“Grudge?” Derisive laughter permeated Allaster’s response. “AmIthe one holding a grudge?”
Silence, thick and still enough that Kasira held her breath. Then, the scraping of a chair and the click of boot heels.
“Brother, please, I didn’t mean—” But Allaster’s apology was cut off by a slamming door, followed by the solid thud of someone banging something against the wall and muttering curses in Miravi.
Kasira frowned. To maintain neutrality, Assistants cut all ties with their past lives upon selection, dedicating themselves fully to their new role before they became Librarian. So what was Allaster doingspeaking with his brother? More than that,howwas he speaking with his brother? If Mora had been Librarian for over a hundred years, Allaster had been her Assistant equally as long, which not only put him at well over a hundred, but his brother as well.
Someone cleared their throat. “Perhaps she is not—”
“Not you too, Iylis.” Ice clinked in a glass, then came the sound of someone dropping heavily into a chair.
“I only meant that you cannot keep her in that room forever. At some point, you must train her.”
“Apparently, I cannot keep her in there at all.” There was a loudsnap, and then Kasira was sprawled out on the portal room floor, her face pressed into the cold marble.
An unexpected surge of true annoyance filled her chest, and she rolled back to peer up at a disheveled-looking Allaster. It was as though someone had taken the pristine, composed Librarian from earlier and replaced him with a rogue. He lounged in a thin wooden chair as if it were a throne, one leg thrown over the other, a glass of gold liquor in one long-fingered hand. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes heavily lidded, and his shirt unbuttoned in a deep V to reveal the hard lines of his chest. The torc gleamed against the long column of his throat.
“Spying, are we?” he inquired in such an icy tone that the priests’ warnings about curses came slinking back. Evidently, she was not as unsupervised as she had assumed. If Allaster’s magic enabled him to track her from a distance, she would need a new strategy for mapping the Library’s layout.
“If that’s what you call giving myself arealtour, then yes.” She stood and dusted herself off as she took in the octagonal room. “Your attempt at one was less than informative.”
He snorted into his drink. Sensing that was the extent of his response, she addressed Iylis. “Thank you for the scone.” She bowed, the picture of a lady’s manners that Eirlana would have clung to even here.
Iylis straightened. “My pleasure. My craft is wasted on this one. All he consumes is mylak and—”
“That’s quite enough, thank you, Iylis.” Allaster rubbed the bridgeof his nose, then turned his strange eyes upon her, the kohl making them look depthless. “Why are you here?”
“Excuse me?”
His lips pressed into a line. “Very well. We’ll play the game if you insist. But you should know I don’t handle losing well.”
Kasira let a little of the contempt Eirlana would surely feel settle in her expression. “I can assure you, having my entire life turned inside out is not a game to me. I have no more desire to be here than you do to have me. But here I am, and I will do what is expected of me.”
Allaster regarded her carefully before saying, “We’ll see about that.” Then he snapped his fingers. Space shifted, dropping them back into the main library. Balelights flooded to life, casting the now empty room in an ethereal light. Kasira groaned and set a hand against a nearby couch.
“You get used to it eventually,” Iylis assured her, though he looked vaguely queasy as he padded off.
“Now then,” Allaster began, either unaware of her discomfort or else entirely unconcerned by it. “A Librarian’s education consists of three main areas: international relations, physical training, and beast management. Most study all of these for the mere possibility of being chosen as an Assistant, and I was assured you had done the same, but seeing as the Kalish haven’t produced a decent mage in decades, I’ll try not to hold your shortcomings against you.”
“How magnanimous of you,” she replied coolly, but he was already off across the room in search of something. While he checked under piles of books and forced open jammed drawers, she inspected the nearby objects. There was a chipped teacup behind several inches of glass; an Avari hunting mask with its dragon-like face; and nestled in a small blue bowl, two white dice with tiny chips of sapphire to mark the numbers, which Loraya would have pocketed in a heartbeat. She always had had a proclivity for beautiful things, and the Library was full of them.
It was as much a museum as anything, lined with history from the other nations Kasira had only heard about in passing. Most of her education came from her time in Thane’s crew, but it was difficult to learnmore about their neighbors when hardly any books on the subject existed, and those that did were heavily doctored through a Kalish lens.
She crossed the room to inspect a sword wrapped in white cloth and mounted on the wall. One end of the cloth hung loose and fluttered in a phantom wind. Amorlin’s tree symbol was sewn into it, and unless she was hearing things, the sword was emitting a faint hum. The sound tickled her skin, making gooseflesh rise, and she shifted a little closer.
“Ah, here it is.” A loudthunkbroke her from her trance, and she turned to find Allaster dusting his hands atop a pile of paper taller than her fist.
“And that is?”
“Your first test.”
“Excuse me?”
“I don’t have time to waste teaching you, which means I need to know what you know and what you don’t.” He flicked one ring-laden hand at the stack of paper. “Hence, your test. You have until morning.”
“Wait, I—”
“Don’t know a thing about international relations, magical theory, artifacts, or beasts?” Allaster blinked innocently at her, and suddenly, she understood. He wasn’t keeping her at arm’s length because he didn’t want to train a Kal. He was doing it because he fully believed she was a pawn, sent here not to fulfill her role as Assistant, but to spy.
