Page 110 of The Jasad Heir

“Essiya, come down from there! You’ll hurt yourself!”

I barely kept from tripping over an overgrown root. “Dawoud?” I cried out.

The voices echoed around me. Ayume or my magic?Why do you do that? Always pull away?the wind asked in Fairel’s voice.

Every limb in my body burned. I wanted to collapse, to rest for just one moment in the soft soil. I hooked to the right. Behind a cluster of abandoned nests, a leg of the lake appeared.

A few moments more and I would have reached it. But in my eagerness, I ventured too close to an emaciated bush. A branch wrapped around my ankle, nearly sending me to the ground. I yanked, and the branch tightened. I tried to climb the tree behind the bush and cut my palm open against the spiked bark. I was caught fast.

The dogs burst from the right, Timur close behind. Their muzzles opened in a macabre grin, and Timur turned his head. “Goodbye, Sylvia.”

My cuffs heated. “If you are going to kill me,” I seethed, “have the decency to look me in the eye.”

I snapped my fingers.

The dogs froze mid-leap, their hateful indigo eyes leveled on mine. My magic ripped the branch from my ankle, but my body’s suffering affected my magic, too. I stumbled with the release and caught myself on the tree.

“Y-you,” Timur panted. He collapsed to his knees, the effect of chasing me apparent in his drooping features. The air would put him to sleep long before he could reach the cliffside, let alone climb it. “Jasadi.”

Part of me insisted I leave Timur to sleep. The scent repelling the dogs could not last long, and they would eat him alive. The same grisly fate he reserved for me. With my magic warm inside my failing body, I forced the images of Sefa and Marek to replace the dogs. I ignored the evil roiling in this forest and surrounded myself with the meticulous jars of Rory’s shop and the warmth of Raya’s keep. These were the exceptions to mygrief, rage, fearrule, but their effect on my magic was the same.

“I will grant you a kinder end than the one you planned for me.”

I snapped my fingers. A boulder cracked against the side of Timur’s head, and his wide eyes went blank. One of the dogs’ paws quivered. I would not be able to hold my magic for long.

Skirting the dogs, I groped for a pulse at Timur’s throat and groaned when one fluttered against my fingers. A dog’s forked tail swished.

I stripped Timur’s coat from his shoulders and put it on. There should have been enough of the scent left to keep the dogs from following me. I summoned the last traces of my receding magic and pushed my palm outward.

Timur’s unconscious form floated, drifting past the dogs and over the bush. My arm shook with the effort of holding my magic. He needed to be lowered at the correct angle, or this endeavor was a wasted mercy.

The heat left my cuffs, and Timur’s body dropped like a stone. He did not splash on impact. The water crept over him hungrily, inch by inch. The lake swallowed the Lukub Champion with a sigh. The rippling surface went smooth. Another life digested in the belly of Ayume.

Stumbling in the direction of the cliff, the world tilted and spun. I clenched my fists and whimpered at the resulting stab of pain from my right palm. A sticky wetness ran down my sleeve. I lifted my arm, narrowly avoiding another snaking branch.

Amber-colored sludge was stuck to the center of my palm, trickling over my cuff. The skin beneath bubbled with pink drops of blood.

Arin’s warning.In the future, avoid touching the trees while you run. Even the sap in Ayume can kill you.

“May you fester eternally in your tomb, Dania,” I spat.

Apprenticing under Rory did not come without its cursed knowledge. Though Rory created cures in areas where few solutions existed, even he rarely bothered with venom. From the pain radiating up my arm, I judged I had less than twenty minutes before the sap immobilized my entire body.

A rope dangled from the bluff, the frayed end brushing my shoulder. The sheer rock face sneered down at me. The cliff cut into the night sky like a blade of darkness. I pressed my forehead to the crumbling stone and closed my eyes. Already, the fingers of my right hand hurt to fold. If my arm quit halfway up the climb, I might be able to dangle from the rope long enough for the air to finish its task and send me to sleep. At least then I would not be conscious when I plummeted to my death.

I tossed off Timur’s coat and hoisted myself onto the rope. Bending my legs, I pushed off the cliff and used the swing’s momentum to begin the climb. I clutched the rope with one hand at the bottom, one on top. I wrapped the knuckles of my bottom hand in the rope for leverage while the top one pulled me upward—an old trick of Hanim’s to prevent sliding. The pattern held; I pushed off the side of the cliff and climbed a foot, swapping the bottom hand every few minutes. I tried to think of Fairel or Rory, Sefa or Marek. Anything to invigorate my magic. But my arms ached, and my eyes struggled to stay open. The sap pumped its poison through me, competing with the fatigue to see which could kill me first.

Instead of anyone dear to me, I thought of Soraya.

I had adored her so completely. Wept over her death long after the tears for my grandparents dried. She had loved me, too. But the hate… the hate that poisoned worse than any sap, that rotted Soraya and left behind the woman who stabbed me in Lukub.

A sudden wind batted me to the side. The rope catapulted me into the bluff. I hit the rocks and lost my grip, sliding down for a dizzying few seconds before I caught myself again. The friction from the rope tore my palms open, coating my forearms in blood.

Swaying gently, I tried to gauge how much left there was to climb.

“You’re not even halfway there,” a little girl said from my right. I jolted, the rope fibers digging into my raw hands. The little girl dangled from a second rope, peering at me with distaste.

It’s not real, Hanim said.It’s the forest’s magic.

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