Chapter 18 Kasira
KASIRA
EVERYTHING FELT DIFFERENT.
Her body moved smoother, stronger, as she let Allaster pull her to her feet.
And where her skin met his, magic prickled.
The dusty, aged smell of the cavern was stronger, the sound of her boots grinding across loose gravel sharper.
And her mind—she didn’t know how to explain it.
She felt aware of something. Connected to it.
As though if she just leaned into it, if she just took hold—
“Don’t!” Allaster reached for her too late. She snapped her fingers. The magic enveloped her, and she vanished from the cavern.
She reappeared above the Library, a hundred feet in the air.
The wind stole her scream as she fell, her arms flailing uselessly, the golden spires of the Library rushing toward her like mounted spears.
Panic erased reason, and she remembered the magic only when she was nearly upon the Library.
She reached for it, trying to fall into it the way she had before, but it slipped away like mist through her fingers.
There was a flash beside her. A hand closed on her arm, and the world turned.
She landed atop something warm and solid and blessedly grounded, her heart stuttering in her throat as she struggled to slow her breathing.
Someone groaned softly, and she sat up gingerly, only to find herself half on top of Allaster, both of them sprawled across a bed.
“You caught me,” she breathed.
He stared mournfully at the ceiling. “You can get off of me now.”
Her cheeks flushed as she realized she was draped across his hips.
She rolled swiftly to the foot of the bed, which was both extremely large and extremely comfortable.
Made of dark walnut wood in the four-poster style, it had no headboard and sat directly in the center of a spacious, circular room, its sheer silver curtains tied back by golden tassels.
A silhouette of two massive wings spread across the bed.
Kasira blinked, and it was gone, leaving her to dismiss it as nothing more than the shock of nearly plummeting a hundred feet to her death.
Allaster sat up, rubbing his temples. “What were you thinking?”
In truth, she hadn’t been. The urge to fall into the magic had been so overwhelming, she never actually made the choice to pursue it. Even now, she felt it simmering beneath her skin, a glance away from enveloping her. It was intoxicating in a way she had forgotten things could be.
“Why are you smiling like that?” Allaster demanded. “Does nearly dying amuse you?”
Kasira touched a hand to her face. She hadn’t realized she was smiling, and she quickly replaced it with the indignation Eirlana would take at his tone. “Perhaps instead of chastising me, you could actually tell me how this magic works.”
Allaster’s incredulity only grew, and he slid off the bed with a sigh. “You have to have a fixed point held solidly in your mind when teleporting. A place or a person works best. Without it, you just get spit out somewhere random.”
She surveyed the spherical room, from the sydara vine–laced balcony on one side to the clearly unused writing desk on the other. “And you thought of … your bed?”
“We needed something soft to land on!” he snapped, and she realized with growing delight that Allaster St. Archer was blushing. It softened him in a way she knew he would hate, and that only made her like it all the more. “You can’t change your orientation mid-teleport.”
She let her tone slide into playful. “And here I thought you were a gentleman.”
He turned a shade darker and spun on his heel for the door.
Who knew the great Librarian of Amorlin, the most powerful sorcerer known, could be undone by a little teasing?
She filed that away. She may have earned Allaster’s trust, but she still knew very little about him, aside from his general air of disgruntlement and that he had an ego to rival kings.
It was time to start picking him apart.
“Wait!” She leapt off the bed after him. “There must be more to the magic than not teleporting myself to my death. What if I accidentally turn someone into a toad or something?”
He whirled about in the doorway. “You can’t—we don’t—what exactly do you think my magic is capable of?”
“Apparently not turning people into toads. How disappointing. What can it do?”
Allaster drew a very slow, very deliberate breath. “You are now connected to the Library. Think of it as one giant organism. If you concentrate hard enough, you can sense everyone and everything inside of it.” He gave her a pointed look, and she closed her eyes, focusing on the magic’s presence.
She felt it the same way she had in the cavern.
It hovered all around her, just waiting for her to reach out and use it.
