“No,” said Hazan, “though I did ask, then, if any of them knew why he wore black all the time, and the housekeeper said he’d once told her that he was in mourning.”
“What?” Alizeh looked at Cyrus. “In mourning for what?”
“Good God.” Cyrus pushed both hands through his hair.
“Hold a moment – this makes no sense,” said Kamran. “You were heir to the throne. How could your parents allow you to pursue a path to priesthood? No respectable kingdom would allow their firstborn to relinquish a duty to the empire –”
“Oh, also” – Huda lifted a finger – “and forgive me for being so blunt about it – but if you didn’t want to be king, why did you kill your father? You might’ve let him keep his crown if you weren’t keen to follow in his footsteps.”
“He’s not the firstborn, actually,” supplied Hazan. “He’s the spare. It turns out he has an older brother – though, interestingly, it was the one subject everyone refused to discuss –”
“I said,enough.” Cyrus was furious now. “This is why I don’t speak of it. This is why I detest talking to people. This is why I never host guests at the palace. I have no interest in explaining my life or my choices to anyone. I will not be interrogated,” he cried. “And I will not answer your questions.Leave me the hell alone.”
Everyone fell suddenly, deathly silent.
Cyrus’s anger was as palpable as the weight of magic in the air, and Alizeh was distraught as she looked at him. It changed nothing to know these things, and yet, somehow, it changed everything. She longed to know what’d happened – what had shifted in his life to bring him to this moment?
How had he gone from the Diviners to the devil?
Cyrus was fighting to regain his composure. “I’m sick of talking. I’m tired of delaying. I want this wretched night to end.Now.”
Hazan, who appeared uncharacteristically chastened, said quietly, “Let us carry on, then.”
But Alizeh could not be calm. How was she meant to live like this, always at the edge of a precipice? She needed more information, needed to understand – yet Cyrus would not reveal his secrets, and she certainly couldn’t force him to speak. She only felt, with greater conviction every minute, a burning suspicion that he was not as villainous as he wanted the world to think he was, and this was enough to drive her mad.
“Cyrus,” she said desperately, “I’m so sorry.”
He looked at her, then looked away, his voice rough as he said, “Why are you sorry?”
“I don’t know.” For some unfathomable reason, she felt close to tears. “I just know that I am.”
He lifted his head, meeting her eyes for a moment with unguarded anguish, and she glimpsed inside him then what she’d seen once before: a staggering, breathtaking grief.
A moment of truth, there – then gone.
Alizeh’s heart broke when he looked away from her, and she watched, spellbound, as he tugged up his shirtsleeves to reveal powerful forearms, his golden skin dusted with fine, copper hair. He closed his eyes and held out his hands, palms up, and soon there came a spine-chilling sound, like a skitter of insects, as a skin of darkness formed slowly along the ceiling.
“Wait – what are you doing?” Kamran asked, alarmed.
Cyrus threw up his arm and, in a move that seemed to require sheer physical strength, he dragged the heaving black shadow down the wall. The strain of this exertion was evident in the lines of his face, the veins in his neck. He pulled at this skin until it finally fell into place beneath their feet, and when it did, Alizeh felt the world tilt.
Then she heard Cyrus scream.
THIRTY-TWO
AT FIRST, ALIZEH THOUGHT SHE’Dgone blind.
Darkness had consumed her eyes, her mouth, filled her nose and throat and seared her lungs. She was drowning, she couldn’t breathe, she could hardly find the strength to make a sound beyond a whimper. She tried to tell herself it was a trick, that her fear of the dark lived only in her mind, but there was no reasoning with the illogical, and Alizeh was soon convinced she would die here, compressed by the weight of the universe just as her ancestors once were, left to wilt and wither without light, without warmth –
She drew a desperate, gasping breath as the dark suddenly drew back and the room returned, the fire crackling in the hearth. Alizeh was doubled over, one hand pressed to her chest as she tried to calm the clamor of her heart, when she heard Huda say, in a horrified whisper –
“Is this black magic?”
Very slowly, Alizeh looked up.
Cyrus hung in the air unclothed, naked save a shroud that coiled around his body like a ribbon, so dark it appeared almost to sever him in pieces, choking his throat, his arms, part of his torso, and his hips – the magic sparing him a modicum of privacy.
Alizeh fell back, aghast.
