to help you win

  Allow us now

  to inhabit your skin

  Fifty-One

  “I’VE BEEN MEANING TO GIVE this back to you,” said Cyrus shakily, and as he drew away from her he pressed a familiar, small glass marble into her hand. “Now, more than ever, I fear you might need it.”

  Alizeh looked into her hand, then up at him.

  It was the nosta.

  Her gathered friends, seeing the object in her open palm, made collective sounds of astonishment.

  “Is that a nosta?” asked Kamran with palpable awe. “I’ve never seen one in real life.”

  “Yes,” said Hazan quietly. “It is.”

  “What’s a nosta?” asked Omid.

  Alizeh weighed the little globe in her fist, marveling at the gift. She listened as if from a distance as Deen explained to the boy that it was a rare magical object, one that discerned truth from lies. It was already warm, glowing red in Alizeh’s hand, confirming the veracity of the words spoken around her. She wanted to ask Cyrus how he’d found her lost nosta; she wanted to ask him how he’d even known it was hers; she wanted to ask—

  “Why?” she said, meeting his gaze. “Why might I need it now, more than ever?”

  “Because,” Cyrus said quietly. “I must tell you a story.”

  He stepped back.

  His hand had been trembling even as she’d briefly held it, and she could still feel the heat of his palm against her own; her skin prickled with unspent feeling, with the touch of burgeoning magic.

  She tucked the nosta into her skirt pocket.

  Everyone was staring at Cyrus now, all of them frozen in terrible anticipation. He’d lowered his head; she couldn’t see his eyes. Alizeh felt the dawn of a tremendous fear inside her then, and she studied him with expectant caution.

  He took a tremulous breath.

  “A hundred years ago,” he said, “Tulan was on the precipice of ruin. You may already know that Tulan is a uniquely rich piece of land, replete with natural resources and dense with magic.” He paused. “For long stretches of history, the empire was ravaged by enemy nations—torn apart and plundered, its people indentured and oppressed. It had been too small a nation to defend itself against so many devouring forces. In desperation, the first Naran king—my ancestor—made a bad deal with the devil.” Cyrus lifted his head. “Iblees had promised to save the empire.”

  The nosta warmed in her pocket.

  Alizeh held steady, the feeling of dread mounting only more within her.

  Cyrus told them about the bargain the ancient Tulanian king had struck, how Iblees had sworn to fortify the kingdom with his own army of dark beasts and lesser demons, slaughtering all enemies and securing their borders—

  All in exchange for a single favor, unnamed.

  This favor could be called in at any time, Cyrus explained, and could only be fulfilled by an heir to the Tulanian throne.

  Alizeh gasped; the nosta flared in her pocket.

  Quietly, Kamran said, “Do you mean to imply that you”—he hesitated—“that you inherited, through your ancestors, a deal with the devil?”

  Cyrus was almost visibly shaking now. “Yes.”

  Again, the nosta went hot.

  “No,” Alizeh said desperately.

  Cyrus gave an aborted shout, stricken as he tensed against an unseen force. He looked down at his feet, which appeared to be hardening to stone, rooting him to the ground. “I have little time,” he forced out. “The confession alone will cost me my life—”

  Alizeh screamed.

  Deen blanched. Omid stepped back. Huda covered her mouth in shock.

  Hazan, meanwhile, had gone slack with horror. “Must you confess?” he said. “Is there really no other choice—?”

  “I must,” Cyrus said, straining to speak. “For I must warn you. Iblees chose to call in this debt last year. He went to my father first. My older brother second—”

  “And are they both dead?” asked Omid, panicking. “Did the devil kill them?”

  “My father made the mistake of instinctively refusing the devil,” said Cyrus, who grit his teeth as fresh pain seemed to surge up his ankles, ossifying him by inches as he spoke. “He was sent almost at once to purgatory, where he remains now, half alive. My older brother abdicated the throne, thinking he might escape the devil by decamping to a distant empire.” He hesitated, swallowing. “The title was left to me.”

  “Good God,” said Kamran, his chest heaving as he exhaled.

