Chapter 3 Kasira #2
“You want me to provide you with that evidence,” Kasira concluded.
Vera smiled. “If the Conclave votes in our favor, your mission will be considered complete. Should they not, I will escort you back to Belvar myself.”
THE ENTIRE BATTALION had gathered for the Burning.
Always executed at dawn with the rising of the light, the igniting of beast corpses was a holy event, the final step of a sin’s destruction.
Often presided over by prayers and followed by a small celebration, the responsibility of lighting the pyre was highly coveted.
But with the presence of the Paratal, who would set the flame himself, it had become something else entirely.
All eyes were on the beautiful boy standing before a mound of corpses, Ambassador Vera at his side.
Hands clasped in supplication or reached for him from afar, more than one Malik falling to their knees with their heads bowed.
The Paratal’s melodic voice carried easily over the crowd, enthralling whosever’s ears it reached.
“Haidra’s light burns brightly for us today,” he called. “You have won a great victory for the fate of our people, and it will not be forgotten.”
Kasira could too easily imagine that voice speaking to a crowd five, ten, twenty times this size. If she succeeded in bringing the Library under Kalish control, that was a future that could very well come to pass.
“Beasts are the manifestations of our sins, of evil,” the Paratal continued.
“But they are also proof of Haidra’s love for us.
They are the opportunity she gives us to redeem ourselves for our mistakes.
The chance to be worthy of a place by her side.
Why else would these creatures exist to harrow us?
Not just in punishment for our depravities, but as a chance for absolution! ”
The crowd cried out in response. The Paratal sounded just like every priest at the orphanage, corralling the children’s minds with beautiful words.
People wanted to be told that things were not their fault.
That their problems had simple solutions.
It was because of the beasts that your crops failed, because of them that your daughter grew sick.
Pray, and pray hard, and the goddess will hear you. The goddess will save you.
They never stopped to ask the price.
Kasira stood at the edge of the crowd, palming Loraya’s recovered hairpin in circles. In her other hand, she held the vylor knife she had taken from Revna. Her friend stood several rows in front of her, oblivious to the world about to shift beneath her feet.
“You will leave during the Burning,” Vera had told her before they had emerged from the tent. “It is important that your disappearance be recorded as desertion and that it be done when the Paratal and I are in full view of the public.”
Trackers would be dispatched to follow her, her unit interrogated, but no one would look any deeper. No one would ask why a criminal almost halfway through her sentence had run the morning the Paratal had visited her battalion.
Except Revna.
“She’ll be blamed,” Kasira had objected. Malik were responsible for their tentmates, and desertion was a crime punishable by death. They would press Revna for information and hang the responsibility for Kasira’s disappearance around her neck.
“Is that a problem?” Vera had asked, and Kasira hadn’t known how to answer.
Revna had been the log that kept her afloat these past years.
The only bright spot in an infinity of darkness.
She didn’t deserve what would happen to her, but people rarely did.
That had been Loraya’s first lesson about living on the streets: You took care of you.
In the end, it was Loraya’s failure to follow her own advice that had gotten her killed.
“Besides,” Vera continued lightly, “you involved her when you executed your little ruse with the Commander. It is either this, or I find another means of dealing with her.”
Kasira’s silence was her answer. She never had been good at planning for collateral damage. That had always been Loraya’s role. Kasira had just figured out how to get the job done.
The Ambassador regarded her with shrewd eyes. “How did you time it?”
“I knew Commander Dessen would try something eventually,” Kasira replied.
“I told Revna I was worried the Commander would try to blame the thefts on me in an attempt to control me and that I thought he was behind them. If she ever woke to find me gone, she was to tell the Lieutenant about the trunk, where I told her I suspected he had hidden the items.”
“But in truth, you had placed them there yourself,” Vera finished in a tone that piqued Kasira’s interest. This was a powerful member of the royal court with a storied political career, the King’s cousin, but she had a look in her eye that Kasira recognized: that of one who had to know how the trick worked.
Kasira would have to be very careful with her.
“You let me do it anyway …?” She trailed off in question.
