You will have plenty of opportunity to be sentimental from the grave. Climb! Hanim snapped.
A thin calfskin slipper covered the bottom of my foot and curled over my toes. I was grateful for its protection as I found a foothold. With an eye to the stones at the bottom of the riverbank, I started to climb.
The sole skill I had developed as the Jasad Heir came from my affinity for climbing. Afternoons sneaking from Usr Jasad to the courtyard outside and scaling our towering date and fig trees. I would climb to the very top and wave at Bakir Tower, imagining Niphran could see me from her tiny window. That Niphran would want to see me.
With a groan, I heaved myself onto the first branch thick enough to support my weight. I threw my leg over it and buried my face in the tree, heedless of the striations and hardened sap digging into my cheek. Let the dark swallow me from his sight. Let him forget to look up. Better yet, let him slide in the mud and right over the riverbank.
Below, unhurried footsteps crossed the spot where the mud stole my footing. I caged my breath.
“This is your last opportunity to minimize the damage you have done tonight,” Arin said. His voice came closer, and I struggled not to move my head. Had he spotted me up here?
“Show yourself, suraira.”
Suraira again. I made a note to investigate the meaning of the Nizahlan word if I lived to see a new day. I was fluent in every kingdom’s original language, but certain dialectal words evaded me.
A long pause. A spider skittered over my elbow and onto my wrist. I didn’t dare breathe.
The soft neigh of his horse perplexed me. Had he brought it out here? The terrain could barely support a human’s weight.
“I was mistaken in my original assessment of you. A Jasadi capable of hiding her magic from an entire village is restrained. Clever. But you insist on running in the dark, chasing monsters you are not prepared to face.” His tone hardened, shedding its false amiability. Each word fell like the swing of an axe. “You want to be hunted?” A branch snapped somewhere below me. “Then I will gladly grant your wish.”
A strangled cry tore through my teeth as searing pain cleaved my calf. “Son of a—” My hand flew to my leg, and there, inches above my ankle, was a knife. He stabbed me?
The knife throbbed with the blood flowing from my wound. Tossing aside my failed attempt to stay hidden, I pulled one arm from around the tree and turned to scour the ground for the Heir. How had he thrown a dagger with such force and accuracy that it found my leg?
My stomach turned to stone. With the reins in one hand and a hold on the lowest branch of the tree behind him, Arin stood on his horse’s saddle. The cliff curved mere feet from its hooves. If it spooked, it could hurl its rider straight over the edge.
The moonlight weaved through his silver hair, loosened from its meticulous tie. Without his coat, freed from his perpetual mask of politeness, Arin of Nizahl was every inch a monster.
And he was staring directly at me.
Death had always scared me more than its fair share. I had watched it steal everyone I loved. I had guided its hand in taking the lives of others. But one thing scared me more than death ever could: capture. Losing myself in the will of another, feeling my purpose crushed and re-molded to fit someone else’s plans. Hanim had torn the Heir of Jasad to parts. She needed a weapon, so she assembled me into one. The night before I escaped, I had pressed a dagger against the throbbing vein at my neck. Death was a door, I told myself. An escape. One slice, and I would be free.
I killed Hanim that same night.
Arin was too strong for me to kill. What good was his offer of my freedom if it was a lie, a honey-soaked trap for the witless bear?
I wouldn’t be trapped again. I had cut and bled and fought for my freedom. I would rip his head from his shoulders with my teeth before I took his shackles.
Gripping the hilt of the dagger, I yanked it out of my leg, burying my cry in my shoulder. A fool’s move, to be sure. Depending on how deep the knife had wedged itself, removing it without a readily available tourniquet would endanger the entire limb.
Another knife slammed inches from my hand. Arin had ridden closer, looping the end of a rope around the base of my tree. “It is not mere caution stilling your magic, is it?”
I stifled my groan. Baira’s blessed beauty, was his goal to evoke my magic by riddling me with knives? I didn’t understand how it healed me last time, and I doubted it would bother to save me twice.
My leg cramped in protest as I hauled myself to the next branch. Blood dripped down the bark like grotesque sap. The wound bled freely, slicking the back of my heel. All I wanted to do was press my forehead to the tree and catch my breath again, but I didn’t have time. I anchored one arm around a thick fork of branches. With the other, I threw the bloody knife straight at the Heir.
My aim met true… in a sense. The knife sailed past Arin and sliced into his horse’s flank. It shrieked, rearing onto its haunches. Had Arin been seated, he would been thrown directly over the riverbank, his body smashed into the stones at the bottom.
I made an unintelligible noise of frustration as the rope in his hand went taut. He swung off the horse with disconcerting grace and landed at the base of my tree. His horse galloped off into the woods.
“You can’t use your magic. Someone or something has blocked it off.” Arin’s laugh, devoid of any warmth or humor, sent shivers along my spine. He retreated from my tree, and to my horror, began to climb the one right next to it. “How utterly miserable you must be.”
Why was he climbing the tree next to mine? I froze, unsure whether to climb higher or drop to the ground and outrun him on foot. He balanced himself on a branch parallel to mine, and I realized his intentions a split second too late.
A new dagger slammed into my arm, pinning me to the tree. I screamed, the sudden agony whiting out my vision.
You will not do this, Essiya, Hanim commanded. You will not allow the Supreme’s Heir to finish what his father started.
My cuffs tightened. I swallowed a sob. Everything hurt. I forced myself to look at the dagger. One good turn: it hadn’t hit bone.
But the next one might. He would cut and cut and cut at me until I crawled down in defeat. My blocked magic was an experiment to him, another string to tug and twist. He thought it would heal me. I did not know how to explain that my magic cared less about my suffering than he did.
“I will not be trapped again,” I whispered.
A path to the finish appeared before me. A way to end this, one way or the other.
I stuffed the torn sleeve in my mouth and grasped the hilt of the dagger. One breath. Two. I yanked the dagger from my arm, my muffled shriek reverberating in my ribs. My hand convulsed. Oh, it hurt, it hurt. Through blurry eyes, I watched the dagger tumble to the ground.