Chapter Fifty-Three: Runaway Blaze

The sounds of the duel died away. Osmund stole a look. Bayram and Cemil, both panting with exertion, stared back.

“You?!” Bayram roared.

Cemil said nothing. Lowering his scimitar, he set off in Osmund’s direction.

“S-stay back!” Osmund yelled at them, opposing Zeyni with all his strength. “Run! Don’t come near!”

He felt it then: the weapon’s pull. Tugging. Consuming. The first embers of a runaway blaze.

Zeyni released her hold, body crumpling, limp as an abandoned doll. But it was too late to reverse what she’d started. In his trembling grip Osmund held the sword, whose scabbard was already burning to ashes and swirling apart in the rising current. The hilt felt fused to his skin; he couldn’t loose his grip for all his trying.

“Osmund.” It was Cemil, why had he come, what was he doing fighting his way so close? “What is…?”

“Please, lead everyone away from here.” The Meskato prince had to feel that wrongness in his bloodstream, had to know the danger that was clawing its way free. “This is what they were making from that wyrm, and the gryphons…!”

His knees started to fail, and if not for the solid presence of Cemil instantly beside him, he would’ve collapsed, too. “What are you doing,” Osmund despaired. “Let go!”

“You’ve done this once before,” said Cemil’s voice near his ear. He sounded afraid, but he wasn’t standing down. “Defy it.”

Osmund nearly laughed, except the breath was snatched directly out of his lungs. He choked and gasped, fighting for air. With his shoulder, he tried to push the other man away. “It’s too much,” he cried. “I can’t!”

But Cemil was unmoving at Osmund’s back, strong arms linking them together, in body and in fate. Why was he so stubborn? It was the duty of princes to live, just like it was the duty of others to die in their stead. Osmund understood that fact, as innately as he knew he wasn’t born to be a prince.

“You can.” Cemil’s tone was unyielding, not betrayed by the slightest waver of confidence. “Because I’m depending on you.”

The tortured soul in the shamshir was roaring to life, whistling its insatiable hunger. Osmund couldn’t pull in enough desperate air to beg Cemil again to run, to try and save himself for the good of his people if no other argument would move him. At the same time he almost felt like laughing again.

It struck him suddenly as so—storybook naïve. How could someone who intended to be emperor not accept the inevitability of sacrifice? Of having to watch people he loved die?

…Or, did Cemil really believe that Osmund could save him? Could save them all?

He remembered the chasm. That memory—the courtyard. Himself, six years old again, and Cemil, steadfast in the present, racing to save him.

Emre’s words. A very deep wellspring of magical power.

Osmund fought to get both hands on the hilt, seized by a sudden fever. Take it, he thought furiously. If it’s magic you want, take it!

That endless void inside him gaped its maw wide. In his mind’s eye he saw it, that deep, swirling abyss of potential, his would-be birthright, a place locked off to him by fate’s cruel design. Take as much as you want—I don’t need it!

He was in the gryphon’s claws, his stomach churning as the world hurtled by. He was drowning, suffocating beneath his own submerging consciousness. And throughout it all, Cemil, keeping him upright. Not letting him go.

Jump. All that mattered was life, and who he’d chosen to share it with.

Everything popped. He burst out of himself, lungs heaving, air filling his lungs again. His hands were empty, the skin of his palms whole and unblemished.

And on the ground, in pieces, it lay.

Osmund blinked furiously to make sense of the world again. He hadn’t moved a foot out of place, yet the vertigo of a great drop was clearing away. All around he saw dazed and fallen soldiers, struggling to their feet.

“Osmund?” he heard, so close.

“I’m sorry,” was what burst out of him in a tide. “I’m sorry I left you alone.”

But there was no time to spill his heart now. Movement. Bayram was advancing, sword levered high. Laying fuel onto his smoldering anger was the dawning realization that he’d been tricked—again. “Deceitful rat! That priceless weapon was mine!”

Osmund was too drained to plead his case. But he didn’t need to. “Your companions were the ones who betrayed you, Bayram,” Cemil appealed after easing Osmund carefully to the ground. “Stand down, and have your answers.”

But the elder prince’s rage was a ravenous storm. His eyes were locked on both Osmund and on Zeyni’s heaped form beside him, murderous intent written over every twisted wrinkle of his expression. “This treachery must be punished. I’ll make up for your weakness,” he snarled to his brother.

