Chapter 32 Kasira #2
“You look a little on edge, Kas,” Thane said softly. “Bad day?”
Her eyes flashed open, and she seized him by the arm. She teleported them both to the northern garden, flinging Thane as hard as she could into the railing. He rolled off it with a grunt and turned to face her, but she already had a knife at his ribs.
“I ought to gut you here and now,” she growled.
“By all means,” he said with a laugh. “Hand Vera the final nail in your precious Librarian’s coffin.”
“He is not—”
“Stop lying to yourself, Kasira!” Thane surged forward against the knife, knowing as well as she that she couldn’t kill him. “Why else would you be here threatening me? For your dear love of a backwater town you’ve never set foot in before today?”
Kasira’s hand trembled, and she spoke each word very carefully. “You interfered in my con. You sent me into a situation I wasn’t prepared for.”
Thane laughed again, sharp and loud, and shoved away her hand.
She tracked his every step back to the railing, thought about what it would feel like to send him hurtling over the edge.
He leaned his hands against the railing, staring out through the waterfall’s mist at the burst of color in the darkening sky as if it were a beacon.
It was there only for a moment, that longing, before he snuffed it out.
Kasira stiffened, flashing back to the first morning after her release from her cell.
How she had simply sat at the edge of her Malik camp and stared at the horizon for hours as the dark brightened into day.
She had watched every sunrise and every sunset with a fervent dedication the priests would have lauded, her entire world strung about that light.
She understood Thane’s yearning, well enough that she began to wonder if there was another way she could approach this. They had been family once, after all, and they had the same goal. If they could work together instead of as enemies, they could both get what they wanted.
“I … am sorry, Thane,” she said. “For what I did to you.”
When he looked at her, his blue eyes softened by the gathering dusk, she could almost see the man who had pulled her and Loraya off the streets, given them a home. A family. For a while, he had made her feel safe for the first time in years.
Then he’d taken it all away.
Slowly, Thane came toward her, and she made herself look hopeful and open and not as if she was struggling not to flee.
He extended a hand, cupping her face. “What is it, exactly, that you think you did to me, Kas?” His voice was so very soft, almost broken, and she wondered how much of it was real.
How much of her betrayal had truly hurt him and not just his ego?
“I took away your freedom,” she replied. “Your network. The woman you loved.” She forced herself to meet his gaze. “I took away your power.”
“That’s right.” His nails curved against her cheek, and like a layer of frost melting to reveal what lay beneath, his eyes turned clear and pitiless as the moon. “And if you think a false apology and a little shallow comradery will make me forget that, you are a fool.”
Kasira flinched back, leaving Thane’s hand hovering in midair.
“Don’t try to con me, Kasira,” he warned softly. “I taught you everything you know.”
She gritted her teeth. Not everything.
“I’ve been watching you, and I know what it looks like when you’ve lost yourself to a performance.
” He leaned toward her, and she retreated against the sydara.
It rattled, reaching out thin-stemmed flowers between them.
“By the time I’m done with you, Vera will throw you in a hole so dark and deep, you’ll forget your own name. ”
Kasira refused to let her expression shift. “My mission is to blend in. I can hardly do that while balking at everything around me. Allaster never would have accepted me as his Assistant had I not performed as admirably as I have.”
Thane brought his hands together in a mock clap. “You always have an answer, don’t you? Come now, Kas, I’ll give you one more chance. Admit now that you’re in too deep. Tell me that you’ve lost your way, that you need my help, and I’ll listen. I won’t tell a soul. Hell, I’ll even help you.”
He spread his hands magnanimously. “But I want to hear you say it.”
Some part of her wanted to. Wanted to hand him her burden like she once had, to have someone, anyone, who knew the truth of her. But that was the danger of people like Thane. They made you feel seen, known. You lost yourself in them, until you could no longer see a way out.
Once, she wouldn’t have been able to recognize that.
She would have cloaked herself in him, mistaken control for safety.
Perhaps it was what Thane had done to Loraya, or perhaps it was months of spending time with Allaster, a man who brought out pieces of herself she had thought too deeply buried to ever find, but she could see it now.
“I’m going to make you regret ever coming here,” she promised, and vanished.
She reappeared in her room, her exhaustion weighing her down.
It took the last of her strength to trek to the bathroom, which had attached itself to her bedroom in recent days.
A bath was already waiting, the lavender-scented air a balm to her singed nerves, and she climbed carefully inside.
The blood sloughed from her skin in pools of red, and she scrubbed until the last of it flaked away.
She stared at it. Stared and thought of how dead Revna’s eyes had been, as if something vital had been leached from her.
Her father would never take her back, ashamed of a failure that wasn’t even hers.
All her life Revna had striven to prove herself to him, dedicating herself to the Malikinar and Haidra’s light, and now she had become something more detestable to him than a beast.
She had become a criminal.
In the silence, Kasira at last let herself crumple beneath the weight of everything she had done.
Of what she still had to do. Between Allaster’s refusal to accept Kalish mages and subsequent denial of magic to Thane, his shielding of Kasira, and the attack on Spenshire, Vera had enough evidence to call the Conclave, and Kasira’s deadline was fast approaching.
Her time here was coming to an end.
The wave of thoughts numbed Kasira’s mind, and soon the water had gone cold.
The taut skin of her scars ached as she dried and dressed, each motion more distant than the last. By the time she had finished and reached for the magic, she had transported herself before she had even considered where she was going.
She reappeared in the Eyrie to find Gievra rolling on his back in a patch of dirt he’d freed of its grass.
When he spotted her, he turned upright and brought one wing to his beak, cleaning his feathers.
It was the most nonchalant greeting she had ever received.
