Chapter 35 Allaster
ALLASTER
“I REFUSE TO BELIEVE THIS.” MAY TOSSED THE NOTE ATOP ELYAE’S bracelet on Allaster’s desk. He left it there, staring at it as if it might offer up some new secret. He hadn’t expected May to condemn Elyae, but her utter resoluteness only made him feel worse about the decision he’d made.
“There is nothing Elyae cares about more than the Library.” May sank into the chair across from him, equal parts incensed and exhausted. He was starting to think it a permanent state for them both. “There must be another explanation.”
“Then by all means, give me one.” Allaster fiddled anxiously with a ring.
Elyae could be hot-tempered and rash, but he could not have imagined her a traitor before now.
He’d recruited her to the Library himself after she had helped him and Mora on a beast mission in Ayador.
She had been only fifteen, her parents dead for less than a month.
Now, he couldn’t stop thinking about the look on her face, as if he’d stripped her very soul from her. Perhaps he had. The Library was everything to her, as it was for him. Spy or not, she would have had its best interest at heart.
May pressed her fingers into her temple. “You should return the bracelet. It was her mother’s.”
“I will.”
They were quiet then, the crackle of the fire the only sound.
Allaster tried to focus on it, to narrow his thoughts down to that single noise, rather than the maelstrom inside him.
So much had unraveled so quickly. Thane, Spenshire, Elyae—what had begun as shifting snow had turned into a full-blown avalanche, and he didn’t know how to stop it.
“So,” May began through a heavy breath. “Does this mean you trust Kasira now?”
Allaster groaned, dropping his head into his hands.
He didn’t know how he felt about Kasira Vitalis.
Half the time he was convinced she was every bit the dedicated mage and the rest he swore she was picking through her words like puzzle pieces, searching for the best fit.
All he knew was that he couldn’t stop watching her do it.
“I’m trying to,” he said at last. “But until I hear from Nyelle, I can’t risk it.”
“Why not?” May’s voice shook with an uncharacteristic fervor, and he looked up to find her brown eyes pinning him to the spot.
“Because she could ruin everything, May,” he said slowly. “The Library—”
“Fates above!” May leapt to her feet. “Stop saying that. You’re not the only one who cares about the Library, and you are not just the Librarian of Amorlin.
You are a person, one who has been little more than a corpse this past year, and now someone shows up who you’ll actually talk to, who makes you act, if only for a moment, like the man I used to know, and you tell me you can’t trust her because of the Library? ”
Her hands came down on the edge of the desk, and it was all he could do to stare at her as she snapped out, “Admit it, Allaster. You’re afraid of losing her.”
She was right. He knew it the moment she said it; he had been afraid of losing her for some time.
Every day he kept the truth from Kasira, every day they spent together, it became harder and harder to voice.
He had tried. Once. And then his mind had pictured the horror sprouting in her woodland-green eyes, imagined the way the perfect bow of her lips would twist, only for Vera’s arrival to save him from the choice.
He had told himself he withheld the truth because he didn’t trust her, had promised May he would do what needed to be done once Nyelle collected the information he sought, and it was true—but he also couldn’t deny that there was a part of him that just didn’t want to lose another person he cared about.
Because he did care, and it was going to break him.
“It doesn’t matter what I feel,” he croaked out at last. “Only the Library matters.”
“Yes,” May hissed through clenched teeth. “You’ve made that perfectly clear.”
Allaster flinched, the heat of May’s anger like a brand against his skin. She had every right to be furious with him, but he had made the mistake of putting his personal desires before the Library once before and had nearly seen it destroyed.
He would not do it again.
“I’m sorry, May,” he said softly. “Is Taya …?”
May closed her eyes. “She’s given me until the month’s end.”
He nodded. “I’ll figure this out before then,” he promised. “One way or the other.”
May was quiet for a moment in which she picked at the dried dough along her fingers. She must have been baking when the leopard spirit he’d sent had found her, trying not to think about the con unfolding mere rooms away.
Eventually, she drew a slow, deliberate breath and retook her seat. “The news about Elyae will not go over well. Kasira was right that the mages already feel distanced from you, and this will only further that. You can’t keep avoiding them while Thane weaves lies for them.”
Allaster’s hand curled into a fist. “I’m trying to protect them.”
“They don’t understand that. To them, you just don’t care. They gave you space after Mora, but now …” She trailed off, perhaps recognizing there was no sense in saying what he already knew. What they both knew.
Mora had been Librarian for over a hundred and twenty years.
