Two sennights crawled by. After her failed attempt at persuading Khaede to let the Amirante know of her condition so that she could take leave until the baby came, it was ironic that Talasyn found herself the one pulled out of active duty so that she could focus on training. Khaede had a good chortle at that, and Talasyn couldn’t begrudge her. There were precious few reasons for Khaede to even so much as smile these days. Talasyn had to concede that, in a way, it was probably for the best that Khaede was being kept busy with airship battles.
Their regiment’s new base was in the Wildermarch, a deep, fertile canyon in the Sardovian Heartland. Winter here was not as harsh as it was on the mountains, and the grounds were still tinged in a rather glorious autumn. It was a world away from the dilapidated orphanage in Hornbill’s Head. That leaky-roofed, rammed-earth compound tucked into the slums of a drab brown city where no trees grew, with its mold-flecked straw pallets and overflowing latrines and apathetic caretakers who spent all the meager funds on women and dice and riesag, a potent cocktail of distilled barley and fermented musk-ox milk that was the cheapest and most effective way to stay warm on the Great Steppe. No matter where she went, it was better than that, but Talasyn had scarce opportunity to appreciate the beauty of their new barracks.
Her every waking minute was spent aethermancing under Vela’s watchful instruction or sparring with Mara Kasdar.
The Lightweave could cut through physical weapons as though they were nothing, so Talasyn and the Blademaster fought with swords, daggers, spears, and flails. It was strenuous but, as the days passed, she noticed that she was getting quicker on her feet and more focused when it came to channeling her magic.
At least there was no longer any need to keep her abilities hidden from her regiment. There had been fears of espionage, or captured soldiers confessing that a Lightweaver walked among them. Since Kesath already knew, Talasyn could train in plain sight, frequently drawing crowds of amazed spectators.
Her aethermancy training had previously been limited to what few hours could be spared. There’d been no use sending her to the front in her capacity as a Lightweaver when there were hundreds of Shadowforged to reckon with. But now that Alaric Ossinast was aware of her existence, now that Gaheris would be even more determined to crush Sardovia because they harbored the last Lightweaver on the Continent—
Well. Talasyn had to start making sure that she was hard to kill.
She thought about Alaric a lot. It was never on purpose but, to her chagrin, he had the disturbing tendency to pop up in her mind when she least expected it. Alaric in all his height and armor, wielding his magic with a lethal confidence that was in such stark contrast to her own scattered, flailing attempts. Although the cuts on her arms had long since healed, she kept going over their duel. Kept pinpointing all the instances he could have easily hacked her head off but didn’t. Was she lucky to have survived? Or had he been holding back? But why would he?
Maybe he wasn’t as good a warrior as everyone said he was. Maybe his reputation lay mostly in his forbidding appearance. Those eyes—
Every time Talasyn thought about Alaric’s eyes, about the silver sheen to them set against a pale and half-shrouded face, about the way they had focused on her and only her, she was assailed by the oddest mixture of sensations. There was fear, yes, but there was also something magnetic. Something that insisted on hauling this memory of him into her orbit, so she could . . .
Could what, exactly?
No matter. She would keep training and she would commune with the Light Sever, and the next time she saw Alaric she would be more than a match for him. She wouldn’t hold back.
Meanwhile, the battle for the Highlands raged on. The bulk of reinforcements were sent from the Wildermarch a few days after they’d settled in, and so, in addition to fretting over her upcoming mission to Nenavar, Talasyn also spent her days fretting over Khaede and feeling powerless that she wasn’t there to help. Fortunately, Khaede returned safely the day before Talasyn was set to leave. Less fortunately, she’d returned to wait for new orders, because most of the alpine cities had surrendered and the War Council had begun discussions on shifting all available resources to the Heartland and the Coast.
A strategic retreat, many called it. It seemed to Talasyn that the Hurricane Wars were one strategic retreat after another on Sardovia’s end, but she kept that to herself. Morale was low enough.
“Do you even know how to commune with a Light Sever?” Khaede challenged. “What is the process, specifically?”
