He dragged a hand down his mouth.They’d be torn apart.
All this ran through his mind in moments, and he was returned to the present by the sound of a terrible whimper. Sarra had begun to pace.
“Heaven help us,” she cried. “If they find out she’s been injured –”
“Yes.” Hazan had sobered a great deal. “This is grim, indeed.”
“And you say you don’t even know where she is? She’s injured and gone? If shedies–”
“She won’t die,” Hazan said harshly.
“Cyrus sent her off on the back of a dragon,” said Kamran. “The king is the only one who knows where she went, and as he is currently indisposed, we have no way of knowing what he did with her.”
At that, Sarra regained a flicker of her edge, her anger. “So she did not fall off a cliff anddisappear. My son sent the injured girl away.”
Kamran narrowed his eyes at her tone. “Indeed.”
“And yet you say you have no way of knowing what he did with her? Is your imagination truly so colorless?”
“I am not a mind reader, ma’am.”
“And you,” she said to Hazan. “What of you? Can you envisage no other explanation for his actions?”
Hazan stared at her with renewed concern. “You think he used dark magic on her? Or perhaps poisoned her?”
Sarra looked almost disappointed in Hazan then, shaking her head as she said, “Your every theory assumes as fact that he intends her harm. You’ve done a poor character study of my son.”
“I disagree,” Hazan replied, his concern displaced by anger. “King Cyrus has proven nothing but violent, aggressive, murderous, and manipulative. In a single night he slaughtered the king of Ardunia and an entire halo of Diviners, and this isn’t even mentioning the destruction he left in his wake, having half destroyed one of the oldest palaces in history by allowing a dragon to –”
“Yes, all right,” she said with a sigh. “I suppose you’re not wrong to draw such conclusions. I confess, at first, I thought he meant to hurt the girl as well. But I no longer believe he’d cause her suffering. Not on purpose, anyway.”
“What do you mean?” Kamran sharpened. “How can you be sure?”
Sarra opened her mouth to respond, then appeared to think better of it, saying only: “Have you never seen the way he looks at her?”
“No,” he said, his mood darkening. “In fact I have not.”
She offered a brittle smile. “Well. I suppose you’ll see for yourself soon enough.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Sarra looked at Kamran then as if he were not the impending heir to the largest empire on earth but an idiot child. “I’d bet my life,” she said, turning her eyes to Hazan, “that he’s entrusted one of his blasted dragons to help her. If the girl were badly injured, there’s only one place he’d –”
“The Diviners,” Hazan said. “Of course.”
“Really?” Huda frowned. “You really think he was trying to help her?”
Omid rubbed at his tearstained cheeks. “Iwaswondering, miss, why he was hugging her so much. Seemed like an awful lot of hugging for people who don’t like each other.”
“He was hugging her?” Huda’s eyes went wide.
“He washoldingher,” Deen corrected. “Probably to keep her from falling off the dragon. Though” – he hesitated – “I suppose if he did mean for her to die, he could’ve simply let her tumble into the ocean?”
Kamran felt himself growing angry, and he couldn’t articulate why. He didn’t realize that what he felt was a warped jealousy, his mind recoiling from the idea thathe’dbeen the one to hurt her, that Cyrus might’ve been the one to save her. And it was with undiluted venom that he said, “If his intention was to help her, why send her off alone? Why not deliver her to the Diviners himself?”
Omid made a face. “And why did he ask her to marry him if all he wanted was to kill her?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Huda, “but my parents have been married nearly thirty years and Mother is all the time going on about how much she’d like to kill Father, and in fact I worry, sometimes, that he doesn’t seem to take her seriously –”
