When Talasyn regained consciousness, her first thought was that she really ought to consult a healer as soon as possible. Getting knocked out twice in the span of two sennights could not be good for anyone’s head.
Her second thought was that she was in a cell, somewhere.
She had been deposited onto a small cot that was only marginally softened by a thin mattress and a threadbare pillow, the battered frame creaking as she sat up and looked around. There was a lone window high up the far wall, outfitted with iron bars. They were too closely spaced to squeeze through, but they let in generous amounts of muggy tropical air and silvery illumination from the radiant night sky. Enough for her to see, without any problems, the hulking figure sitting on the cot opposite hers, his gauntleted fingers digging into the edge of the mattress and his booted feet planted firmly on the floor—right beside his obsidian mask. Talasyn assumed it had been removed by their captors as she couldn’t imagine one of the Legion willingly parting with his armor in this situation. The mask’s lupine fangs snarled up at her in the moonlight, but it was quick to fade from her awareness because the presence of its owner sucked all the air out of the room.
She swallowed nervously as she realized that she was looking at Alaric Ossinast’s bare face for the first time.
He wasn’t what she’d expected, although she wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting in the first place. Someone older, perhaps, given his fearsome reputation and his prowess in battle, but he appeared to be in his twenties. Waves of disheveled black hair framed pale angular features dotted with beauty marks. He had a long nose and a sharp jawline, the overall harshness alleviated by a pair of full, soft lips.
Talasyn found her stare lingering on those lips. They were—petulant, almost. Or maybe pouty was the correct term, and that was not an adjective that she would have ever guessed that she’d one day use to describe the heir to the Night Empire.
It was probably just the novelty of never having seen the lower half of his face before. Her gaze flitted upward to meet his, an act that brought her back to less unusual territory; his gray eyes were as hard as flint, regarding her with caustic dislike.
“How long was I out?” Talasyn demanded, matching Alaric’s glare as best as she could.
“I came to shortly before you did. However, our gracious hosts have not seen fit to grant us the luxury of a wall clock.” Unmuffled by the mask, Alaric’s voice was low and deep, with a hint of hoarseness around the edges. It shouldn’t have shocked her, but it did. It made her think of rough silk and honey mead in an oaken barrel.
Then he added, in a snippy tone that was quite effective in dismantling all her fanciful notions, “In any case, telling time is the least of our problems.”
“Our problems?” Talasyn bristled. “You mean this mess that you’ve gotten us into?”
“There were two people creating a ruckus in that courtyard,” he reminded her.
“One of whom shouldn’t have been there in the first place!”
Alaric smirked. “I missed the part where you received an engraved invitation from the Zahiya-lachis to make use of her Light Sever.”
Talasyn sprang to her feet, agitated, and crossed the distance between them. “You were the one who followed me all the way to Nenavar to pick a fight!” she yelled, looming over him. As much as she could loom, anyway. She had the advantage of barely an inch even though he was sitting down. “The shrine was abandoned. I could have easily gotten in and out with the Dominion none the wiser. But you interfered!”
“I had to.” Alaric’s reply was pure ice. “You could not be allowed to access the nexus point. That would have put me at a severe tactical disadvantage.”
“And I suppose that getting captured in a foreign land by people with a documented loathing for outsiders who can somehow take away our powers and wield magic that we’ve never encountered before is the height of strategy,” she sneered, jabbing a finger into his broad chest. It was . . . irritatingly solid. It had no give at all.
He grabbed her wrist before she could draw it back. “I liked you better when you were afraid of me,” he drawled.
“Well, I liked you better when you were unconscious. And I should never have been afraid of you at all,” she retorted, flushing at the reference to their first encounter. “You’re just your father’s dog. I bet you’ve never had an independent thought in your head—”
Alaric stood up, crowding Talasyn in the space that she refused to cede to him. She attempted to pull her hand out of his grip but he tightened it, nearly hard enough to bruise. He was so close that she could smell him, the sweat and smoke of battle mingling with the lingering balsamic spice of sandalwood water. It was a heady combination and, coupled with the wrath in his star-cut eyes, she felt as though she was drowning, would drown in him—but she held her ground, lifting her chin, baring her teeth.
“You’ll pay for that, Lightweaver,” he said. It was a raspy promise, rolling off his tongue on the fumes of a simmering, contained rage.
She balled her free hand into a fist and punched him square across the jaw.