Rather than fall into it like last time, she touched it gently in her mind’s eye, allowing the warm, tingling feel of it to spread through her.
She sensed herself first, the way you see yourself in a dream.
Pushing out farther, she detected four people in the tower, as well as a leopard spirit.
This must have been how Allaster knew she had been outside the portal room but why he didn’t constantly know her location—he had to actively access the magic to sense her. Which was how she realized he was now halfway down the stairs without her.
Rolling her eyes, she focused wholly on him—then snapped her fingers. Everything twisted, then straightened, and she reappeared at his side. He flinched, slamming back into the stairwell, and she realized that it must have been a while since he’d had anyone else around who could do this.
“You have to know by now that you can’t run out on giving me answers,” she said as he peeled himself off the wall with a glower.
Something shifted in his expression, and he looked almost pained when he asked, “Why do you care?” He ran a hand through his hair, his movements frenetic.
“I realize I may have jumped to … conclusions … about you when we first met, and that you are not the Kalish zealot I expected, but you actually sound like you’re genuinely interested in all of this. ”
The question stole the smile from her lips, as sobering as a shock of cold water.
Because her questions had been genuine, her excitement as real as the beat of her heart.
She had felt, if only for a moment, what those short few years with her parents had been like, full of magic and curiosity, with no one to tell her she was wrong.
But it was. This life wasn’t for her; it was a means to an end.
This is what you do, came Loraya’s warning. You lose yourself to the game and leave me with the consequences.
I won’t, Kasira promised. It was because of Loraya that Kasira had stayed alive as long as she had, because of her that Kasira had made it through the orphanage, through Belvar and the Malikinar.
Loraya kept her alive, a beacon that lit her path, and this place was doing everything within its power to make her forget that.
She had failed Loraya once already. She would not do it again.
“I suppose I am,” she replied at last, her excitement contained. “I’ve always had a thing for stories, and this place is full of them.”
Truth.
“Besides,” she added, “this is my life now. My duty. I will see it done right.”
A wry smile curled his lips, but it quickly soured, and he leaned back against the wall with a sigh.
“Give it a few decades. At best, you’ll come to resent it.
At worst …” He trailed off, his jaw working, and she didn’t know if it was the implication of worse or that decades would be meaningless to her if she stayed that sent a shiver down her spine.
“Am I like you now?” she asked. “Ageless?”
“So long as you stay at Amorlin,” he replied. “Our powers weaken the farther we get from it, though they will never leave you entirely. However, you will age with prolonged distance.”
Kasira didn’t know what to make of that.
For all that she had worked to avoid it, she had never feared death—and she had found herself on its doorstep more than once—but the idea that she would never age stood in stark contrast with the day-by-day survival that had become her life.
For so long, she had been focused on staying alive, and now she had been endowed with the ability to live a prolonged life—for some reason, that terrified her.
How long would it take for the power to fade once she left the Library?
Would she crave it once she found her house by the lake, or be thankful for its absence?
She tapped each finger against her thumb, feeling the spark of magic beneath her skin.
This sense of connection, of place, it was new to her in a way she didn’t know what to make of, and some traitorous part of her didn’t want to let it go.
You don’t have a choice, came Loraya’s voice, softer this time. Either you finish this job, or you spend the rest of your life in Belvar. Either way, this isn’t something you can have.
Allaster spun a ring about his finger, his gaze set somewhere on the stairs below them as a muscle flexed in his jaw. Her gaze dropped to the ring. She had yet to find any information about the substance in the Library, but she was sure now that he was wearing more of them than before.
“What aren’t you telling me?” she asked and watched his expression shutter. It was more of a tell than a denial would have been. “Does it have something to do with why your magic has been acting strange?”
“There is nothing wrong with my magic,” he replied defensively.
“Anyway, come with me. It’s time you fully understood why I was so concerned about you being a Kalish spy.
” He offered her his hand, and she obliged.
It wasn’t until they had disappeared that she remembered he didn’t actually have to touch her to take her with him.