Slowly, his wings unfurled, revealing his furred, hawkish face and a lean, muscular body. Pure white, like the snow on the distant Eyrie mountains, and so very, very scared. They sat that way for some time, both uncurled and open. Then something shifted in the grass behind her, and the cub coiled back into his ball with a hiss.
It shattered the spell, her guilt twisting into something new and so much sharper. What she couldn’t tell was how much was for the beast before her, or for the woman who wasn’t here.
“Allaster,” Kasira said in greeting at the sound of footsteps.
Allaster sat down cross-legged beside her, proffering her one of the glasses clasped in his hand. He held a bottle of mylak in the other. “Drink?”
She took the glass and held it out. He filled it, then his own. She nodded at the cub. “He needs shelter. Somewhere to hide.”
Allaster waved his hand, and a small, round hut appeared in the enclosure. Gievra recoiled, but upon seeing the hut’s opening, sniffed it suspiciously before darting inside.
“It’s unusual,” he said. “Most Alkatir hate enclosed spaces.”
Kasira suspected she knew exactly why Gievra hadn’t hesitated to hide himself away, and it had to do with his mother’s murderer sitting across from him. The last time he had probably felt truly safe had been beneath his mother’s wing.
“You’re going to have to teach me how to do that.” She gestured at the hut, sipping her mylak. The vanilla notes were pleasant on her tongue, and she wondered what it tasted like to Allaster. Probably old books and dust.
“We can start tomorrow.”
They didn’t talk for some time after that, the only noise the many sounds of the Eyrie. Kasira focused on the gentle lapping of the nearby lake and the taste of mylak as they worked their way through half the bottle. Her body felt warm and relaxed, her mind a little hazy, and she knew her face had to be flushed by now. Her cheeks always turned bright red after a few drinks. She wondered if Eirlana’s had as well.
“Sometimes,” Allaster began, hesitant, “I forget that you’re not just the Assistant Librarian. You’re Eirlana Corynth. You had a life before this.”
Her hand curled tighter around her glass. He had no idea just how much of a life she’d had. “You didn’t?”
He shrugged, the tension on his brow belying the ease of his tone. “I always knew I would end up here. I didn’t get called until I was nine, but I was five when my parents took me from my home in Spenshire to study at the Arcadamium. I have a mind for beasts and a knack for interacting with them, which was rare among a people who preferred the study of them to the actual thing. That, and I discovered a new subspecies.”
She blinked at him, and he shrugged. “There is a very slight difference in appearance between Northern and Southern Solen Birds. The Northern ones have a small patch of white on the females, right here.” He pressed a finger to the hollow of his throat. “Previously, it was classified as a mere color variation, but I discovered the hard way they possess a cry that can paralyze their prey.”
Though the Library had mostly cataloged the main species of beasts over the centuries, new ones were occasionally still discovered. But to have done so as a child, and to have entered the Arcadamium so young, he must have been a prodigy. What must that have been like, knowing his future all his life? She had never known such certainty.
He tilted his head back, peering up at the Eyrie’s night sky. “I spent almost my entire childhood at the Arcadamium, only returning to the sea during summers. There were other candidates training, of course, but even they seemed to think it would be me. Everyone did. And when the call came from the Library for a candidate, the High Mage went straight to my parents.”
“You sound … disappointed,” she said.
“I wanted to study dragons.” A small smile tugged at his lips, and she thought of his excitement when he’d told her about the dragon whistle. “They’re one of the few known magical beings not classified as beasts. A little like ourselves, you might say. They’re even said topossess powers much like mages, but no one has seen one since Avaria shut its borders.”
He crossed his legs, cupping his glass with both hands. “My brother and I had this dream of traveling north and sneaking into Avaria to find one. We wanted to know why they never left the north, why they partnered with the Avari and no others. It was a faraway dream, but I had a hard time letting go of it my first few years here.”
She struggled to imagine Allaster hunting dragons through the constant blizzards and treacherous mountain terrain of Avaria. He seemed far more likely to lecture the snow for daring to inconvenience him with its cold. But there was also an inquisitive side to him, one that called to her own.
“So the two of you became mages instead,” she said. “It must have been nice, working with him.”
Allaster snorted, taking a long drink of his mylak. “We hadn’t seen much of each other by the time his candidacy was accepted, so it took time for us to reconnect. We worked well together for a while, but the Miravi have a way of turning everything into a competition, and my brother and I were no different. In the end, I think he retired purely to get away from me.”
He offered her a half smile whose ease she did not believe, then downed the last of his mylak and refilled both their glasses. He looked at her from the corner of his eye. “What was yours?”
“My what?”
“Dream,” he said, as if the word didn’t carry a smothering weight to it.
She paused with her glass midway to her lips, averting her gaze. “I don’t have one.”
“Nothing?”
“Dreams are for people with futures. People who know the world is there to catch them when they fall.” And she had already fallen, a shade trapped inside the world’s cracks. One of the unremembered, as Thane had called them. The forgotten, who couldn’t claw their way back to the surface.
Now she knew nothing else but the spaces in between.
