Chapter 22 Kas learns many new things.
twenty-two
Kas learns many new things.
Nesrina lay nude on a bed of asters, her emerald eyes sparkling in contrast with the purple flowers that surrounded her. Her rosy nipples peeked at him beneath strands of her caramel hair.
“Mi tilal,” my beloved, he whispered as his eyes and molten wisps of his magic traced her curves.
“Eth ye de mi,” she rasped. I am yours.
Tendrils of his magic flowed over her skin, cupping her breasts and gliding down the smooth plains of her stomach. One particularly bold cord of his power wound its way down between her thighs, where it made her writhe and pulse, flicking against her clitoris as he coaxed her higher and higher.
She moaned, calling out his name as she came for him.
Kas awoke with a start, his erection straining to escape his linen trousers.
“Leneteki,” he cursed quietly, swinging his legs over the side of the bed where they met the cold floor. Flexing his thighs, he willed the evidence of his desire to dissipate, to no avail. With a huff, he stood from the feather-stuffed mattress.
Nesrina rolled over, drawing his attention. He hadn’t meant to wake her—and it turned out he hadn’t. She sighed contentedly, still asleep, the blankets kicked down to the foot of the bed and her small form spread out to overtake the space he’d vacated.
How was he ever going to move forward with her? Every time he was close to making progress, his foot found his mouth, and he choked. With a weary sigh, Kas made his way into the washroom to handle his simmering need.
“Iknew lightmages aren’t inherently ‘good,’ and darkmages aren’t ‘bad.’ But I didn’t realize how cyclical their magic is, for lack of a better term,” Nes mused, her shoulder bumping his elbow when she glanced up.
“Cyclical feels like the right word, or maybe counterbalanced?” Kas replied, the back of his hand brushing her arm as they walked to their second session of the day—the final day.
The symposium went far too fast, and their impending departure was a dark cloud hovering on his horizon.
But walking with her by his side felt amazing, and something like pride wrapped in comfort settled over his heart.
This wasn’t over. “I already knew Gramenians use light and dark magic in their farming, but the information about their funerary practices was new.” Glancing down, he found her bobbing her head in agreement.
“It’s a beautiful tradition, with the trees,” she murmured.
Nes’s tiny feet moved twice as fast as his while she attempted to keep up. That couldn’t have been enjoyable for her, so he slowed.
Their next lecture was on the ancient use of ritual magic, an antiquities presentation regarding carved runes found in the remote peaks of the Dhegurs. The presenters argued that faeries once practiced blood magic there. Kas wasn’t sure how he felt about that assertion.
Nesrina wasn’t convinced either. “That feels preposterous,” she commented as he held the door for her after the lecture.
Sunlight passed through the wispy curls escaping her braid, glowing golden brown, and he wondered if that’s what chaos looked like to her.
Nes continued, “Blood magic to determine whether people are related to one another? If such a thing existed at any point, it would be useful. I find it hard to believe knowledge like that would’ve been lost to time.”
“Perhaps it’s not lost. Maybe it exists and is under wraps,” Kas offered, joining Nes on her walk across the quadrangle. “Though, I agree with you. I find it improbable.”
When he was a new student here, the idea of crossing the quad with a beautiful woman at his side was, honest to gods, one of his daydreams. As a bookish teen, the mere thought of conversing, in any meaningful way, with any woman other than his sister was apoplexy-inducing.
His scant experiential learning was paying off, nearly a decade later.
A smile flitted across his face at the concept of his younger self witnessing him here now, with the brilliant, beautiful Nesrina Kiappa at his side.
“Kas!” Nes’s voice called him back to reality.
“Hmm?” He met her gaze, sun calling out the blue in the middle of her eyes.
“Did you hear anything I said?”
Sheepishly, he shook his head.
Nes’s lips quivered, and he had to pinch his pant leg to stop his hand from flying up to her adorable mouth.
“I was asking where your next session is. Aren’t you going to something boring?”
He raised a brow. “Aren’t you going to something boring?”
Stopping before an ancient-looking building, one where Kas had once taken courses on the Old Tongue years before, Nes retorted, “The titillating lecture I’m attending is in here . . . I believe.” She craned her neck to double-check the signage engraved above the door.
“It is. And mine’s over there.” Kas hooked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing where they’d come from.
“Oh.” She fidgeted, fingertip tracing the iron railing. “You didn’t have to accompany me.”
“I know I didn’t. I wanted to.”
Her mouth fell open in a silent O.
Kas couldn’t help but brush his fingers against the back of her hand. It was better than popping his index finger in her mouth as his mind suggested. “Meet back at the inn when we’re done?”
She nodded mutely before spinning on her heel and dashing inside.
While Kas nearly joined her at her dull as rocks lecture on the merits of philosophical stoicism, he forced logic to win out in the end, reminding himself he was a grown man, capable of spending an hour away from her.
The panel discussion he attended was on the mining potential of gypsum; a potential new venture to bring more prosperity to Kabuvirib.
