21 - Rohan
R ohan couldn’t stay still. His leg kept wanting to twitch in irritation and impatience and annoyance. He hadn’t wanted Jafar to leave. He didn’t know what he wanted, but he certainly didn’t want Jafar going out and finding that prisoner.
Because that was what Jafar would do. Caution? He didn’t know it.
Rohan had been so eager to hurt Jafar that he hadn’t thought of anything else. He tried sinking deeper into the bed, hoping the lush sheets and feathery cushions would hold him captive and lull him to sleep. He tried listening to the night, facing the open window and the breeze rustling the curtains.
With a growl, he threw off the covers, pulled on his shirt and then his robes, and slipped into his sandals by the door. The guard was nowhere to be seen. A palace at night was a lot like any other place at night. Dark, quiet, lonely. Lit sconces were few, and the moon could slip in through only so many windows.
Rohan retraced his steps with care, and after several detours because it was sometimes too dark to see where he was going, he found the corridor where he’d seen the attendant girl hand the guard the food and medical kit.
He didn’t know what lay through the corridor. His teeth were on edge, his limbs even more restless now. What if Jafar was in trouble? Rohan took a careful breath, wishing he had thought to bring a lantern from their rooms.
And then he froze. A hand clamped down on his shoulder, and his soul nearly left his body. A long silhouette stretched in the dark. Shadows painted his face gaunt and the parrot on his shoulder in black.
“Jafar! What are you doing?”
Jafar lifted a brow. “Following you. Did you think I’d know how to get in there?”
The pounding in Rohan’s chest careened from fear into anger—at himself. How could he have been so stupid? Not only had he been used again , but he’d done exactly what Jafar had thought he would.
“Now come,” Jafar said.
“Come?” Rohan seethed, his voice so hushed that it sounded like a rat skittering in the dark. “You can’t just take over—”
“I didn’t,” Jafar said. “It’s no one’s fault you’re being predictable, and you’re the one who told me about the prisoner. I did nothing but pay heed to what my brother had to say, and now I want to see him. If you don’t want to come, you’re more than welcome to sit this one out. Iago, will you help my brother find his way back?”
“I don’t need your pet’s help,” Rohan snapped. “Let’s just go.”
He stomped ahead of Jafar, still squinting through the shadows. The floor disappeared under his next step and he nearly plummeted down a set of stairs. Gah! This was all Jafar’s fault. I’m behaving just like Baba, Rohan thought, blaming others for the consequences of my own actions.
And yet, he was surprised to find he wasn’t as bothered by that realization as he would have expected to be.
There was a door at the very end of the steps, heavy and black. Rohan knew this because it was ajar, because there was a line of light slipping from its other side, flickering in shades of orange and red. Like the fire that had taken Baba from them. The one Rohan had wished for.
His throat closed, cinching his lungs tight, denying him another exhale.
“Breathe,” Jafar whispered to him kindly, gently. It took everything in Rohan not to step closer to him, back in his shadow, in his protection.
Baba was gone; there was no use blaming himself for it. No point stifling himself with his fear.
Rohan opened the door. More stairs. Shadows grew and folded, dragging a shiver out of him. It was desolate and pitiful, a cold that dug into his bones.
“I was thinking,” Jafar began. He sounded distant and unaffected. “Baba was most horrible with a soul. Imagine asking a genie to bring him back. Imagine Baba without a soul.”
A chill crept down Rohan’s spine, freezing into the divots. Was Jafar trying to make him uneasy?
“Hmm?” Jafar asked when Rohan didn’t respond. “Let’s see your prisoner.”
A low keening reverberated through the walls. Rohan shivered. Iago didn’t look too happy to be here, either.
“He isn’t my prisoner,” Rohan said, glancing back. His voice caught when the keening sounded again. “Maybe this was a bad idea. We probably shouldn’t be here.”
Jafar was utterly unfazed. “I thought about what you said. About combining the spells to make someone speak.”
Rohan took a careful step back, but Jafar didn’t move. His eyes took on a reddish hue, his features still as stone.
“I think we can use that to get the Sultana her secret,” Jafar said.
Whatever happened to wanting to leave the palace? Rohan didn’t know what Jafar was planning, but he wanted to be useful to the Sultana. He wanted to be the diplomat and question the prisoner.
Not let Jafar do it.
