“Calm yourself, Fariq.” Rahim spoke through gritted teeth as the guards around them shifted uneasily. “The warden has clearly already assessed the situation and come up with a solution.”
“If the warden had killed Javan in Loch Talam like she was supposed to, she wouldn’t need a solution,” Fariq said in a furious whisper.
Rahim frowned. “The warden was on the team of assassins?”
“She was my backup plan.” Fariq glared at the arena, lines of tension bracketing his mouth. “She was supposed to kill him if the assassins failed. I told her to watch the academy in case he survived the attempt on his life after the commencement ceremony. It’s not like her not to do her job.”
“I don’t see how one person, however formidable, could do a better job than a trio of assassins.” Rahim clenched his fists in the folds of his robe. He was surrounded by incompetence. If he’d been in charge of killing Javan, if the FaSaa’il ever once bothered to listen to him, the prince would be long dead.
“The warden isn’t just a person,” Fariq said quietly. “She’s a Draconi. She was supposed to shift into her dragon form and—”
“She’s the Draconi who attacked the school the day before the commencement ceremony?” Rahim struggled to keep his voice down as the competitors near Javan sifted through the sand at their feet to remove the weapons buried there.
“What are you talking about?” Fariq turned his attention to Rahim.
“The headmaster increased security at Milisatria because of it. He got into the carriage with me to discuss Javan’s safety since the Draconi had attacked the prince during some sort of exam.” Rahim leaned closer to Fariq, his words falling like blows. “Javan wasn’t supposed to die publicly, and certainly not before his commencement ceremony. It would be difficult to convince people that I’m the prince if they’d already seen the prince die. Your partnership with this woman nearly compromised our goals once, and now it seems she’s had Javan under her roof all these weeks, and didn’t see fit to either tell you or kill him herself.”
The prison guards assigned to the competition hefted large rocks into the air and threw them into the center of the sand. They landed with muffled thuds, and the sand shuddered and then began sliding away from the thing that was slowly rising.
“It doesn’t matter now,” Fariq said. “No one in that arena is going to survive this.”
A smile stretched across Rahim’s face as a shiny black lizard with seven snake heads mounted on necks as long as two grown men lying end to end shook itself free of the sand and swung its heads toward the prisoners huddled at the edges of the arena.
Javan turned away from the royal box to focus on the threat, his mouth moving as he spoke to the prisoners who were working with him. Rahim clasped his hands together in a white-knuckled grip and leaned forward.
The crowd sucked in a collective breath as the heads all struck at once—seven glistening black streaks of lethal speed that left four prisoners bleeding on the sand. One competitor sliced off the head that came for him, and two more were rapidly growing in its place. The creature’s golden eyes were bisected by a thick black bar of a pupil, and Rahim shuddered when one head rose to look around at the crowd.
He certainly hoped the warden knew how to control the creature.
The heads struck again, blurs of motion that were hard to track, and the crowd screamed as more prisoners fell, more heads were hacked off, and still more grew in their place.
When the head closest to Javan struck, he lunged to the side, as did his allies. Again and again, they danced just out of range, and Rahim’s palms began to sweat. Surely the boy wouldn’t escape certain death again. No one could be that lucky.
Rahim sat, stomach churning, heart thundering in his ears, as the sand demon whipped its heads around, lashing out at anything that moved.
This time, Javan wasn’t fast enough. He stumbled, and the demon’s teeth sank into his back, tearing at the prince’s flesh.
Fariq made a choked noise in the back of his throat as Javan hit the sand, blood flowing freely. The four who were allied with him grabbed him and helped him up, but he swayed on his feet.
Slowly, Rahim stood, triumph burning through him.
The monster struck again, this time latching onto one of the boy’s allies. The man screamed as the snake’s head tore into his neck.
Javan looked away from the creature, away from the injured man, and toward the side of the arena. Rahim stepped to the edge of the royal box to follow his gaze and found a tall girl with pale skin and black hair glaring at the prince as she mouthed one word over and over.
What was she saying?
He leaned further to get a direct look at her lips, and hands snatched his arms to hold him back, as down in the arena Javan yelled something to his allies.
“Step back, Your Highness,” a guard said, her tone respectful but firm.
Javan’s allies abandoned him and ran along the edges of the arena toward the wall beneath the warden’s platform.
“Let me go.” Rahim tried to look at the girl again, but she’d stepped away from the arena’s edge.
Had she helped Javan in some way? Surely she couldn’t have much to offer. The prince was facing a sand demon. His weapons were useless.
“Your Highness, you are too close to the edge. Please, step back now.”
The monster’s heads swiveled toward the three prisoners running along the arena’s edge, and then Javan was yelling. Jumping up and down, his face a mask of pain as he hefted a short sword.
Rahim’s gaze swung from Javan to the running prisoners as the creature attacked Javan, its other heads still snapping toward the remaining competitors. Dread pooled in his stomach and clogged his throat.
Javan was buying them time. He knew something the others didn’t.
“No!” Rahim yelled, his voice ripe with fury. “Get the ones who are running!”
“Your Highness!” Another guard joined the first to forcibly pull Rahim from the edge of the box.
“They know something. The girl must have told them.” Rahim rounded on the guards and shoved them away. “Fariq!”
Fariq’s lips were pressed tight as Javan sliced through the head that was tearing at his stomach and then fell back on the sand, a sword still held in his hand, though his grip looked weak.
“Sit, my prince,” Fariq’s tone was brusque. “It is unseemly to become so invested in the lives of mere prisoners.”
Rahim glanced around to find all the palace guards watching him with narrowed eyes. His pulse spiked, his knees trembling with the effort to rein in the fury and find his royal composure before anyone could wonder why their prince wanted one particular contestant dead. Drawing in a shaky breath, he took a step away from the edge of the box and nodded once to show Fariq that he was under control.