Clang. The first strike was against steel. Cemil stood as a bulwark between them. “Stand down,” Cemil repeated. Everyone understood there would be no third time.

Yet Bayram did not stand down. The duel would continue anew. Osmund tensed in fear. What followed happened so fast, his eyes barely tracked it.

The elder prince had gone for a swing—too wide, too open. A brilliant red gash appeared in his side, and he stumbled forward, reeling from Cemil’s strike. In a frenzy came the yells and exultations of the soldiers.

“Accept your fate,” Cemil commanded, unassailable. “Surrender.”

But Bayram only spat at his feet. “Your men don’t know what you really are,” he snarled. “The truth that we pretend away because of our father’s taboo.”

He launched another reckless attack. Stray embers blew into the scattering crowd. But Cemil was simply too fast.

The next cut was deep. Bayram groaned, pain breaking over his features. “Then tell them who I ‘really’ am,” Cemil said coldly. “And keep in mind that’s who has just bested you.”

Bayram’s eyes burned with contempt. But Cemil had called his bluff. He couldn’t divulge his brother’s greatest secret if it meant lowering himself in defeat.

He made one more desperate swing instead. Osmund looked away at the moment of Cemil’s answer. He still heard the thump and Bayram’s anguished scream as flesh rended from bone.

Among the things healing magic alone couldn’t do: regrow something lost.

The elder prince’s howls echoed throughout the camp. Osmund kept his head angled to the ground. Then Cemil’s feet came into his view.

“Let me help you,” the Meskato prince said.

Osmund looked at his outstretched hand, spattered with fresh blood. Then up at Cemil’s face, haggard and tired, dripping with sweat. And he thanked the heavens for sending him such a welcome sight.

But there was still Zeyni, curled motionless in the dirt. Whether alive or dead remained unclear. “Take her,” Osmund said. “I can manage.”

Cemil’s gaze didn’t stray. Without a word, he nodded and gestured, and up came a soldier, kneeling down to scoop up the strange woman as effortlessly as if she’d been nothing but air. And so Cemil remained. Waiting for Osmund’s answer.

The Tolmishman stared at his offered hand, his imploring eyes. Let me be the one to help you stand, they said.

Osmund took his hand, and stood.

For now, at least, it was over.

Under Osmund’s direction, Cemil sent a party equipped with healers out to search for Emre. Meanwhile the soldiers in pursuit of Nadir and Lalezar started to trickle back empty-handed, unequipped as they were for a journey into the wilds. The two traitors were by now long gone.

Bayram had been confined to his tent under constant guard. Cemil had stopped his brother’s bleeding, but the lost arm was given to the fire. A vicious decision, except that it lessened Bayram’s own potential for viciousness. A prince couldn’t always choose mercy.

As for Zeyni, Cemil didn’t disguise the sinister truth. “She must have information about her fellows. They’re still a threat to the empire. Some way or another, we’ll get to it.”

“But she can’t even speak!”

Cemil looked past Osmund rather than meet his eye. “Even if it yields no results, we must try.”

“Try” here carried an overwhelming weight. Zeyni had been a former interrogator for the emperor. That meant that here, just as in Valcrest, torture was a tool wielded in the name of national security.

And so before Cemil’s allies, knives sharpened, could enter the tent, Osmund crept his way inside. This time he hadn’t even needed to be invisible—the soldiers didn’t blink an eye at his comings and goings anymore. Everyone assumed he had their prince’s blessing.

Hopefully—on some level—he did.

“Zeyni? he ventured, his shadow falling into the already-darkened space. “That’s your name, right?”

There was no response. Zeyni—Örümcek—the short-haired, long-faced girl, whoever she was—was kneeling on the floor, arms bound, expressionless. But it wasn’t the look of someone resigned to her fate.

It was like peering through glass. Emptiness.

He sat down beside her. “Do you know what’s going to happen to you?”

More silence. Not even a glance in his direction. “Did Lalezar ask you to sacrifice yourself?” he attempted again.

This time, a response, albeit not much of one. Her shoulders jerked with something like indignation. Briefly her eyes flicked over, then down once more.

If Lalezar had really been controlling Örümcek, she couldn’t have been controlling her now. Not at such distance, not with such precision. It was simple for an ambitious necromancer to raise an army and instruct them to attack the nearest stronghold, but anything more nuanced than that—anything that required individual control, stimulus followed by response—increased the strain a hundredfold. Another tidbit remembered from his lessons at the castle.

