Chapter 31 Kasira
KASIRA
ALLASTER REDONNED HIS SHIRT AND TELEPORTED HIMSELF AND Kasira to the infirmary, where Warrin was tending to an injured Ambric with a look of desperate focus.
“What happened?” Allaster demanded.
“Kalthos,” his brother wheezed, before breaking into a coughing fit.
Allaster held a cup of water to Ambric’s lips, helping him drink as Warrin tore the cloth away from the High Mage’s injured leg, revealing a deep cut.
“This will need stitches,” he warned, his directness surprising her.
She’d barely heard a word out of him since arriving, but he looked entirely in his element here.
Ambric reached for Kasira’s hand. “The Ryveren.”
She went cold at the name. As a child, she had heard as many stories of the Ryveren as she had the Library.
Falder Zardoc had established the band of outcasts and fugitives after deserting the royal army, the bloody atrocities they had committed as an organized militia now legend.
They recruited from the streets, taking kids with nowhere else to go.
Her Malik unit had passed through a town hit by them not six months back.
There had been nothing left but corpses.
“The Kalish government would never employ them,” she told Allaster. “There’s a bounty on Zardoc’s head fit for a king.”
“And I’m sure Vera will be counting on everyone to come to that exact conclusion when people start asking questions.
” There was a flat edge to Allaster’s voice, but it was the cold emptiness in his eyes that prickled her skin.
“This is a message for me. Vera said I would regret claiming you, and this is her response.”
He was wrong. This was a message for Kasira. She had told Vera to send soldiers to Spenshire, to take hostages without hurting anyone, not to send butchers who would kill without a second thought. But this kind of cruelty …
This was Thane’s doing.
He must have given Vera the idea when she told him of Kasira’s plan.
Was he trying to get under Kasira’s skin, to force her to slip up?
Knowing him, he had probably done it purely for the pleasure of ruining her move and watching her squirm.
She knew what she was supposed to do next.
She was supposed to convince Allaster to go.
But this wasn’t the simple intervention she had planned to get him back on her side. The Ryveren were butchers.
This would be a bloodbath.
The debate on Allaster’s face told her he thought the same, and so it was with growing apprehension that she sought the words to push him over the edge.
“You mustn’t go,” she said and watched the resolve settle in his eyes like a noose slipping about his neck.
“I agree,” Warrin said as he cleaned the blood from Ambric’s wound and began to stitch the flesh together. “This is a political trap.”
Allaster thrust out a hand, and his bow and quiver materialized. “It is an assault on my home, and I will not stand by and watch it done.”
Of course you won’t. It was one of the things she admired about him, and it would be his undoing.
Kasira summoned the relic sword. “I’m coming with you.”
She thought Allaster would deny her, his anger still too raw, but he only slung his bow across his back and said, “You’re the Assistant Librarian now. You’re subject to the same laws I am. If they come after me, they’ll come after you too.”
“I know.” She swept past him before the doubt worming in her heart could writhe free. “Now hurry. The Ryveren work quickly.”
They returned to the portal room, where Allaster ripped open the Miravi door to reveal a dark-paneled study that would have looked cozy if not for the overturned furniture and blood trailing from the entrance to the portal.
Panicked voices resounded from the hall, and the scent of smoke filled the air.
“Stay close.” Allaster nocked an arrow, and Kasira hefted the relic blade, its faint humming almost tangible.
Wherever they were, Allaster was familiar with it.
He led her along a broad curving hall toward a vine-covered archway that opened to the outside.
Someone screamed, and a servant tumbled through the arch.
She tried to regain her feet, but a hulking form swept down its sword, decapitating her a second before Allaster’s arrow caught him through the neck.
Allaster didn’t even stop to watch him die.
Kasira kept to his side as they skirted corpses and emerged into a garden courtyard fraught with chaos.
The white stone was dyed red with blood, dismembered bodies spanning the walkways as fires consumed the planters.
Beyond the courtyard, a wide staircase descended into a square that on any other day might have been picturesque.
Small cerulean and lavender buildings with white-painted signs.
Elegant spiraling towers wrapped in ironwork.
