Chapter Twenty Amunet
TWENTY AMUNET
Nasir wasn’t in the house. I asked one of the guards who stood by the front door where to find him, and he directed me down the street. “Seeing to the final preparations,” he said mysteriously.
Jasim shadowed me as I wound through the streets.
The coarse wig irritated my inflamed skin.
The itch was loud, demanding my attention, nearly as loud as those claws against glass.
It was as if the reprieve this morning had been the calm before a storm.
The claws were no longer just scratching; they were breaking through.
The sound of splintering glass crashed through my head.
The distant mine’s persistent chink, chink, chink only seemed to accentuate it. So much noise, so much distraction—
Amunet.
My head snapped to the left.
People bustled about. No one so much as glanced in my direction.
“My queen?” Jasim’s hand landed on his scimitar. “What is it?”
The voice had been so clear. Yet the space before me was empty.
A chill washed over me. I scored my nails over the back of my neck, readjusted my wig, and kept moving. My jaw was clenched so hard, my molars threatened to crack. Jasim’s eyes seared into the side of my face, but I kept my gaze studiously ahead.
We turned a corner and came upon the mine.
The crater plunged eternally into the ground and spanned a few miles in diameter.
Men and women currently hung into the gaping maw on thick ropes, sweating in the early morning sun, the sound of their pickaxes ricocheting against the walls and up into the air.
The hole was so deep, no one had ever reached the bottom.
Supposedly, the crater was a remnant of the War of the Ancients, like the various megaliths that dotted Ashorah’s landscape.
On my first patrol here, Nasir had told me some of the theories for what could have left such a scar on the world.
An arrow forged of stars. A catapult that had launched the sun itself.
Or a fallen god.
The story went that somewhere in the dark recesses of the never-ending hole slumbered a fearsome god—a god that had been forgotten since the War of the Ancients—just biding its time until it unleashed itself upon the world.
I found myself staring into its black depths.
The sun struggled to penetrate very far.
How anyone could voluntarily lower themselves down there, and for what, I didn’t know.
It looked far too similar to the suffocating darkness that haunted my nightmares.
Goose bumps spread down my arms. Fuck, I hated the dark.
“Queen Amunet?”
I looked up. Nasir stood a few yards away from the crater with his guards—including the insolent female one—constructing a pyre. He waved me over.
It looked like the pyre was nearly finished, and there were fifteen bodies lined up in front of it.
They’d been draped in sheets of varying faded colors, but their faces were left exposed.
If not for the grayish pallor to their otherwise dark skin and their purple lips, they would’ve looked like they were merely sleeping.
Many of their faces were mottled with sunburns.
It was Ashoran custom to embalm the dead and place them in tombs.
All Khadas were laid to rest beneath the palace, while advisors were allowed use of the mausoleums speckled throughout Ketopolis.
And the everyday Ashoran… well, I didn’t know what they did exactly.
I doubted they could afford tombs. Maybe they just stuffed their loved ones in a mountain.
But these bodies didn’t look as if they’d been embalmed at all. There was no smell of myrrh, cassia, or any other typical spices.
Nasir noticed my curious gaze and explained, “Heatstroke and dehydration.”
I nodded. That was how most people died in Ashorah. “They shouldn’t be left in the heat without being embalmed.” It was a miracle they weren’t already rotting and rank.
Sweat stained Nasir’s tunic, visible even beneath his leather armor. “They won’t be embalmed.” He nodded to the pyre. “We burn our dead.”
I glanced sharply at him. “You what?”
“We’ve run out of places to bury them in the small territory you’ve allowed us. We have no choice.” The smile he gave me was flimsy. “Of course, we are grateful to have any territory at all, my queen.”
“But how will they reach the After Realm without their bodies?”
Nasir drew in a deep breath as if it was a thought that had haunted him for some time. But he only repeated, voice tight, “We have no choice.”
No wonder Shaya had been so silent. His very essence was tied to death, to the people who came to his realm. If the other principalities were also burning their dead—if people in Ketopolis were, too—then Shaya had very little to draw from. He was weak.
A bigger sacrifice than a candle would be needed, indeed.
Nasir accidentally stepped on a woman’s burial shroud as he faced me. “Walk with me?”
Jasim instantly fell a few steps behind, right beside the female guard, Sara.
The jinni-descended prince fussed with his braids, pushing them back and then pulling them forward again.
He appeared perpetually frazzled. It seemed the panic of being forced into the role of prince after his father’s untimely death had never quite dissipated. Some men were just not meant to rule.
I twisted my fingers together to stop them from twitching. “So when do we leave?”
He didn’t respond for a long moment, lips screwed to the side, the only sound the crunch of sand beneath our sandaled feet. Finally, he asked, “Do you know how we pass our time here?”
I blinked, caught off guard by the question.
“In Reeda,” he clarified. “Out here in the middle of nowhere. When we’re not mining or battling the desert heat.”
“No, Nasir, I don’t know your people’s hobbies.”
“Stories,” he said. “There’s an amphitheater not far from here where we put on plays.
