“You have my book.”
“Or better yet, why don’t I drown myself in the Seven Veils? Save you the headache.”
“Corynth—” he began, but she was already heading for the collections room beneath the ramp, where mages returned texts for the spirits to reshelve. Books had a habit of vanishing from there the moment they hit the counter, and the Library had already lost his book once.
He cut her off, very nearly causing a second collision. “If you make me drop these again, I’m going to aim for your foot,” she warned, though she would hardly have to try.Roomwas a generous word for what was really an alcove, and with the both of them tucked inside it, there was hardly space to turn about.
“I need that book,” he demanded.
She set the stack down, pulling his book from the middle and very nearly sending the whole thing toppling again. “Why are you researching Avaria? We don’t have contact with them, do we?”
“There is no ‘we,’ and that is none of your business.” He made agrab for the book, but she stepped deftly around him, flipping the tome open to scan the first page. Her back was to him now, nearly pressed against his own in the cramped space, but all Allaster could think about was getting the book back before it inspired the sort of questions he didn’t want her asking.
He spun and reached for it again just as she turned around, bringing them face-to-face with the book between them, his arm nearly encircling her. She stopped then, her head tilted back the barest so she could peer up at him through her lashes, and he realized with a start that she had done this on purpose. Running into him, taking his book, drawing him here alone.
She must have seen the realization on his face, because the smile slipped from hers. “You’ve been avoiding me,” she said. “I had to get your attention somehow.”
So she had taken hisbook.
He snatched it from her, its width the only space between them. He could still feel the heat of her against his skin. “I haven’t been avoiding you. I simply happen to be where you aren’t.”
“You’ve been watching me,” she countered. “What exactly is it you’re waiting for me to do? Go on a beast-murdering rampage?”
“The thought has occurred to me,” he muttered, and her annoyance redoubled. But there was something off about it, something that left him doubting its sincerity even as he struggled to identify it. As desperate as he was to trust her, as much as he needed her to be who she claimed, something held him back.
And after a hundred and twenty years, Allaster had learned when to trust his instincts.
“Allaster—” she began, but he was already gone.
CHAPTER 10
KASIRA
AS A CHILD,KASIRA HAD LOVED STORIES.SHE WOULD LIE IN BEDlistening to her mother’s voice weave tales of distant lands and ancient magic, falling asleep to the rhythm of her words. The details of her mother’s face had long ago fled her, but those stories had become a part of her, shaped her in ways she hadn’t truly understood until her parents’ deaths put her on the streets. She learned to keep her interest close, and she stopped speaking of the mother who had taught her wonder instead of fear.
Then came the orphanage.
Our Lady of the Light resembled a children’s home as closely as Belvar did a tavern. The royal court paid the priests a stipend for each child they took in, and so they had a deal with the city watch to bring them those caught committing petty crimes. The priests were meant to teach the children of Haidra’s light, but Kasira had spent more time scrubbing church pews than studying scripture.
She was ten and used to the children of the street, who had grown uncomfortable at her off-putting comments, but nothing more. The first time she had shown too much interest in a beast, a priest threw her to her knees before Haidra’s altar and commanded she pray until her voice grew raw. The second time, another child snitched on her for reading a stolen book about the Library; she still had scars from that lashing. After that, the other children had called her beastsympathizer, Library whore, all names they whispered behind her back year after year.
But none of that had compared to the day she brought home an injured Talowell, a tiny creature without claw or fang, the same kind her mother had once placed in her hands and said,See? It is not so scary. When the priests discovered her tending to it, they made her drown it. She still remembered the feel of its scaly body thrashing in her hands before going irrevocably still. Then they took a hot knife to her palm to burn out the sin of touching it.
That was the day she had truly understood that the only thing her people hated more than a beast was a beast sympathizer.
She brushed her fingers absently over the old scar. That day, a little of their fear had seeped into her and never left. It had festered and rotted until she too looked at beasts with dread, until the vicious things she heard people say no longer turned her stomach. Four long years in the Malikinar had done the rest.
Yet now, here she was, tucked away within the Library’s towering walls, with more books at her disposal than she had time to read, nestled among people who would not condemn her for it. She didn’t know what to make of it. It felt like being handed a weapon for the first time, clumsy and unfamiliar. The wrongness of it chafed at her, and though she affected an air of ease, everything inside her was in knots. She kept waiting for that knife.
Instead, they only watched her—Allaster most of all—and so she kept reading. Her attempt to corner him into conversation had failed, and she had learned very little of note from the book he’d been reading. She had come back for it that night, but all it contained were accounts of age-old Avari history.
But letting Allaster see her engrossed in study was only the first step of many in building on the foundation she had laid for him. She had planted the idea during their sparring match that he might be wrong about her, and with each action she took now, she would give him reason to question himself, in hopes of eventually convincing him to trust her.
It would be a difficult task, seeing as he wanted nothing to do withher, but that only meant she would need to rely on others to communicate the information for her. People like May and the mages, who made no attempt to hide their staring each morning as she collected a stack of books and claimed the table by the fire. Time dulled emotion. It was exhausting to be constantly on guard, particularly when the person you were defending against insisted on sitting alone with a pile of books that completely rewrote your perception of them.
Over the next few days, she made her way studiously through her stack. She took notes as she went, her hand cramping from mimicking Eirlana’s flowing script, and discussed the contents with May at lunch. She read about the Revenant gods of the Jacari and Riviair’s bureaucratic society, from the twelve ministers to the opulent business district that housed the capital city’s elite. She read of the Miravi sand caves and the blue-finned Tolvish beasts whose scales emitted a substance that turned the Ayadese mountain lakes a pale sunrise orange, working her way through field guides covering the countless years mages had spent cataloging beast versus animal.
Several of the texts detailed now-extinct nonmagical species, the snow leopards of Avaria among them. Others theorized about what had led to the development of creatures steeped in magic and those free of it, but none held any sort of final conclusion. Iylis himself only had shrugged when she asked about his form, quite pointedly inquiring why she looked like a human woman, and in the absence of any rejoinder, had strode away with his nose in the air.
