“Haidra’s light burns brightly for us today,” he called. “You have won a great victory for the fate of our people, and it will not be forgotten.”
Kasira could too easily imagine that voice speaking to a crowd five, ten, twenty times this size. If she succeeded in bringing the Library under Kalish control, that was a future that could very well come to pass.
“Beasts are the manifestations of our sins, of evil,” the Paratal continued. “But they are also proof of Haidra’s love for us. They are the opportunity she gives us to redeem ourselves for our mistakes. The chance to be worthy of a place by her side. Why else would these creatures exist to harrow us? Not just in punishment for our depravities, but as a chance for absolution!”
The crowd cried out in response. The Paratal sounded just like every priest at the orphanage, corralling the children’s minds with beautiful words. People wanted to be told that things were not theirfault. That their problems had simple solutions. It was because of the beasts that your crops failed, because of them that your daughter grew sick. Pray, and pray hard, and the goddess will hear you. The goddess will save you.
They never stopped to ask the price.
Kasira stood at the edge of the crowd, palming Loraya’s recovered hairpin in circles. In her other hand, she held the vylor knife she had taken from Revna. Her friend stood several rows in front of her, oblivious to the world about to shift beneath her feet.
“You will leave during the Burning,” Vera had told her before they had emerged from the tent. “It is important that your disappearance be recorded as desertion and that it be done when the Paratal and I are in full view of the public.”
Trackers would be dispatched to follow her, her unit interrogated, but no one would look any deeper. No one would ask why a criminal almost halfway through her sentence had run the morning the Paratal had visited her battalion.
Except Revna.
“She’ll be blamed,” Kasira had objected. Malik were responsible for their tentmates, and desertion was a crime punishable by death. They would press Revna for information and hang the responsibility for Kasira’s disappearance around her neck.
“Is that a problem?” Vera had asked, and Kasira hadn’t known how to answer. Revna had been the log that kept her afloat these past years. The only bright spot in an infinity of darkness. She didn’t deserve what would happen to her, but people rarely did. That had been Loraya’s first lesson about living on the streets: You took care of you.
In the end, it was Loraya’s failure to follow her own advice that had gotten her killed.
“Besides,” Vera continued lightly, “you involved her when you executed your little ruse with the Commander. It is either this, or I find another means of dealing with her.”
Kasira’s silence was her answer. She never had been good at planning for collateral damage. That had always been Loraya’s role. Kasira had just figured out how to get the job done.
The Ambassador regarded her with shrewd eyes. “Howdidyou time it?”
“I knew Commander Dessen would try something eventually,” Kasira replied. “I told Revna I was worried the Commander would try to blame the thefts on me in an attempt to control me and that I thought he was behind them. If she ever woke to find me gone, she was to tell the Lieutenant about the trunk, where I told her I suspected he had hidden the items.”
“But in truth, you had placed them there yourself,” Vera finished in a tone that piqued Kasira’s interest. This was a powerful member of the royal court with a storied political career, the King’s cousin, but she had a look in her eye that Kasira recognized: that of one who had to know how the trick worked.
Kasira would have to be very careful with her.
“You let me do it anyway …?” She trailed off in question.
Vera had shrugged one shoulder. “Fewer loose ends. Dessen is a drunken fool apt to wag his tongue, but no one will listen to the tall tales of a thief.”
It sounded reasonable, but it was likely only half the reason Vera hadn’t excluded Dessen from their meeting. Not only would it have looked suspicious for them to meet without the Commander present, but now Vera had taken everything from him, and only she had the power to return it.
It was a trick Thane had loved to use on new recruits, tearing them down so he could build them back up, ensuring they knew they owed everything they were to him. It was shrewder than she had expected the Ambassador to be, and it had left Kasira wondering if she could have been like Vera had she been given everything instead of nothing.
The Paratal’s voice floated above the crowd in the call to prayer. The gathered soldiers chorused back, a hundred voices crying out Haidra’s name. The Paratal lifted his hands to indicate the start of prayer. All around her, heads bowed as one, and Kasira slipped into the Isherwood.
The trees spread about her in an impenetrable wall, only the moss on the trunks’ northern sides keeping her pointed in the rightdirection. The Ambassador had promised a carriage would be waiting for her on the main road to deliver her to the Library. It would feign a broken wheel to explain its presence, but it could only wait so long. Kasira had two hours before it left, the amount of time Vera had estimated it would take.
Vera had never traversed the Isherwood on foot.
The sodden ground sucked at Kasira’s boots, trying to draw her down. The leaves pressed together so tightly above her, she had fished a balestone out of her pocket to see and now clutched the glowing blue crystal in one fist. Every rustling leaf made her pause, every snapping twig drew her hand to Revna’s knife. If she weren’t careful, this con would end before it even began.
Something shifted in the underbrush behind her. She went utterly still. A low, rattling keen whined across the clearing, and she almost laughed at her ill luck.
A Zeras.
It must have been attracted by the scent of Alkatir flesh on the wind. The dangerous, oxlike beasts had grown rarer in recent years, their hides a coveted trophy for Malik to shape their leathers from, but they were still the fodder of many a Kalish nightmare. Fueled by aggression and a constant hunger, they were the swiftest and strongest of beasts to haunt the Isherwood, known for the toxin in their tail that gradually killed their prey, keeping their quarry warm as they fed.
The keening came again, closer, and this time, Kasira had no choice—she ran. The pounding of a two-ton beast thundering after her drove her faster, faster through the trees. She chanced a look back, glimpsing rough, gray hide and the snapping of a serpentine tail. She smothered the reflex to send Revna’s knife flying at its heart. Only vylor steel could pierce a Zeras’s hide, but a knife that small would hardly damage it.
