Chapter 19 Kasira #2
Curious, she reached for the magic and sought the Alkatir cub. What came flooding back was so fast and uncontrolled that she pulled back with a gasp. The Alkatir stared at her with one wide, fear-blown eye, its furred chest puffing erratically.
“You felt that too,” she said, breathless.
She dropped to her knees, inching closer, and the cub trembled.
“It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.” As she reached for the magic again, sliding along it in search of the cub, she focused on those words, on that feeling of safety and comfort she’d once had with Loraya.
The cub’s breathing slowed, and with it, the rampant hail of emotions pulsing through the magic. They settled into a familiar rhythm. Fear. Pain. Exhaustion. He was so, so very tired. He was alone.
“I know how you feel,” she said softly and wondered if he could sense her the same way she could him.
The cub stepped back, and a memory flooded her mind: his mother’s limp body pressed against his, the sharp tang of blood in the air.
Something wrenched in Kasira’s chest, and she tore away from the magic, her gut churning.
In the orphanage, there had been so many who had lost their parents to beasts, but how many beasts had the Malikinar left orphaned?
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, two words she had never been very good at saying. They always came too late.
Hesitantly, she waded back into the magic, reopening the connection between them. The emotions funneling along the link redoubled, and she felt his fear and pain and confusion as surely as he felt her guilt and regret.
“I can’t bring her back,” she whispered. “But I can take care of you for her.”
What was she saying? She wouldn’t be here any longer than it took to complete her job. This beast would be here forever. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to turn away from it.
The cub’s current of emotions calmed a little. She focused harder on that feeling of safety, trying to share it with him. “My name—” She stopped, but she couldn’t sense anyone else nearby. They were alone. “My name is Kasira. What should I call you?”
It felt at once a foolish question and the right one.
Little was documented about Alkatir, but she had read that one of the reasons people feared them was because of their ability to adapt to human speech.
To learn and understand it at a level that made people uncomfortable, because if this creature could think and change and feel the same way they did, what did that mean?
Kasira felt something along the connection between them. A pulse, a sound—she couldn’t tell. It just formed in her mind, and she said aloud, “Gievra.”
Slowly, his wings unfurled, revealing his furred, hawkish face and a lean, muscular body.
Pure white, like the snow on the distant Eyrie mountains, and so very, very scared.
They sat that way for some time, both uncurled and open.
Then something shifted in the grass behind her, and the cub coiled back into his ball with a hiss.
It shattered the spell, her guilt twisting into something new and so much sharper. What she couldn’t tell was how much was for the beast before her, or for the woman who wasn’t here.
“Allaster,” Kasira said in greeting at the sound of footsteps.
Allaster sat down cross-legged beside her, proffering her one of the glasses clasped in his hand. He held a bottle of mylak in the other. “Drink?”
She took the glass and held it out. He filled it, then his own. She nodded at the cub. “He needs shelter. Somewhere to hide.”
Allaster waved his hand, and a small, round hut appeared in the enclosure. Gievra recoiled, but upon seeing the hut’s opening, sniffed it suspiciously before darting inside.
“It’s unusual,” he said. “Most Alkatir hate enclosed spaces.”
Kasira suspected she knew exactly why Gievra hadn’t hesitated to hide himself away, and it had to do with his mother’s murderer sitting across from him. The last time he had probably felt truly safe had been beneath his mother’s wing.
“You’re going to have to teach me how to do that.” She gestured at the hut, sipping her mylak. The vanilla notes were pleasant on her tongue, and she wondered what it tasted like to Allaster. Probably old books and dust.
“We can start tomorrow.”
They didn’t talk for some time after that, the only noise the many sounds of the Eyrie.
Kasira focused on the gentle lapping of the nearby lake and the taste of mylak as they worked their way through half the bottle.
Her body felt warm and relaxed, her mind a little hazy, and she knew her face had to be flushed by now.
Her cheeks always turned bright red after a few drinks. She wondered if Eirlana’s had as well.
“Sometimes,” Allaster began, hesitant, “I forget that you’re not just the Assistant Librarian. You’re Eirlana Corynth. You had a life before this.”
Her hand curled tighter around her glass. He had no idea just how much of a life she’d had. “You didn’t?”
He shrugged, the tension on his brow belying the ease of his tone.
“I always knew I would end up here. I didn’t get called until I was nine, but I was five when my parents took me from my home in Spenshire to study at the Arcadamium.
I have a mind for beasts and a knack for interacting with them, which was rare among a people who preferred the study of them to the actual thing.
That, and I discovered a new subspecies. ”
She blinked at him, and he shrugged. “There is a very slight difference in appearance between Northern and Southern Solen Birds. The Northern ones have a small patch of white on the females, right here.” He pressed a finger to the hollow of his throat.
“Previously, it was classified as a mere color variation, but I discovered the hard way they possess a cry that can paralyze their prey.”
Though the Library had mostly cataloged the main species of beasts over the centuries, new ones were occasionally still discovered.
But to have done so as a child, and to have entered the Arcadamium so young, he must have been a prodigy.
What must that have been like, knowing his future all his life? She had never known such certainty.
He tilted his head back, peering up at the Eyrie’s night sky.
“I spent almost my entire childhood at the Arcadamium, only returning to the sea during summers. There were other candidates training, of course, but even they seemed to think it would be me. Everyone did. And when the call came from the Library for a candidate, the High Mage went straight to my parents.”
“You sound … disappointed,” she said.
“I wanted to study dragons.” A small smile tugged at his lips, and she thought of his excitement when he’d told her about the dragon whistle.
