40 - Rohan
D read and confusion had a way of filling one up quite well, for Rohan wasn’t the slightest bit hungry anymore. He didn’t know why his brother had fled or the princess looked so miserable.
“Eat,” the Sultana commanded. “Stop being so sullen.”
But the image of Jafar’s face was seared behind his eyelids, and the myriad of dishes the servants had spread before them faded to dust.
“She’s beautiful, and you know it,” the Sultana said, seething. “Sit up before you ruin this for me.”
For me. She was always concerned with herself before anyone and anything else. She had made Rohan a prince and done worse to Jafar—she had stripped him of purpose and abandoned him.
The princess appeared beside him.
The Sultana looked surprised. “Is something the matter, princess?”
“I only wished to introduce myself to Prince Aman,” the princess said, and then added, “if I may.”
“Of course,” the Sultana said with far more enthusiasm than was warranted, and the princess glared until the Sultana finally turned to the emir on her other side.
Rohan immediately liked her, and he could only stare as she sat down beside him, the warm folds of her gown brushing his side. Rohan had never been the focus of someone so beautiful before.
Watch yourself, he chided. Here and now, he was the prince. The Sultana’s son.
“You are doleful,” he said to her.
Doleful? Ridiculous. Rohan saw that her eyes were much like her father’s: astute. She missed nothing. She had seen him spot and recognize Jafar. She knew the two were acquainted.
But how did she know his brother ?
She looked away, her reflection distorted in the empty silver platter in front of her.
“You must think me horribly rude,” she said, and Rohan was amazed at how these royals could shuffle between expressions and emotions like they were nothing. “My name is Yara.”
Rohan, he wanted to say, but could not.
He couldn’t even give her his name. Something as small and simple and mundane as his name. His name—the one and only thing he had left of his childhood, of his life in Ghurub.
And he was to be married to her? To spend the rest of his life beside her?
What was the point in being able to speak if he could not do so freely? What was the point in wearing a crown and having every dish imaginable if he had to take the history of himself, his most precious possession, and lock it away for good? What was the point in appeasing a woman who meant nothing to him and losing the best brother in the world?
Rohan shot to his feet, teetering from the abrupt movement and his thoughts alike. The entire banquet hall fell silent. Every eye turned to him and his bright robes and fancy adornments as if he were some sort of peacock.
He wanted to laugh at it all. Or possibly cry.
But what he needed was to find Jafar and make things right. Rohan, like his brother, wasn’t good at apologizing, but it was never too late to start. Every important emir in the kingdom had seen him, which meant he would never be able to right his wrongs and cede the crown to Jafar.
But they could run.
The two of them could go anywhere and be anything, so long as they were together.
“Aman?” the Sultana asked, and he heard the warning in her voice. He had seen the condition of her dungeons, seen how quickly she could turn a smile lethal.
Rohan paused, aware that there was no turning back from this moment. He would either be Aman for the rest of his life, or die as Rohan.
He glared down at her. “Don’t call me that.”
And then he fled.
Rohan’s footsteps echoed dully through the halls, growing louder as he left the roar of the banquet hall farther and farther behind him until the palace spat him out into the cold night. Wispy clouds shrouded the moon, ominous and haunting. He lowered his gaze to the sprawling building across from the palace.
He knew where he would find Jafar.
But as much as his brother loved the House of Wisdom’s library, when he was upset, he preferred to busy his hands more than his mind. As he could in the laboratory.
Rohan took off down the dusty path, stumbling to a halt in the open space between the palace and the House of Wisdom. He was alone. Nothing but him and the expanse of the night, stars twinkling above, the future just out of reach.
He could run on his own, leave the palace and the House of Wisdom and everything else behind. He wouldn’t be Aman or Baba’s son or Jafar’s brother.
He would be his own person. Rohan . He would claim his name for his own.
Not without making amends.
The House of Wisdom was deathly silent, not a guard or scholar in sight. Rohan had not expected the crimson cloud crowding the dark ceiling, strange and eerie. Heart in his throat, he navigated the blood-drenched shelves, avoiding the glinting shadows and beckoning darkness.
For a moment he was back in the dungeons, in front of those dank cells, desolation creeping up his arms and power thrumming in the air. Rohan followed flashes of red to the back of the library and an archway that he assumed led to the laboratory. He paused and looked up the short rise of steps to the platform ahead, but he had no reason to be afraid. This was his brother, and they were going to make things right between them.
Something sharp cracked across the floor, as jarring as a clap of thunder. A pair of eyes flashed in the gloom, vividly red. Rohan flinched, freezing in place as a figure emerged from the haze.
He could only muster a whisper. “Jafar?”
The shadows accentuated his height, stretching him like the plume in his headdress. His robes undulated in the breeze from the wide windows behind him. His long fingers curled around a dark gold staff with brilliant ruby eyes that Rohan could not look away from. Iago sat on his shoulder, equally imposing. Standing in front of them, Rohan felt small and droll.
“Oh, it’s a serpent,” Rohan ventured, trying for a laugh.
Jafar glided down the steps to face him, his eyes hard. It was how he’d looked at Baba, how he had begun to look at the Sultana.
Rohan took a small step back, and the words blabbered out of him. “This was doomed from the start, Jafar. I came to apologize. I—I tried speaking to the princess, and I know it’s all a big mess, but—”
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 be us again, 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 never ask , 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 were our enemies, 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— had a 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.