Between it and the steady thrum of magic pulsing toward her, she might have actually thought he was happy to see her.
It took her three tries to summon his dinner from the shed, the magic less than cooperative, and she was about to toss a piece of meat inside when another urge struck her.
She checked for Thane’s presence and, finding him far enough away, clambered over the fence and dropped inside the pen.
Gievra watched her with his one curious golden eye as she took a chunk of meat and proffered it to him.
Slowly, he rose to his feet and edged a little nearer.
She didn’t move, encouraging him closer through the magic connecting them.
This close, she realized just how much bigger he had gotten in the past few weeks.
Fully raised, his head reached her shoulders, and she was by no means short.
Where his ribs had once protruded there was now thick muscle coated in luxurious white fur, save the few places where his scars had prevented regrowth, and he had begun to develop a crown of black feathers on his head.
Please don’t eat my fingers, she requested as he lowered his head to sniff the meat.
Then, with the utmost care, he took the piece in his beak.
The moment he had it, he threw back his head and downed the bite whole.
She laughed as he trilled, the sound half rumble, half avian cry, and she fed him the rest of what was in the bucket, after which he stuck his head inside to ensure she wasn’t hiding any.
“That’s it, you bottomless pit.” She turned the bucket upside down. “I’ll be back with breakfast in the morning.”
She expected Gievra to retreat upon finding the food gone, but he only cocked his head in consideration.
Feeling a little reckless, she reached out a hand, sending soothing pulses along their connection.
She almost didn’t believe it when her fingers sank into the thick fur of his shoulder, soft and supple as Verentula silk.
She ran her hand back and forth along his neck, and he leaned into her with a low whine.
Then something snapped.
Gievra bolted, disappearing inside his hut with a hiss. Kasira spun, expecting Thane, but found only Warrin watching her from beside the shed.
She hopped back over the fence. “Are you trying to get me killed?”
Warrin ducked his head with a wince. It made him look so much younger, and suddenly his beard felt an obvious attempt to age himself, though his sheer size did that well enough on its own, perhaps a bit unfairly.
There was a smattering of iridescent dust on his clothes and hands that suggested he had been working.
“Do you need something?” she asked more gently.
His lips parted, then shut, his hands fisting at his sides, his uncertainty so at odds with the surety he’d shown in the infirmary.
When he finally spoke, it was in halting starts and stops.
“I—You. Spenshire. Are they okay? Was anyone else hurt?” His voice was so soft, she had to strain to hear him.
“Allaster and I handled it,” she replied carefully. “There was some damage done to the town, but nothing irreversible.”
“And the people?”
It was in the way he asked it, as though he at once had to know but also couldn’t bear to hear her answer. “You know people there, don’t you?”
“I was raised there. Ambric is my great-great-grandfather.”
How hadn’t she seen it before? The tall frame, the aquiline nose—Warrin could be Ambric’s younger self.
Which also made him Allaster’s distant nephew.
Perhaps that was why she had never considered it.
He didn’t show Warrin any sort of favoritism, but she supposed, knowing Allaster, he wouldn’t for the sake of fairness or propriety or something boring like that.
Perhaps she could change that, turn Warrin into yet another mark against the Librarian.
“My family lives there,” he said. “In the manor the portal leads to. My parents—”
“Are fine,” she assured him. She and Allaster had met with the lord and lady of the house before they’d left. Allaster’s grandniece was a kind-faced woman who had brought them tea and cookies.
Relief swept through Warrin, but the tension didn’t leave him. “Was this because of Allaster?”
The bitterness in his voice surprised her. Her instinct told her it was a thread to unravel, but after the events of the day, she didn’t have it in her to pull. “I think you should talk to Allaster about that. He’s with Ambric in the infirmary. Do you want me to take you there?”
He nodded, and she transported them both to the portal room, though Kasira didn’t follow him into the infirmary. She only leaned back against the wall with a heavy breath, content to let it hold her up for a moment.
“What are you doing?” Allaster stood in the hallway.
He was still in his bloodied uniform, though he’d unbuttoned it, and his hair was a tousled mess.
There was a lack of focus in his eyes that told her the flush in his cheeks wasn’t from heat, though the glass held between two ring-laden fingers made that clear enough.
“I brought your nephew,” she replied, scanning him openly as she walked toward him.
He held himself still beneath her gaze, as if aware of every line her eyes traced.
She reached out, slowly enough that he could have stopped her, and pressed a finger to the torc around his throat.
It sucked the heat from her skin, and she felt her magic pull away. “Why do you wear this?”
His free hand closed around hers, rough and calloused and warm. “You ask too many questions.”
Her eyes tracked his touch. “You never answer them.”
“And yet you keep asking.”
She lifted a shoulder. “I told you. I was curious once. Perhaps I am again.”
He turned her hand over, revealing the scar marring her palm, and brushed his thumb along it. It was such a gentle motion, so entirely at odds with the storm settling across his brow. She wanted to smooth it away.
Eye to eye, hand in hand, the heat of him radiating from his skin—she thought, for one wild moment, of telling him the truth.
Of damning the consequences and risking everything, if only to carve away that exhaustion that lived in every line of him, to absolve herself of the blood now coating her hands.
Your precious Librarian, Thane had called him, and she suppressed a shudder.
If she told Allaster now, with his trust already broken, it would be the end of everything.
Her life at Amorlin, her freedom, her future.
Her dream of the cottage would die alongside what remained of her soul, because she would not survive in Belvar’s darkness.
If she ran, would he let her, or would he hunt her down for what she had done to him, for breaking him twice?
In the end, he released her, sliding back into the shadows of the hallway.
“Thank you,” he said. “For coming with me today.”
Then he was gone, and she was alone.