The Jasad Heir (The Scorched Throne #1)

by Sara Hashem

Sylvia. My first and favorite lie. I pressed my hands together. “A consolation gift for the spinster?” Not once in five years had Rory failed to remember my fabricated birth date.

Panic was a plague. Its sole purpose was to spread until it tore through every thought, every instinct.

I turned my palms up, testing the silver cuffs around my wrists. Though the cuffs were invisible to any eye but mine, it had taken a long time for my paranoia to ease whenever someone’s idle gaze lingered on my wrists. They flexed with my movement, a second skin over my own. Only my trapped magic could stir them, tightening the cuffs as it pleased.

“You think you are the most frightening creature in these woods, but you’re not,” I said to the raven. “I am.”

“The Jasad Heir perished in the Blood Summit. Everyone saw the blaze take her and the Malik and Malika. You cannot be her. She burned.” “You are correct, soldier,” I said. “The Jasad Heir did burn in the Blood Summit. She was a better person. Susceptible to such notions as honor and virtue. She would have tried to save her kind. Protect them from the likes of you, even if it spelled her own destruction. “But your Supreme killed her.” I stroked a finger down the soldier’s cheek. “And Sylvia replaced her. I do not heal. I do not lead.”

“If you are hoping to light a fire of fear in me, you are too late. It was lit long ago.” Sefa tucked the rocks in her pockets. “Be at ease, Sylvia. Before it ever came to a tribunal, I would promptly follow you into death.”

Mild. I examined the word, testing the fit. It amused me.

“Sylvia.” A chill crept along my spine. It was the wrong name in his mouth, but it perturbed me no less. When he met my gaze, the anger fled from my bones, replaced with pounding terror. His eyes were flinty, colder than rain on my skin. I forgot Rory, Adel, the dead soldier. I forgot Mahair in its entirety.

The Nizahl Heir withdrew his hand. “Perhaps. But a temper that ignites as quickly as yours leaves ashes in its wake. I need only follow the trail.”

He sidestepped, but not quite fast enough. Satisfaction surged through me at the slash of blood beading on his left thigh. It lasted until he slammed his boot down on my hand. Agony blackened my senses, and the axe dropped from my limp grip.

“I am alive because you need me, don’t you?” I lingered close enough to count his silver lashes. “And you’re furious.” Arin smiled, pulling his scar tight. “Finally.

He stabbed me?

“I have no need for your empty promises, Commander. Throw your clouds to the sky. I will keep my feet planted in the earth.” “How can I convince you my word is true?”

She had the temperament of a deranged goose. Every interaction he’d shared with her had thoroughly convinced him he was not dealing with a stable woman.

“Are you a donkey’s bastard?

“You should eat,” Jeru said, breaking the seal of silence. “Then give me food.” I pushed the bowl away. The spoon dropped with a clatter, spattering gruel over the table. “This is cow vomit.” Tension wired the thick cords of Vaun’s neck. He did not look in my direction, and I wondered if it was to keep himself from dismembering me. “It helps if you add salt.” Jeru nudged a small platter toward me. “I would truly rather eat the salt.”

“Jasadi magic is not a bottomless well. Every Jasadi has a finite supply from which to draw. Imagine one uses their magic sparingly, easing the drudgeries of daily chores. Another spends their allotment on some spectacular display. For the first Jasadi, replenishing their magic is not an issue, because they never reached the bottom of the well. The one who drained their magic by commanding a horse to fly or rain to fall must wait, helpless, until time renews their supply.”

“I am not rich in names, Your Highness. I have only the one.”

Shame is a dangerous feeling to manipulate. Pull at the string too many times, and it will eventually snap into apathy.

Arin’s gaze slid to Vaun and hardened. Though his voice didn’t change, a frigid chill swept through the room. “You put your hands on her.”

“What do you want to see?” “Anything. Everything.”

“First Fairel, then your friends, now a map of the Scorched Lands. You haven’t noticed a connection?” Grief. Rage. Fear. But I usually felt all three without my magic reacting.

“Do you deny your nature?” Disgust suffused my words. “What nature? If you mean my tendency to violence, it is no greater than yours.”

I pushed the dagger against the hard plane of Arin’s stomach, tearing through his black vest. Arin glanced at the blade, then at me. He pursed his lips, looking vaguely annoyed.

Arin’s gaze lingered on my neck for longer than normal. When he reached forward, I cringed, tightening my grip on the dagger. I half expected him to close his hands around my throat. Instead, what he did was far more baffling. He folded back my collar.

I threw my arms up. “If you want to quietly bleed for the next hour, it is not my place to stop you. But don’t expect me to drag you to the tunnels if you faint!”

