“I am not sorry about interfering. You cannot ask me to actively assist you in capturing Jasadis. My only part in this is to compete in the Alcalah.”
Arin’s brow furrowed. “I didn’t ask you to assist. It was meant to proceed without your involvement.”
My lips parted, winded from the blow. He had expected me to do what I did best: stand idly by. Maybe I would have, had the arrows not put Marek and Sefa at risk. Most people feared what they were capable of doing, but I… I was starting to fear what I was capable of ignoring.
“So you aren’t angry anymore?”
He lifted a shoulder. “The power you displayed will encourage the Urabi to utilize every resource to capture you. When they come again, I’ll be ready.”
He didn’t elaborate, and I did not ask him to. No matter what the voice inside me urged, this was not my battle. I wouldn’t let it be.
“Sylvia.” There was a strange note in the way he said my name. “You helped me in the Pass. The magic might have driven me from my mind if you had not stopped it.”
“Arin.” I said his name the same. “You are more miserly with your gratitude than with your praise. Just say thank you.”
Arin gifted me one of his rare smiles. My stomach clenched, and it took an inordinate amount of time to tear my gaze from his mouth. He should know better than to share his smiles with me. I should know better than to crave them.
“Thank you,” he said softly.
Rarely did fortune place me in an advantageous position, and I would not see the opportunity wasted. I hadn’t forgotten Arin’s agonized state in the Pass.
“How can you sense magic?”
In Arin’s world, information was a transaction. He did not gift it freely, and he certainly never wasted it. The price for this information was prohibitively high. I had nothing to barter for it. I hadn’t possessed an ulterior motive for helping him in the Pass, but Arin would sleep better if he thought I helped in anticipation of this moment. Just another material exchange removed from the vagaries of emotion.
He nodded to himself, as though he had been prepared for my question. “I will satisfy your curiosity, Suraira.”
He lowered himself to the chair across the bed. With the moon casting half his face in shadow, his back straight and gloved hands curled over the arms of the chair, he was an artist’s dream.
“As Heirs, we inherit the enemies and debts of our father. I am my father’s sole child. I represented an invaluable emotional currency for his enemies. The Citadel was well protected, and my mother rarely left my side.” Arin turned his cheek to the window. His eyes dissolved in the moonlight, swirling in its colors. “When I was two years old, my father executed a Jasadi merchant found guilty of enchanting the weapons of Nizahlan dissidents in the lower villages. There was an outcry from Malik Niyar and Malika Palia. They had wanted him punished in Jasad. Two weeks later, a musrira misted past our guards and into my bedroom.”
I frowned, tempted to interrupt. I had begged Dawoud to introduce me to a musrira when I was a child. Most Jasadi magic did not show a preference in how it was expressed or exhibit an affinity toward a particular use. Musriras were one of the rare exceptions. These Jasadis possessed the ability to move through space in spirit. They could vacate their physical forms in a safe place and spirit themselves anywhere they wanted to go. Usr Jasad had been warded to the teeth, but even our most powerful security barriers could not keep out a musrira.
“She cursed me. We believe she intended the curse to kill me, but my mother interrupted halfway through. The curse took only half effect. I woke up three days later with a new attunement to magic. I could sense it, feel it.” He turned away from the window. A strand of silver hair came loose at his temple. “Temporarily drain it.”
“You said… you once told me my magic felt strong. If it pains you to touch me now, when I can barely use a fraction of it, what would happen if my magic were free?”
Arin raised his chin, unmoved by the question. It must have occurred to him soon after the events in the Relic Room.
“I can’t know for certain what would happen if your full magic was accessible. I might be able to drain it normally. Maybe I’d never reach the bottom of your magic’s well, so to speak, and could only temporarily drain portions of it,” Arin said. “But if you want my strongest theory, I suspect touching you while you can fully express your magic would kill me.”
He offered it calmly, as one might report the presence of rain in the clouds. It took me a minute to gather myself and collect the jaw I’d dropped. “That is quite a theory.” One I doubted had any shred of likelihood. My magic was powerful, but not to the extent that draining it would kill him. That touching me would kill him.
“Anything else?” Arin braced his hands against the arms of his chair, clearly ready to conclude the conversation.
The dreams I had plummeted through after Soraya’s attack. They were only dreams, but in one of them…
“Was your hair black before the curse?”
I might have asked if he licked muddy horse hooves from the shock flickering over his expression. Kapastra’s horned beasts, could there have been a measure of truth to those dreams?
I thought quickly. Arin would want to know how I knew, and “I saw it in my dreams” would not serve me well.
“Sefa told me she heard a rumor at the school you attended together.”
The tension relaxed fractionally. He was still suspicious, but my answer must have been acceptable enough for the time being. “I see.” He stood abruptly, straightening the lines of his coat. “You should sleep. I will come escort you to the trial tomorrow.”
A resounding end to the conversation, then. My questions about the full scope of his curse lingered, but he had given me plenty to consider.
“Of course. Yes. I will see you in the morning.” A wave of inexplicable sorrow crested over me. For better or worse, tomorrow would usher in the beginning of the end. End of Essiya, and maybe the true start of Sylvia. I covered by dipping into an exaggerated bow. “Good night.”
Arin studied me. My smirk faded. I had worn a thousand faces in my twenty years. Fooled friends and enemies with my false names and empty smiles. But sometimes, like now, Arin gazed at me a certain way, and I thought he saw it. My true face, hidden beneath the debris.
I wondered what it looked like.
I wondered why in a world ripe with monsters and magic, only he could see me so clearly.
“Good night, Suraira.”