The Jasad Heir

“Only two months ago, an Orbanian merchant illegally trading in Jasadi body parts was brought to your Supreme’s fair and just courts. He confessed to crushing and selling Jasadi bones to those eager to ingest traces of magic. His patrons, blessed with the brains of a goat flea, believed Jasadi remains were flush with health benefits. Your precious tribunal released the merchant with a warning and a hearty chuckle. He helped people eat Jasadis and walked free.”

When the soldier accuses Sylvia of being a Jasadi, he encourages her to surrender and face what he calls a “fair” trial. Sylvia responds with a specific example of injustice carried out against Jasadis. Citizens of the other kingdoms can murder Jasadis and consume their flesh and remain free, while Nizahl soldiers often murder Jasadis before they even reach the courtrooms of the Citadel.

“So many of Jasad’s customs had been adopted by the other kingdoms. Jasad’s food, art, traditions—pretty spoils of war for the circling scavengers.”

Cultural appropriation plays an important role in The Jasad Heir, as Sylvia often notes stolen Jasadi cultural touchstones that she finds throughout the other four kingdoms. The four kingdoms resented Jasad for its power, but they are happy enough to take its traditions and pass them off as their own. Sylvia criticizes this practice, using a metaphor to compare the other kingdoms scavengers such as vultures.

“The name Essiya brought darkness wherever it went.”

Sylvia struggles with her past identity and cannot even hear her old name without a visceral emotional reaction. When Rory reveals that he has always known who she is, Sylvia worries that the life she’s built in Mahair will crumble, that the “darkness” of her past will follow her into the present.

“Hanim had bled those memories from me. She left them gray, so everything to follow could be a dark, dripping red.”

Hanim’s treatment of Sylvia has lasting psychic ramifications. Sylvia once had positive memories of Jasad and her childhood, but her most vivid memories are of Essam Woods and the torture she endured. Sylvia uses synesthetic imagery to convey the pain of these memories, describing them as “a dark, dripping red.” This pain informs Sylvia’s worldview and makes her mistrustful of others, inspiring her to keep even Sefa and Marek at arm’s length.

“You mean exposing your savagery, Hanim said. Would they treat you the same if they knew you could snap a man’s neck without a thought?”

Though Hanim has been dead for five years, she haunts Sylvia, and Sylvia hears the darkest thoughts about herself through Hanim’s voice. This demonstrates Sylvia’s propensity for self-criticism and the drastic impact Hanim’s abuse had on her adolescent development.

“I was truly Niphran’s daughter. The madwoman in the tower births the madwoman of the woods. It would take less than nothing for him to block an attack. To plant his boot on my throat and press.”

When Arin and Sylvia fight, Sylvia connects herself to her mother. Both women are oppressed, Niphran by her own parents and Sylvia by a world that denigrates Jasadis. Niphran died unable to protect herself, and Sylvia wonders if a similar fate is her destiny, if she is “next to nothing” to Arin.

“He had trapped me in Essam just as Hanim had. Planned to use me, just as Hanim had. I wanted to laugh—who could have known the Nizahl Commander and the Qayida of Jasad had so much in common?”

In the tunnels beneath Essam Woods, Sylvia compares Hanim and Arin, both of whom intended to use her as a tool while robbing her of agency. Five years after killing Hanim for her freedom, Sylvia finds herself back where she began, but this time she’s a tool for the oppressive state that killed her family and razed her kingdom.

“Shame is a dangerous feeling to manipulate. Pull at the string too many times, and it will eventually snap into apathy.”

Sylvia reflects on the nature of shame and guilt in her conversation with Arin. Hanim uses shame as a tool to inspire Sylvia to access her magic and fight for a new Jasad. Hanim was clearly heavy-handed, as Sylvia struggles with apathy and despair throughout the first half of the novel, feeling helpless to improve the lives of the oppressed Jasadis.

“I hated every Nizahl soldier, but Vaun—Vaun represented a type I despised above all else. The kind of soldier who thrilled in the ounces of power the colors on his uniform lent him. The kind for whom inflicting misery was not a byproduct of necessity, but the purpose.”

Sylvia critiques the soldiers of the Nizahl army, as she’s had countless negative experiences with them. Power corrupts in the wrong hands, and Vaun is the epitome of a power-hungry soldier who delights in harming those he deems lesser than himself.

“The water rippled with my reflection. I tried not to linger, but the sight of my face still stung. The hollows beneath my eyes were darker than date pits. My hair hung in a lusterless braid down my back. The face of someone who had failed to fulfill a legacy of sacrifice.

As Sylvia washes her face, she finds anguish in her appearance. She criticizes herself for her “failure” to save Jasad, as she believes her destiny is to sacrifice herself for her kingdom, a sacrifice she remains unwilling to make.

“I was never anyone’s daughter. My father vanished from the world with an arrow in his throat, and my grandparents hurled Niphran into Bakir Tower when she sought to follow him.”