Everyone here had been personally selected by her, had lived and worked alongside her as a friend and mentor.
Her death had hit them all hard. But they didn’t know what he did about how she had died, and they never could.
Not if the Library was to survive what was to come.
So May and Allaster carried that pain alone. He gave it its own chamber in his heart and held it close, a reminder of why he did what he did, of why he kept himself apart.
Because soon, they would lose him too.
“It won’t be much longer,” he admitted. “It’s getting worse, May.”
She regarded him with unguarded sorrow, and he restrained the urge to tell her not to worry. They were past such hollow platitudes. They had promised each other the truth long ago, when Mora’s body was not yet cold.
“You have to tell Kasira.” She said it so simply, as if the words would not condemn them both, wouldn’t shatter everything he had worked so arduously to hold together.
As if they weren’t the very reason he could never act on what he felt.
“I will,” he agreed. “Soon.”
ALLASTER REMAINED IN his office long after May departed, until the flames of the fire died into embers and went cold. It felt as though everything he had worked for was slipping through his fingers, and he was running out of time to mitigate the damage. How long did he have left? Days? Weeks?
He could feel the beast writhing beneath his skin, feel its desperation to take over. When Mora had turned, the transformation had torn her apart, body and mind. There had been nothing left of the woman he had known for over a century.
There would be nothing left of him.
His office door clicked open, and he sensed Nyelle before he saw her. She approached him with a file in hand and set it softly on his desk. “Everything I could find on Kasira Vitalis.”
He took the folder reluctantly, already regretting his decision to ask for it.
The idea of fully placing his trust in Kasira still left him unsteady, but after what had happened in Spenshire, this felt less like due diligence and more like a betrayal.
But he had told May he would share the truth of his curse with Kasira, and if he was going to do that, he had to know.
Flipping open the file, he flicked quickly through the sparse pages within.
There was little about her before her sentencing to Belvar, and the information after talked only of her time in the Malikinar until she deserted.
But he found what he was looking for on the last page, the knowledge slotting into place like a book onto its shelf.
“She worked for him,” he said. “Thane.”
“She did.” Nyelle eyed him carefully, before taking her customary chair. “But she also turned him in. Whatever existed between them before, I highly doubt it survived that.”
“I would like to believe that, but you didn’t see the way she looked at him.” It had been the look of someone who had found something familiar in a sea of strange. And the way he had spoken of her …
Whatever story existed between them, it was still being written.
A sly smile quirked Nyelle’s lips. “If I didn’t know better, I would say you sounded jealous.”
Allaster shut the folder with a scowl. “It’s a good thing you do know better then.”
But did he?
Unbidden, he thought of their sparring sessions, of the moment between them in the portal room after Spenshire, when she had left her hand in his.
She probably thought he didn’t remember, but his skin was branded by her touch, and if he was honest with himself, that was the very reason he hadn’t called off Nyelle’s search.
Because his emotions were clouding his decisions, and that was not a mistake he could afford to make.
Nyelle gave him an almost pitying look. “You should know that Ambassador Vera is making quite a show of campaigning against Kasira at court. She’s painting her as a con artist and a thief who’s stolen Kalthos’s rightful choice for Assistant. She’s blaming you for not turning her over.”
“I can’t, even if I wanted to.” Not without giving Vera the opportunity to plant a pawn who would become Librarian after him. “She knows that.”
“If you agreed to relieve Kasira of her position, it would go a long way toward weakening Vera’s claim against you,” Nyelle pressed, ever the diplomat.
She had always been the counterweight to Allaster’s emotions when they were together, a tension that often caused the arguments that inevitably led to the end of their relationship.
“It would also do me a fair turn to be able to claim I persuaded you.”
Allaster’s grip tightened around the file, nearly folding it in two. “She is the Assistant Librarian of Amorlin, Nyelle. For better or for worse.”
Nyelle lifted a hand, her fingers brushing along his jaw in a familiar gesture that still sent a tremor through him. “Fine. Keep her if you must, but don’t lie to yourself about why. You’ve never been any good at it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He averted his gaze, but Nyelle only tilted his chin, forcing him to look at her.
“You used to look like that when you thought of me.” Her hand fell away, leaving Allaster to stare at her in wide-eyed objection. But he said nothing.
She was right. He never had been a very good liar.
Nyelle’s smile turned forlorn, then disappeared. “You should know that there’s something else in that folder. The day Kasira was reported for desertion is the same day Ambassador Vera visited her battalion.”