Chapter 38 Kasira
KASIRA
KASIRA’S MIND SPUN FURIOUSLY. IF MAY HAD BEEN INJURED, AND Kasira couldn’t sense her—No, she thought. She’s not dead.
There was only one person who would have done this.
She snapped her fingers on instinct, reappearing in front of the sydara vine on the northern rooftop garden. Thane stood at the railing looking out at the gathering dusk. He didn’t even bother to turn when she arrived, though he had clearly been waiting for her.
“Where is she?” Kasira demanded, magic already flowing through her veins.
Thane tapped one finger against the balustrade. “Why does it matter? These people should be nothing to you.”
“Answer me.”
Thane faced her, leaning back against the railing. “Oh, you really do care for this cursed place, don’t you? Tell me, does it bother you knowing you’ve betrayed your own people to become a whore of the Library?”
“You misunderstand me.” In a flash, she was before him, her hand on his throat fueled by magic-enhanced strength. She forced him back over the barrier, far enough that he could feel the empty air of the hundred-foot drop below. “It wasn’t a request.”
Thane’s fingers clutched at the railing, his eyes flaring bright with fear for the briefest moment before his expression emptied.
He was good; she expected nothing less of him.
One of his hands clasped hers where she held his throat, nails digging into her skin.
“You misunderstand me,” he growled back.
“My purpose here was to ascertain your loyalties, and I would use every tool at my disposal to do so.”
Her eyes caught on a branching pattern of ridged skin at his collarbone, where it dipped below the neckline of his tunic.
His eyes followed hers, and he brought his other hand to his collar, tugging it down to reveal pale skin raked with scars.
“Do you know how many of them I killed? Perhaps as many as you. They used me in Belvar, and they are using me now, but this time, I stand to turn a profit. I will not go back there.”
Kasira searched Thane’s face, desperate for a tell, a flicker, anything to give her a way in.
But Thane wasn’t just good—he was telling the truth.
The fear deep in his gaze had nothing to do with hovering over a hundred-foot drop; he was terrified of Belvar, and he would rather die than return there. Just like her.
Which meant he was willing to do anything to see his bargain through. Even kill the First Mage of Amorlin.
Snarling, she wrenched Thane from the railing and shoved him back toward the garden. She had to get ahold of herself, but she felt like she was unraveling. Between the threats of Vera, Thane, and the King, everywhere she turned, there was a weapon pointed at her.
Thane laughed, one hand rubbing at his throat. “I truly don’t understand your attachment. What is this place but another prison?”
She recoiled. “What?”
“I could see it in your eyes,” he hissed. “When I said I wouldn’t go back. That fear—you feel it too. How long did they keep you in the dark, Kasira?”
Too long. Until the barest wisps of light pained her eyes, and the feel of it on her skin was more powerful than a drop of water after a long drought.
When her voice had finally failed her, and the stories she told herself were no longer enough, Kasira had descended into a depth inside herself she had never fully emerged from.
A dark, quiet place where no one could truly see her, lest they see too much.
“Beasts are a stain upon this earth,” Thane said bitterly.
“With every step of progress Kalthos takes forward, those creatures drag us back. Our time, our energy, our funds—they all go to defending our people against them. To surviving. There is nothing left for the rest of us. Nothing left to build a new future.”
He spoke with the zealousness of the Paratal before a vast crowd, his congregation under his sway.
There was truth in his words. Truth in how Kalthos had been restricted by its war against the beasts, truth in how the people had suffered.
More than one child at the orphanage had lost their parents to beasts; more than one would have died beneath their claws themselves by now.
Thane leaned in close. “Your fascination with them is the reason there was no one there for you after your parents, Kasira. The reason your life begins and ends in darkness.”
A shiver traced the length of her spine.
Suddenly, she was ten years old, the faces of the fervent priests surrounding her.
Sinful, they called her. Dangerous. A threat to herself and others.
Her curiosity would see her dead; her dreams would damn her immortal soul.