  Cyrus fought another cry as the dark magic swept up his calves, hardening his knees. He nearly lost his balance. He was becoming a veritable statue before her, and Alizeh thought her heart might give out.

  She tried to go to him then, to run to him, but he held up a hand with difficulty. “Please,” he said, struggling for breath. “These consequences are irreversible. I am already dying. There is nothing to be done—”

  “No,” she said brokenly. “Cyrus— Please—”

  He only shook his head.

  He told them of the consequences of reneging on the contract. He told them of the stakes. He told them of the retribution Iblees had promised upon the people of Tulan and of the bargain he’d struck, the better deal he’d tried to make, the many strange tasks he’d been assigned. With every confession the dark magic took more of him, fossilizing him inch by agonizing inch, until soon he was half-paralyzed, his chin lifting as he fought to breathe, to animate his lungs.

  “I hadn’t known you then,” Cyrus said roughly, looking desperately into Alizeh’s eyes. “I couldn’t have known the devil’s true intentions. I’d been a naive, sheltered second son. I was only weeks from taking my vows at the temple and leaving home forever. I couldn’t have known the timing was suspicious— I couldn’t have known that somewhere, in another empire, you’d finally come of age—”

  Alizeh clapped a hand to her mouth, choking back fresh tears. Hazan made a terrible, frightening sound. Kamran looked stunned, searching the landscape in blind horror.

  Everyone looked feverish with fear.

  Quickly, desperately, Cyrus told them everything then.

  He disclosed every awful detail of the last year—every horror, every harrowing experience—and all the while, the nosta burned in Alizeh’s pocket. She wouldn’t have needed the verification of the magical object to know that Cyrus spoke the truth, but she understood, too, that he was finally giving her the proof she’d so long desired. Never again would she have to listen to a bad word spoken against him. Never again would she be without a defense in his honor. The evidence was in her pocket—and here, transforming before her eyes.

  Cyrus had been wrongly condemned, and now everyone knew it.

  Their group stood paralyzed before him as he spoke, even as his own body grew only more petrified. He told them, in halting words, how the devil would soon claim his favor—that the devil would soon inherit his body—and they were transfigured in the wake of this final disclosure, horrified into silence.

  All but Alizeh, who fell to her knees on the impossible, silken threads of grass—

  And openly wept.

  She was so destroyed in the aftermath of his confession that she hardly had breath to speak. “Cyrus,” she gasped through her tears. “Tell me you’ve found a way out—give me a reason to hope—tell me there is a way forward—”

  “I tried,” he said, and here, his voice broke.

  These two words wrenched a fresh sob from her throat. She felt raw for having received his pain; desperate for being unable to save him; ashamed for ever having doubted him; and she didn’t know what to do.

  There was nothing she could do.

  Cyrus would soon be dead.

  For so long she’d hoped for precisely this kind of admission from him—an admission that might release him, that might deliver him to her unshackled—for she’d already known in her marrow what kind of man she’d married. It hadn’t mattered to Alizeh that the world disagreed; she bore the evidence of his everyday selflessness, his decency. Cyrus was worthy and noble and enduring. There wasn’t a dishonorable bone in his body.

  And his words had cleanly severed her.

  “I beg you now, with my last breaths, not to cry for me,” Cyrus said to her, his voice catching as he spoke. “I am unworthy of your tears. I’ve failed my family, my people, and my very humanity. But there is no greater disgrace upon my soul”—he swallowed with difficulty, his eyes bright with heat—“than knowing that I have failed you.”

  “Cyrus—”

  “Forgive me,” he’d rasped, his chest hardening such that he could hardly speak. “Forgive me.”

  “Wait—please—Wait—”

  Cyrus made a faint choking sound as his throat fossilized, then his mouth. His blue eyes went gray, deadening in his face. In frozen horror Alizeh watched as the paralysis fully overtook her husband’s body. Tears blurred her vision as she bore witness to the effects of this dark magic, her heart coming apart inside her chest. This astonishing, powerful king had turned a sickly shade of pale, his body hardened to granite, and he finally collapsed as might a monolith, hitting the ground with a force the world could not ignore.

