men crowded the tiny space, looming over the still figure on the ground. Blood spattered their shoes, their clothes. None of it theirs—not a single man had a scratch on him.

On the ground, Arin lay unmoving.