She looked up at me, pushing the tangled hair from her eyes with a dirty hand. “Yeah, me too.”
But there was more to this story. Souma had betrayed Vahid, andI knew as well as anyone what happened when you were accused of betraying the emperor.
“You said Souma hid zoraat from the emperor? That he stole from him?” I ran through the implications of that. I had been thrown into a cell to rot, but I hadn’t stolen djinn power from the emperor. “I’m surprised Vahid didn’t destroy Souma’s entire family.”
Noor was silent for a moment, and I didn’t expect her to respond. “Oh, he did. Vahid was furious. All Souma’s sons were executed, and anyone connected with Souma was sent here and tortured for information on where the zoraat was hidden. As you can imagine, Thohfsa loved that.”
Her voice was bitter and I thought about what that must have been like for her. At least I knew that my father was still alive and waiting for me. Everyone Noor had known was gone.
I chipped away at the hard packed earth and was thankful that I was the one rotting in prison and not my father.
But if Souma had hidden zoraat, did Noor know about it? And if she did, would she go back to claim it?
Access to magic like that was worth more than just breaking out of here. It was complete freedom. It was the power to go anywhere, be anything you wanted. I could escape with my father, away from the emperor, away from Maz.
But something dark and rotten answered inside me.
Did I really want to run away from Mazin?
Did I want to run?
Or make him burn?
I gave Noor a sidelong glance. She hadn’t said if Vahid had recovered his missing djinn magic. Which meant she might just know where it was.
“Everyone you know is gone,” I said, breaking a particularly large stone free from the earth and handing it back to her. “And Vahid killed Souma. So, what willyoudo when you break out of here?”
She’d asked me this question, but hadn’t shared her own answer.It was enough to simply want free of this place, I supposed, but she dug the stones away with fire in her veins, just as I did. This wasn’t only about freedom, like my motivation wasn’t just getting to my father. We both had something we hadn’t wanted to confess, because confessing it meant acknowledging it.
Noor held the rock, the shadows staining her expression, making her appear more ominous than usual. She was a small girl, with a pointed chin and a mop of dark curls, but now she appeared more like a vengeful ghoul than when she’d first burst into my chamber.
“I suppose you could say I’m a loyal person,” she said quietly. “And I believe that Souma deserves justice.”
“And are you the person to mete that justice out?” I asked, wondering if that same need flooded through my veins.
But justice seemed more noble than what I wanted. Admirable. What I wanted from the people who betrayed me wasn’t admirable.
Not when I pictured the dagger that would tear through Mazin’s heart.
But even I had a greater reason to want justice than she did. Noor was an orphan, beholden to no one. It wasn’t she who was accused of treason, it wasn’t her own name she had to clear. It seemed odd she would focus so much on the injustice done to the man who had simply taken her in.
“I am.” Her voice was gravel hard. “If not me, there isn’t anyone else left.”
“How?” I asked, the word curling between us like an incantation. “How would you get justice?” We both knew I was asking something much larger than the mechanics of a strategy.
How can one take down an empire?
Vahid had done it with the power of the djinn by his side. Could it could be done again?
She hesitated, her response catching in her throat. “I have a plan.”
There was no doubt in my mind that plan involved djinn magicand a stolen treasure Thohfsa had been trying to torture out of people for three years. And if Noor had access to that treasure, perhaps I could as well.
Coupled with the possibility of escape, I felt hope bubbling in my chest.
But having that small kernel of hope was a dangerous thing, because if I lost it, then the despair might finally overtake me.
That much I knew from the past year.
