Chapter 19 Kasira
KASIRA
ALLASTER’S WORDS STAYED WITH KASIRA LONG AFTER SHE HAD LEFT his study.
She held no great love for Kalthos. It had failed her as a child on the streets and every day since, but she had met good people too.
People who had given her a home, a job, a chance, when others wouldn’t—even if it was all a ruse.
People who would be pulled into this war regardless of what they wanted and be used to pave the way for Vera to stand and say, Look at what I’ve done for you.
But Kalish history was riddled with the battles they had started over imagined slights or coveted resources, their leaders asking why trade for what they can take?
She was surprised it had taken them this long to turn their might against the beasts on such a scale.
They had none of Miraval’s interest in learning from them, none of Jacara’s respect or Avaria’s veneration.
She understood why. Kalthos had always had the highest density of dangerous beasts, and whether by circumstance or provocation, no other country lost as many citizens to attacks.
But nowhere else did people push so aggressively into the beasts’ territory.
Nowhere else were beasts so mercilessly hunted.
Before coming to the Library, she might have understood more, but if there was one thing she had learned during her time here, it was that she, like many Kalish, had fundamentally misunderstood beasts.
Not your problem, whispered Loraya’s voice. You have one job. Do it.
She was right. She had always been right. But for once, Kasira didn’t want her to be.
Allaster had her teleport them down to the main library for practice, then led her to the dining hall.
The entrance was marked by an arched double door painted so ornately with beasts and flora that she wondered if it had once been used for something else.
There were stories in Kalthos about Amorlin attempting to establish itself as a seventh kingdom hundreds of years ago, but the Kalish had no historical account, and the other nations never supported the claim, which the Library denied.
“What could you possibly need to show me in here?” she asked as they approached the hall. “I still need to go see the Alkatir cub today.”
“Because I would rather not die by May’s hands tonight.”
“What are you talk—” She cut off as Allaster pushed open the dining hall door to the sound of applause.
Three long tables occupied the center of the hall, filled with clapping mages.
Fen and Carlia let out matching high-pitched whistles, their faces lit up with grins, and Kasira realized with a start that this was all for her.
Or rather, Eirlana, who had spent her life away from court, who’d had so few friends that she had turned to beasts for company.
Eirlana as Kasira embodied her would be terrified of something like this.
And while once Kasira would have basked in the knowledge of how thoroughly she had played her part, now she felt the same as Eirlana.
There were too many eyes, too much noise.
It crested over her like a wave, drowning her.
She bolted back down the hall. Voices called after her, but she tore around the corner and pressed herself against the wall, panting. The knot in her chest only curled tighter, her breathing too shallow to satisfy her lungs. She had to get ahold of herself.
This isn’t real, she thought, trying to separate herself from the burgeoning anxiety.
She leaned her head back against the cool stone. What had she expected? For the naming of the next Assistant Librarian to go unnoticed by a couple hundred people who had dedicated their lives to serving the place she was now irrevocably tied to?
“Dammit,” she hissed, unable to reel in her sudden panic.
It had hit so hard and so fast, she couldn’t even say where it had come from.
She never could. One moment she was fine, the next she couldn’t breathe.
Her only redemption was that Eirlana would have fled too, but that didn’t save her from it having been reflexive, not planned.
She could not fall apart like this. Not now.
May appeared around the corner. “Lana, what is it? Are you all right?”
Kasira flinched at the nickname. It didn’t belong to her. None of this belonged to her. “I can’t go in there. They—I’m not what those people think I am.” She never was.
“The new Assistant Librarian of Amorlin? I know they’ve been tough on you, but that will change now.” May laid a hand on her shoulder, and Kasira ducked away.
“You don’t understand—” She stopped. The urge to bare herself to May was nearly overwhelming. What was wrong with her? She never spiraled apart like this during cons.
“I never should have come here,” Kasira whispered.
