“I’m sorry, Allaster,” Kasira said into the thickening silence. “I know you didn’t want it to be her.”
“I didn’t want it to be anyone.” He peered at her between his fingers. “I wanted you to be wrong.”
Then he was gone.
CHAPTER 35
ALLASTER
“IREFUSE TO BELIEVE THIS.” MAY TOSSED THE NOTE ATOPELYAE’Sbracelet on Allaster’s desk. He left it there, staring at it as if it might offer up some new secret. He hadn’t expected May to condemn Elyae, but her utter resoluteness only made him feel worse about the decision he’d made.
“There is nothing Elyae cares about more than the Library.” May sank into the chair across from him, equal parts incensed and exhausted. He was starting to think it a permanent state for them both. “There must be another explanation.”
“Then by all means, give me one.” Allaster fiddled anxiously with a ring. Elyae could be hot-tempered and rash, but he could not have imagined her a traitor before now. He’d recruited her to the Library himself after she had helped him and Mora on a beast mission in Ayador. She had been only fifteen, her parents dead for less than a month.
Now, he couldn’t stop thinking about the look on her face, as if he’d stripped her very soul from her. Perhaps he had. The Library was everything to her, as it was for him. Spy or not, she would have had its best interest at heart.
May pressed her fingers into her temple. “You should return the bracelet. It was her mother’s.”
“I will.”
They were quiet then, the crackle of the fire the only sound. Allaster tried to focus on it, to narrow his thoughts down to that single noise, rather than the maelstrom inside him. So much had unraveled so quickly. Thane, Spenshire, Elyae—what had begun as shifting snow had turned into a full-blown avalanche, and he didn’t know how to stop it.
“So,” May began through a heavy breath. “Does this mean you trust Kasira now?”
Allaster groaned, dropping his head into his hands. He didn’t know how he felt about Kasira Vitalis. Half the time he was convinced she was every bit the dedicated mage and the rest he swore she was picking through her words like puzzle pieces, searching for the best fit. All he knew was that he couldn’t stop watching her do it.
“I’m trying to,” he said at last. “But until I hear from Nyelle, I can’t risk it.”
“Why not?” May’s voice shook with an uncharacteristic fervor, and he looked up to find her brown eyes pinning him to the spot.
“Because she could ruin everything, May,” he said slowly. “The Library—”
“Fates above!” May leapt to her feet. “Stop saying that. You’re not the only one who cares about the Library, and you are notjustthe Librarian of Amorlin. You are a person, one who has been little more than a corpse this past year, and now someone shows up who you’ll actually talk to, who makes you act, if only for a moment, like the man I used to know, and you tell me you can’t trust her because of theLibrary?”
Her hands came down on the edge of the desk, and it was all he could do to stare at her as she snapped out, “Admit it, Allaster. You’re afraid of losing her.”
She was right. He knew it the moment she said it; he had been afraid of losing her for some time. Every day he kept the truth from Kasira, every day they spent together, it became harder and harder to voice. He had tried. Once. And then his mind had pictured the horror sprouting in her woodland-green eyes, imagined the way the perfectbow of her lips would twist, only for Vera’s arrival to save him from the choice.
He had told himself he withheld the truth because he didn’t trust her, had promised May he would do what needed to be done once Nyelle collected the information he sought, and it was true—but he also couldn’t deny that there was a part of him that just didn’t want to lose another person he cared about.
Because he did care, and it was going to break him.
“It doesn’t matter what I feel,” he croaked out at last. “Only the Library matters.”
“Yes,” May hissed through clenched teeth. “You’ve made that perfectly clear.”
Allaster flinched, the heat of May’s anger like a brand against his skin. She had every right to be furious with him, but he had made the mistake of putting his personal desires before the Library once before and had nearly seen it destroyed.
He would not do it again.
“I’m sorry, May,” he said softly. “Is Taya …?”
May closed her eyes. “She’s given me until the month’s end.”
He nodded. “I’ll figure this out before then,” he promised. “One way or the other.”
May was quiet for a moment in which she picked at the dried dough along her fingers. She must have been baking when the leopard spirit he’d sent had found her, trying not to think about the con unfolding mere rooms away.