He noted the strange something in her shoulder. Though it shone, it was no weapon. A needle? he observed, trying to divine its shape and function. “She’s the one who did this,” he surmised, indicating it. “And it’s keeping you alive somehow.”

No reaction. But it also wasn’t a denial.

“You knew each other before your execution. You and Lalezar.”

As his eyes adjusted, details about the woman’s appearance began to register. Her carefully-trimmed hair. Her short, neat fingernails. Her clean face, despite her ghastly greyish complexion. They were inconsequential, small things, at least in isolation, but together they painted a picture. These weren’t the signs of someone unloved and unappreciated.

“You chose to use the sword on your own,” he breathed. “You didn’t want their plan to fail.”

“That’s right.”

Osmund’s whole body jolted, and his neck cramped from how fast he craned his head to follow the voice. How could it be…? But it was! Lalezar was in the tent with them!

Before he could ponder the how?! and the when?! of it, the familiar tingle of wrongness alerted him to the deception. “I would never order Zeyni to give up her life,” the illusion recited. “Not after all I’ve done to keep her here.”

Osmund stole a glance back at Zeyni again. This had to be an image of her own construction, something conjured from memory and imagination together. To the specter of Lalezar he said, “Why did you try and kill Bayram and Cemil and all those soldiers? Who were you working for?”

Only an aloof stare. Well—fair enough. It wasn’t like they were allies. Re-grouping, he asked, “How did you bring Zeyni back to life?”

“But she is alive. Look at her!”

Zeyni might not be fully dead. But at the same time, she wasn’t properly alive either. It was the same unnatural, in-between state he’d observed with the large gryphon. Necromancy—that is, the puppeteering of a corpse by imposing one’s own will—didn’t bring back the dead. It was a false life, an illusion just like those woven by dark mages. So what was this? And Lalezar—what was she?

“She struggled to let you go, didn’t she,” Osmund breathed, turning away to address the mage, and not her illusions. “She couldn’t accept that you were really gone.”

A glimmer. Tears had appeared on Zeyni’s cheeks again, even though corpses didn’t cry. “I don’t think Cemil’s soldiers understand what you are. They’re going to torture you. Can you endure that?”

The illusion of Lalezar stepped into his line of sight. “You have to free her,” it pleaded. “Please, have mercy. She needs me. I need her.”

“I can’t do that! We’re enemies. You tried to kill someone I love. And anyway…I’d get caught.”

“It’s your job, isn’t it—not letting your prince slip too far away?”

Osmund jolted. That’s right. She’d delved into his mind back in Kaliany. The reminder of what had once been a private moment stole away his breath. And it was the truth.

His actions here weren’t for her sake.

Again he turned to the ashen-faced girl. He knew already what he had to do—all that remained was to accept it. Her pale pink irises lifted and regarded him. Intrusive visions flooded his mind, memories laid bare that were not his own.

Two girls, underfoot and overlooked. Servants for an important family at the palace. Two nothings from nowhere, until suddenly, they weren’t.

Zeyni, as she once was: ebullient and giggling. Her friend, Lali, small and dour.

A mild-mannered master. Encouraging words for a budding mage. How had it all gone so wrong?

It’ll be okay. See? I can make him walk again.

No, no, Lali, you can’t. They’ll know!

Osmund shook his head, willing the visions away. He didn’t want to know, couldn’t carry it. But she was determined he bear witness.

Are you the ones who did this?! Two young girls? Killing a teacher from the Imperial Mages’ College—it’s a capital crime.

Lali didn’t do anything. It was all me. I’m the one with the powerful magic. She’s nobody. See? I’m a dark mage. She’s just a—

Oh, she had looked so betrayed. Why did you say that back there? Why did you take the blame for me? I’m not leaving without you!

It’s too late. You have to.

Then I’ll come back for you! I’ll raise an army if I have to!

You aren’t coming back. Listen, don’t you dare come back!

The whorl of images, confused and dreadful, dissolved before his eyes. It was all a mess, one memory bleeding into another like recollections often did, and though Osmund had seen a mere glimpse of their shared life, he’d grasped one thing clearly.

Lalezar had not come back in time. She was forever too late. A fact no amount of magic could undo.

Zeyni’s eyes traveled down to the implanted object in her shoulder. And he understood her meaning.

It was with her blessing that Osmund moved his hand to the site, and pulled.