Chapter 53 Sirsha
Sirsha
Locked in her mind, Sirsha was forced to watch as Div bound up the jinn and tormented them. She was forced to listen to Div’s plotting as she paced the cavern, waiting for Quil.
For this had been Div’s secret game. She wanted Quil’s power for her own vengeance. All Sirsha’s attempts to protect him had been for naught.
And yet Quil had done something to Div. He’d opened her up, understood her in a way Sirsha never could. When she felt him in Div’s mind, she’d shouted over and over again: Quil, she is not one. She is many. That fact was the key to understanding this creature.
At some point, he heard, and in the locked room she rejoiced. Because despite Div’s iron grip on her, Sirsha still had something left of herself. Enough to reach Quil.
So even as she shivered from the horror of what had been perpetrated on the jinn children, she paced in her mind, waiting for a moment of weakness when she could take her body back.
That moment came in the deepest depths of Div’s rage, when Quil held to the light the memory that lived at her core.
As Div reached out to take Quil’s heart, to satisfy the unending hunger of despair that ate at her, Sirsha screamed and threw herself against the walls of her prison—just in time to snatch her own hand back, even as Quil wrenched away.
She was so startled to be in control of her body again that for a moment, she didn’t know what to do.
“Run!” she screamed at Quil, understanding that she might only have moments. “Run, I can’t control her. She’s in me and—”
“Sirsha.” Quil spoke so quickly that each of his words blurred into the next. “What the jinn children told us—that wasn’t everything. There’s something else there, deep within them. I—I can’t get to it. It’s linked to the void in that chamber.” He nodded to the doorway. “And to the other jinn.”
With Div’s momentary lapse in control, the bindings holding the jinn to the wall came free. They converged upon Sirsha.
“Stop, it’s me, it’s Sirsha!” she cried out. “Whatever you’re doing isn’t working! She can’t be bound, she has to be—”
Heard, she was about to say. Healed. Avenged.
“Silence!” Div roared through Sirsha’s mouth, shoving her back into her prison.
Div took full control of Sirsha’s body again and strode into the other, rounded chamber, dragging the jinn behind her like fish in a net.
She pinioned them to the walls the moment they were inside.
When she saw the void, Div stopped, her intake of breath a sharp hiss.
There were other people in the room—but Div hadn’t noticed them or didn’t care. Sirsha caught a glimpse of faces she didn’t expect. Cero bet-Dafra and a young woman she didn’t know but who reminded her of Elias Veturius. The young woman held on to something small—the body of a child.
“Look into my memories, Prince,” Cero said. “It’s faster than explaining.”
“How did you—Karinna?” Quil addressed the girl, and Sirsha recognized the name. Sufiyan’s little sister.
“Just do it, Quil!” Karinna said, frantic as Div advanced on the void. Karinna backed away from Div, dragging the dead child with her.
“Look, little witch.” Div pointed to the void, to the ceiling, limned in the luminescent blue ore. “I am tethered to this place. I am bound to it. And I wish to be free.”
I thought you wanted vengeance, Div, Sirsha said.
“Yes, vengeance first, for my freedom requires pain,” Div said. “You—Quil. The memory. Put it into the jinn—make them hurt. Then I will force them into that—that place of monsters—” Her voice trembled. “As I was once forced.”
Div, Sirsha realized, was speaking of the Owa Khel. She feared the Owa Khel. Sirsha frantically thought of what Quil had said. That there was some other devilry to untangle.
Sirsha considered the doomed Brijnan villagers, and the knowledge that she was the reason for so much death. She would never wipe that stain from her heart. But beneath that was something worse—something Div had been saying all along.
It was Sirsha’s elders who’d failed her. It was those who had asked her to bind the child in the first place. Who had created a world in which binding him was acceptable? And who had then blamed Sirsha for all that went wrong so that she, too, blamed herself?
Your death, she said to Div. That wasn’t the end of it, was it? Something happened to you. This was the truth the wind had told Sirsha about. This was why Loli had said, You must know her. Sirsha was close. So close.
“Stop it, witch,” Div said, “Stop picking at me. Boy! Do as I say, or—”
Say it, Div. Tell me what happened to you.
“Enough!”
Tell me about the Owa Khel. And Sirsha found that even in her mind, she still had her will. She pressed it against Div—against the memory of a thousand jinn, who seemed scattered and confused at her attack.
