The Library of Amorlin

Chapter 1 Kasira

KASIRA

KASIRA SWORE TWO OATHS THE DAY SHE JOINED THE MALIKINAR: the first to her unit, to slay any beast she laid eyes on; and the other to herself, that she would survive.

She never thought it would be so damn hard.

The darkness of the Isherwood yawned around her, an assemblage of crooked branches and ink-green leaves tipped in barbs as fine as bone dust. The swampy forest ringed nearly seventy percent of Kalthos’s borders, its depths densely populated with the continent’s most dangerous beasts.

Her boots sank into the wet earth with every step, her hand curled around the hilt of the vylor blade on her back.

She had split off from the main body of her unit several paces back.

Though every Malik was an elite beast slayer, their talent lay in their brutal skill with a sword, not the silence with which they stepped, and the Alkatir they hunted would hear them coming.

She didn’t want to be there when the beasts struck.

“Kas!” hissed a voice, and she slowed as Revna picked her way through the brush.

Her friend tore free of a vine with a curse, and Kasira flinched, listening for the sound of paws in the undergrowth.

It was quiet. The small clearing they occupied could have been another world for how silent it was, how still.

The Isherwood had a way of swallowing sound. No one ever heard you scream.

It reminded her of her prison cell.

“What are you doing out here?” Revna demanded.

“Hunting.”

“You’re breaking procedure. Again.”

Kasira gave her a knowing look, and her friend glowered firmly back.

Revna’s scarlet curls were tied back with a strip of leather taken from a Tyver beast she’d slain when she joined the Malikinar, and her alabaster skin was covered in a thin sheen of sweat.

The close canopy of trees sealed out the sun but did nothing to temper the heat, and Kasira felt the same dampness on her brow.

She loathed the humid weather, loathed the scrape of her black fighting leathers against her clammy skin, and the weight of the sword across her back.

Each one was a reminder that her life was no longer her own, and she carried them like stones through a river, waiting for the day they dragged her under.

Revna lifted her chin. “They’re going to think you’re a coward. They don’t need another reason to hate you, Kas.”

“I kill more beasts than any of them.”

“That’s not the problem.” Revna eyed her sidelong, a sign she was about to say something sensitive. “You never take a drenga, and you don’t celebrate your kills. It doesn’t matter how many you slay when half the unit’s convinced you’re a beast sympathizer.”

Kasira didn’t respond to the unasked question buried in her friend’s words: Are you?

She killed because it was her job. Because if she didn’t, she would be sent back to Belvar, back to darkness so thick it suffocated, to a four-by-four cell she could barely stand up in, and the scritch, scritch, scritch of distant claws.

“Kas? Kas!”

Kasira stared down at the hand on her arm, coming back to herself in pieces. The concern on Revna’s face only sickened her. She jerked her arm free. “I’m fine.”

Revna’s verdant gaze betrayed her doubt. “I’m worried about you.”

Kasira withheld a derisive snort. What Revna really meant was that she was worried about Kasira’s soul. But what use was a soul if it could not be sold for a hot meal, nor burned on a cold night to stave off winter’s chill?

She could only afford to worry about one life at a time.

“I’m fine,” she said again. It was the simplest and yet most necessary lie she ever told. In the cold and quiet of her cell, those two words had kept her alive.

Revna didn’t get the chance to argue as a scream tore through the trees, followed by the resonating roar of an Alkatir.

“You’re welcome,” Kasira said simply, then dove into the woods.

They found their unit under siege in a nearby glade.

The Alkatir had doubled back behind the Malik, and though small in number, the beasts more than made up for it in size and ferocity.

With feline bodies, hawkish heads, and wings powerful enough to carry twice their weight, the Alkatir had only to throw their bodies into the Malik to crush bone, or else rend them with wicked claws.

Anyone else would have collapsed beneath the onslaught already, but the Malik were not ordinary soldiers.

Their rigorous training and constant battles honed them to perfection, into legends the other nations feared, until even Kasira had begun to wonder if they were truly blessed with a piece of Haidra’s light.

Drawing her blade, Kasira fell in alongside Revna at the Alkatirs’ flank, cutting and hacking at white-furred limbs.

