Kasira refused to let her expression shift. “My mission is to blend in. I can hardly do that while balking at everything around me. Allaster never would have accepted me as his Assistant had I not performed as admirably as I have.”
Thane brought his hands together in a mock clap. “You always have an answer, don’t you? Come now, Kas, I’ll give you one more chance. Admit now that you’re in too deep. Tell me that you’ve lost your way, that you need my help, and I’ll listen. I won’t tell a soul. Hell, I’ll even help you.”
He spread his hands magnanimously. “But I want to hear you say it.”
Some part of her wanted to. Wanted to hand him her burden like she once had, to have someone,anyone, who knew the truth of her. But that was the danger of people like Thane. They made you feel seen,known. You lost yourself in them, until you could no longer see a way out.
Once, she wouldn’t have been able to recognize that. She would have cloaked herself in him, mistaken control for safety. Perhaps it was what Thane had done to Loraya, or perhaps it was months of spending time with Allaster, a man who brought out pieces of herself she had thought too deeply buried to ever find, but she could see it now.
“I’m going to make you regret ever coming here,” she promised, and vanished.
She reappeared in her room, her exhaustion weighing her down. It took the last of her strength to trek to the bathroom, which had attached itself to her bedroom in recent days. A bath was already waiting, the lavender-scented air a balm to her singed nerves, and she climbed carefully inside. The blood sloughed from her skin in pools of red, and she scrubbed until the last of it flaked away.
She stared at it. Stared and thought of how dead Revna’s eyes had been, as if something vital had been leached from her. Her father would never take her back, ashamed of a failure that wasn’t even hers. All her life Revna had striven to prove herself to him, dedicating herself to the Malikinar and Haidra’s light, and now she had become something more detestable to him than a beast.
She had become a criminal.
In the silence, Kasira at last let herself crumple beneath the weight of everything she had done. Of what she still had to do. Between Allaster’s refusal to accept Kalish mages and subsequent denial of magic to Thane, his shielding of Kasira, and the attack on Spenshire, Vera had enough evidence to call the Conclave, and Kasira’s deadline was fast approaching.
Her time here was coming to an end.
The wave of thoughts numbed Kasira’s mind, and soon the water had gone cold. The taut skin of her scars ached as she dried and dressed, each motion more distant than the last. By the time she had finished and reached for the magic, she had transported herself before she had even considered where she was going.
She reappeared in the Eyrie to find Gievra rolling on his back in a patch of dirt he’d freed of its grass. When he spotted her, he turned upright and brought one wing to his beak, cleaning his feathers. It was the most nonchalant greeting she had ever received. Between it and the steady thrum of magic pulsing toward her, she might have actually thought he was happy to see her.
It took her three tries to summon his dinner from the shed, the magic less than cooperative, and she was about to toss a piece of meat inside when another urge struck her. She checked for Thane’s presence and, finding him far enough away, clambered over the fence and dropped inside the pen. Gievra watched her with his one curious golden eye as she took a chunk of meat and proffered it to him.
Slowly, he rose to his feet and edged a little nearer. She didn’t move, encouraging him closer through the magic connecting them. This close, she realized just how much bigger he had gotten in the past few weeks. Fully raised, his head reached her shoulders, and she was by no means short. Where his ribs had once protruded there was now thick muscle coated in luxurious white fur, save the few places where his scars had prevented regrowth, and he had begun to develop a crown of black feathers on his head.
Please don’t eat my fingers, she requested as he lowered his head to sniff the meat. Then, with the utmost care, he took the piece in hisbeak. The moment he had it, he threw back his head and downed the bite whole. She laughed as he trilled, the sound half rumble, half avian cry, and she fed him the rest of what was in the bucket, after which he stuck his head inside to ensure she wasn’t hiding any.
“That’s it, you bottomless pit.” She turned the bucket upside down. “I’ll be back with breakfast in the morning.”
She expected Gievra to retreat upon finding the food gone, but he only cocked his head in consideration. Feeling a little reckless, she reached out a hand, sending soothing pulses along their connection. She almost didn’t believe it when her fingers sank into the thick fur of his shoulder, soft and supple as Verentula silk. She ran her hand back and forth along his neck, and he leaned into her with a low whine.
Then something snapped.
Gievra bolted, disappearing inside his hut with a hiss. Kasira spun, expecting Thane, but found only Warrin watching her from beside the shed.
She hopped back over the fence. “Are you trying to get me killed?”
Warrin ducked his head with a wince. It made him look so much younger, and suddenly his beard felt an obvious attempt to age himself, though his sheer size did that well enough on its own, perhaps a bit unfairly. There was a smattering of iridescent dust on his clothes and hands that suggested he had been working.
“Do you need something?” she asked more gently.
His lips parted, then shut, his hands fisting at his sides, his uncertainty so at odds with the surety he’d shown in the infirmary. When he finally spoke, it was in halting starts and stops. “I—You. Spenshire. Are they okay? Was anyone else hurt?” His voice was so soft, she had to strain to hear him.
“Allaster and I handled it,” she replied carefully. “There was some damage done to the town, but nothing irreversible.”
“And the people?”
It was in the way he asked it, as though he at once had to know but also couldn’t bear to hear her answer. “You know people there, don’t you?”
“I was raised there. Ambric is my great-great-grandfather.”
How hadn’t she seen it before? The tall frame, the aquilinenose—Warrin could be Ambric’s younger self. Which also made him Allaster’s distant nephew. Perhaps that was why she had never considered it. He didn’t show Warrin any sort of favoritism, but she supposed, knowing Allaster, he wouldn’t for the sake of fairness or propriety or something boring like that. Perhaps she could change that, turn Warrin into yet another mark against the Librarian.
“My family lives there,” he said. “In the manor the portal leads to. My parents—”