They were sitting on the burnt umber grass and crisp fallen leaves outside the barracks, beneath a shedding but still exuberant coppery cypress. The sun was setting on the Wildermarch, its crimson light rendering the canyon ablaze at the edges as a stiff wind rolled in from the north, carrying with it the glacial bite of faraway polar tundra. This particular spot overlooked a riverbed that would flush turquoise come the spring thaw, but for now it was just a wide ribbon of cracked earth, edged with gorse and sagebrush.
The riverbed would have been wholly unremarkable if not for the fact that it was the site of a Wind Sever, where the Squallfast sometimes bled through. A white-cloaked Sardovian Enchanter stood on the bank with a chest full of empty aether hearts at his feet, patiently waiting for the Wind Sever to discharge so that he could collect its magic.
While they couldn’t directly summon any of the dimensions into existence, Enchanters were the most prized of aethermancers throughout the world of Lir for their ability to manipulate the Tempestroad, the Squallfast, the Firewarren, and the Rainspring—as long as there was an existing source to draw from. Here on the Continent, they were the backbone of both sides of the Hurricane Wars, kept away from the fighting to craft the hearts that powered the airships and the stormships day in, day out. It was a thankless, taxing role, and Talasyn felt a twinge of guilt. She’d crash-landed so many wasp coracles during combat, wasting the multiple aether hearts that were built into each one.
With her gaze still trained on the Enchanter, she set about answering Khaede. “I’m not sure, but the Amirante and I have discussed in the past what would happen if I ever came across a Light Sever. She thinks that it shouldn’t be much different from how the Shadowforged meditate with their nexus points and that my instincts will tell me what to do.”
“So, you’re going to sneak into a country that’s notoriously unfriendly to outsiders and might possibly have dragons with the sole purpose of finding the Lightweave high up on a mountain using only a roughly sketched map, and you have no real idea what to do once you get there.” Khaede placed a hand over her eyes. “The war is lost.”
“Well, when you put it like that, of course it sounds impossible,” Talasyn shot back. “But I’ll figure it out. I have to.”
They sank into a desultory silence. It blew in with the northern wind rustling the cypress leaves. Talasyn wondered if she should broach the topic of Sol. They’d buried him here in the canyon, with the other dead, and Khaede had sailed back to the Highlands shortly after. But before Talasyn could decide on what to say and whether she should say it, Khaede spoke again.
“What do you know about Nenavar?”
I know that it calls to me, Talasyn thought. I know that it’s familiar for some reason. I know that I want to find out why.
She longed to tell Khaede—to tell someone—about all the emotions that Nenavar stirred in her, but she couldn’t bear to do it. She was too much like her friend; she didn’t want to open herself up to other people’s pity. Khaede would surely think that she was just desperate for any sense of connection, indulging an orphan’s foolish hopes.
Instead, Talasyn patched together everything she’d heard over the years from other Sardovians regarding their enigmatic neighbor across the sea. “It’s made up of seven large islands and thousands of smaller ones. The climate is tropical. It’s a matriarchy.” She’d learned that word from a Hornbill’s Head shopkeeper chatting about Nenavar with his patrons while she waited for an opportune moment to slip his wares into her pockets.
“Don’t forget all the gold,” Khaede helpfully supplied.
“Right.” Talasyn cracked a smile as she echoed one of the older children at the orphanage, in the slums of her early years. “A country of islands ruled only by queens, where the skies are home to dragons and the streets are made of gold.”
She couldn’t fathom a nation so rich in the precious metal that they paved with it. Perhaps that was why the Dominion refused to get involved in the affairs of the outside world: they had too much to lose.
But something had in fact motivated them to break tradition and lend aid to the Lightweavers of Sunstead, nineteen years ago . . .
“Have you ever heard of the Fisherman’s Warning?” Khaede asked.
Talasyn shook her head.
“No, I suppose that you wouldn’t have. You grew up on the Great Steppe.” Khaede worried her lower lip, uncharacteristically pensive. Perhaps even nostalgic. “It’s a Coast thing. A legend, of sorts. Once every thousand years or so, a bright glow the color of amethyst illuminates the horizon over the Eversea, heralding months of rough waters and meager catch. The last time it supposedly happened, the Sardovian Allfold hadn’t even been formed and we sure didn’t have airships yet. Most inhabitants of the Coast agree that the Fisherman’s Warning is simply a myth, but those who do believe—the older ones, and this used to include my grandfather, may his soul find shelter in the willows—they say that the glow comes from the southeast. From Nenavar.”