  When Cyrus fell, the very earth fractured beneath him.

  Tremors rocked the strange scene, shattering the gently rolling hills in a deceptively slow, dreamlike collapse. Sunlight warped; snow trembled; clouds disintegrated. The diaphanous, woven roses were dissolving like doused sugar; the filmy, gauzy trees evanescing like lost memory. The gossamer castle that doubtless held her fate was slowly wilting in the distance, the Book of Arya like a small gravestone in her pocket.

  It shocked her to discover she didn’t care.

  Alizeh couldn’t hear her friends’ cries; she couldn’t see their grief; she couldn’t think of anyone but him.

  Alizeh ran to his dead body.

  She needed to see for herself that Cyrus was gone, that she’d truly lost him. She’d seen him die with her eyes, but she still felt a faint tether in her soul. She didn’t know whether the chain of the blood oath had been suppressed or else was fading out like a flame—

  She bent over him desperately, sobs wracking her body. She took his lifeless face in her hands and begged him to wake up, to come back to her, to tell her he was still in there, somehow—but his skin was cold, his chest did not expand, and his heart made no sound.

  And then, violently, he was launched into the sky.

  Fifty-Two

  ALIZEH SCREAMED.

  Cyrus hung in the air like a dagger, his limp body having been dragged sharply into the clouds. His eyes were closed; his skin was bloodless; his limbs lifeless. Snowflakes spiraled about him, catching in his hair, glinting in strange celebration. The surreal moment evoked a sense of dark déjà vu—for Cyrus had hung horribly in the air not long ago, just before the blood of his body had been transferred into her own veins. That night had been one of the bleakest of her life.

  This was infinitely worse.

  Now she watched, with increasing despair, as he was similarly bound in shadow, a ribbon of pitch winding about his body as if it were a shroud. Soon there was nothing left of him but his mummified figure, dark as death against the clear sky.

  All the while, the ground beneath them shattered.

  “How long do you think it’s going to take?” said Omid, who was openly crying now. “What do you think it’ll be like?”

  “I don’t know,” said Alizeh, her voice in shreds.

  She wiped at her tears with shaking hands, reminding herself over and over that the creature that would soon emerge from its dark cocoon was no one she knew.

  She would not be fooled.

  “Is it really over?” asked Huda, who was also fighting tears. “Is it all over? Has the book gone dark forever? Is the entire journey a wash?”

  “I don’t know,” said Hazan, who was staring, unflinching, at the dark wound in the sky.

  Alizeh’s priorities had swiftly reordered.

  She didn’t know how she could worry about her magic when the horrors of her life had only just begun. How could she think of anything beyond this moment, when the world as she knew it had extinguished? How could she wring her hands over a ticking clock, when her husband would soon be displaced by the devil?

  The ground she stood upon appeared to be fraying at the edges, separating into threads of color and light, yet she couldn’t bring herself to care. She’d be inhaled by this strange illusion before she moved an inch from where she stood.

  Her tears were alchemizing into rage.

  Suddenly, Deen gasped. “Look,” he said. “It’s happening—”

  By horrifying degrees, the black bandage around Cyrus’s dead body was unwound, and they all stood in amazement as an imitation of the southern king was slowly revealed.

  “Nothing in life can prepare you for such a moment,” said Kamran softly, his eyes focused on the spectacle.

  “No,” said Hazan.

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t admit it,” whispered Huda. “But I’m terrified.”

  “I’m often terrified, miss,” said Omid.

  “Me too,” said the prince.

  Huda looked up at him, surprised, though he didn’t turn to see it.

  Kamran had been deeply altered by Cyrus’s confession, and he’d seemed different in the aftermath. Heavier.

  In a moment that surprised everyone, Cyrus had thanked Kamran directly. “Were it not for your keen instincts and unrelenting insistence,” he’d said, “I might never have realized my error, and I might never have been able to issue these warnings. I should never have overlooked your judgment or dismissed your intelligence. I’m grateful, sincerely, for the gift of your sight when I was blind.”

