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An immortal life, one without Kiran, flashes before my eyes. Seasons and years and decades without him, watching Dinah and my father and Kiran die, while I continued unending. I can’t seem to breathe, and for the first time, I recognize just what Kiran had been holding in for over a year.
“I didn’t make you immortal, Asha. I’m not sure that I could have. The way it was explained to me, that kind of magic loses some of its potency when it’s transferred, and that’s when the recipient is alive. The power it took to bring you back…” He lets out a shudder, but he smiles through it all the same. “You’re not immortal, I promise.”
Now it’s my tears wetting my cheek. “But you’re not either? You gave it to me?”
My heart pounds in my chest. So strange, after it was so mortally wounded.
“No. No, I don’t believe I am.”
I expect there to be sadness in his voice, a twinge of, if not regret, then at least loss.
Kiran’s voice holds no such thing.
Instead, his smile overtakes his face. “I guess we’re the same in that way.”
I won’t have to go on forever without you, is all his eyes say.
“I love you, Asha,” he says. “I don’t want immortality without you. I never did.”
“I love you, too,” I say, “which is why I’m slightly annoyed you ever considered taking your father’s advice.” I jab him in the chest, but it’s a fairly weak assault, given my arms still feel like jelly.
“You’re a fool if you think you’ll live another day,” says a voice behind us, one that reminds me that Kiran and I are not alone in this room.
Kiran looks toward the sky as if it’s taking everything in him not to tear Az’s head from his body for having the audacity to speak at this moment.
I go to prop myself up, so I can look Az in the face. My arms tremble with weakness, but with Kiran’s help, I get myself sitting upright.
Across the room, Blaise holds both of Az’s bound wrists in her grasp. His hands are turning purple. She doesn’t bother holding a blade to his throat, but her teeth are bared, which I figure is practically the same thing.
Hopefully, she won’t decide to release him on a whim or an empty promise.
“Put him down,” Az spits at the guards, nodding toward Kiran. “Or have you forgotten? The guards are sworn to me.”
Fear swells in my chest. “Az, please,” I whisper, but the guards don’t move.
“Fools, you’ll die by your oath if you don’t obey.”
“That’s all right with us,” says the guard to the left, just before he spits on Az.
Gratitude swells in my heart for these guards, who both look at me and nod. “Your kindness to us has not gone unrepaid,” says the other.
Then he clenches his teeth, preparing to die.
He doesn’t.
Both guards blink, but nothing happens.
“Yes, about that,” says another voice, one that pricks my belly with the pang of betrayal. Out from behind the corner steps the vizier, a scroll unwound in his hands.
“They’re sworn to me,” Az insists, though his confidence seems to falter as he looks toward the vizier.
“They were sworn to you,” corrects the vizier, branching the scroll and clearing his throat again.
Kiran’s gaze latches on the wax seal, his emblem.
“I, King Kiran of Naenden,” reads the vizier, “hereby declare that females now be eligible to claim the throne of Naenden, if such is their birthright.”
My husband lets out an exasperated laugh.