“Guess I’ll let you know if I find any strange purple lights hanging around there, then,” Talasyn quipped.
Khaede offered her a fleeting smirk. “Bring back a dragon instead. That would be more useful.”
We’d win the war with even just one, the bowman had said at the stone longhouse in Frostplum. The memory that was so innocuous on a surface level sent a pang through Talasyn. Everyone was tired, but they didn’t want the conflict to merely end—they wanted to emerge from it victorious. Because the alternative was to spend the rest of their lives bound by the chains of shadow and empire.
She would do her part. For Khaede, for the Amirante. For Sol, and for everyone else who had died to let the dawn break over Sardovia once more.
“How are you feeling?” Talasyn finally worked up the nerve to inquire.
Khaede went tense, her dark eyes narrowing into a glare. Then something in her seemed to crack, and she slumped as one would after an exhale that had been a long time coming.
“It’s hard to believe. That he’s really gone,” she admitted, her voice thick with grief. “I keep thinking that this is a nightmare I’ll wake up from at any moment. And then there are times when it hits me that I’ll never see him again, and I start missing him so much that it hurts to breathe.” Khaede twisted her wedding ring around her finger; the gold band glinted in the fading light. Her shoulders stiffened with determination. “But Sol would want me to keep moving forward. He went to the willows believing in the Sardovian Allfold, believing that we would triumph. And I’ll make sure that we’re going to. My child will grow up in a better world.”
“They will,” Talasyn said softly. She meant it with every fiber of her being, even if no one could tell the future. There were just some things that had to be true, because, if they weren’t, what was the point in fighting?
Khaede reached over and patted Talasyn’s knee. “Come back in one piece. I can’t lose you, too.” She leaned against the cypress trunk, withdrawing her hand to rest an open palm on her stomach. The sunset cast its burnished gloss over her face in such a way that it made the sadness lingering there all the more stark. Made her look older than her twenty-three years.
It was then that Talasyn truly understood: Khaede would be haunted by Sol’s death for the rest of her days. A part of her would always be missing, buried with him in the canyon, lost forever to the Hurricane Wars. And although Talasyn knew that it was selfish to take her friend’s pain and contextualize it in terms of her own self—although she knew that it probably made her a terrible person—she couldn’t help but be oddly grateful for the lack of belonging that had plagued her all her life, because it meant that she would never experience such a harrowing ache. She couldn’t help but think, Thank the gods that I will never love someone that much.
Talasyn met with Vela after supper. The Amirante provided her with a more detailed map and intelligence dossier courtesy of General Bieshimma, as well as a slew of last-minute instructions. Then Vela went over to the bow windows of her office, which offered a panoramic view of the Wildermarch in its moon-silvered splendor, her hands folded behind her back.
“I think that it will be all right,” she muttered. “Even if they catch you, there is no cell—no manner of restraint—that can hold a Lightweaver for long.”
“They won’t catch me,” Talasyn declared. It wasn’t that she had a wealth of confidence in her abilities. It was more the fact that she couldn’t allow herself to get caught, and so she wouldn’t be.
“You understand why you have to go, don’t you?” Vela held out an upturned palm. Wisps of shadow magic curled into the space above her fingers, the strands shifting and unfurling like smoke, swallowing up what rays of starlight were there to touch them. “It was a stroke of luck for us that the Lightweave and the Shadowgate can be summoned and manipulated with the same basic methods, but they are still fundamentally different in nature. There is only so much that I can teach you.”
“I’m well aware,” Talasyn quietly replied. “I need to do this so that we can win the war. Of course I’ll go.”
For Sardovia.
For Khaede’s child, who will never know a father.
For myself. Because I have to understand why Nenavar calls to something inside me, and because I have to give Alaric Ossinast the fight of his life the next time we meet in battle.
She just hoped it would be enough.