The Alkatir fell with pained bellows, and she silenced them with strikes to their throats, ensuring a swift death.

Their attack from the rear split the pride in two, and the unit surrounded the beasts, cutting off their escape.

Kasira turned from felling one to find an injured female hunched low to the ground.

The Alkatir swiped at her with claws coated in gore.

Kasira dodged, bringing her blade down along its flank.

It was a poor swing, barely grazing flesh.

The beast could have easily escaped, but it stayed where it was, snarling. Her next strike didn’t miss.

As the Alkatir’s body crumpled to the dirt, she realized why it hadn’t moved. A downy cub cowered behind its mother’s corpse, one golden eye slashed to a bloody pulp. Kasira’s sword came forward on instinct, but she stopped with the blade raised, unable to look away from the terrified cub.

She ought to kill it. The position of Malik was sacred.

As Haidra’s chosen, only they could touch a beast without corrupting their souls.

Only they were blessed to kill, and Kasira had tempted the goddess’s ire enough for one lifetime.

Yet she didn’t move. Like an ember coaxed back to life, some long-smothered part of herself stayed Kasira’s hand, and she only watched as the cub darted into the safety of the woods.

Only then did she notice the silence of the battlefield. The last of the Alkatir were dead or had escaped, and the few injured Malik were being tended by the second unit’s medics.

Everyone else’s eyes were on her.

“I saw that, criminal.” Commander Dessen’s voice slithered into her ear. “You let it go.”

She turned a fraction, taking in the Commander’s roving eyes and the grip of his thin fingers on the coiled whip at his side.

Even surrounded by a unit of fully trained Malik, he looked a step away from pissing himself at being this deep in the woods.

How a man like him had risen through the ranks she didn’t know, but power rarely went to those who deserved it.

“She wasn’t here when they attacked, Commander,” said Jevin, a thin-faced man with the bearing of a rat. “She probably drew them here herself. The Kott can’t be trusted.”

“Beast sympathizer,” murmured someone at her back.

Revna started to intervene, but Kasira warned her off with a look. This was not the sort of thing her friend could fix with a brash word and a strong fist.

“Well?” Commander Dessen knew full well she couldn’t provide a suitable explanation.

Though he had only been assigned to the Fifth Battalion two months prior, his eyes had followed her from the start.

As a convicted criminal in the work-release program, being in Dessen’s good graces was the only thing keeping her out of a windowless cell, and he enjoyed exercising that power.

She would have to do something about him soon.

Commander Dessen’s voice rose to address the others. “The entire unit will take the Kott’s cleanup responsibilities for today’s kill as reward for the criminal’s mercy.”

A vicious murmur circled through the clearing, and the back of Kasira’s neck prickled with the press of angry eyes. She knew what Dessen was doing: letting her escape punishment, disbursing the consequences across the unit. He wanted to isolate her, to leave her with no one to turn to but him.

There was a time when Kasira would have relished that challenge, when she would have discerned all of Commander Dessen’s strings and delighted in learning to play them. Now, her mind ran through cons like a wounded beast fleeing her sword—it just hadn’t realized it was dead yet.

The unit split into groups, some to guard the perimeter, others to haul the Alkatir corpses into a pile.

The beasts would be burned with the morning sun, the sins that led to their births disintegrating into ash by the grace of Haidra’s light, and tomorrow the unit would seek its next kill.

One by one, until every beast, every sin, had been eliminated in the goddess’s name.

Kasira made for the nearest corpse—the young mother she had killed—and dragged its body to the pile.

She gave the beast a final shove, and it collapsed upon its fellows, one golden eye staring up at her.

Alive, the Alkatir were elegant, powerful creatures.

In death, they looked impossibly fragile, gleaming with silver blood.

She worked in silence, refusing to let Revna catch her eye.

It wasn’t long before the air grew thick with the scent of rot, the gathering evening breeze doing little to allay the damaging autumn sun.

The scent clogged her throat and nose, her muscles aching down to the bone.

Others were already searching the corpses for drenga.

Curved three-inch claws, silver feathers, snow-white fur—whatever part of the beasts they desired to tie to their leathers as a token of their kill.

Kasira took nothing.