It wasn’t possible that it came from her.
And yet, there in the center, the threads of yellow light pouring out of her like a river, stood the girl.
Yaseema.
They curled around her dark hair, kissed the curves of her hips, and stroked her legs. If I didn’t know better, I would say they were alive. They were like Baghisha’s hair, like the current of the River, like the vines that I called to me.
They were magic.
“Anything here? Keep looking.” She muttered the words, unaware that I watched her.
This girl was no human.
As far as I knew, humans didn’t have magic of any sort. Some had even worshipped peris, building temples in our honor, awed by the power we possessed.
But this girl had magic flooding from her fingertips.
It wasn’t like any power I’d seen, not in all the peri courts. Certainly not from the Court of Salt, where their power sucked out and drained life, mimicking the power of others, growing poison and stealing language instead of bringing life.
But this girl talked to her magic, followed it, studied it as it whipped around the stacks of books. One by one the threads of her power began to disappear, as she looked at various manuscripts and parchment scrolls in the library. I stayed in the shadows, watching as the light in the room slowly winked out.
When the last golden wisp of her magic faded, the final glow of gold highlighted a tear streaking down her cheek. I stepped back fully into the hallway, not wanting to listen to her sobs as I headed back to my office.
She was looking for something, was so desperate to find it that she wept when she didn’t.
And the more I watched her with her magic, and listened to the words she spoke, I realized what it was her magic did.
It helped her find things.
If she had the power to locate lost objects, that would explain how she wore the Queen’s bracelet when I’d first seen her. And if she could find hidden objects, she was much more useful than I’d ever imagined.
Chapter 19
I’m worried for Yaseema. And I’m worried for you. Every time they string up another rebel in the square, I cannot bear to look. Sometimes they make us march past them, and though I don’t raise my head, their bodies dangle in the wind, their bloodied legs the only glimpses of the people they once were.
Sometimes I worry that it’s your feet I see.
—Excerpt from correspondence from Mahira Nazir to Zimran Nazir, contained in Mahira Nazir’s journal
Yaseema
The next few days were the same—me doing whatever chores Zafreen gave me, and not finding much time to search the palace for any clues to the Queen’s lost crown. I’d searched for the jasmine flower, any mention of Azari or the ancient fae, maps, books, archives, anything that would give me a clue to where it would be.
Ramishah gave me more information about the peris and every new thing she unwittingly revealed made me increasingly aware of how foreign this all was to me.
For one, they never seemed to refer to themselves as fae, and I realized it was because that was a name humans, and more specifically the Empire had given them. My mother’s journal gave clues to how brutal the fae were, but the soldiers from the other Court—the Court of Salt—seemed similar to the soldiers from the Citadel in their cruelty.
I guess invading powers were the same, no matter what world I was in.
From what I gathered from Mishah, there were six fae Courts, and the Court of Salt to the west had found a magic that had allowed them to invade the Court of River and take over. One of their high ranking leaders was now living in the Court of River and had called himself the “Viceroy”. He was the one who wielded a type of magic that had limited all the power of the Court of River so they couldn’t properly fight against him.
The magic here was the thing that most interested me, especially given that I had only ever known my own. Mishah talking about ancient fae King’s crown that had stolen the power from the Court of River reminded me of what the Empress had done to Astola in the human world—draining our life magic so that we weakened with every fae object she unearthed.
And here they used their powers openly, as part of their everyday life.
I nearly jumped out of my skin when Mishah lit a fire with just her hands, the flames sparking out of her fingertips like a gas lamp.
And if that was with theirlimitedpower, I couldn’t imagine what could be done if they were at full capacity.