The Hurricane Wars were coming down to the line and the Allfold’s sole Lightweaver had to start doing something. At the moment, however, Talasyn knew only how to shape weapons and fight with them. According to the stories, the Lightweavers of Sunstead had toppled buildings and created barriers around entire cities and called down strikes from the heavens. The last time she had tried to create a protective barrier, she’d lost control and nearly zapped Khaede’s wasp out of the sky.
The Light Sever in Nenavar offered Talasyn a chance for her magic to reach the heights it was truly capable of. A chance for her to actually be useful.
The Amirante closed her fist around the swirling darkness and it vanished. “Get some rest, then. You’ll leave at first light tomorrow.”
Talasyn had one hand on the doorknob when a question occurred to her. One that she’d wanted to ask for years but hadn’t had the guts to until today, when it had never before seemed so stark that there might not be a tomorrow to ask it.
“Amirante? Before you defected—when you were still with the Kesathese army, I mean—why didn’t you join the Shadowforged Legion?”
The older woman didn’t respond for so long that Talasyn thought she never would.
“I was very young when I enlisted as a helmsman,” Vela finally said, still looking out the window. “My abilities manifested much later. But I made the decision to hide them because—well, I didn’t have a clear idea of what was right and what was wrong back then. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be the person that the Legion would have required me to become. Had I given in to that darkness, the Night Empire would have swallowed me whole.” Her gaze met Talasyn’s in the glass, in the vague shards of their star-etched reflections. “You have a chance to end this, Talasyn. To become the light that guides us out of the shadows, and to freedom.”
Talasyn leaned against the wall outside Vela’s office, attempting to center her emotions. The weight of the Amirante’s words hung heavily on her heart, but that wasn’t what preoccupied her. In a little over twenty-four hours from now, she would be in Nenavar. At last, she would learn what was pulling her there.
Come off it, she chided herself. Here you go again, looking for connections where there aren’t any.
As she had so many times before, she recited a mantra of cold logic to herself. Her parents were most likely descendants of the Sunstead Lightweavers, which explained her magic. They had, for whatever reason, left her on the doorstep of the Hornbill’s Head orphanage. And she would never know why, so it was better to make her peace with that instead of live on wishful thinking, nurturing the part of her that believed she would still be able to find them again one day. It was better to go to Nenavar focused solely on the mission that she’d been entrusted with, and nothing else. Everyone was counting on her.
Slow, shuffling footsteps resounded through the quiet hallway. Coxswain Darius was approaching Vela’s office, with the ponderous steps of one who carried the world on his shoulders. He stopped when he reached Talasyn.
“You’re off, then?”
She gave a cautious nod, unable to speak. The coxswain looked—defeated. As if he’d been running on fumes for months and now there was nothing left.
“Not sure how much good it will do now,” Darius mumbled, almost to himself. He shook his head, as though belatedly remembering that there was someone in the hallway with him. “Word has just come in from the Highlands,” he told Talasyn. “It’s over. The King on the Mountain bowed to the Night Empire. And the Shadowforged Legion cut off his head.”
Dread swept through Talasyn’s veins in an icy wash.
Following the Cataclysm between Kesath and Sunstead, the Sardovian Allfold had been composed of the Great Steppe, the Hinterland, the Highlands, the Coast, and the Heartland. Now, after a decade of ground warfare and stormship battles, Sardovia was down to those last two states. Surrounded on all sides except seaward.
“It’s not over,” Talasyn insisted to Darius, trying to convince him as well as herself. “We’ll fortify our defenses. I’ll commune with the Nenavarene Light Sever and then I’ll come back and I’ll be there on the front lines—”
“What is the use?” Darius burst out. His words echoed off the stone walls, and Talasyn paled, remembering the Hornbill’s Head orphanage, a time when a caretaker’s raised voice heralded his palm ringing against her cheek.
Darius didn’t strike her, of course. Instead, he continued in a quieter tone that was raw at the edges with despair, “What good will one trained Lightweaver be against the entire Legion? And that’s assuming you’ll even be able to access the Dominion’s Light Sever. The Amirante is grasping at straws, Talasyn. We’re—” He swallowed. His next words quavered on his tongue. “We’re all going to die. The Shadow will fall across the Continent and Gaheris will show us no mercy. Why would he? We’ve been a thorn in his side for so long.”
