“There is always a choice,” I snarled. “What I don’t understand is why. I wouldn’t have challenged your claim to power if you had united our people and secured their trust and safety. I was content in Mahair, with my life in the village. My magic is trapped! It can’t harm anyone.”
Bitterness laced Soraya’s laugh. “I have a long memory, Mawlati. Many have forgiven your grandparents’ sins, caught in the nostalgia of a lost age. But I remember. You would have grown into the image of every royal who had come before you.”
The room vanished. We were in the eastern province of Jasad, in a tiny, ramshackle village. Thatch and moldering wood held up the tiny hovels, and rank-smelling liquid muddied the potholed dirt road. Flies buzzed around a dead munban. Children wearing clothes three sizes too small threw rocks into the pools of filthy water.
Three Jasadi soldiers marched past in gold-and-silver uniforms, scattering the swarming flies. The children receded, eyes widening in their haggard faces. Two of the soldiers carried a stretched canvas similar to the one the Alcalah’s medics used. A large, shrouded figure lay still on top.
The Jasadi soldier knocked on one of the doors. A scowling woman stuck her head out. She batted away the three small girls peeking around her skirts. The soldier held out a thick letter, sealed with a soaring kitmer. Jasad’s royal crest.
Her gaze flew to the body.
Soraya stood near the children while the woman dropped to her knees, tearing at the shroud. The soldiers tried to yank her back. “I remember my father’s mangled, charred carcass. The smell of it.”
One of the girls who’d been throwing rocks ran over. She was no older than ten or eleven, but the weeping little girls tugged on her sleeve, mouthing a name. Soraya.
The girl picked up the letter her mother had dropped. The adult Soraya moved to read over her shoulder. “ ‘Malika Palia and Malik Niyar offer their sincerest regrets for the tragic accident.’ Almost every house in our village had received one of those letters. They fed us to their greed and pretended to care when it chewed.”
“The magic mining,” I realized. My hand flew to my mouth. The memory I’d uncovered in Omal…“The other rulers were accusing my grandparents during the Blood Summit. But I thought… I thought magic mining was impossible.”
“It is impossible to mine magic from the land.” Soraya’s mother threw off the shroud covering her husband, and my stomach heaved. The corpse of Soraya’s father did not resemble any creature that had once walked the earth. His bones were crushed into fragments and rearranged. The sharp edges of his bones were clear and glassy. His skeleton—because he had no mass or flesh—was covered in soot and ichor.
“But not people. No one had ever thought to mine magic from blood until your grandparents. When they realized Jasad’s magic was weakening, and our children were born with less power each generation, the Malik and Malika drained the magic from the people in the poorest wilayahs, one by one. Taking our magic for Usr Jasad or feeding it back to their favorite wilayahs. Do you have any idea what it feels like to have the very source of your magic stripped from your body? My father believed in the importance of respecting the throne, and they consumed him.”
Your magic is powerful, Essiya. Gedo Niyar and Teta Palia might try to take some of it.
If my grandparents were cruel enough to mine magic from their own people, how terrified of my magic must they have been to put it behind cuffs?
“Then why would you work with the Mufsids? They’re as complicit as my grandparents!”
“The Mufsids have resources, connections. They saw to it that Hanim was appointed as Qayida. They placed me as your attendant. And when it came time to wipe the throne of Jasad free of your family’s scum, they were primed to strike. The only point of disagreement was you. Their goals were entirely centered on your magic, but once the fortress fell and you were declared dead at the Blood Summit, I had no problem cementing my control.”
“Why my magic?” I demanded, at a complete loss. I knew it was powerful, but how could it merit all this chaos? “What do they want to do with it?” They couldn’t mean to simply mine my magic like they’d mined it from Soraya’s father. They could have accomplished that at any point before the siege, especially if they had unfettered access to me through Soraya.
Suddenly, Soraya stumbled, agony ricocheting across her face. “He found me,” she spat. “Damn it to the tombs, how?”
The walls shifted again, and I didn’t waste the chance. I hurled myself at Soraya, taking us both to the ground. In an instant, she disappeared from beneath me, and I landed in a massive bedroom.
A different Soraya sat in front of an oval mirror. Without the dirt caked into her hair and the rage lining her features, this younger version of my attendant was easier to recognize. She ran a brush through the pin-straight hair falling to her shoulders. My Soraya, sweating with the effort of remaining upright, grunted, “I hated ruining my curls. But I already had too much marking me as a Jasadi.”
I walked past the young version, coming to a halt at the foot of a wide bed. I caged my breath. Beneath the covers, a teenage Arin slept. I watched him breathe, shaken by the vulnerability in his youthful features.
“He likes to think I’m the one who made him so cold,” Soraya said, climbing beside him. Her fingers passed through his cheek, and I wanted to break them one by one. “He was already such a challenge. Paranoid, distrustful. Constantly looking for a reason to doubt. He didn’t trust kind gestures, and he interacted with life at arm’s length.”
She grinned at me with a spark of the mischief that earned my devotion in the first place. “If anybody was going to bring a mountain to its knees, it would be you, amari. Arin of Nizahl falls in love with the Jasad Heir. Ha! And he thought my deceit was bad. No wonder he has shuttered his heart so tightly: the damned thing keeps leading him astray.”
“I did not deceive him,” I said. “When we met, I was not the Jasad Heir. I was an Omalian villager, barely even a Jasadi. I didn’t intend to become—to start—”
The other Soraya finished brushing her hair. She put the brush on the vanity.
“To start caring?” Soraya finished. “Yes, Hanim does an excellent job of excising that particular failing. It doesn’t matter. Arin doesn’t consider betrayal the way we do. To him, it is the fury of being outmaneuvered. Of miscalculating.” The other Soraya straddled Arin over the covers, gazing down at his peaceful face. His unscarred face.
Meanwhile, Soraya’s magic was weakening. The room’s colors faded in and out, and her skin had a sallow cast.
On the bed, a blade materialized in the other Soraya’s grip. With a shaky breath, she slashed down, toward Arin’s throat. The Nizahl Heir’s eyes flew open. He twisted, changing the dagger’s trajectory. Blood curved up his jaw, forming the line of the Commander’s infamous scar.