Page 52 of The Wishless Ones
“How did you do it?” she asked, glancing from Jafar to Rohan. Did she suspect the lies? Could she see right through them? Jafar latched on to that glimmer of hope.
Still, he said nothing. He couldn’t tell them the truth without vilifying his brother.
“By combining two well-known alchemical findings,” Rohan said, and then smiled. Confidence dripped from his every word, because he knew Jafar. He knew Jafar wouldn’t betray him the way he’d just done. “The words spilled out of him.”
As they were spilling out of Rohan now, as if Jafar had ceased to exist. He didn’t tell her the secret itself, his burgeoned pride likely waiting for her to ask him for it. Or maybe he hadn’t heard it at all, too frightened by what he had been seeing to hear anything.
The Sultana laughed, still a little uncertain. For her, this was likely too good to be true.
“We’ve been at our wits’ end for months,” she said.
“I’m currently at my wits’ end myself,” Iago groused in Jafar’s ear.
Jafar couldn’t dwell on it anymore. His focus was on the wall that had risen between his brother and himself. He didn’t feel angry, he didn’t feel that insult to his pride Rohan often did.
He felt sad, but he remained silent.
Whatever you’re worried about might just not be worth the trouble,the girl had said, but she was wrong, wasn’t she? The worst part of betrayal was that it never came from an enemy.
An oath was an oath, even when it was a burden.
Rohan returned to their chambers with a silent Jafar. His brother’s dark eyes were shattered, mistrust and hurt dragging the proud line of his shoulders down. Rohan had wanted to show him what it was like to feel the pain that he did. To trust in someone completely and learn they’d been selfish. To be used by someone he loved.
He’d thought it would make him feel better.
It had not.
When Rohan tried to speak, his tongue tied itself in knots, but it didn’t matter, for Jafar stalked into his room and slammed the door in Rohan’s face.
It was long past midnight, and as tired as Rohan was, he was also overwhelmed—from the voices and the blood and the fact that he’d opened his mouth. As he lay in bed, tossing and turning, the distance between him and Jafar more than an antechamber, he realized something far more horrifying than anything that had happened tonight.
The Sultana hadn’t asked for the secret.
Jafar could not sleep. The sheets were a tangle around his legs, and he’d memorized every pattern in the detailed ceiling above him in the hours since he’d crawled into bed. In the long list Jafar had to describe his brother,rivalwas never a word he thought he’d choose. Rohan had abysmal confidence on a good day, but he had somehowknownJafar wouldn’t call him out. He had exploited him. He hadusedhim and made him feel lesser, inferior.
Rohan had behaved exactly as Baba would have.
“That’s enough with this moping,” Iago quipped, hopping onto the cushions.
“Because you told me so?” Jafar asked, and he had. Iago had warned Jafar when he was still locked in the broom closet, when he’d first held the ripped remains of his scholarship.
He braced himself for Iago’s gloating.
“For someone who was plotting how to steal a pair of mind-controlling rubies from the Sultana of Maghriz’s pocket, you crumble fast,” Iago said instead.
Jafar didn’t want to hear it. There was so much else about their meeting with the Sultana that gnawed at him, namely the fact that she hadn’t asked for the secret itself. It was all too much, and he couldn’t stand to be in the presence of Iago or Rohan, stark reminders of Baba, stark reminders of everything that had gone wrong. He threw off the sheets and retied his loose trousers, not bothering with a shirt before pulling on his robes and leaving their rooms.
The halls were dark, the palace still asleep. Even now, it struck Jafar as peculiar that the Sultana had arrived to the dungeons so quickly, with her royal vizier at that. As if she’d plotted the entire event—from disclosing knowledge of the prisoner to gathering them all for a meeting.
Jafar’s brain hurt. His shoulder felt bare without Iago. In the middle of the hall before one of the trellised windows, he sank to the floor with his back to the wall. His fingernails were rimmed in blood where he couldn’t scrub it away. The life had drained out of him, leaving nothing but weak limbs and a mind too numb to think.
“Hello, ink boy.”
Jafar looked up, quickly shifting his hands from the light. He didn’t have an explanation for how the lovely cadence of her voice made him feel. “Are you spying on me, moon girl?”
She laughed, and he could have sworn the hall brightened. Her existence was sorcery, and Jafar was thoroughly under her spell.
He could see her gown now, a deep blush that was almost purple, black filigree forming thick, stiff cuffs around her wrists. When his gaze returned to hers, it was to find her studying him just as diligently, and he remembered that his chest was bare and his robes only covered so much. A hint of red colored her cheeks. Jafar swallowed and saw her gaze follow the bob of his throat.