Alaric reeled backward and Talasyn advanced. “Tell me who the traitor is.” She had some hazy idea of beating the information out of him if he didn’t cooperate. They were stuck in a cell, after all, and there was nowhere for him to run. “Be good for something, for once in your miserable life—”
He pounced too fast for her to react. Before she knew it, he’d swept her onto her back on his mattress and he’d pinned her down, the cot groaning under their combined weight. He clasped her shoulders loosely as she lay sprawled beneath him. The clawed tip of one gauntleted finger dragged along the side of her neck, raking a path of heat and static across her skin. “Knowing the identity of some random informant won’t do you any good.” His eyes caught the moonlight, blazing silver like a knife’s edge. “The Sardovian Allfold is on the verge of being eradicated. Nothing you do can stop it, especially now that you’re so far away from home.” The corner of his lush mouth twitched in a sardonic half-smile. “It’s too late.”
She stared up at him. Was he hinting at an impending attack? She had to go back. She had to warn everyone.
The door to the cell creaked open, and the officer who had apprehended them at the ruins walked in. He stopped in his tracks, raising an eyebrow at the sight of Alaric frozen above Talasyn on the cot.
“It would seem that this is a habit for the two of you,” he commented wryly.
The prisoners were to be interrogated separately and Talasyn had the dubious honor of going first. Her wrists cuffed behind her back with steel restraints, she was escorted by no less than five Nenavarene soldiers, two of them gripping each of her arms and one nudging an iron tube—cannon—thing at her spine. The other two flanked the group, hemming her in, those birdcage-like contraptions strapped to their shoulders.
Talasyn snuck surreptitious glances as the officer led the way down a narrow corridor of split bamboo lashed together with rattan vine. One of these birdcages had also been hung outside her and Alaric’s cell and she suspected that whatever lay within was responsible for suppressing their ability to tap into aetherspace. She had never thought that such a thing would be possible, and she itched to know what lay within the cages, but they were covered with panels of opaqued metalglass shielding the contents from view.
Eventually, she was ushered into an austere lamplit chamber and made to sit at a table over which the pack that she’d brought with her from her coracle had been emptied, her supplies and navigational equipment arranged in neat rows. There was also water, a pewter cup full of it, outfitted with a wooden drinking straw. The soldiers placed the two birdcages in opposite corners of the room and filed out, leaving Talasyn alone with the officer, who took the chair across from hers and pushed the pewter cup closer to her.
The Nenavarene were benevolent captors, at least. Or they just didn’t want her to drop dead of thirst before they finished their questioning. In any case, she was hardly going to refuse.
With her hands still bound behind her back, Talasyn leaned forward as best as she could and sealed her lips around the straw, drinking greedily. There was nothing subtle or polite about it. She drained the cup in seconds, not stopping until she was slurping loudly on air.
The officer observed her with a trace of amusement, but he didn’t say anything. In fact, the amusement soon vanished after she’d straightened up. His dark eyes raked over every inch of her face until she fidgeted from the intense scrutiny and he cleared his throat in a manner that could have been considered apologetic.
Talasyn decided that, if she had to sit with her hands bound in an interrogation chamber, she might as well let loose with some questions of her own. “Those tubes your men carry—”
“We call them muskets,” said the officer.
“All right, muskets,” she said flippantly, trying her very best to not stumble over the unfamiliar word. “What was that magic that they fired? That was from aetherspace, wasn’t it?”
“I gather that the Northwest Continent has yet to discover the Voidfell dimension,” said the officer. “It is a very useful type of necrotic magic. It can kill, and it can also be calibrated to merely stun,” he added, casually enough, but his meaning was clear. The next time his men fired at Talasyn if she tried anything funny, their muskets would not be set to stun.
The muskets . . . Her brow furrowed. The crystals that both Kesath and Sardovia mined to contain energy from the dimensions that they had discovered were the size of supper plates. Aether magic destabilized if it was contained in anything smaller. Not anything small enough to fit into those slim iron tubes. “What kind of aether hearts—”
The officer spoke over her with the air of one who had indulged somebody else long enough. “I am Yanme Rapat, a kaptan of the patrol divisions, charged by Her Starlit Majesty Urduja of House Silim, She Who Hung the Earth Upon the Waters, to keep our borders safe,” he announced in a formal tone of voice. “The remnants of the Lightweaver shrine on Mount Belian are under my jurisdiction and, as such, the judgment for your trespass falls to me. Foreigners are not permitted in the interior without a dispensation from the Zahiya-lachis.”
