Page 47 of The Wishless Ones
This was the dark side of running a kingdom.
A single guard leaned against a small pillar of stone near the lantern. His legs were crossed, his head tipped.
“There’s a gua—”
“Shh,” Jafar whispered, pulling Rohan deeper into the shadows as Iago shot past, wings an almost silent rustle.
Moments later, a voice called from the stairs: “Which one of you is down there? I need you in the banquet hall at once!”
The guard straightened, blinking groggily and wiping drool from his beardless chin with the back of his hand.
“Yes, Sultana!” he called back, and Rohan pressed himself flat against the cold hard wall as the guard sprinted past them and out the door.
And then they were alone.
“You’re welcome,” Iago said in his normal voice, fluttering back to Jafar’s shoulder.
Jafar was waiting for him by the guard’s lamp. The lamplight cast half his face in shadow, the other half in starry-eyed mischief. “Good job.”
Rohan could have done that. Jafar only had to ask.
“He’ll come back when he sees the empty banquet hall,” Rohan said, hoping to wipe the victory from Iago’s face. “We need to go.”
“No, he’ll try to find the Sultana and then question why he heard her voice in the first place,” Jafar countered.
Iago harrumphed. “Yeah, stop being such a killjoy. This was your idea, remember?”
Rohan gritted his teeth. He’d told themaboutthe prisoner, not that he wanted to interrogate him. Jafar was staring at the prison cells. Despite its size, the dungeon housed no more than ten cells as far as Rohan could tell. He guessed that the Sultana only locked the more important prisoners here. The ones she needed to keep close.
Jafar stepped in a puddle of something dark and questionable. He didn’t even flinch. He was too cavalier. Too at ease.
Rohan’s next inhale was deep, and the dank odor of the prison assaulted his senses. It was sour and musty, combined with the sweet and sickening stench of rot. He barely stopped himself from retching right there in the middle of the place.
And that was when Rohan saw the cell with the tray of food and that medical kit outside of it.
The papermaking prisoner.
“That’s him,” Rohan whispered.
“Odd, he doesn’t look too bad,” Jafar said, and Rohan had to agree.
The man wheezed, leaning his head back against the stone wall, but even barely illuminated and striped in the shadows of the cell bars, it was clear his clothes weren’t too worn, his beard and mustache still relatively trim. But his knuckles were dirty, and the hair by his ears was matted with something dark.
Rohan choked.Blood.They were torturing him.
“‘No secret can be kept forever,’” Jafar said, repeating the Sultana’s words and looking at Rohan.
The prisoner was clearly Maghrizi, as the Sultana had said, but why would he protect the secrets of another kingdom? Why would he risk his own life for a place he had no allegiance to?
The Sultana had said his secret could start a war and change the course of the future—that for as long as the kingdoms to the east held a monopoly over papermaking, they also held great power. By that reasoning, Rohan thought those kingdoms must be dangerous, which meant any number of deaths to protect against them could be justified.
Still, something was off about this.
For the Sultana had also claimed papermaking wasn’t a necessity. And those kingdoms had no reason to come for her with swords if she left them to their own devices. They were flourishing, as she was. Rohan might even argue they were at peace.
Unlike the man in front of him now.
“He’s—he’sbleeding,” Rohan said with half a sob.