“Don’t say that.” May’s dark eyes grew sober. “You are here because you are meant to be, and I am glad for it.”
Kasira shook her head and kept on shaking it.
What else could she say? That she was a fraud?
A cheat? They would strip her of her magic and turn her over to Vera, who would stuff her in a cell so deep, she would never see the light again.
The future she and Loraya had promised each other would wither and die in that darkness. She would wither and die.
Kasira stared at the look of openness and concern on May’s face, and then her gaze settled over May’s shoulder, where Allaster stood, clearly having heard every word.
Somehow, it was the sight of him that brought her back to herself, that reminded her she could still spin this mistake in her favor.
Strong emotions made it almost impossible not to react, but a good player only redirected them into something else.
She let her fear and uncertainty wash across her face, let Allaster see it, before she snapped her fingers.
THE ALKATIR CUB sat as far away from her as he could, his body pressed low to the ground.
Though his injured wing was still in a splint, it had healed enough the past few days to join the other in a defensive posture, like two shields driven point-first into the dirt.
She sat with her arms around her knees, chin resting atop them.
She had been there for hours.
No one had come looking for her, though she knew Allaster could find her if he wanted to, and she was starting to think he wouldn’t come.
By allowing him to see her like that, even if it hadn’t been intentional at first, she had given him an opportunity, a chance to reach out a hand and wipe away their beginning, to grow together instead of apart.
If he had started to trust her, if he believed she wasn’t Vera’s pawn, he would come.
“What do you think?” she asked the cub.
The cub shook what she could see of his furred head, pointed ears twitching.
His hawklike face was still soft and downy, his adolescent fur half grown.
She had to admit he was kind of cute, with his one big burnt-gold eye and fleecy mane, and then she nearly laughed.
How had she gone from hunting beasts to trying to befriend one?
Why did I ever stop? she thought, though she knew the reason. So much of her life had been a battle. She had worn herself down to nothing to survive, rewritten herself over and over again until the words bled together, and she could no longer recognize the truth.
You did what you had to, consoled Loraya’s voice.
She had always been the first to defend Kasira.
Had always tried to shelter her from the worst of the world, as if Kasira hadn’t lived it alongside her.
But for once, her best friend’s words were not a comfort.
Sitting before the Alkatir cub whose mother she had killed, she admitted to herself that everything she had done, the choices she had made, she hadn’t just made them to survive.
She had made them because they were easier.
There was a comfort in knowing your place in the world, in knowing what you believed, and the Library was stripping that away from her.
It was forcing her to ask the sorts of questions that had seen her condemned, and each day it grew harder to swallow them back.
And now, for the first time in a long time, she didn’t want to.
Closing her eyes, Kasira focused on the feed shed to her left.
She sensed the objects inside, though they were fuzzy and indistinct.
Was that one strips of dried meat? With a wave of her hand, she summoned …
a trowel. Scowling, she tossed it aside.
It took several more tries, in which she received a water bowl, a leather lead, and a rusty nail, before a small container of dried meat appeared in her hand.
Standing, she approached the pen. The cub cowered into a tighter ball, but she only held out a piece of meat.
“Hungry?” she asked. The cub hissed. Kasira tossed the meat to the ground beside his paws, but the beast didn’t move.
What exactly was she doing? Hoping he would accept her after what she had done?
Worse, she thought. I want him to forgive me.
The thought sat with her strangely. It would change nothing.
It would prove nothing. She had killed this cub’s mother.
She had been the cause of the cub’s capture and so its wounds.
Because of her, it would live forever in captivity.
A prisoner, condemned to a fate worse than death—ah, she thought. There it is.
She knew what that was like, and she would not wish it upon anyone.
The cub drew its wings closer to its head, so only its one golden eye and the tip of its beak showed through.
She felt something though. A flicker, or a pulse, and she remembered that moment in the village when Allaster had said so certainly that there was a beast in town, though they’d seen no sign of one yet.