Talasyn stared at him. She had never witnessed a Sardovian officer crack like this—least of all Coxswain Darius, who had been as steady as a rock since the day they met. Across the span of years, a child in rags screamed as a Kesathese soldier who’d spotted her through the dust and the rubble pulled his crossbow trigger, the light inside her growing until he was burned to dust. She remembered Darius calmly leading her through the wreckage of Hornbill’s Head, away from the Kesathese soldier’s light-ravaged bones, assuring her that everything would be all right as she trembled, afraid of what had just happened, not understanding what she had done and how she’d been able to do it. He had saved her that day.
How difficult it was to reconcile that memory with the broken man before her now.
“I have to report the Highlands’ surrender to Ideth,” Darius choked out before Talasyn could respond, which was just as well because she didn’t have the slightest idea how to respond. “Safe travels, helmsman. May Vatara’s breath grant you a fair wind and carry you back to us.”
He pushed open the door of Vela’s office and shut it behind him, leaving Talasyn alone in the hallway to wrangle with the fact that the success of her mission was now so much more critical than ever before.
Before the sun had risen the next morning, her wasp coracle glided out of its dock and shot over the deep gash of the Wildermarch, cloaked in the gloom of nautical twilight.
No one had seen her off; she’d said her goodbyes the night before. A faint tinge of guilt mixed with worry waged within her at leaving Khaede, but if she didn’t, there would be nothing left for any of them.
Forty-five minutes flew by before she lowered the sails—plain ones, replacing the striped cloth with the phoenix crest that would have easily marked her vessel as Sardovian—and gradually brought down the lever that controlled the Squallfast-infused aether hearts, reducing speed as she slipped into the zigzagging ravine that was aptly called the Shipsbane.
She needed to concentrate here. Navigating the sharp and rocky turns in daytime was already a challenge for even the most veteran of helmsmen, and as this was a covert mission, the Firewarren-powered lamps affixed to her tiny airship’s bow were dimmed. However, despite her concerns, the wasp wove through the treacherous ravine with minimal trouble.
Still, Talasyn didn’t allow herself to relax until the narrow maze of earth and granite opened up into an expanse of sycamore forest. She flew low, as close to the treetops as possible, the aether hearts emanating their fumes of greenish light.
Some of her earliest memories involved sitting on the front stoop of the orphanage at night and looking up at the rushing sound of the Squallfast, her eyes widening in wonder at the sight of coracles streaking overhead and trailing aether in their wake like emerald shooting stars. Back then, she would never have imagined that she’d grow up to steer one of these things. There had been no space in the Hornbill’s Head slums for dreams like that.
As the sky lightened into a less oppressive shade of gray, Talasyn extinguished the fire lamps and unfolded the map that Bieshimma had provided, checking it against her compass to make sure that she was on the right course.
A Shadow Sever picked that moment to discharge, its distant guttural shriek piercing the air. She looked out the sidescuttle to her right and saw an enormous pillar of dark magic erupt from the earth in whorls of thick smoke, just past the Sardovian side of the fraught southern border. It blossomed over the treetops, inky tendrils reaching for the heavens like clouds of ash spewed forth from an enraged volcano.
Zannah’s Fury, older Sardovians called it whenever a Shadow Sever flared into existence, ascribing the phenomenon to the goddess of death and crossroads. Talasyn could almost believe it, viewing the harrowing display even from afar. The Shadowgate had brought nothing but horror and anguish to the world.
She tore her gaze away from the billowing column of magical energy. There were ten more kilometers’ worth of forest to go before the coastline. If she sped up, she’d be able to reach the Eversea before true sunrise and minimize the risk of being spotted by Kesathese patrols.
It would be a lie to insist that she wasn’t nervous. She didn’t know what lay in store for her in Nenavar or if she could even get in—or out, for that matter—in one piece. She knew only that she couldn’t let Sardovia down.
She had to keep moving. That was the only way to survive the Hurricane Wars.
Talasyn accelerated. Her wasp roared through the stillness as it sped toward the waiting horizon.
