Page 74 of The Wishless Ones
Jafar didn’t let him finish.
“What do you want,Aman?” He spoke in that bitter cold tone he reserved for those he loathed.
He might as well have struck Rohan across the face with his shiny new staff.
“That was uncalled for,” Rohan managed to whisper. “I know I made some poor decisions, and I regret everything. I want us to beusagain, Jafar. We can make the Sultana pay for everything she’s done. Easily, too. If we leave now, she’ll be princeless, and the Hulumi will have everything they’ve ever wanted: a reason to go to war with her, while we go anywhere else. Agrabah, maybe.”
“Uncalled for?” Jafar asked, rubbing the head of the serpent almost lovingly and ignoring everything else Rohan had just said. “Did you hear that, Iago? We were only trying to be more accepting of the new you, brother. I mean,my liege.”
Iago snickered. “That’s right.”
Rohan drew a slow and measured breath, and it loosened the lid he had latched tight since he’d put on the ridiculous robes of the Sultana’s son. Anger thrashed its way free.
“I didn’t ask for any of this,” he snapped. “Not to be a prince, not to be engaged to a girl I know next to nothing about, not even to be brought to this place.”
Jafar’s eyes flashed like the rubies set into the serpent’s head. “You neverask, Rohan. You only ever take, and I only ever allowed you to.”
Rohan couldn’t stop the dark laugh that tore out of him. “Then you have no one to blame but yourself, do you?”
“As you do, for Baba’s death?” Jafar asked. He scoffed at Rohan’s shock. “You came all this way for him. All this way to find the two halves of the scarab beetle, to find the genie lamp and waste your wishes on that boor, but you couldn’t even do that, could you? You went and got yourself a crown instead.”
“I told you, I’m cursed—”
Jafar laughed, sharp and dangerous. “Don’t give yourself too much credit. I killed him. I was tired of him hitting me, and holding me back, and spinning you around in whichever direction he pleased, so I got rid of him.”
Rohan stumbled back, nearly falling off the steps to the laboratory. “Then—that means you started the fire.”
“And then I made sure he stayed in it.”
Jafar did it. He killed Baba, and their servants and their maids, and yet Rohan could barely focus on the horror of it—he was too overjoyed by the fact that he wasn’t cursed. Too upended by the realization that people didn’t die when he made desperate wishes.
It had never been real.
“See what I do to my enemies, brother?” Jafar continued. “They wereourenemies, up until you decided I was not enough for you.”
“The Sultana promised us that we’d be equals.”
Jafar rapped the staff on the tiles. “She lies, and you know it. I’d rather be in control of my own fate than be a puppet to a prince whose shoes you will never fit.”
“A prince will one day be king,” Rohan snarled. “You will always be second best.”
That was the wrong thing to say.
“Is that why you told Baba to tear up my scholarship?” Jafar asked, deathly quiet. “Were you afraid you couldn’t keep up?”
A chill dragged down Rohan’s spine.
“I didn’t,” he whispered. “He asked long before your scholarship arrived, and you know I—I have—hada hard time opposing him. I didn’t know he’d tear it.”
“Oh, it wasn’t hard to oppose him, Rohan,” Jafar said. “You simply didn’t care enough to do it. I’ve come to learn that your backbone works whenever you want it to.”
That wasn’t true. Still, Rohan had known about it, and he should have apologized, but the pride he’d inherited from his father would allow no such thing. Jafar drew closer, and Rohan shrank back from his brother’s dead, flat stare. The stare of a boy who was wholly capable of murder.
“I didn’t want this any more than you did,” Rohan said, voice taut. “I thought…I was tired of being in your shadow. I thought taking credit for the papermaking secret would make me feel better about myself. It didn’t, and I was wrong. I should have listened, Jafar. I should have done exactly as you said.”
Jafar’s lips curled into a smile Rohan would remember for the rest of his days. “I can help you with that.”
Rohan had the sinking feeling that this was the end. His end. Jafar was past the point of accepting apologies, of caring. Jafar flourished his scepter. The ruby-red eyes set in its face flashed, drowning Rohan in crimson, scarlet, blood,fear—and then he lost all feeling and remembered very little after that.
