shadow of the Neverseen King up the stairs, he seems to sink deeper into invisibility until I lose my imagined projection of him altogether and am forced to rely completely on my intuition that he’s still ahead of me.
I can’t bring myself to touch the banister again.
So I walk alone, moving one foot to the next stair, and the next, trying to ignore the clamminess of my hands, and the way darkness spots across my vision with each step. At this point, I don’t believe he will kill me. Not outside one of his heartless competitions. But that doesn’t make me any less afraid of him, and it doesn’t ease the tightness in my chest. The sense that I am a lamb walking mindlessly to the slaughter.
By habit, I begin counting, despite trying not to. One, two, three, four, five, six.
His deep voice cuts through the silence, and it sounds like he keeps his back to me. “I cannot help but notice how your heart has not stopped racing since the competition. Especially since Itr was killed.”
He can sense that?
I lift my black-spotted vision from my feet to the curve of the seemingly empty staircase before me. “I cannot help but notice that you didn’t stop her from being killed.”
A foolish thing to say. My hand goes instinctively to the hilt of a knife at my belt, and my fingers flex about that comforting weight. As if it would be any more protection against the Neverseen King than it was against Jabir.
Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen.
“You resent me for allowing her to be killed.”
I don’t dare affirm that. My lack of answer stretches out into a reply of its own.
“I couldn’t have stopped that blade any more than you could have,” he says quietly.
“Why not? You move faster than lightning.” And you clearly have stores of magic at the tips of your fingers. A mystery for another day, if I cannot escape soon enough.
“Because I wasn’t expecting it either.”
I find that hard to believe. He must be hiding something. Some other reason he wouldn’t intervene.
The sultan continues, filling my silence. “Safya is more skilled even than you.”
I feel the weight of his invisible gaze, like he’s looking back at me and measuring my reaction to his words. But I won’t let my face betray me. I stare ahead coldly, even though my gut does a strange series of leaps and dips. His statement was both praise and criticism—that I am one of the most skilled women here, but I am not the most skilled woman. I withhold my tongue, not wanting to give him anything that would betray my thoughts.
I’ve lost track of my counting. Good. Maybe my brain will stop it now.
Except it doesn’t. It starts again.
One, two, three.
“And Safya is ruthless to her core,” he continues. “Unlike you.”
A dry scoff escapes me. Does he know how many people I’ve killed? While other girls veiled their faces and wedded their father’s choice, I’ve been scaling walls, slipping poison into goblets, slicing Separator across the throats of fathers, husbands, uncles, sons, merchants, councilmen.
“Will Safya serve your purposes as a bride?” I ask.
“She would.”
“Then select her. Let Eshe and I go.”
“You do not ask whether you would also serve my purposes?”
“I don’t want to serve your purposes.”
There’s a snort. Then the sultan’s frame suddenly coalesces into dark shadow three steps ahead of me, and my eyes have something almost physical to look at. His hand rests on the banister—which is stiff and unmoving—and he twists to look back at me.
He wants me to look him in the eye. That’s why he’s made himself partially visible.
My heart races faster with every breath. I consider not meeting that gaze, looking over his shoulder or perhaps staring blankly at his chest. Or my own toes.
But avoiding his gaze makes me feel weak. Weaker than I felt avoiding Jabir’s gaze as a child. So I do what I learned to do with Jabir—I match that gaze. I won’t flinch. I won’t. I won’t let him know I’m terrified of him. I want him to remember that I have taken lives. Blood stains my hands. There is a knife at my hip, one that I know how to wield with deadly precision, and I am not afraid to use it.
Defiant compliance was how I survived this long as Jabir’s slave. I may obey, but I will never submit.
I stare into my sultan’s unseen gaze, and I don’t flinch one muscle.
He’s the one who looks away first. Triumph thrills in my belly.
“You do not know what my purposes are.” He resumes his climb, and his form slowly ebbs away into invisibility again. “From what I’ve surmised of your character thus far, I’d rather think you’d prefer my purposes to mindlessly killing innocents, no?”
With three of the twelve women he brought here against their will already dead, I’m not sure how his purposes don’t involve killing innocents. But he won’t bait me that easily. “Better the devil you know,” I say as I follow him. The staircase seems to go on and on, spiraling around and around forever. Will it ever end?
He rounds on me so suddenly, becoming partially visible again, that I step down a step, my neck craning as I stare up at him. My heart leaps with fear, a gasp catching in my throat.
“You’ve said that before. But do you truly believe that? Is the one you know better? Will you opt for a wretched existence because it is safe—or familiar, rather?”
I stare at him, frozen.
Something warm comes near my face. A hand. He reaches out a hand toward my face, and its heat blooms beneath my chin, hovering beside my cheek. But at the last second, he draws it back.
I am not sure I will ever breathe again.
When he speaks, his voice is low, and desperately earnest. “Cast your lot with me, Nadira, and I think you will find the gamble is worth the potential reward.”
I realize with a sudden spike of terror that he isn’t choosing me. He’s asking me to choose him. What is this reward he speaks of? Riches? Honor? The so-called freedom of being the queen of a fragmenting kingdom? He wants me to cast my lot with him, to bet on him. Against what? Or whom?
I’ve never liked games or gambles. I’ve never been a good sport either—and I know that. Games are no fun because sometimes you lose, and most of the time it’s not even your fault. It’s dumb luck. I’m not willing to bet anything on luck. I’m pragmatic. A good weigher of risk and reward.