That was Rohan’s gift to give, but Jafar was already squeezing past him, sweeping down the stairs as if he owned the place.
“What for?” Rohan asked
“We could use it to barter, I’m sure,” Jafar answered without breaking stride. It was a guarded response, mired in another secret Jafar was clearly keeping from him.
Rohan stared after him. This was beginning to feel less diplomatic and more reckless. He wanted no part in the cold hollow in Jafar’s voice. Jafar was scaring him, and he was ready to run back to their rooms and burrow back under the covers.
But like any good shadow, Rohan disappeared after his brother.
The walls pressed tight. Rohan stretched his arms, and stone greeted him on either side, rough and damp. His footfalls echoed behind Jafar’s until the stairs spat the three of them out into a large room. Slowly, his eyes adjusted to the dim, greedily seeking out the lone lantern. It cast off the metal bars that formed cell after cell. A forlorn leak squeezed into a tin pail somewhere in the darkness, and that low keening began again, so helpless that Rohan wanted to cover his ears.
This was the dark side of running a kingdom.
A single guard leaned against a small pillar of stone near the lantern. His legs were crossed, his head tipped.
“There’s a gua—”
“Shh,” Jafar whispered, pulling Rohan deeper into the shadows as Iago shot past, wings an almost silent rustle.
Moments later, a voice called from the stairs: “Which one of you is down there? I need you in the banquet hall at once!”
The guard straightened, blinking groggily and wiping drool from his beardless chin with the back of his hand.
“Yes, Sultana!” he called back, and Rohan pressed himself flat against the cold hard wall as the guard sprinted past them and out the door.
And then they were alone.
“You’re welcome,” Iago said in his normal voice, fluttering back to Jafar’s shoulder.
Jafar was waiting for him by the guard’s lamp. The lamplight cast half his face in shadow, the other half in starry-eyed mischief. “Good job.”
Rohan could have done that. Jafar only had to ask.
“He’ll come back when he sees the empty banquet hall,” Rohan said, hoping to wipe the victory from Iago’s face. “We need to go.”
“No, he’ll try to find the Sultana and then question why he heard her voice in the first place,” Jafar countered.
Iago harrumphed. “Yeah, stop being such a killjoy. This was your idea, remember?”
Rohan gritted his teeth. He’d told them about the prisoner, not that he wanted to interrogate him. Jafar was staring at the prison cells. Despite its size, the dungeon housed no more than ten cells as far as Rohan could tell. He guessed that the Sultana only locked the more important prisoners here. The ones she needed to keep close.
Jafar stepped in a puddle of something dark and questionable. He didn’t even flinch. He was too cavalier. Too at ease.
Rohan’s next inhale was deep, and the dank odor of the prison assaulted his senses. It was sour and musty, combined with the sweet and sickening stench of rot. He barely stopped himself from retching right there in the middle of the place.
And that was when Rohan saw the cell with the tray of food and that medical kit outside of it.
The papermaking prisoner.
“That’s him,” Rohan whispered.
“Odd, he doesn’t look too bad,” Jafar said, and Rohan had to agree.
The man wheezed, leaning his head back against the stone wall, but even barely illuminated and striped in the shadows of the cell bars, it was clear his clothes weren’t too worn, his beard and mustache still relatively trim. But his knuckles were dirty, and the hair by his ears was matted with something dark.
Rohan choked. Blood. They were torturing him.
“‘No secret can be kept forever,’” Jafar said, repeating the Sultana’s words and looking at Rohan.
The prisoner was clearly Maghrizi, as the Sultana had said, but why would he protect the secrets of another kingdom? Why would he risk his own life for a place he had no allegiance to?
The Sultana had said his secret could start a war and change the course of the future—that for as long as the kingdoms to the east held a monopoly over papermaking, they also held great power. By that reasoning, Rohan thought those kingdoms must be dangerous, which meant any number of deaths to protect against them could be justified.
Still, something was off about this.
For the Sultana had also claimed papermaking wasn’t a necessity. And those kingdoms had no reason to come for her with swords if she left them to their own devices. They were flourishing, as she was. Rohan might even argue they were at peace.
Unlike the man in front of him now.
“He’s—he’s bleeding ,” Rohan said with half a sob.
“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.”
“His being here 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. Was Jafar trying 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 do this .
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.”