Ryveren mercenaries cloaked in the slate gray of beast-scale armor clashed with the town’s forces. Civilians fled their homes as they were set ablaze. And beyond the town was the glittering midnight blue of the impassive sea, which watched Spenshire’s destruction in silence.
What had Vera been thinking accepting Thane’s proposal? Had she thought she could control the Ryveren, that this wouldn’t unspool into carnage?
Allaster assessed the square. “They’re overwhelming the town guard.”
There were two Ryveren for every guard in pale green, and the guards were falling quickly. The Ryveren were brutal, disemboweling people and hacking at limbs with cool efficiency.
“The Ryveren are bandits first, mercenaries second,” Kasira told him. “If they sense the tide turn, they’ll abandon the town with whatever they’ve already stolen.”
Allaster nocked another arrow, and maybe it was the coastal sunlight glinting off the white stone, but his eyes looked pure silver as he said, “This doesn’t have to be your fight.”
This was the second time he had given her a way out.
Was it only that he didn’t trust her, or was it something more?
She thought of the way he’d looked at her in the arena before Elyae arrived, as if she were a salvation he didn’t deserve, and in that moment, she wanted so badly to break down the last of the wall between them.
But seeing him now, with Kalish blood darkening the hem of his uniform and his bow a trembling threat in his hands, she knew it was a future she couldn’t have.
Not after what she had done.
“Haven’t you figured it out by now?” she asked, and the words came as if from another’s lips.
She could feel the magic flooding into his body like water into a pool, and she drew it into herself as well.
The relic sword emitted a hawklike cry, turning the heads of the fighters. “I’m not that easy to get rid of.”
She charged down the stairs, slamming into two Ryveren who had been coming to investigate the new arrivals.
Her blade clove clean through the nearest one’s leg, sending him tumbling to the stone with a scream.
The other caught her downstroke with his own sword, but with the strength of her magic in her veins, his arms buckled, and her blade caught him across the chest. A second strike was all it took to put him down permanently.
An arrow whizzed past her ear, and she spun in time to catch the falling corpse of the Ryveren whose knife had been inches from her back. Then Allaster was past her, engaging another mercenary at the base of the stairs. She shoved the body away and surged onward.
Kasira had always been a good fighter. When you grew up on the streets, you learned to defend yourself.
But more than that, you learned what your body was capable of, and hers had been capable of quite a lot.
Her training alone would have made her a formidable foe, but when combined with the magic in her veins, her opponents hardly stood a chance.
The bloodbath she had anticipated became entirely one-sided as she and Allaster cut through the Ryveren.
Just as quickly as they had entered the battle, it was over.
The fighting dwindled, the remaining Ryveren fleeing.
The man Kasira was dueling thrust his dagger at her as a distraction and bolted across the square.
The surprise of the action resulted in her only wound as she reflexively caught it by the blade, slicing her hand.
She turned the knife over. “This is good vylor steel.”
The clang of weapons echoed nearby, and she lifted both blades, but it was only Allaster engaging a redheaded woman who had yet to realize she had been abandoned.
The fighter was good, her skill evident with every block and counterstrike of her sword.
Against a normal opponent she might have won. But Allaster was not a normal opponent.
He brought his bow down, the sharpened tip slicing her across the thigh, then back up, catching her across the stomach. When he pulled back to strike again, the woman turned, and Kasira saw her fully.
Revna.
Kasira moved before she had time to think. She flung the dagger, knocking Allaster’s bow off target. Then she was between them, her arms outstretched. “I know her,” she exclaimed to his bewildered expression. “She’s a friend.”
“Kas?”
Kasira turned slowly, taking in Revna’s freckled face and unruly red curls. Her white skin showed evidence of faint bruising, the color having turned yellow-green with age, but it was the X branded into her neck that turned the adrenaline pumping through Kasira’s veins to ice.
The brand of a traitor dishonorably discharged from the Malikinar.
Revna’s lips parted as recognition blackened into fury. With a roar, she tackled Kasira to the ground. They fell hard, the cobblestones knocking the air from Kasira’s lungs. Allaster lurched toward them, but Kasira held up a hand. He drew up short but didn’t lower his bow, an arrow nocked.
