At last he said, “If you are successful, I will consider clemency for your family. Butnotfor the Lord Enchanter.”
“I’ll need the pouch your men took from me,” I said, pushing forward. “Everything inside will aid me with the enchantment. And I’ll need fabric enough to make a new set of robes.”
“A cloak,” he decided. “You will enchant a cloak for me. Have it ready by dawn. If it is not, I will have a seamstress killed for every hour longer it takes.”
The doors slammed shut behind him. Minutes later, a guard barged into my room and threw my pouch at my feet.
When I looked inside, all I glimpsed was my scissors and my sketchbook. Panic rose in me, until I turned the pouch’s soft leather inside out. The meteorite dagger tumbled out, along with my carpet, the mirror, and Edan’s flute.
I hugged the pouch to my chest, sighing with relief.
I’d barely returned everything into the pouch when one of the older seamstresses arrived. Her back was hunched as if it’d been recently whipped, and she wouldn’t look at me.
In her arms was a bundle of material and threads with which I was to make His Majesty’s garment.
“I’m sorry,” I wanted to say before she left, but the words wouldn’t part from my lips.
I worked through the afternoon, fashioning a cloak with a gold-inlaid hood, then embroidering a dragon onto the back of the garment.
But how to restore the emperor’s former glory to him? I did not have any more magic from my journey—no more tears of the moon or laughter of the sun—to weave into the garment.
Even my scissors would conjure no magic on his behalf.
“Amana, help me,” I whispered, praying over and over.
She did not heed my plea. My plight, to sew an enchanted cloak for the emperor, was not one worthy of the mother goddess’s attentions. The pendant around my neck remained still, the dresses silent.
Even my scissors did not hum. What was I to do?
You know precisely what magic will bring the power you need to restore Khanujin.
My head snapped up. I reached for my meteorite dagger, raising it at the shadows slinking across the floor. I half expected to see Bandur there, his laugh echoing against the walls.
But there was no one. No one but the demon inside me.
My fingers tightened around the dagger’s hilt.
“Jinn,” I whispered. The veins of meteorite on the blade gleamed to life. As before, touching the stone edge stung. But this time, the blade was warm instead of cool. This time, my fingertips flinched at the pain—as if tiny thorns had bitten them.
I studied the double-edged weapon, stroking the iron half, then touching the meteorite side and laying my fingers flat against the stone.
“Don’t use the amulet,”Edan had warned me.“The more you rely on its magic, the harder it will become for you to resist the change.”
But if I didn’t, the shansen would win. A’landi would belost.
Had Lady Sarnai stayed, things would be different. But it was left to me. I had to fight the shansen alone.
“I have to protect A’landi,” I murmured to myself.
My pendant thrummed against my chest, its light writhing and boiling as if Amana’s children within—the sun, the moon, and the stars—sensed that I was trying to summon a demon.
I removed the pendant from my neck and set it on the ground. My body gave a sudden heave, my pulse quickening as Amana’s strength left me.
I wrapped my hand around the sharp edge of the blade and whispered, “Edan, forgive me.”
A hot flash of pain cut off my breath. I opened my hand slowly, taking in the thin line of blood arcing across my palm. The color was bright against my skin, but as it seeped out of the wound into the loose lines of my palm and settled there, it darkened like black ink.
Demon’s blood.