This, unfortunately, is a terrible ratio of risk to reward.
And I don’t even want the reward.
I lift my chin. “Do you really think you can kidnap an assassin and expect her to willfully bind herself to her kidnapper?”
He gives me no response. He merely turns and keeps climbing the stairs.
I hesitate, not quite able to make my feet move to follow. Shivers race down my spine, through my arms, until my hand is quaking. I place it on the railing and lean into it.
Warmth surges into me. I won’t let him sand you, comes the garbled voice of the House into my fingers, flooding like pleasantly warm water through my skin and into my awareness.
“Don’t believe a word it says,” comes the sultan’s annoyed huff from further up the stairs.
Can he tell what the House is saying to me? Or is he just aware of the communication? I grip the railing tighter. I catch the inside of my cheek between my teeth and clench my jaw hard until it’s painful, and I taste blood.
Then I plant my feet. “If you want me to follow you, you have to tell me where you are taking me.”
The railing gives a slight creak, as if it were warning me not to challenge the sultan. But I keep my chin lifted, my gaze unbreaking. Only I know how sweat slides from my armpits down my ribs like a wet, tickling finger.
Finally, I hear his voice. It’s deceptively calm.
“You make demands of your Neverseen King?” he asks.
That voice. That voice, which communicates such a tight rein on the force of his power and persona, is more cutting than the sharpest edge of anger. Sands, I’m terrified of him. But I’m also angry. I’m angry, confused, frustrated, and I feel like a cornered animal.
A cornered animal may cower, but it also bites.
I contemplate bowing my head and feigning submission, following after him as I plot his demise. I consider turning around and marching back down the steps. If he wants to show me something, he’ll have to drag me there.
But I don’t want to be dragged against my will.
“You cannot play with a viper and expect not to be bitten,” I say instead. After all, wasn’t that his description of me and the other women—vipers? Perhaps if I use his words, he won’t realize . . .
Realize what? How much he scares me?
Surely he knows that already.
“Then shall I soothe you with honeyed words and the hypnotizing tunes of a flute?” he says, coming down the steps he’d mounted until he stands onto two above me, staring down at me from his towering height. His voice is steeped in bitterness, almost cutting. “Do you want me to woo you, Mourner?”
I draw back sharply. “N-no! Didn’t I just tell you to take Safya as your bride and leave me be? You clearly admire her so much.”
Something in my voice seems to make him pause. He tilts the outline of his head to one side, and I swallow, suddenly feeling the weight of his acute study.
“You have surmised by now that I have a particular need for a bride, one that does not involve . . . the more tender variety of sentiments. I do not need your trust, as it were, or your positive opinion of me. What I need is a mutually beneficial agreement, and it’s one that I need you to want. I will not debase you by attempting to manipulate your emotions by flattery or courting. I want a level-headed commitment from you, to stand at my side and fight with me.”
“Fight?” I croak. “What are you fighting?”
He doesn’t answer. Another secret, apparently.
“You do not need my trust,” I say carefully. I swallow and draw a deep breath before I continue. “You do not need my trust, and yet you ask for it.”
“I do not.”
“You ask me to follow you,” I snap, hurling my words at him in a burst of anger as I clench my fingers tighter around the railing.
I won’t let him sand you. I won’t let him sand you, whispers the House to me.
The Neverseen King ignores the House, and instead shoots back, anger lacing his voice, “That was not a request for your trust. That was a command from your sovereign to obey.”
Just because I don’t want honeyed words and flute playing does not mean I want poison and barbs. I’m not a child to be ordered about, though I withhold those words lest I sound like one.
A split second later, I have a knife unsheathed in each hand as I take one determined step up until I’m only one below my sultan, and I’m practically arching my neck to stare up at him. I hope he can see the fire burning in my gut through the glare I fix on him.
He doesn’t flinch away as I slide one knife up to his ribs and fit the blade of the other one against his throat. He’s only partially corporeal, so I doubt I could kill him, his unnatural speed notwithstanding, but I hope he feels my threat as sure as I feel the closeness of his warmth.
“If you want my commitment to stand at your side and fight,” I say, pitching my voice low, “then you cannot treat me like your slave. Force your will upon me, Neverseen King, and you may temporarily gain my compliance. But know that if you do, I will defy you to the ends of the world.”
I finish my speech, still glaring up at him, my heart racing. It’s only the racing adrenaline in my blood that keeps my hands from trembling.
I wait for his response, my breaths shallow and rapid. My pulse is the loudest thing in my ears.
He sighs. It stirs my hair. Then he turns, loses all but the faintest outline of his form, and marches up the stairs.
I stand as though frozen, my two blades poised in midair.
“Very well,” he says, and his voice is dry again. “Then follow me if it so pleases you, Nadira al-Risya.”
What? He’s given up on forcing me? Just like that?
“Where are you wanting to take me?” I ask warily, lowering my blades but not sheathing them.
I can almost make out his palm clenching into a fist on the railing above me. Cold sweat breaks out on my brow, but I hold my ground.
“If you want to know, then follow me. You wish not to be ordered about, which means that if we are to interact, then there must be some semblance of trust between us. So I will not order you to follow me. In exchange, you will trust my leading.”
“I don’t have to trust you to follow you.”
There’s another sigh. Then his low, muttered voice drifts to me, and I’m not sure if he intended for me to hear.
“Oh yes, you do.”
