May strode from the room before Kasira could protest that Allaster didn’t seem the type to be ordered about. She slid back into her bed, spotting a tray of scones across the way that sent her stomach rumbling. She had just resolved to fight her way toward them when the air shimmered, and Allaster appeared in the middle of her room looking somewhere between chastised and extremely put out.
“May said you needed something.” He edged toward the door even as he spoke.
“You tried to kill me.”
Allaster stopped mid-step, the tension descending along his body like a rivulet of water confirmation enough. “Technically,” he said slowly, “I merely delayed in saving your life.”
“In the hopes I would die.” Zeras venom moved fast, but not that fast. For it to have come this close to killing her, he must have waited a good few minutes before bringing her back to the Library for the antidote.
“Yes, well, seeing as I had thought you tried to kill me first—”
“What?”
“You expected me to believe you had nothing to do with that poorly disguised ambush?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He huffed a laugh. “The trail of Alkatir blood into the town? The open gate? The signal the town head claimed ‘inadvertently’ indicated the wrong beast class? Everything about that mission was designed to see me killed and make it look like an accident, and should it fail, you were there to finish the job.”
“Is that why I let you use me as bait?” She swung her legs over the bed and stood to face him despite her body’s protest. “Or why I nearly got myself killed neutralizing that damn thing’s tail?”
He averted his gaze. “You’re not dead, are you?”
She nearly shrieked,no thanks to you!before she realized what he meant. She wasn’t dead because, in the end, Allaster had reached the same conclusion.
“Why aren’t I?” she asked roughly, wanting him to say it.
He didn’t respond right away, and for an instant, sitting in that silence, she saw not the ageless sorcerer, but a man who wore his exhaustion like a second skin.
“Because,” he said at last. “You saved the cub.” He turned his pale eyes upon her, and for once, they weren’t cold and cutting, but soft and searching. “You risked your life to save a wounded beast you were scared of, and I don’t understand why.”
For one dangerous moment, Kasira found herself wishing she had a real answer to that. Something more profound than the truth coiled in her heart.
In the end, she only asked, “Did it survive?”
“It’s recovering in the Eyrie. Would you like to see it?”
She nodded, and to her surprise, he offered her a hand. When she took it, his touch impossibly gentle, he snapped his fingers. This time the sensation of traveling wasn’t like being ripped away, but rather like gliding through smooth water.
They reappeared in an unimaginably large cavern. Soft sand shifted beneath her bare toes, and before her stretched a glistening blue lake. Elropes bent their elegant horned heads to drink from the lapping waters where emerald-feathered Lywins floated in flocks, synthesizing a gentle chorus. Beyond the lake rolled hills of the deepest green, full of roaming beasts. The lake ended at a small wood of trees she didn’t recognize, and beyond that, whitecapped peaks unlike anything she had ever seen before.
“This is impossible,” she breathed, and she told herself it was weakness and not wonder that had her leaning so heavily into Allaster’s arm. “What is this place?”
“The Eyrie,” he replied, eyes pinned on where she held him. “It’s where the majority of our protected beasts live, though this is only one room. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the Library has a way of playingwith space. What it fits inside does not always align with how it appears from the outside. Contained within these walls, there are many more rooms of different climates and geographical designs to suit beasts from all over the world.”
“It’s incredible,” she said, and found that she meant it.
Allaster shifted awkwardly, then tugged her up along the beach. The warm sand transitioned into velvet-soft grass that swayed in a gentle breeze as they approached a circular pen, one of many placed beneath the shade of a swath of willows. The Alkatir cub lay curled inside, one tattered wing cupped around its head as if to hide it from the world. Its injuries had been treated, the other wing placed in a splint, but it looked so small and frail.
The cub quivered and wound itself tighter when they approached, emitting a small, pained breath that reminded Kasira of a hound that used to whine outside the orphanage all night.
Kasira extricated herself from Allaster and leaned against the pen, peering through the slats at the beast. “They used it as bait.”
“Alkatir are the Zeras’s favored prey,” Allaster replied tightly. “They’re usually safe in their prides, but a cub alone, particularly an injured one, had no chance of survival.”
She’d thought she had let it go, but she had only condemned it to a different death. Had it been imprisoned in their camp even as she had made her escape? Carted through the Isherwood by soldiers who would have jeered at and tormented it, only to be tossed into that building like a scrap of meat to be torn apart?
“I will find the people who did this,” Allaster said softly, and in his voice Kasira heard not the vexing prince whose manner she had come to disdain, but the powerful sorcerer who had all the time in the world to take someone apart piece by piece.