Vera had shrugged one shoulder. “Fewer loose ends. Dessen is a drunken fool apt to wag his tongue, but no one will listen to the tall tales of a thief.”
It sounded reasonable, but it was likely only half the reason Vera hadn’t excluded Dessen from their meeting. Not only would it have looked suspicious for them to meet without the Commander present, but now Vera had taken everything from him, and only she had the power to return it.
It was a trick Thane had loved to use on new recruits, tearing them down so he could build them back up, ensuring they knew they owed everything they were to him.
It was shrewder than she had expected the Ambassador to be, and it had left Kasira wondering if she could have been like Vera had she been given everything instead of nothing.
The Paratal’s voice floated above the crowd in the call to prayer. The gathered soldiers chorused back, a hundred voices crying out Haidra’s name. The Paratal lifted his hands to indicate the start of prayer. All around her, heads bowed as one, and Kasira slipped into the Isherwood.
The trees spread about her in an impenetrable wall, only the moss on the trunks’ northern sides keeping her pointed in the right direction.
The Ambassador had promised a carriage would be waiting for her on the main road to deliver her to the Library.
It would feign a broken wheel to explain its presence, but it could only wait so long.
Kasira had two hours before it left, the amount of time Vera had estimated it would take.
Vera had never traversed the Isherwood on foot.
The sodden ground sucked at Kasira’s boots, trying to draw her down.
The leaves pressed together so tightly above her, she had fished a balestone out of her pocket to see and now clutched the glowing blue crystal in one fist. Every rustling leaf made her pause, every snapping twig drew her hand to Revna’s knife.
If she weren’t careful, this con would end before it even began.
Something shifted in the underbrush behind her. She went utterly still. A low, rattling keen whined across the clearing, and she almost laughed at her ill luck.
A Zeras.
It must have been attracted by the scent of Alkatir flesh on the wind.
The dangerous, oxlike beasts had grown rarer in recent years, their hides a coveted trophy for Malik to shape their leathers from, but they were still the fodder of many a Kalish nightmare.
Fueled by aggression and a constant hunger, they were the swiftest and strongest of beasts to haunt the Isherwood, known for the toxin in their tail that gradually killed their prey, keeping their quarry warm as they fed.
The keening came again, closer, and this time, Kasira had no choice—she ran.
The pounding of a two-ton beast thundering after her drove her faster, faster through the trees.
She chanced a look back, glimpsing rough, gray hide and the snapping of a serpentine tail.
She smothered the reflex to send Revna’s knife flying at its heart.
Only vylor steel could pierce a Zeras’s hide, but a knife that small would hardly damage it.
As she crested a small hill, she spotted a glimmer in the distance.
She broke toward it. Her boots struck damp earth, then shallow water, and she stumbled forward into the swamp.
Fighting to get her feet under her, she pressed deeper into the moss-laden water until she made it to the center, forced to tread water to stay afloat.
The Zeras paced at the swamp’s edge, tossing its horned head as its venom-barbed tail snapped angrily in the air. It stamped its clawed feet one final time then turned back the way it had come, huffing hot breath into the faint morning light.
Kasira stayed in the pool for several minutes until something scaly brushed her leg, and she could bear it no longer.
She swam to the edge and clambered out, cold and smelling of the swamp.
Her back stung, the wounds reopened from her flight, and she had gone drastically off course.
Valuable time spun away as she wrung out her clothes, but she couldn’t risk Briarbeetles; one bite, and the beasts’ venom would paralyze her.
Once dressed, she hurried on with a hand resting on Revna’s knife, ducking behind thick trunks when she heard movement or else drawing her blade at the flash of eyes. By the time she reached the main road, the carriage was trundling away.
“Wait!” she called.
One of the Malik escorts heard her and called for the carriage to stop.
They must have been from a different battalion, since she didn’t recognize them, nor the driver who peered back as the carriage doors opened to release two neatly clad women.
Their dresses reflected the militaristic style of Kalish clothing, the shoulders squared and the bodices resplendent with two columns of golden buttons.