Sylvia effectively became an orphan as an infant, when Hanim began poisoning her mother, Niphran. As the text progresses, Sylvia finds that most relationships she’s forged have been with people who want to use her for her magic: Niyar and Palia attempt to mine her magic, Hanim tries to use her magic to reconquer Jasad, and Arin wants to use her magic to draw out the Mufsids and Urabi.

“I would die in the Alcalah as the Nizahl Champion. Meet my fallen family wearing the enemy’s colors.”

Sylvia’s emotional agony leading up to the Alcalah stems from her feelings of betrayal to Jasad. She agrees to represent the same country that destroyed her kingdom, and she worries the stain of that treachery will follow her into the afterlife, highlighting The Tension Between Personal Desire and Communal Obligation.

“What freedom is worth this? I thought, wild. Can I cut into my own soul and sell away the Jasadi pieces?”

Sylvia again wrestles with the idea of loyalty and identity, especially through the lens of individual survival versus collective duty. The Alcalah offers her the chance to be free from the past, but it requires her to turn her back on who she is and where she comes from.

“The drink was Jasadi in origin, but I wasn’t alarmed. After Jasad’s fall, the vultures had picked at Jasadi culture, tearing out the choicest bits for their own nests. I had seen the evidence in Mahair, watching bakers flip aish baladi into their ovens as though they had done it for generations.”

Sylvia again interrogates cultural appropriation through the simile of a vulture eating a carcass. Hashem specifically mentions “aish baladi,” an Egyptian flatbread, demonstrating Jasad’s narrative connection to her Egyptian cultural heritage.

“Your mind is a maze of mirrors, reflecting only the memories you choose to save. The best thing Malik Niyar and Malika Palia did for Jasad was putting you in those cuffs.”

Hashem suggests that Sylvia may be an unreliable narrator with this revelation from Soraya: Sylvia cannot even trust her own mind and her own perceptions of Jasad, making her naïve to Jasad’s, and her own, past shortcomings.

“You are right. You are not your father. Rawain is cruel by nature, but you?…You are cruel by choice.”

After saving his life in the Meridian Pass, Sylvia struggles with Arin’s lack of gratitude. She knows that Arin is a fairer, more just ruler than his father, but she levies the accusation of cruelty against him anyway, confident that it will sting.

“He was warm and strong, and he smelled like the rain that never fell in Ayume.”

Sylvia survives the first trial in the Ayume Forest, but the tree sap injures her. When she’s physically weakened, she lets herself become emotionally vulnerable and slowly realize that she’s developing feelings for Arin, who carries her away from the forest and its horrors.

“Grief. Rage. Fear. A pit of darkness fed my magic, and it chose which hand to help—and which to ignore. It cared for Jasad and for the ones I loved, but it would happily watch me scream beneath a beast’s gaping maw or Hanim’s whip without once stirring.”

Sylvia prioritizes her own survival over her communal duty, but her magic does not. Hanim tortured Sylvia for years, but Sylvia’s magic never stirred. Arin quickly discovers that her magic will activate to save Sefa and Marek, and Sylvia realizes that her magic springs forth also on behalf of Jasad, the country she tries unsuccessfully to leave in the past.

“The only part that originates from Omal is the audacity. Muqarnas date back to Jasad’s Awal. Rovial designed them for his kingdom. Each muqarna is meant to hold a small focal point of magic shining down on Jasad’s vulnerable. The dying came to heal under muqarnas, and the heartsick found peace.”

Muqarnas are a specific architectural ornament in Islamic art. Sylvia points out their Jasadi cultural heritage and healing properties while criticizing Omal for appropriating the custom without the necessary cultural context.

“What makes us any different? We are entering this village to kill and maim. In the measure of monster or man, what tips the scales?”

Sylvia questions the ethics of the second trial, and the lack of distinction between man and monster foreshadows Dawoud’s presence in Dar al Mansi. The other kingdoms accept a slaughtered Jasadi as a “trophy,” passing Sylvia through to the final trial, though Sylvia knows that Dawoud is a man, capable of love, warmth, and kindness, not a dangerous creature.

“Dawoud was Jasad to me. He was love and warmth and free compassion. I anchored his memory, fixing it to the inhospitable soil of my mind, and some piece of me sighed in relief.”

Sylvia grieves Dawoud, and she grieves Jasad. Instead of letting the memories slip from her mind, she “anchors” Dawoud within her mind and keeps his memory close, showing her continued growth in emotional vulnerability.

“You clung to me, and I held you right back. I had no choice, Essiya. My love for you could not outweigh what needed to be done…You would have grown into the image of every royal who had come before you.”

Soraya reflects on her love for Sylvia before trying to kill her, but Soraya accepts that duty outweighs love. Soraya believes she must kill Sylvia to create a new Jasad, and regardless of her feelings, that obligation must come to fruition. Soraya values her communal obligation to the Mufsids’ original mission above all else.

“The Supreme ran in, and just as the room warped, I could have sworn the colors in his scepter began to swirl.”

In Soraya’s vision of her attack on Arin, Sylvia sees the scepter, the symbol of Rawain’s power, moving. This detail is mysterious, as Rawain supposedly cannot access magic, yet the item he keeps with him constantly seems imbued with magic, foreshadowing future developments in the series.