“Are you aware you have five freckles under your jaw?” He offered this information to me with complete seriousness, as though it had escaped from a vault of secrets.

Alarm flared through me. Vaun and I hadn’t ever been truly alone. His loathing for me had only increased with time, and I was hardly penning prose about him.

“Conditions?” “Try not to die.”

Loss was an anchor I would always drag behind me. If I stopped moving, if I let the anchor catch, I would never summon the strength to keep going. I was not kind. I did not choose right over wrong or my heart over my head. But I was tenacious. I was spiteful.

Arin was attractive—it was as obvious and indisputable as the sun. But I had spent nearly twenty-one years capable of acknowledging attractiveness without being attracted myself. I had never wanted anyone, never yearned for the physical relationships Marek chased.

“Oh, my sweet Sylvia.” Vaida’s smile was all teeth. “The way most men love is so boring. It is frequent and fickle and altogether unextraordinary. Arin would love to obsession. To madness. But do you want to know the real reason he would never allow himself to love another?” Vaida stepped close, her floral scent tickling my nose. “Arin is consumed by what he loves. If asked, he would get on his knees and let it kill him. He withholds his heart out of self-preservation.”

If Arin’s mind was a finely sharpened dagger, then his body was its armor. I couldn’t imagine how anyone touched him and remained whole. Being with him would be honeyed annihilation, too much for a flesh-and-bone body to bear. Enough. I rolled my shoulders. Too little sleep and too much near-death was my problem.

“It’s customary for the hostess to outshine her guests.” Arin’s eyes swirled with humor and something quieter, more intimate. Just for me. “You’ve made that impossible.”

Perhaps Arin was his own ghost, too.

My golden glove fit against his black one. In a burst of restless nerves, I said, “We match.” Instead of taking the excellent opportunity to mock my inane comment, Arin’s eyes softened. “So we do.”

Your mind is a maze of mirrors, reflecting only the memories you choose to save.

“You have an unpleasant habit of nearly dying,” Arin said. “Twice does not a habit make.” I tapped the newly repaired place where Soraya ran me through. “I suppose I have you to thank for this?”

“I have the blood of everyone Soraya has harmed on my hands,” he said. “Allowing her to escape the Citadel was my greatest mistake.” Thinking Arin wore his scar as a barrier between him and the world underestimated the Heir. He had plenty of barriers already. His scar served as a reminder. A debt to settle. His relationship with Soraya explained a few discrepancies. Vaun’s rabid animosity toward me, Arin’s visceral reaction to Marek’s snide comment about a lovers’ spat. The conversation between Jeru and Wes a lifetime ago.

Arin studied me. My smirk faded. I had worn a thousand faces in my twenty years. Fooled friends and enemies with my false names and empty smiles. But sometimes, like now, Arin gazed at me a certain way, and I thought he saw it. My true face, hidden beneath the debris. I wondered what it looked like. I wondered why in a world ripe with monsters and magic, only he could see me so clearly. “Good night, Suraira.”

“Now, Diya. How did you know insults were the way to my heart?”

“Who did this to you?”

We stared at each other until the shadows in the room lengthened. “Why do you keep trying to save me?” he said, and if I hadn’t been inches from him, I wouldn’t have heard it. “Why do you keep needing to be saved?”

Diya paused at the door. “Do try not to die. I would hate to listen to Mehti yammer on a third time.” I fluttered my lashes. “Why, Diya. Is this your formal offer of friendship?” She considered the distance between herself and the ground. “Die, then.” She leapt.

Soraya was right. Mirrors. My memories were fragments, reflections of what I needed them to be to survive. Dawoud’s pained admission cracked open the day I burned his quilt. The shatter echoed into my body, ringing in my bones. Essiya was no better than Sylvia. I had always been this broken. This selfish. Sylvia was just a reflection of the worst parts of a girl I had buried.

Arin looked at me until it started to hurt. A covered thumb slid across my cheekbone. “What appeal can reason have in the face of your tears?”

“You little liar,” he whispered. Choked and low. “You maddening Jasadi girl, I cherish your tongue too much to see it cut out of your head. Never speak those words to me or anyone else again. Do you understand?”

“I am glad to hear you speak my name outside of imminent danger,” Arin said softly, and the battle was lost.

I smiled shakily. “I will make frequent use of it, then.” After a lifetime of running, he was my homecoming.

“I have a joke about an Heir and an orphan. It’s so ridiculous, even your mighty stoicism will crack,” I whispered. I buried my face in his collar. “Would you like to hear it?” His breath ghosted across my skin. “Probably not.” “That’s all right. It’s funnier in my head.”