She could have stayed in the orphanage. Become a priestess of Haidra or been funneled into the Malikinar as a child like so many others. She could have bent herself into the shape they wanted like Revna had done all her life, but Kasira had wanted more than that. Only now did she realize that she had simply been forced into a different kind of box.
Something shifted in Allaster’s expression. She stepped toward him, and when he didn’t retreat, she closed the distance. “I took Eirlana’s place because I had nowhere else to go. I couldn’t stay in the Malikinar. The things I told you about Eirlana’s past … They weren’t lies, not really. I did grow up befriending beasts, and people hated me for it. They tried to burn my curiosity out of me.” She bared her hand to him, where the scar spoke of the hot knife that had cut across her palm.
Allaster’s eyes locked on it, staying there until she curled her hand into a fist and pulled it to her chest. “I’m sorry,” she said, and deep, deep down, in a place she refused to look, she knew she meant it, and she knew it did not matter.
The storm building in Allaster’s eyes broke, and he spun, hurling his glass at the wall with a roar. It exploded, sending shattered pieces skittering across the floor as his hands dropped to the mantel, his head bowed between them.
Kasira didn’t move; she barely breathed. She only stared at Allaster’s back and realized she had underestimated him. For all his irritability and arrogance, he cared deeply for the Library, deeply enough that something like this, a betrayal, was not a mere personal slight, but a threat to something larger. This would not be easy to recover from.
“You don’t understand what you’ve done.” Allaster’s voice was hoarse.
“Then tell me,” she coaxed him. “Tell me the truth.”
A bitter laugh escaped him, and he pushed off the mantel, running one hand through his pale copper hair. His curls fell askew, complementing his disheveled clothes, and the henolite torc gleamed against the column of his throat.
She felt the echo of the cuff’s chill against her wrist. If the metal did what she thought, how could he wear those and still perform magic?
“I knew you were lying, but I couldn’t figure out how,” he said. “And I needed you,needed you, to be telling the truth.”
“It wasn’t all a lie,” she said softly, but the words only seemed to cause him more pain.
He shook his head. “Leave me.”
“Allaster—”
He flinched, and she fell silent. He would need time. Time to accept why she’d done what she had, time to understand before she could take his strings in hand once more and play a new song. But as Kasira snapped her fingers, transporting herself back to her quarters, she struggled to understand herself.
She summoned a bag and started packing.
She hadn’t decided to leave, but wanted to be ready while her mind worked. She had told Allaster too much, given too many truths, but everything had been unspooling so quickly, and she hadn’t known what else to do. If she couldn’t recover from this, if her place here was forfeit, she would be better off fleeing through the portal room and using her magic to disappear.
It would weaken eventually, and she would have to keep moving, always moving. Vera was not the type to let such a treachery go.
She would hunt Kasira forever.
Once, Kasira had embraced the freedom of the streets, despite its difficulties. She had slept in damp alleys or watched her toes turn purple from the cold and wondered if she would survive the night, but she’d also had Loraya and, for a time, the safety of Thane and his crew. She had learned a thousand and one things and been a hundred different people. But the truth was, she had spent her life running from, not to. From her past. From her mistakes.
From herself.
We survive, whispered Loraya’s voice.It’s what we do.
What if I want more?The question felt like a betrayal, even locked inside her head. After everything Loraya had sacrificed for her, to doubt her now felt profane. Above all else, Loraya had kept her alive. She would have told Kasira to run away, to protect herself, but for once, just once, Kasira wanted to runtowardsomething. She wanted to be free of her history, free of everything, and if she left now, she never would be.
So bit by bit, she unpacked the bag. Returned her clothes to the sorka and her knife beneath the pillow. And then she climbed beneath the covers and fell asleep thinking about the look of horror on Allaster’s face.
CHAPTER 28
ALLASTER
THERIVIAIREN AIR WAS WARM AND LACED WITH THE SCENT OF JASMINEamong the graves.
Allaster had always liked the way the Riviairens honored death, their graveyards serving as homes to art and history as much as final resting places. There were headstones carved in mimicry of the lives they marked, others sculpted into the flash of wings or the crook of an oak tree’s branches, the backs inscribed with the history of the deceased’s life, which was more important to them than what came after.
Mora’s was simple, a square headstone engraved with Amorlin’s sigil. Her hometown of Kelmir had wanted to build her a monument honoring her as Librarian and the many ways she had given back to the town, but Mora would have hated that. The idea that her grave could become an attraction for visitors or some sort of shrine had made her purse her lips in disdain and say, “You bury me right, Allaster, or I’ll claw my way out of the earth and hunt you down.”
He’d believed her. There wasn’t much he would have put past Mora. From his first day at the Library, she had seemed like a god to him. Her magic, her knowledge—he’d wanted a fraction of what she had, and she had shared it all freely. In time, he forgot his homesickness, forgot his yearning for the salt air of Spenshire and dreams of dragons, and had become a piece of something so grand, so vast, that it had felt like being part of the ocean or the sky.
Something infinite.