  Kamran had been stunned.

  Now, he appeared both subdued and formidable, tense with a quiet fury. “I can’t believe we’re unarmed,” he murmured. “I’m nearly never without a weapon, except for now, when it matters most.”

  “It’s almost as if he planned it this way,” said Hazan bitterly.

  Like a falling star, Cyrus’s body lowered to the ground, and though the black ribbon had been unwound from his body and reduced to dust, he appeared, alarmingly, much the same. His eyes were still closed, his face still expressionless; he looked for all the world like the Cyrus they knew. Only when his feet hit the strange grass did he animate, his eyes flying open to reveal a pair of unnerving blue irises, similar and yet—somehow—entirely different.

  Alizeh drew breath and drew back.

  Iblees blinked a few times. At first his gaze was unfocused, then too high, too low, too far afield. It took him a moment to discern them, his neck hinging unnaturally as he searched, and when he did lock upon a face he seemed frustrated, discarding every discovery with a deepening frown until, finally, his eyes alighted upon the queen.

  The devil went still.

  Alizeh’s heart pounded painfully against her ribs.

  The devil stared at her awhile, canting his head as he studied her, and then he leaned forward, tilting badly, as if he didn’t understand how to draw the image of her closer. In fact, he didn’t seem to know how to articulate his body. The very weight of his head appeared to surprise him.

  He looked away sharply, as if to dislodge the issue, and then, realizing the obstruction was rooted to his neck, drew his hands up his jaw, feeling blindly for the problem. He paused in his inspection of Cyrus’s face to marvel at the soft, malleable shape of his ears, then grabbed a fistful of his copper hair in apparent confusion—and grimaced at what was, no doubt, a spike of pain. He then relinquished the hair to test out his foreign limbs, tensing his arms and then his fingers, examining himself in stages of slowly building delight.

  He made a sound, something like a laugh—and then recoiled, startled by the noise.

  Surprise widened the devil’s borrowed eyes.

  He touched his rented mouth with wonder, tracing the shape of his lips, then swept a finger along Cyrus’s straight teeth like one might the keys of a piano.

  Iblees smiled with disarming joy.

  Alizeh, whose heart was now racing at a dizzying pace within her, reminded herself that any trace of humanity evinced by the devil had been stolen from her husband. It was Cyrus’s skin, Cyrus’s smile, Cyrus’s impressions of happiness. She would not be tricked into believing for even a moment that there was anything but evil trapped in the figure of the man she’d married.

  Yet there was something horribly, morbidly fascinating about watching the devil discover he had not only a body, but limbs; not only limbs, but a face; not only a face, but a mouth; not only a mouth, but—

  A voice.

  “Hello?” he said, testing out the word with a surprising, childlike innocence.

  The six of them tensed.

  The devil looked up at the fraying sky, then the slowly rumbling, fracturing ground. The scene appeared to be disassembling like the pulled threads of a tapestry, curls of life spiraling away like so much yarn.

  Iblees frowned at the sight of it.

  “This seems like a bad sign,” he said, then stiffened, then burst into unrestrained laughter, the gasping sounds leaving his body in a stunning, uncontrollable tide. The action was so unlike the real Cyrus that it was suddenly quite easy to believe that they were facing off with an imposter.

  “I haven’t”—Iblees touched his mouth in wonder—“I haven’t spoken in regular sentences in so long! Can you imagine how infuriating it’s been to have to piece together rhyme after endless rhyme just to politely entice an idiot to ruin his own life?”

  He burst into raucous laughter again, and the six of them exchanged uncertain looks. It was impossible to form expectations of the devil, but certainly no one had expected him to laugh like a buffoon.

  It was Hazan who first stepped forward, drawing apart from the others. This small action attracted the devil’s notice at once, and he stopped laughing to inspect Hazan, canting his head in that same strange, inhuman way.

  “Whatever it is you seek,” said Hazan, “you will not find it here.”

  “Ah,” said the devil. “And you must be Hazan.”

  Hazan’s only outward reaction to this was the slight widening of his eyes. He did not respond.

 

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