“You left!” Revna screamed, her hands fisting in Kasira’s uniform. “You left, and they blamed me.” It was all the story Kasira needed. No one would employ her now. The Ryveren was how she had stayed alive, something Kasira couldn’t fault her for. Not when Kasira knew the cost of survival.
“How could you?” Revna’s voice broke. “I thought we were friends.”
“We were,” Kasira whispered, and so they had been, in the only way she could be friends with someone after Belvar. In silence. In presence. She hadn’t been capable of more than that. She didn’t know what it meant that she felt like she could be now.
Revna’s grip loosened, the strength draining from her.
She looked tired and careworn, nothing like the vibrant woman Kasira had known, whose laugh had carried across the camp and who always had a quick word at the ready.
What did Kasira expect? The Malikinar had meant everything to Revna, and Kasira had taken it from her.
“Is this what you left for?” Revna twisted Kasira’s uniform in her hands. “Blasphemy and magic?”
“It’s not like that.” Kasira’s hand closed around Revna’s wrist, and the girl jerked back as if she had been burned.
She scrambled to her feet, backing away.
Allaster moved as she did, offering Kasira a hand up.
She took it, but her attention stayed squarely on Revna.
The hurt in Revna’s eyes, the betrayal—it had broken her.
Revna trembled with fading rage. “Everything I’d worked for,” she breathed through clenched teeth.
“My father wouldn’t even look at me.” This was as far from the future he had wanted for her as she could get.
Her entire life she had striven to become what he’d asked, been the dutiful daughter at the expense of her own autonomy, and Kasira had gone and set the whole thing on fire.
“Rev, I—” But Revna had heard enough. With a shake of her head, she turned and fled after the rest of the Ryveren, the only people she had left thanks to Kasira. Only when she had disappeared between two sandstone buildings did Allaster relax.
“What was she talking about?” He looped the bow over his chest.
“It’s none of your business.”
“Kasira—”
“I said no!” She rounded on him. “I had a life before you, before any of this, and you are not entitled to it just because you don’t trust me.”
Allaster’s jaw set, and she practically saw him dig his heels in. “What happened to asking you anything?”
She snorted, the lie so easy on her lips. “Maybe if I thought for a second you were telling me everything, I would do the same.”
Ignoring his bewilderment, she surveyed the square, then stalked toward one of the injured Ryveren. A thin-faced Kalish man with rough-hewn features, he had propped himself up against a building wall, grimacing. His leg was a bloody mess, but he would live. Assuming he cooperated.
Allaster followed, his face set in an impassive mask. Kasira gestured at the man. “Captain Falder Zardoc, the Librarian of Amorlin. Librarian, the former leader of the Ryveren.”
Zardoc spit blood onto the ground. “Former?”
Kasira gestured to the square, which now consisted only of town guards and civilians tending to the wounded. “Do you see anyone coming back for you?”
He winced. “What do you want?”
“The truth.” Allaster nocked a warning arrow. “Were you hired by the Kalish government to execute this attack?”
The captain evaluated them with shrewd eyes. It was a look Kasira knew well. “Let me guess. You were promised that if you were captured, you would be freed and taken care of?”
Zardoc spread his hands as if to say, What can you do?
“Captain Zardoc,” Allaster began in a voice that prickled the back of her neck.
“You attacked my home and nearly killed my brother. I don’t care what the Kalish offered you, because unless you start talking, you won’t make it to a Miravi jail cell.
You’ll return to the Library with me, where I will show you exactly which creatures spurred every nightmarish legend your people have until you beg for a death I will refuse to grant. ”
The mention of the Library made the Captain’s already pale skin turn chalk white. He looked to Kasira, as if expecting her to rescue him, but he had not been a part of her plan. None of this had, and if she had the opportunity, she would make Thane pay for it.
“I would do what he says.” She stepped back to give Allaster space to loose his arrow. “You’ll get no help from me.”
Zardoc let his head tip back against the wall. “They offered us reinstatement. A full pardon. These people”—he gestured at the still corpses and wounded Ryveren—“they just wanted a second chance.” Revna’s face flashed in her mind, but Kasira pushed it away.
“Who made the offer?” Allaster demanded.
“Ambassador Vera Helsen.”