PART I
CHAPTER 1
KASIRA
KASIRA SWORE TWO OATHS THE DAY SHE JOINED THEMALIKINAR: the first to her unit, to slay any beast she laid eyes on; and the other to herself, that she would survive.
She never thought it would be so damn hard.
The darkness of the Isherwood yawned around her, an assemblage of crooked branches and ink-green leaves tipped in barbs as fine as bone dust. The swampy forest ringed nearly seventy percent of Kalthos’s borders, its depths densely populated with the continent’s most dangerous beasts.
Her boots sank into the wet earth with every step, her hand curled around the hilt of the vylor blade on her back. She had split off from the main body of her unit several paces back. Though every Malik was an elite beast slayer, their talent lay in their brutal skill with a sword, not the silence with which they stepped, and the Alkatir they hunted would hear them coming.
She didn’t want to be there when the beasts struck.
“Kas!” hissed a voice, and she slowed as Revna picked her way through the brush. Her friend tore free of a vine with a curse, and Kasira flinched, listening for the sound of paws in the undergrowth. It was quiet. The small clearing they occupied could have been another world for how silent it was, how still. The Isherwood had a way of swallowing sound. No one ever heard you scream.
It reminded her of her prison cell.
“What are you doing out here?” Revna demanded.
“Hunting.”
“You’re breaking procedure.Again.”
Kasira gave her a knowing look, and her friend glowered firmly back. Revna’s scarlet curls were tied back with a strip of leather taken from a Tyver beast she’d slain when she joined the Malikinar, and her alabaster skin was covered in a thin sheen of sweat. The close canopy of trees sealed out the sun but did nothing to temper the heat, and Kasira felt the same dampness on her brow.
She loathed the humid weather, loathed the scrape of her black fighting leathers against her clammy skin, and the weight of the sword across her back. Each one was a reminder that her life was no longer her own, and she carried them like stones through a river, waiting for the day they dragged her under.
Revna lifted her chin. “They’re going to think you’re a coward. They don’t need another reason to hate you, Kas.”
“I kill more beasts than any of them.”
“That’s not the problem.” Revna eyed her sidelong, a sign she was about to say something sensitive. “You never take a drenga, and you don’t celebrate your kills. It doesn’t matter how many you slay when half the unit’s convinced you’re a beast sympathizer.”
Kasira didn’t respond to the unasked question buried in her friend’s words:Are you?She killed because it was her job. Because if she didn’t, she would be sent back to Belvar, back to darkness so thick it suffocated, to a four-by-four cell she could barely stand up in, and thescritch, scritch, scritchof distant claws.
“Kas? Kas!”
Kasira stared down at the hand on her arm, coming back to herself in pieces. The concern on Revna’s face only sickened her. She jerked her arm free. “I’m fine.”
Revna’s verdant gaze betrayed her doubt. “I’m worried about you.”
Kasira withheld a derisive snort. What Revna really meant was that she was worried about Kasira’s soul. But what use was a soul if it couldnot be sold for a hot meal, nor burned on a cold night to stave off winter’s chill?
She could only afford to worry about one life at a time.
“I’m fine,” she said again. It was the simplest and yet most necessary lie she ever told. In the cold and quiet of her cell, those two words had kept her alive.
Revna didn’t get the chance to argue as a scream tore through the trees, followed by the resonating roar of an Alkatir.
“You’re welcome,” Kasira said simply, then dove into the woods.
They found their unit under siege in a nearby glade. The Alkatir had doubled back behind the Malik, and though small in number, the beasts more than made up for it in size and ferocity. With feline bodies, hawkish heads, and wings powerful enough to carry twice their weight, the Alkatir had only to throw their bodies into the Malik to crush bone, or else rend them with wicked claws.
Anyone else would have collapsed beneath the onslaught already, but the Malik were not ordinary soldiers. Their rigorous training and constant battles honed them to perfection, into legends the other nations feared, until even Kasira had begun to wonder if they were truly blessed with a piece of Haidra’s light.
Drawing her blade, Kasira fell in alongside Revna at the Alkatirs’ flank, cutting and hacking at white-furred limbs. The Alkatir fell with pained bellows, and she silenced them with strikes to their throats, ensuring a swift death. Their attack from the rear split the pride in two, and the unit surrounded the beasts, cutting off their escape.
