Page 139 of The Jasad Heir

A man shoved to the front, rounding on Soraya. A deep gouge split his cheek from nose to ear. “Did you consider maybe she wanted the enchantment to fail? She asked us to attack before she was banished, and we refused her. What if this is her revenge?”

“She would never let Jasad fall to Supreme Rawain!”

“Why not?” he bellowed. Another reverberating thud shook the air, and a crack splintered over the fortress’s facade. “We betrayed her. With Jasad under his control, she stands to regain her power. Hanim has no loyalties, no principles. She wants the throne, and she thinks the Supreme means to rule Jasad. By the time she realizes his true intentions, the entire kingdom will be destroyed!”

“How could she think Supreme Rawain would ever let her take Jasad’s throne?” Soraya balked. With a deafening smash, the multiplying cracks in the fortress fractured. The Mufsids threw themselves to the ground as a million gold and silver rays engulfed them. Like a rupture of the sun, the light swathed Jasad in warmth, the result of centuries of magic and enchantments fed to the unassailable fortress.

The thunder of thousands of hooves rocked Jasad as horses appeared through the broken fortress. Black-and-violet uniforms stretched as far as the eye could see. On the crests draped over their horses, a raven rose between two clashing swords. The crest fluttered as the riders pounded over the scorched ground where the fortress had stood. The flame from their torches dotted the horizon like a starlit night.

Nizahl descended on Jasad in a swarm of darkness.

The Mufsids were already fleeing, but Soraya remained beside me. We watched the soldiers gallop into the towns. We listened as the screams began.

“It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” said Soraya. When she turned, she was older. The Soraya from the Banquet.

Jasad melted around us. White walls replacing its verdant fields.

Around us, flickers of Jasad seeped onto the walls. Hooves pounding down the street. Flames licking up the side of a lower village’s school.

“Hanim deceived me. She ruined us,” Soraya said. “I wanted to show you I would never have sent you to the Blood Summit if I suspected the fortress would fall.”

“Do not patronize me. You have lied since the moment I met you.”

“Not about this! I was barely more than a child myself when Hanim recruited me to the palace. You clung to me, and I held you right back. I had no choice, Essiya. My love for you could not outweigh what needed to be done.”

“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 thetragicaccident.’ 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 theyconsumed 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.

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