As she crested a small hill, she spotted a glimmer in the distance. She broke toward it. Her boots struck damp earth, then shallow water, and she stumbled forward into the swamp. Fighting to get her feet under her, she pressed deeper into the moss-laden water until she made it to the center, forced to tread water to stay afloat.
The Zeras paced at the swamp’s edge, tossing its horned head as its venom-barbed tail snapped angrily in the air. It stamped its clawed feet one final time then turned back the way it had come, huffing hot breath into the faint morning light.
Kasira stayed in the pool for several minutes until something scaly brushed her leg, and she could bear it no longer. She swam to the edge and clambered out, cold and smelling of the swamp. Her back stung, the wounds reopened from her flight, and she had gone drastically off course. Valuable time spun away as she wrung out her clothes, but she couldn’t risk Briarbeetles; one bite, and the beasts’ venom would paralyze her.
Once dressed, she hurried on with a hand resting on Revna’s knife, ducking behind thick trunks when she heard movement or else drawing her blade at the flash of eyes. By the time she reached the main road, the carriage was trundling away.
“Wait!” she called.
One of the Malik escorts heard her and called for the carriage to stop. They must have been from a different battalion, since she didn’t recognize them, nor the driver who peered back as the carriage doors opened to release two neatly clad women. Their dresses reflected the militaristic style of Kalish clothing, the shoulders squared and the bodices resplendent with two columns of golden buttons.
Kasira approached them cautiously, but they had no such qualms and ushered her toward the carriage.
“Hurry, into the cab,” one said with the deep vowels of the northern Kalish.
“What a mess you are!” cried the other, younger one as she took in Kasira’s now-stiff leathers and matted hair. “Your back is soaked through with blood. Tavlan, find a rag.”
A moment later, Kasira was settled onto a seat in the cab, the curtains drawn as the carriage rattled onward. They went for as long a time as the two women could bear, before Tavlan at last knocked for the driver to stop. Both women set to work with a determined dexterity, one undoing the laces and buckles of Kasira’s uniform while the other wet a cloth from a bucket.
“That stays,” Kasira said curtly, knocking aside Tavlan’s hands when she tried to remove Loraya’s pin from her braid. The woman’s hair was bright red, like Revna’s, but where her friend was lean and fine boned, Tavlan was all curves with handsome features. Still, she was an unwelcome reminder of the woman whose life Kasira had likely just destroyed.
Tavlan frowned. “It’s cheap silver, not fit for a lady,” she pointed out, and she was right. It was the kind of mistake Kasira never would have made seven years ago, when she had slid from persona to persona like a snake shedding its skin.
It hit her then that this was really happening. After years spent ending the lives of the same creatures that had once inspired wonder in her, she was being sent to the very place she had dreamed of as a child to pull off the job of a lifetime. She expected that to mean something to her—she felt nothing. This was simply the next step in the rhythm: sleep, wake,hunt. Only the target had changed, and her weapon no longer a vylor blade but the tools of a thief that Loraya had put in her hands the day they left the orphanage: a quick wit and even faster hands.
If she succeeded, she would finally have the life she and Loraya had always dreamed of.
Tavlan reached for her again, but Kasira stopped her with a look. “I can undress myself.”
“Well, be quick about it,” the younger one said instead. “We can’t have you catching a cold before we reach the Library.”
It took Kasira less than ten minutes to undress, wash, and don an entirely new persona. At least on the outside. Her hair had been brushed to a luster and neatly braided, her ears adorned with rubies fit for a princess. Loraya’s hairpin had gone into her pocket. Her dress, like that of the other women, provided for little movement in the chest and arms, and kept her shoulders rigidly back. It unfurled around her in waves of seafoam green, with delicate, white-laced needlework trimming the edges.
They had cleaned and rebound her wounds, and by the time they finished, Tavlan was looking at her with a mixture of pity and curiosity.“I don’t know what you did to be chosen as the new Assistant, Lady Eirlana, but I will pray for you,” she said as the carriage started up again.
Kasira wanted to tell her it was her own soul she should be worried about. Vera had probably paid them handsomely for their silence, providing as little information as possible, but Kasira would not be surprised to hear of the carriage running afoul of a pack of beasts on its way back through the Isherwood.
Since her battalion was stationed near the coast, the trip to the inland Library would take several days, a length of time that would enable her to settle into her new role and let her back heal. And as the days passed, Kasira walked herself deeper into the mindset of the woman she had to become.
Eirlana would not be happy to be the first Kalish mage to grace the Library in so long, but she would recognize the good it did her family and be proud of it. She would disdain the Library and all it contained, from the mages to the beasts to Allaster St. Archer himself. Likely she would resist training, disparage any attempts at friendship, and sour the mood of any room she entered—but such a nature would do little to advance Kasira’s cause.
So Kasira would take those same characteristics—Eirlana’s pride, her etiquette, her intelligence—and repurpose them into a different story. She would be a dutiful daughter determined to make this work in thanks for her family’s salvation. She would see it as Haidra’s path for her, and though hesitant, would slowly begin to mold into the confines of her new life.
She would see the sacrifice of her soul as a worthy cause to spread Haidra’s light, a notion Kasira could hardly fathom. To her, death was death.
In the end, you rotted to dust either way.
“Lady Eirlana?” Tavlan tapped her shoulder, pulling her from her study. “We’re here.”
CHAPTER 4
KASIRA
BEFORE THE FIRE THAT TOOK HER PARENTS’LIFE, A PAINTING HADhung in the kitchen of Kasira’s childhood home. It had been of a small cottage nestled between a lake and a swath of rolling green hills, the sky a wash of pastel blues and purples. It had looked almost fantastical: a gentle fog tracing the grassy yard, vines and trellises of flowers trailing along the side of the house. It was one of the only things she remembered from back then.
She told Loraya about it once, and her con partner had promised that one day, they would find their own house by the lake, a place free of fear and the endless scramble to survive. Kasira had known it was impossible, but it had become a symbol of the life they chased—real, peaceful, warm. That promise had gotten her through a life on the streets, through years of manipulation in Thane’s crew, through Belvar.
“None of this is real,” they would say to each other when things got too hard, when one of them began to wear or break. “It’s only temporary.”