“We were used, witch!” Div burst out. “We were killed, our magic stolen. But our spirits were not set free. We were made to suffer in the Owa Khel for a thousand years. The witches did it—”
Sirsha thought back to what Div had said when she broke the Adah coin. They took your light, like they once took mine.
“Why?” Quil asked, and Sirsha could feel his magic emanating out in waves, easing around Div. Div batted the magic away.
“It doesn’t matter why! They’re monsters—” Div pointed at the pinioned jinn, straining to escape the ore wrapping around their bodies. “They let us be used. Let our spirits be twisted into something horrible.”
“The Loha—” Cero, quiet until now, glanced up at the ore.
“The Kegari created Loha through an outpouring of life—a life freely given, offered in love. But a thousand years ago, the Jaduna fought with them. They wished to punish the Kegari by transforming the Loha, which enhanced magic, into Ikfa, which negated it.”
Sirsha recalled her mother’s words. Sometimes, the only way to blunt the violence of twisted magic is to confront it with its opposite. The same must apply to pure magic.
“For that transformation,” Cero said, “the Jaduna needed an immense amount of death. More than humans could provide. That’s—that’s what happened to you, isn’t it?”
Cero looked at Sirsha now—or at Div. How he knew that Div had taken over, Sirsha couldn’t guess.
“When the humans killed you,” Cero said, “the Jaduna saw an opportunity and stole your magic. They placed it here in this cave, in that metal—a conduit to the Loha. That’s why this place feels so alive. But your spirits were discarded. Thrown into the Owa Khel.”
Sirsha thought back to the way Loli described the Cloud Forest: Duah-la fa sinanh cha. Home of the first sin. Skies, her friend had tried to tell her.
Your spirits were trapped, Sirsha said to Div, and the horror that rolled through her was so visceral that Div shuddered in Sirsha’s body. Did the jinn know?
“What does it matter?” Div said. “Our parents did nothing. They let us suffer. We would have been trapped there forever if not for Laia of Serra. The Shatharin heard us. The tale she set down was not our true tale, but it gave us an anchor in this world.”
“And you are still anchored,” the jinn Diriya said. “But we can set you free. We can make the pain end.”
“How?” Karinna looked suspiciously at Diriya. “Are you going to kill her?” She pointed to Sirsha’s body.
“Not without killing me first,” Quil said.
“The magic of our children is bound here.” Diriya looked pointedly at the glowing blue ore. “But their spirits are tied to the Owa Khel. We must banish this magic to the Owa Khel. Only then will they be fully freed from this world.”
“But the Owa Khel is a nightmarish place,” Karinna said. “Why would you condemn your own children there?”
“Because after so long,” Umber said, “all they are is pain.”
Panic enveloped Div at the thought of the Owa Khel, a weakening of her will so potent that Sirsha escaped from her prison and took control of her body again.
No! Div screamed in her mind. Do not let them, little witch.
“You want to banish your children to a place they are terrified of,” Sirsha said, and Quil swiveled toward her, knowing somehow that it was Sirsha speaking, and not Div. “Why would you do that to them after they’ve suffered so much?”
Diriya opened her mouth to answer, but whatever she said, Sirsha didn’t hear.
For some old fury was building inside Sirsha now, and it did not belong to Div.
It was her own rage at what had been done to the jinn children, through no fault of theirs, by the Jaduna.
At what their so-called elders proposed now.
Our wounds are the same, little witch.
Yes, she and Div were both killers. They both had magic. But they’d also both been neglected by their families. Betrayed.
Yes, Div said within Sirsha’s mind. Cast out. Forgotten.
“You abandoned your children,” Sirsha said.
“You sent them away to save them, but in the end, you weren’t careful enough and they died.
But you kept fighting your war. You used your rage over your children’s deaths to fuel you in battle, but you didn’t stop to make sure their spirits were safe.
Yet you want their memory so you can toss it into the place they fear. ”
“We did not know,” Umber said. “We could not let ourselves linger over their deaths because we were in the middle of a war!”
But Sirsha had heard a litany of excuses from her own mother. We thought—we said—we believed—rubbish, all of it. Raani Sh’ban hadn’t lingered over Sirsha’s loss, either. At least, not enough to try to protect her.
Hunger hissed in Sirsha’s stomach, a snake left starving for too long. Her pain was rabid, insatiable. But if she took vengeance on these jinn, on these few insignificant humans lurking in this cave, that would make the hunger feel better, would it not? That would feed the pain that gnawed at her.
“Sirsha.” Quil spoke. “Sirsha, come back.”
“Help me, Quil,” she said. “Help me hurt them.”