Jeru and Wes broke from the outskirts as the announcer peered down at Dawoud and my state of undress. Al Anqa’a had taken my tunic in its talon, and a large white band covered my breasts, keeping my stomach and shoulders exposed. He cleared his throat. “Do you—uh—”
I gently laid Dawoud in Jeru and Wes’s arms without meeting either of their eyes. They would care for him. See he was taken somewhere the scavengers could not reach.
I tossed the nisnas’s finger to the ground and pulled the dulhath’s spidery limb from its binding around my thigh.
“A nisnas finger. A dulhath leg. A Jasadi. Three monsters. Three trophies.” I smiled, and the announcer took a step back. “Go ahead. Declare me.”
“Sylvia,” Jeru tried, voice hoarse. I looked at him, and the Nizahl soldier blanched.
The announcer whirled to the gathered masses. “The Nizahl Champion joins the Orban Champion to proceed to the third trial!”
I walked past him, past Jeru and Wes and the dead man in their arms, past the applauding royals. I did not stop to see the satisfaction in Rawain’s gaze or the irritation in Vaun’s. I entered the Champions’ carriage with Diya, and the wheels groaned as the carriage jerked into motion.
We stayed silent until we reached the palace. Diya pulled the quilt from around her shoulders and tossed it into my lap. “Give them nothing to see but the look in your eyes,” she said.
Numb, I pulled the quilt around my shoulders. No servant intercepted me as I entered the palace, and no guard asked questions. I floated up the stairs in a haze. In the stillness of my quarters, I let the quilt spill to the ground.
Does it hurt more when your failures have names? Hanim whispered. Does it hurt more to put a face to the people you have let down?
The drawers rattled in the bedside table, shooting into the opposite wall. My cuffs pulsed around raw wrists, but I did not feel the pain.
You could be faced with not a single obstacle and still find an excuse to turn away from your people, she said. Dawoud is dead, your family is dead. Soraya was never yours. Who do you have left?
The wardrobe flew into the divan, upending cases of meticulously packed gowns. Blankets tore, and the bedframe snapped, taking the bed to the ground. Flames danced over the rug, trailing up the wall.
Dawoud mouthed my name before he drove the dagger into his chest. A name I gagged and buried deep inside me, a name that should have burned to ash with the rest of Jasad.
For so long, I thought Essiya’s name brought death wherever it went. But hearing Dawoud speak it… I had forgotten what it meant to be real to someone. I had felt more whole in those few minutes than I had in eleven years. Even if I no longer knew who Essiya was.
The door opened as several pillows exploded, raining feathers on the dancing fire.
My neck prickled, and I turned to see the Nizahl Heir closing the door.
The fire licked over the mattress, casting the room in an orange glow. Something wet had been steadily dripping from my chin since I entered the palace, and I wiped my cheeks with detached wonder.
“Do you know that I can’t remember the last time I cried? Maybe six, seven years ago.” Cracks spidered in the mirror. The glass burst, raining shards over the destroyed wardrobe. I caught a tear from the corner of my eye and examined it thoughtfully. “They just keep coming.”
“Do you intend to bring down the Omal palace, then?” Arin asked conversationally, as though the objects hurtling around the room were nothing more consequential than overexcited dust motes.
“Oh, I’m not greedy. Just this half of it will do.” The triangular head of the window toppled in a rupture of white concrete.
An advantage of living with the Nizahl Heir for months was how familiar I had become with the tiniest shifts in his inscrutable expression. “What was his name?”
Everything on my side of the room rose into the air and hurled into the opposite wall.
“Be quiet,” I growled.
Arin could not anchor me this time. I would not let him break the blessed emptiness again.
Arin dusted wooden shards from his coat. His boots extinguished the flames beneath them as he approached. “Who was he to you?”
“I’m warning you.” Instead of flourishing with my outrage, my magic started to splutter.
Arin trapped me against the wall, his arms bracketing the sides of my head. All I could see was pale blue, steady and unwavering. “He will be taken to Jasad,” Arin said. I clutched my chest, shaking my head. “They will prepare him for burial in the Jasadi custom.”
“Stop, stop,” I cried out. I shoved at his shoulders.
“He will be buried in a spot where the grass still grows.” Arin’s voice filtered into my head. A firm, cauterizing force cutting a path through the wound. “A fig tree will be planted to mark his memory.”
My cuffs slackened even as the chasm inside me yawned wider. I tried to block the sight, but it unfolded before me anyway. Dawoud washed by gentle hands and wrapped in white linens. The death rites gently whispered in Resar. A fig tree blooming beside him every spring.
Arin caught me as I slid down the wall. The Nizahl Heir pulled me into his chest as sobs racked my body, easing us to the ground. I sobbed like I hadn’t since the Blood Summit, when my first life ended. Pressed against the son of the man who had taken everything.
“I am not a butcher.” I wept into Arin’s throat. “I am not an axe to be swung in any direction I am pointed. He deserved better than this. He deserved better than me.”
Everyone in that village deserved better. Supreme Rawain harming Jasadis came as no surprise, but their own Heir? I killed and buried Hanim to avoid this fate.
Arin didn’t reply. Solid arms tightened around me. He was real. Arin was real, Dawoud was real, and I was nothing more than a ghost inside the body of a coward.
Gloved hands framed my face, drawing me back. Arin’s ironclad composure faltered as he searched my tearstained face. There was a wildness to him I had never seen before. “Look at me, Suraira.” A fierce defiance radiated from the Nizahl Heir. “You don’t have to do this. Run. Take a horse and get as far away as you can.”
I blinked. “Wh-what?”
“I won’t come after you. I have hidden holdings in every kingdom. Throughout Essam Woods. They’re yours. Take them. Be free.” Arin’s grip was tight enough to hurt, belying his words.
I searched his face. Which one of us had lost their mind?
“A donkey kicked in the head six times wouldn’t suggest such an unreasonable course of action. Are you mocking me?”
Arin looked at me until it started to hurt. A covered thumb slid across my cheekbone. “What appeal can reason have in the face of your tears?”
I stared at him. The silky locks of silver hair falling around his ears. His death-defying scar. The shape of his mouth. A mouth I had watched speak terror in the eyes of men and spin the axis of destiny to his unyielding will. A lethal, poisonous mouth. One that curved upward under my heavy gaze.
Why was the Summit called? Before it was the impetus for the Jasad War, before it was the Blood Summit—why did the kingdoms assemble?