Better to lock them away, to lock herself away.
To be what her people wanted of her, a flower in a garden, not a beast in the brush.
In the darkness of those memories, Kasira made a vital mistake: She forgot how well Thane knew her. Everyone had something. Something so raw and so personal that if you picked at it, it came apart in a bloody mess.
Thane knew hers intimately.
“Loraya would be so disappointed in you,” he all but crooned in her ear. “You broke the first rule of the con.”
His voice turned deadly quiet. “You forgot the lie.”
He was right.
When you lived a lie long enough, eventually it became the truth, and the truth was that Kasira loved this place.
She liked the strangeness of the Library and its many secrets.
She liked sitting by the fire with Iylis and eating lunch with May and sparring with Allaster.
She even liked mucking out paddocks and how the beasts came running to the fence to see her each morning and the way the sunset played across the mist thrown up by the waterfall.
And what of me? came Loraya’s voice, softer than before. What of our dream?
Your dream, Kasira thought. Not mine.
For so long, Kasira had carried Loraya’s death like a sin to be absolved.
She had built Loraya up into something unattainable, draped her in guilt and absolution, as if by fulfilling their promise, Kasira might somehow undo the damage she had done.
Every choice she had made since accepting Vera’s bargain had been in service of that oath, but to what end?
Had the woman she had been paying penance to ever existed at all?
You were her precious little Kasira, the light she would save from the darkness. Thane’s words came slithering back. That future you dreamed of together? She only ever did it for you.
All this time, Kasira had been pursuing this dream for Loraya, but that future Loraya had imagined, that house by the shore—Kasira didn’t want it.
Not anymore. She wanted beasts and magic and adventure.
She wanted a library full of books and a fire to read them by.
She wanted to visit far-off places, to map uncharted magic, to grow comfortable and rooted in a place where she was known.
The Library was her home, and she could not let it go.
But the King and Vera had backed her into a corner, leaving her with an impossible choice, and the King’s ultimatum had made it painfully clear: She couldn’t con her way out of this.
Either way, she lost. Either way, the people she cared for would be hurt.
And she did care for them, no matter how deeply she tried to bury it.
The King wanted her to choose, him or his cousin, but in the end, she would have neither.
She would choose the Library. She would choose May and Iylis and Fen and Carlia and Gievra.
She would choose Allaster and pray that he would choose her too, one last time.
“You’re right,” she said. “I care about the Library, about the beasts.”
It felt like a chain coming undone, the possibility opening up before her.
She would find a way to reverse the damage she had done.
A way to ensure Vera’s case against Allaster at the Conclave failed, even if it meant revealing her con.
She had only to hold Vera off long enough to reach a solution, to convince the Ambassador that whatever claims Thane made against her were false.
Except Thane was looking at her in a way she knew too well. It was the stare of a hunter before his trap, watching it close about his prey.
“I had truly hoped it would not come to this,” said a voice.
A cloaked figure stepped out from behind the sydara vine trellis, lowering their deep hood with white gloves. Ambassador Vera stared back at Kasira without expression, clasping her hands at her waist with the poise of a priest prepared to hear her sins.
Kasira had fallen for Thane’s con.
He had known all along that she cared for the Library. He’d manipulated her emotions, tricked her into saying the very words that would damn her, and ensured Vera was there to hear them. Kasira had been so frantic about May that she hadn’t stopped to check the rooftop for another’s presence.
Her fury grew molten at Thane’s satisfied grin, but she withheld it, desperate to keep her mind clear. There had to be a way she could twist this. A means of ensuring she didn’t lose everything again.
“Don’t worry, Kasira.” The softness of Vera’s voice would have been almost comforting were it not colder than the mountain snow.
“I have a new bargain for you. I need your testimony at the Conclave. If you refuse and the Conclave fails, I will take the Library by force, and I will make sure every person you have forged a connection with here spends the rest of their lives in a windowless cell, save the Librarian.”
There was no life in Vera’s eyes as she said, “Him, I will kill.”