“And yet here I am,” Talasyn muttered. “Where’s here, exactly?”
“The Huktera garrison on the Belian range.”
Talasyn had gleaned from Bieshimma’s dossier that Huktera was the collective name for the Nenavarene armed forces. And it was a relief to learn that she wasn’t all that far from the ruins. Once she escaped, it would be easy to lose any pursuers in the dense jungle, regain her bearings, and make her way back to the cave where she’d stashed her wasp coracle.
But perhaps there was no need to escape. Perhaps this officer, this kaptan, could be reasoned with. “Look,” she said, “I’m sorry for trespassing. I truly am. I meant no harm.”
Rapat leaned forward and plucked the map from the assortment of Talasyn’s belongings. “This, relatively speaking, is very detailed, considering that we are not in the habit of disseminating our nation’s layout to the rest of the world. Aside from marking the Light Sever’s location, whoever made this also charted the entire route from our harbor to our capital city. So that you could engineer your course to avoid the busy thoroughfares, I think. The most recent outsider to have gotten that far inland—thus, the only one who could have drawn up this map—was General Bieshimma of the Sardovian Allfold, who flouted our laws by not remaining in port and attempting to infiltrate the Roof of Heaven. The royal palace,” he clarified, noting the confusion on her face. “A fortnight later, here you are, wreaking havoc at one of our most important historical sites. These are not the actions of a people who meant no harm.”
Presented like that, the facts were damning. Talasyn tried to recall if she’d ever heard of outsiders being executed for sneaking into the Nenavar Dominion. Then again, if that was par for the course, it wasn’t as though anyone would have lived to confirm it. Perhaps she would just be detained indefinitely—but that was another set of problems in itself.
Her willingness to go on this mission, and Vela’s willingness to assign it to her, had hinged on a Lightweaver’s ability to fight their way out of anything. Without that, the options were severely limited.
Talasyn’s gaze flickered to one of the opaque birdcages in the corner. If only she could figure out how they worked—what they were—and how to disable them. She’d already surmised that whatever they did to suppress aethermancy was contained to a fixed radius, given that the Nenavarene made sure to keep them in her and Alaric’s periphery, but she had no idea how wide the area of effect was.
Following her line of sight, Rapat flashed a tight smile. “A sariman cage,” he explained. “You won’t find its like anywhere else on Lir. Most garrisons have at least a couple, but my men are the only ones who carry several while on patrol, precisely to guard the Belian Sever from unauthorized Lightweavers such as yourself. The fourth Zahiya-lachis commissioned the prototype as a countermeasure against the aethermancers. Such power could not be allowed to go unchecked, you see. Enchanters were useful, but the others . . . they were a threat to the ruling house.”
“You drove them all out,” Talasyn guessed. She saw the collapsed, ghostly shrine in her mind, tangled in wilderness. “Or you killed them.”
“The Lightweavers, the Shadowforged, the Rainsingers, the Firedancers, the Windcallers, and the Thunderstruck all left Nenavar voluntarily countless generations ago,” said Rapat. “They did not wish to submit to the sariman cages and the will of the Dragon Queen, so they went elsewhere in search of other nexus points.”
Dragon Queen, Talasyn noted, wondering if it was literal or simply a part of their nation’s mythology. “And what of the aethermancers that could access the Voidfell?”
“The Voidfell has never had any corresponding aethermancers here in Nenavar. My point is”—Rapat waved off the tangent with a dismissive hand—“there was no genocide. The Dominion is not Kesath.”
Talasyn’s jaw clenched. “So you do know what’s been happening in Sardovia.”
“We do,” Rapat confirmed. “It is unfortunate, but we cannot help. Nenavar has survived for so long precisely because we do not interfere with other nations’ affairs and they in turn do not interfere with ours. The one and only time a portion of our fleet sailed northwest, it ran into the teeth of Kesath’s stormship.” For a fleeting moment, the shadow of an old pain fell across the kaptan’s features. “Queen Urduja was right. They never should have gone.”
Talasyn was confused. “Did they sail without her permission? Isn’t she the sovereign—”
“I am not the one being interrogated here,” Rapat interrupted with the alacrity of one belatedly realizing he’d given away too much. “If you cooperate, perhaps we will be more lenient. Now, what is your name?”
She answered begrudgingly. It was a name that had been given to her at the orphanage, a play on talliyezarin, a kind of needle grass that was ubiquitous on the Great Steppe and had no discernible purpose whatsoever. She’d never liked it even on a good day.
