Page 48 of The Wishless Ones
“And we can make that stop,” Jafar said.
“How?”Rohan asked. Ah, the kit! They could—
“We’ll make him vomit words,” Jafar said, turning to Rohan with a smile. It was his usual smile, a gesture that normally set Rohan at ease. But here, half bathed in shadow, in the presence of someone’s suffering, it was sinister.
And as fear coiled tighter and tighter around Rohan’s limbs, Jafar seemed to grow less and less concerned. Less himself. Less worried over consequences and what “vomiting words” might do to a starved man who had been shoved in a dank, dark prison cell.
Rohan peered closer. The man was awake, but barely. He didn’t seem to notice them.
“Jafar, this is wrong,” Rohan said, shocked by his apprehension toward his own brother.
“What is?” Jafar asked. “Using alchemy to get an answer out of him? I’d say it’s better than whatever they’ve been torturing him with to get him to speak.”
“Hisbeinghere is wrong. And I don’t know if the Sultana is someone I want to barter with.”
Nor was Rohan so sure he wanted to help the Sultana anymore. A queen who could recklessly torture her own subject wasn’t one whose favor he wanted to earn. WasJafartrying to gain her favor after Rohan had lied about eating honey cake with her? He had lied to make Jafar jealous, not spur him to dothis.
Jafar tilted his head. “Mm, we might not be Maghrizi, but we can both agree that we’d rather see the Sultana win than some other kingdom, no?”
“Win? This isn’t a war. They’re not hurting us,” Rohan said.
Not once in Jafar’s life had he cared for politics, and while they might have been in a palace, Rohan still didn’t think that was enough reason for Jafar to begin now.
“That’s how it always begins,” Jafar said, and Rohan had the sense he wasn’t talking about wars or queens, but their past. “And the only way to ensure you don’t get hurt is to hurt them first.”
Jafar pressed his eyes closed for a long moment, and when he opened them, Rohan imagined that red glow again. A dagger of fear sliced through Rohan.
“Get me that lantern,” Jafar said, picking up a coil of twine from the medical kit. “We’ll need to borrow some oil. Then gather three stones, and we’ll need something that he’s touched—ah, yes, and grab his empty plate from over there.”
Before Rohan could even think of a response, Jafar pushed past him, snatching up the ring of keys that had sat on the pillar where the guard had been resting. He stopped before the man’s cell and peered inside.
“Marhaba,” Jafar said to him.
The lantern lit the caution in the man’s dark eyes.
“What is your name?” Jafar asked.
The man said nothing.
Jafar was unfazed—no, he almost looked satisfied that the man wasn’t answering. “I know why you’re here and the pain keeping your secret will cause our world. You have no reason to keep it, you know. Divulge your knowledge and you will live as a free man.”
The man only drew a stuttering breath. If he felt even half of Rohan’s desperation, he didn’t show it.
“You owe them no loyalty,” said Jafar. “Speak, man.”
The man remained silent, watching through dead eyes as Jafar dipped the twine in oil and lit it aflame, twisting it into a strange symbol, placing the stones just so, picking up the plate, his eyes sharp with intent. If Rohan hadn’t been uneasy to begin with, he was wholly so now.
He thought he saw the hint of a smile flit across the prisoner’s face. A pitiful one. If this had been any other circumstance, that defiance would have rattled Rohan’s pride.
As it did to Jafar’s.
He rose, the keys jangling hauntingly, and the lantern stretched his shadow to something frightful. “Very well, sayyidi.”
Jafar had not anticipated the screaming that reverberated from the dungeon’s stone walls or the blood the lone lantern illuminated quite well. He had never seen so much of it.
Dead bodies, yes. He’d seen flesh charred and blackened, bubbled and crisp from merciless heat, when he’d gone back to the remains of their home, unbeknownst to Rohan, to make sure his father really was dead.
His past life had ended with that massacre.