While he did pick up excellent tidbits about gypsum, he spent most of the session reassuring himself he was making exceptional headway with Nesrina, he only needed to shift the tone of their conversations from erudite to exploratory—with passion intact.
They met for a late lunch at the Elk & Heron, as planned, before moseying to the public hall for the penultimate event of the entire symposium, the presentation that interested Nes the most, the one he had so much fun teasing her about: a discussion on Thanin’s latest work.
His dear friend Isahn was acting as the author’s spokesperson, per usual, and would be summarizing the elusive scholar’s latest piece, then moderating a discussion on the subject.
They took seats near the back of the room, snagging the only two chairs side-by-side. The popular session was nearing capacity, and within a few minutes, only standing room remained.
He knew Nes couldn’t see much of anything past the broad shoulders ahead of her, but she was listening, entranced, the entire presentation.
It was obvious from the way she nodded along, bouncing one leg in excitement, or drumming her fingers against her knee when she wasn’t sure if she agreed with one of Isahn’s statements.
Kas found he listened to little of the presentation proper, distracted, as always, by the incomparable Nesrina Kiappa.
After the talk, a heated discussion derailed Isahn’s best attempts at moderating. Someone across the room with a froggish voice shouted his disagreement with the author’s proposal to replace naughtbirin with tishtafir.
“We have elemental magic and the elements themselves are long discovered. Naughtbirins don’t work with nature, they’re unnatural. They create from nothing. It’s a mutation! Thanin can’t call ‘nothing’ an element and upend an entire classification system,” the dissenter croaked.
Suddenly, she was talking, her pitch rising with each brilliant sentence that tumbled from her mouth.
Nesrina’s words were sure and clear as she defended Thanin’s work.
She called out the flaws in the frog-man’s argument in a way that had Kas tumbling head over heels, as if he wasn’t perpetually falling for her.
He outright stared at her, as did most of the people in the room, men and women alike.
Nesrina didn’t notice. Or if she did, she didn’t care.
Or if she cared, she didn’t show it. He wasn’t sure which it was.
Kas soaked in her speech and gazed intently upon her face, watching her eyebrows dance and her cheeks bunch as she raged on.
Her impassioned counterargument reached its crescendo: “What you seem unable to grasp, sir, is that we are not creating matter from within as Thanin posited. As much as I respect the author, he’s wrong.”
Thanin was dead wrong, but he appreciated how nicely she went about expressing it to the roomful of scholars.
She’d long since stood from her seat to climb upon it, and he loved the way she pounded her foot as interactive punctuation while she argued her point. Steadying her chair with ropes of air, he let loose a smile, enjoying the heat of her fire when he wasn’t the one being burned.
“Our magic draws from movement in the atmosphere, in nature.
It could be a misunderstood element that I, and others like me, manipulate.
But the fact remains that the chaos I draw upon already exists.
Nothing we create is real or permanent. Do you truly want to go the mutation route?
I do not—not with any type of mage, but for you, sir, I shall.
“By your definition, would it not be elemental mages, who can literally create earth, air, fire, or water, who are the most ‘unnatural’? My magic does not create, it weaves an approximation of an object, at best. What I make is drawn from chaotic movement in nature, perhaps momentum itself. Setting your idiotic elemental argument aside, I posit a new term for my magic. Not naughtbirin, nor tishtafir. Based on the Old Tongue, we are azhelekezhi. That’s azhel- from the word for chaos, coupled with -kezhi from kezher, or weaver. Chaosweavers.”
She stuck out her arm, her palm smacking Kas’s chest as she made a silent request for him to help her climb down.
Murmurs rippled through the crowd, predominantly in agreement with Nes’s astute take. He wasn’t surprised at all.
Pride filled his chest, thrumming through his bones. To stand by her side while she shined was nothing short of blissful. This is what he’d dreamt of after hearing her speak at the symposium two years before. This is what he’d wanted to see up close. She was magnificent.
He knew with certainty that Nesrina didn’t know much of the Old Tongue, but she knew enough to coin a fitting term, better than Thanin’s.
Azhelekezhi. Chaosweaver. He liked the sound of it. Her passion and eloquence as she’d defended Thanin’s work was magnificent, compelling, enrapturing. It made sense that others were stirred as well. So no, he wasn’t surprised by the overwhelmingly positive response.
What did surprise him was the way she’d outed her extremely rare magic bravely, albeit stupidly, in a room packed full of academics who were now eyeing her like she’d make the ideal subject of their respective studies.
Maybe this is why Hothan never wrote about his. Secret’s out now.
Several audience members tested the sound of Nes’s newly coined phrase.
A few even acted like they might approach her to speak further, but Kas placed an arm around her shoulders and ushered her to the rear of the theater, where they took up residence between two large parlor palms with the wall at his back.
Simultaneously wanting to shield her from the world and show her off, he decided it was best to step back and take on the role of passive protector.