Rapat fired off one inquiry after another and Talasyn responded every time with a combination of the truth and as much vagueness as she felt she could get away with. When he slid the map over to her and asked where she’d docked her wasp coracle, she marked a random location on the outer edge of the coastline. She did tell Rapat who Alaric was and why they’d been fighting—a vindictive part of her hoped that the kaptan would be unnerved by the revelation that he had the Kesathese crown prince in his custody and, therefore, the beginnings of a diplomatic incident on his hands, but his expression didn’t change in the slightest—until . . .
“There remains just one more question to be asked.” Rapat took a breath, as if steeling himself for whatever was to come, looking for a moment much older than his years. “What is your relationship to Hanan Ivralis?”
Talasyn blinked. “I have no idea who that is.”
Rapat frowned. “Who are your parents?”
Her heart skipped a beat. “I don’t know. I was left on the doorstep of the orphanage in the city of Hornbill’s Head, on Sardovia’s Great Steppe, when I was about a year old.”
“And how old are you now?”
“Twenty.”
Rapat’s composure had slipped. A visible tremor ran through his frame as he stared at her, seemingly at a loss for words. Before Talasyn could ponder this odd turn of events, the door opened and one of the soldiers poked his head into the room, speaking to Rapat in the Dominion’s lyrical tongue.
“His Highness Prince Elagbi is here,” Rapat translated for Talasyn’s benefit, still looking at her as though she’d sprouted several extra limbs. “I requested his presence. I think it best that the two of you should meet.”
This only made the situation even more perplexing. Was it their custom for royals to interrogate random trespassers? When she left Sardovia, Talasyn had been prepared for a long flight, an exhausting trek, and perhaps some combat. She hadn’t bargained on Alaric Ossinast figuring in that last bit, and she certainly hadn’t bargained on having to encounter yet another hoity-toity title.
A few minutes passed before the man who was obviously Elagbi swept into the room. Despite his slender build, the Nenavarene prince’s regal bearing still managed to ensure that he cut an intimidating figure in his pale blue tunic and flowing cape of gold silk. His graying hair was pushed back from his high forehead by a gilded circlet crafted in the likeness of two serpentine forms intertwined, and the face beneath the intricate arrangement of precious metal was immaculately proportioned and fine-boned despite the lines of age.
That wasn’t the only reason Talasyn was gawking, however. The Dominion prince was also familiar, in a way that she couldn’t place but nagged at her like a dull toothache. It was almost as though she’d seen him before, but that was impossible.
Wasn’t it?
Elagbi’s jet-black eyes had been trained on Rapat from the moment he padded into the interrogation chamber. He spoke to the other man in Nenavarene, which Talasyn felt was a bit rude—and also dangerous, if she didn’t know what they were planning to do with her.
“Excuse me,” she loudly interrupted. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
Without missing a beat, Elagbi switched to Sailor’s Common. “I was telling the esteemed kaptan that he had better have a good reason for summoning me from the capital in the midst of the succession debate—”
Elagbi broke off abruptly as his gaze darted to Talasyn. And stayed there.
She was no stranger to haunted expressions. She’d seen it on her comrades’ faces when they spoke of all that they had lost in the Hurricane Wars. This was different, though: more potent on a soul-searing level. The prince of the Nenavar Dominion was looking at her as if she were a ghost.
“Hanan,” he whispered.
That name again. Before Talasyn could open her mouth to demand who that was and what was going on, Rapat spoke up. “My men and I were on a routine patrol when we found her and another intruder fighting at the temple, Your Highness. They are both from the Northwest Continent. The other intruder is Alaric Ossinast, the Night Emperor’s heir. She says that she was abandoned as an infant and she has no memory of her parents. However, she is currently twenty years of age and she is a Lightweaver—”
“Of course she is,” Elagbi murmured. He ignored the news of Alaric’s presence in the holding cell entirely, never taking his eyes off Talasyn, who was simply sitting there and weathering the scene with blank confusion. “It’s passed down via the bloodline, isn’t it?”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Rapat hastened to tell him. “I recommend—”
“Have you gone blind?” Elagbi snapped. “Do you not see what is in front of you, that she is the spitting image of my late wife? And she can spin the Lightweave, just like Hanan. There is no doubt about it, Rapat.”
He then said the words that brought the world to a halt.
“She is my daughter.”