“They’re one of the few known magical beings not classified as beasts.
A little like ourselves, you might say. They’re even said to possess powers much like mages, but no one has seen one since Avaria shut its borders. ”
He crossed his legs, cupping his glass with both hands.
“My brother and I had this dream of traveling north and sneaking into Avaria to find one. We wanted to know why they never left the north, why they partnered with the Avari and no others. It was a faraway dream, but I had a hard time letting go of it my first few years here.”
She struggled to imagine Allaster hunting dragons through the constant blizzards and treacherous mountain terrain of Avaria. He seemed far more likely to lecture the snow for daring to inconvenience him with its cold. But there was also an inquisitive side to him, one that called to her own.
“So the two of you became mages instead,” she said. “It must have been nice, working with him.”
Allaster snorted, taking a long drink of his mylak.
“We hadn’t seen much of each other by the time his candidacy was accepted, so it took time for us to reconnect.
We worked well together for a while, but the Miravi have a way of turning everything into a competition, and my brother and I were no different.
In the end, I think he retired purely to get away from me. ”
He offered her a half smile whose ease she did not believe, then downed the last of his mylak and refilled both their glasses. He looked at her from the corner of his eye. “What was yours?”
“My what?”
“Dream,” he said, as if the word didn’t carry a smothering weight to it.
She paused with her glass midway to her lips, averting her gaze. “I don’t have one.”
“Nothing?”
“Dreams are for people with futures. People who know the world is there to catch them when they fall.” And she had already fallen, a shade trapped inside the world’s cracks. One of the unremembered, as Thane had called them. The forgotten, who couldn’t claw their way back to the surface.
Now she knew nothing else but the spaces in between.
Vera had offered her a way out of that. A way back to the light, to dreams, but even that felt impossibly far away.
She couldn’t shake the grip of the years she had spent in the Malikinar, in Belvar.
Couldn’t open herself up to the possibility that, come the end of this job, she might finally have the home she had always wanted, a place where she was safe.
She knew she had revealed more than she ought to and cursed the mylak for it, but either Allaster was too drunk to notice, or he chose not to press her.
In the silence, it struck her for the first time how similar she really was to Eirlana, both the real woman and the persona Kasira had crafted.
All of them had had their futures taken from them.
It was good craft to build your lies around the truth, but perhaps Kasira had put too much of herself into this character.
Too much truth was dangerous.
“Dreams are unrealized stories.” Allaster’s voice was soft as the swish of the lake’s waters. Twice as alluring. “How can someone so passionate about stories not have a dream?”
The question struck her strangely, and it took her time to understand why.
It wasn’t just the poignancy; it was that it meant Allaster had noticed, had thought about her.
He had followed her here, just as she had hoped, and every word out of her mouth was nothing but a performance, but in that moment, it felt like something more.
She wanted it to be more.
She dug her fingers into the grass, the soil cool against her hot skin. Then she ripped a clump free, thinking of the past few years. “I let them die.”
“Dreams don’t die.” He spun one ring about his finger with the single-minded focus of a prayer. “They just become something else.”
“Regrets,” she muttered and tossed the grass aside. The blades fluttered slowly to the ground. She could feel him studying her and reached for the mylak bottle, only to find it empty.
She set it back down with a sigh and lurched to her feet. She was dancing too close to things better left buried. If she wanted her regret to become a dream once more, this could go no further. “I’m going to bed.”
“I’m trying here, Corynth,” Allaster said quietly.
She peered down at him stretched along the grass, the fringes of his copper hair curling over his brow.
He was staring at his hands stretched before him, flexing them as if reaching for something he couldn’t touch.
“I’ve not had to do this for a very long time. ”
“Talk to someone?”
His too-bright eyes found hers. Was it the Eyrie moonlight, or was the blue almost gone from them entirely?
“Get to know them,” he admitted uncomfortably. “Be … a friend.”
She didn’t know what to say. Her throat had gone dry, her heart diving into a mad skitter that only made her feel foolish, like some lovestruck maiden whose sweetheart had finally noticed her.
It wasn’t the right response. She shouldn’t care that Allaster was trying.
Shouldn’t care about the single golden eye glowing in the enclosure at her back.
His words shouldn’t make her feel a thing.
Guard your heart, Loraya whispered.
“Goodnight, Librarian.” She snapped her fingers, returning to her room, but the ache in her chest followed. It never truly went away, a bruise that wouldn’t heal, but she had learned long ago to live with the pain.
The pillow on her bed was slightly askew, and she shifted it aside to find a paper folded underneath. She had wondered when Vera would make contact again.
Unfurling the note, she read:
You have three months to build our case. Two weeks before Alderotch, we will call the Conclave.
Alderotch marked the shortest day of the year, when Haidra’s faithful would repledge themselves to the goddess’s light, as they did every solstice.
It was also the day currently set for the wedding between the Yadora heir and the Kalish Prince, according to Fen.
Vera wanted her move to overshadow the union, or at the very least, be the main topic of conversation at it.
While the King married his son to the enemy, she struck a blow to the heart of evil.
Three months.
With Allaster’s decision to grant her magic, he had finally accepted her as his Assistant, and this evening had been her first step toward establishing a more personal relationship with him.
He had begun to trust her. She had only to solidify that mistake and begin maneuvering him into compromising positions, and three months was plenty of time to do it.
And yet, as she climbed into bed, her mind fuzzy with the effects of the mylak and the sound of Allaster’s voice, she couldn’t help wishing she had longer.