Chapter 10 Kasira
KASIRA
AS A CHILD, KASIRA HAD LOVED STORIES. SHE WOULD LIE IN BED listening to her mother’s voice weave tales of distant lands and ancient magic, falling asleep to the rhythm of her words.
The details of her mother’s face had long ago fled her, but those stories had become a part of her, shaped her in ways she hadn’t truly understood until her parents’ deaths put her on the streets.
She learned to keep her interest close, and she stopped speaking of the mother who had taught her wonder instead of fear.
Then came the orphanage.
Our Lady of the Light resembled a children’s home as closely as Belvar did a tavern.
The royal court paid the priests a stipend for each child they took in, and so they had a deal with the city watch to bring them those caught committing petty crimes.
The priests were meant to teach the children of Haidra’s light, but Kasira had spent more time scrubbing church pews than studying scripture.
She was ten and used to the children of the street, who had grown uncomfortable at her off-putting comments, but nothing more.
The first time she had shown too much interest in a beast, a priest threw her to her knees before Haidra’s altar and commanded she pray until her voice grew raw.
The second time, another child snitched on her for reading a stolen book about the Library; she still had scars from that lashing.
After that, the other children had called her beast sympathizer, Library whore, all names they whispered behind her back year after year.
But none of that had compared to the day she brought home an injured Talowell, a tiny creature without claw or fang, the same kind her mother had once placed in her hands and said, See?
It is not so scary. When the priests discovered her tending to it, they made her drown it.
She still remembered the feel of its scaly body thrashing in her hands before going irrevocably still.
Then they took a hot knife to her palm to burn out the sin of touching it.
That was the day she had truly understood that the only thing her people hated more than a beast was a beast sympathizer.
She brushed her fingers absently over the old scar.
That day, a little of their fear had seeped into her and never left.
It had festered and rotted until she too looked at beasts with dread, until the vicious things she heard people say no longer turned her stomach.
Four long years in the Malikinar had done the rest.
Yet now, here she was, tucked away within the Library’s towering walls, with more books at her disposal than she had time to read, nestled among people who would not condemn her for it.
She didn’t know what to make of it. It felt like being handed a weapon for the first time, clumsy and unfamiliar.
The wrongness of it chafed at her, and though she affected an air of ease, everything inside her was in knots. She kept waiting for that knife.
Instead, they only watched her—Allaster most of all—and so she kept reading.
Her attempt to corner him into conversation had failed, and she had learned very little of note from the book he’d been reading.
She had come back for it that night, but all it contained were accounts of age-old Avari history.
But letting Allaster see her engrossed in study was only the first step of many in building on the foundation she had laid for him.
She had planted the idea during their sparring match that he might be wrong about her, and with each action she took now, she would give him reason to question himself, in hopes of eventually convincing him to trust her.
It would be a difficult task, seeing as he wanted nothing to do with her, but that only meant she would need to rely on others to communicate the information for her.
People like May and the mages, who made no attempt to hide their staring each morning as she collected a stack of books and claimed the table by the fire.
Time dulled emotion. It was exhausting to be constantly on guard, particularly when the person you were defending against insisted on sitting alone with a pile of books that completely rewrote your perception of them.
Over the next few days, she made her way studiously through her stack.
She took notes as she went, her hand cramping from mimicking Eirlana’s flowing script, and discussed the contents with May at lunch.
She read about the Revenant gods of the Jacari and Riviair’s bureaucratic society, from the twelve ministers to the opulent business district that housed the capital city’s elite.
She read of the Miravi sand caves and the blue-finned Tolvish beasts whose scales emitted a substance that turned the Ayadese mountain lakes a pale sunrise orange, working her way through field guides covering the countless years mages had spent cataloging beast versus animal.
Several of the texts detailed now-extinct nonmagical species, the snow leopards of Avaria among them.
Others theorized about what had led to the development of creatures steeped in magic and those free of it, but none held any sort of final conclusion.
Iylis himself only had shrugged when she asked about his form, quite pointedly inquiring why she looked like a human woman, and in the absence of any rejoinder, had strode away with his nose in the air.
Out of curiosity, she even researched the ancient Ryzitch that May had mentioned.
There was little in the Library on it—a fact she learned by asking the leopard spirits.
Iylis had explained the spirits were, like him, creatures of magic, born of the Library’s power and deeply in tune with it, which made them particularly suited to scouring its depths.
They had brought her only one book. It contained a single paragraph about the creature, describing it as a beast of darkness and smoke, supposedly capable of answering any question asked of it—for a price.
Despite the Library’s vast collection, she couldn’t find anything that talked about the black metal ring she had taken from Allaster’s study.
Even the geology texts she tried didn’t have anything that matched the material’s description, and she had to be careful of when she looked, considering Allaster himself was often among the stacks.
She was toying with the ring in her pocket when she first noticed the girl.
There were several tricks for discovering if you were being watched.
Leading someone into a narrow alley to see if they followed, changing locations to make a tail stand out in a new background, even just making a run for it.
Kasira needed none of those. The mage staring at her didn’t care if she was seen.
In fact, Kasira was sure that she wanted to be, because when she finally pretended to notice her for the first time, the girl all but snarled at her, clutching a small black journal to her chest.
Kasira made a point of showing the bewilderment Eirlana would surely feel, letting it meld into a frown of distaste, but inwardly she recognized what was unfolding: This girl would be a problem.
To anyone else, the encounter might have seemed benign, but trusting her gut had kept Kasira alive, and she wasn’t about to ignore it now.
She sought out May the next morning, finding her in one of the Library’s front rooms where they kept an assortment of equipment, including the tall, dark leather boots May was currently tugging on.
She had her face turned away from them, as if trying to keep from smelling something offensive. A moment later, Kasira discovered why.
“Ugh.” She covered her mouth and nose with a hand. “Are those boots treated with Nematir oil?”
“Unfortunately,” May replied with equal displeasure. “But it’s quite effective at keeping the water out.”
Kasira shuddered. “Do you have a moment? I—”
But May was already on her feet and off toward the exterior door, a bucket in hand.
“If you can walk and talk,” she replied, leaving Kasira scrambling to slide on her own pair of foul-smelling footwear.
She jogged to catch up with May, who was already outside.
The air was crisp and damp with mist from the falls when she emerged, following May down a winding path toward the river.
“Where exactly are we going?” Kasira asked.
“Mushroom hunting.” May hefted her bucket. “According to Warrin, there’s a type of mushroom that grows in the mud along the riverside that’s quite effective at stimulating memory.”
“Warrin?” Kasira questioned as they hit the sodden grass of the riverbank.
“One of our healers in training. He’s doing his first independent shift at the infirmary; you should introduce yourself when we’re done.
” May offered her the bucket, which Kasira accepted.
“The mushroom has a thick white stalk and a light blue cap that sometimes has gray splotches. Help me look while you talk?”
They sloshed along the edge of the riverbank as Kasira described the girl from the library.
Slender; with sleek black hair and prominent cheekbones; her skin a soft golden brown; and a smooth, sloping face with a broad, flat nose.
Kasira had marked every detail, down to the way the girl held her weight in her left foot.
May’s lips curled with amusement as she crouched to inspect a collection of mushrooms. “Elyae. She’s Ayador’s representative at the Library. Each nation has one.”
“She seems young to be in a position like that.” The girl hadn’t looked more than a teenager to her. “Though I suppose I shouldn’t judge anyone’s age around here by their appearance. For all I know, you’re sixty.”
May chuckled as she stood, empty-handed. “Twenty-nine. But yes, Elyae is young. She’s also a talented mage and very dedicated. She helps train new mages, and many of them look to her as a leader.”