Kasira approached them cautiously, but they had no such qualms and ushered her toward the carriage.
“Hurry, into the cab,” one said with the deep vowels of the northern Kalish.
“What a mess you are!” cried the other, younger one as she took in Kasira’s now-stiff leathers and matted hair. “Your back is soaked through with blood. Tavlan, find a rag.”
A moment later, Kasira was settled onto a seat in the cab, the curtains drawn as the carriage rattled onward.
They went for as long a time as the two women could bear, before Tavlan at last knocked for the driver to stop.
Both women set to work with a determined dexterity, one undoing the laces and buckles of Kasira’s uniform while the other wet a cloth from a bucket.
“That stays,” Kasira said curtly, knocking aside Tavlan’s hands when she tried to remove Loraya’s pin from her braid.
The woman’s hair was bright red, like Revna’s, but where her friend was lean and fine boned, Tavlan was all curves with handsome features.
Still, she was an unwelcome reminder of the woman whose life Kasira had likely just destroyed.
Tavlan frowned. “It’s cheap silver, not fit for a lady,” she pointed out, and she was right. It was the kind of mistake Kasira never would have made seven years ago, when she had slid from persona to persona like a snake shedding its skin.
It hit her then that this was really happening.
After years spent ending the lives of the same creatures that had once inspired wonder in her, she was being sent to the very place she had dreamed of as a child to pull off the job of a lifetime.
She expected that to mean something to her—she felt nothing.
This was simply the next step in the rhythm: sleep, wake, hunt.
Only the target had changed, and her weapon no longer a vylor blade but the tools of a thief that Loraya had put in her hands the day they left the orphanage: a quick wit and even faster hands.
If she succeeded, she would finally have the life she and Loraya had always dreamed of.
Tavlan reached for her again, but Kasira stopped her with a look. “I can undress myself.”
“Well, be quick about it,” the younger one said instead. “We can’t have you catching a cold before we reach the Library.”
It took Kasira less than ten minutes to undress, wash, and don an entirely new persona.
At least on the outside. Her hair had been brushed to a luster and neatly braided, her ears adorned with rubies fit for a princess.
Loraya’s hairpin had gone into her pocket.
Her dress, like that of the other women, provided for little movement in the chest and arms, and kept her shoulders rigidly back.
It unfurled around her in waves of seafoam green, with delicate, white-laced needlework trimming the edges.
They had cleaned and rebound her wounds, and by the time they finished, Tavlan was looking at her with a mixture of pity and curiosity. “I don’t know what you did to be chosen as the new Assistant, Lady Eirlana, but I will pray for you,” she said as the carriage started up again.
Kasira wanted to tell her it was her own soul she should be worried about.
Vera had probably paid them handsomely for their silence, providing as little information as possible, but Kasira would not be surprised to hear of the carriage running afoul of a pack of beasts on its way back through the Isherwood.
Since her battalion was stationed near the coast, the trip to the inland Library would take several days, a length of time that would enable her to settle into her new role and let her back heal. And as the days passed, Kasira walked herself deeper into the mindset of the woman she had to become.
Eirlana would not be happy to be the first Kalish mage to grace the Library in so long, but she would recognize the good it did her family and be proud of it.
She would disdain the Library and all it contained, from the mages to the beasts to Allaster St. Archer himself.
Likely she would resist training, disparage any attempts at friendship, and sour the mood of any room she entered—but such a nature would do little to advance Kasira’s cause.
So Kasira would take those same characteristics—Eirlana’s pride, her etiquette, her intelligence—and repurpose them into a different story.
She would be a dutiful daughter determined to make this work in thanks for her family’s salvation.
She would see it as Haidra’s path for her, and though hesitant, would slowly begin to mold into the confines of her new life.
She would see the sacrifice of her soul as a worthy cause to spread Haidra’s light, a notion Kasira could hardly fathom. To her, death was death.
In the end, you rotted to dust either way.
“Lady Eirlana?” Tavlan tapped her shoulder, pulling her from her study. “We’re here.”