“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 wasgood; she expected nothing less of him. One of his hands clasped hers where she held his throat, nails digging into her skin. “You misunderstandme,” 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 willnotgo 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. “Withevery 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 shedidcare 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.”