They’re delightful, my queen. We’ve got all the usual fairy tales with scimitar fights and vanquished beasts.
But every single story shares the same theme.
” Nasir paused a few feet away from the crater.
Too close for my liking. Sara, too, seemed nervous, and stepped closer in case she had to yank the ungainly prince back to safety.
The darkness seemed to yawn up at me like a hungry mouth.
I shifted away as Nasir said, “Justice.”
“Justice,” I repeated blankly.
His gold-flecked eyes gleamed. “There is nothing a people who have suffered so much injustice value more.”
I studied the prince, but his shimmering eyes gave nothing away. “I’ve already promised to return you to your home. What more do you want?”
“I’m very grateful for your generosity, my queen, and I would never presume to ask—”
“Out with it, Nasir.”
“A position in court.” He tipped his chin haughtily in the air. “I am of noble blood. I deserve a place in the palace.”
He was delaying my trip to my father’s temple because of petty politics. I nearly throttled him. But I figured that would only prolong my delay. So I smiled and nodded. “Sure. A position in court it is.”
But he did not look appeased. Those gold-flecked eyes narrowed.
I swallowed a sigh.
Jinn-descended did not have as much magic as their full-blooded ancestors, but that didn’t mean they were entirely without.
The princes each boasted specific gifts, individual to the jinni they were descended from.
Ilias in Wethai had control over the elements—water, fire, earth, wind—while Anwar in Haisab held powers of empathy, capable of turning one’s emotions against them.
No one knew what Sen of the Dry Lands had, but I knew that Nasir’s power was truth.
He could pick out a lie as soon as it left my mouth.
And one just had.
For fuck’s sake.
“Yes, you can have a position in Khada Palace,” I said again. I had no choice but to mean it.
What fun times lay ahead.
Amunet.
I flinched at the voice but didn’t look away from Nasir. It was trying to distract me—whatever it was. It wasn’t real, there was no one there. I trained my eyes on the prince and waited.
Nasir’s eyes darted all over my face, gold flecks sparking like fireflies as his magic flared, searching for deception. But there wasn’t any.
At least, for now.
In a month’s time, who knew what would change, or what Shaya might disagree with? If my promise fell apart then, I didn’t think Nasir would complain. Not when I’d have the power to flay him on the spot.
Amunet. A bit firmer, a bit more impatient than the last time. The glass in my mind splintered further.
I fisted my hands. Go away, I mentally thought at the voice, keeping my gaze easy and calm. No trace of potential deceit, no trace of anything amiss.
The prince studied me with a deep intensity. Then an easy smile spread over his face. “Excellent. We’ll stay for the funeral, and then we’ll go.”
I ground my teeth. “No. We’ll leave now.”
“I cannot abandon my people when they are in mourning.” He gave me a reassuring smile. “It will only take a few hours. I’ll make sure my soldiers are ready to depart as soon as it’s over.” Before I could argue further, Nasir jogged back to the pyre, Sara on his heels.
My eyes did not leave him. “Jasim.”
“Yes, my queen.” He was at my side in an instant.
“I want you to talk to Nasir’s soldiers.”
Jasim frowned. “About what?”
“This is the second delay he’s caused us. I want to know if he’s keeping us here just because he’s greedy and stupid…”
“… or if we need to run,” he finished for me.
I nodded. “I doubt they’ll tell me very much, but I’ll see what I can do.
While I’m gone, stay in your room. Door locked.
And keep this”—he thrust a dagger into my hands—“on you at all times, plus a scimitar. And we’ll brush up on your training.
” He was already undoing one of his scimitar sheaths.
“I don’t need a refresher course.”
“You haven’t practiced in almost two years.
” I opened my mouth to respond, but he wrapped the leather belt of the sheath around my hips.
His arms went around me as they met at the small of my back, nearly bringing our bodies flush, and the smell of him—sweat, the fresh woody smell of river reeds, and something headier that was purely him—surrounded me.
Deep brown eyes bled out the rest of the world as he dipped his face down toward mine.
“Ashorah is your realm,” he said, “but your safety is mine. If I tell you to carry a blade, then you do. If I tell you to train, then you do. No arguments. Understand? My queen.” The last part added as an afterthought.
I should have laughed at his attempt at assertiveness and thrown off his hands, which had already finished securing the belt and now merely rested against my sides.
But I didn’t.
Something had shifted between us this morning. I could not pinpoint it exactly beyond a peculiar fluttering in the pit of my stomach. But it prompted me to nod silently.
Jasim gazed at me a moment longer, lips thin within his beard, before he finally nodded and stepped away.
Able to breathe again, I pulled my eyes away from Jasim and set them back on Nasir.
It was probably nothing. But we should have been several miles closer to Shaya’s temple by now. Something just did not feel right.
I wanted Nasir’s help, but if I had to make do with just Jasim and whatever we could scrounge up, I would.
A chuckle sounded. Not from Jasim or any of the miners. A mocking chuckle. A familiar one that left me feeling cold. That disembodied chuckle reverberated around me, like the strikes of the pickaxes against the crater walls.