Talasyn had dreamed about this moment for nineteen long years. As she plodded through the long grass and the bitter wind of the Great Steppe and stole and sold what she could to scrape out a meager existence in the Hornbill’s Head slums, as she curled up in whatever corner of the orphanage and then of the fetid streets she had claimed for the night, as she mixed seeds into water just for something to fill her stomach—and, much later, as she huddled in deep trenches with comrades that were now long dead, as she closed her eyes while stormships screamed through the land—her imagination had been her refuge, conjuring a different set of circumstances every time. She’d often wondered what her family would say when they found her, if they would hold her in their arms, if the only tears shed would be happy ones at last.
In none of even the most dramatic, far-fetched scenarios had she been in restraints, and she’d never imagined that her first words to the man who was purportedly her father would be: “I’m your what?”
“My daughter,” Elagbi repeated, his aristocratic, copper-skinned features softening as he took a step toward her. “Alunsina—”
She sprang to her feet, some latent sense of panic spurring her to retreat further into the room, shaking her head. “My name is Talasyn.”
For a moment, Elagbi looked as if he was about to argue. But Talasyn could feel the blood draining from her face and her eyes growing wider and wider with each second that passed, and such a ghastly picture must have convinced him that a more delicate touch was required.
“Yes, you are Talasyn,” he said slowly. “Talasyn of Sardovia, who walks between this world and the aether. But you are also Alunsina Ivralis, only child of Elagbi of the Dominion and Hanan of the Dawn. You are Alunsina Ivralis, granddaughter of Urduja, She Who Hung the Earth Upon the Waters, and you are the rightful heir to the Dragon Throne.”
“Your Highness, I must counsel against such premature declarations.” Rapat looked aggrieved. “Despite the striking resemblance to Lady Hanan, Her Starlit Majesty would never accept—”
Elagbi waved a dismissive hand. “Of course there will be a thorough investigation for formality’s sake. However, it will only confirm what I already know to be true.” His full attention swung back to Talasyn, who noticed, much to her discomfiture, that his eyes were wet with tears. “I know you, you see. You were such a mischievous, tiny thing, always trying to yank this”—he motioned to the circlet that he wore—“off of my head every time I carried you. But I could never stay mad for long because you’d blink up at me with your mother’s eyes and smile her smile . . . I would know you anywhere. Another nineteen years could have passed before we found each other again and my heart would still tell me that you were mine. Do you not remember your amya at all, even if only a little bit?”
No, Talasyn thought, I don’t.
Things were finally clicking into place, however. The connection to Nenavar that she’d always felt. The dreams and visions that it dawned on her now had been memories all along.
She had gone to the Dominion searching for answers and here they were. But it had never occurred to her that she wouldn’t feel an instant connection to her family once she was reunited with them. The Nenavarene prince was familiar, yes, but she was bewildered by the odd situation, helpless with her hands bound and the Lightweave blocked off. This was such a far cry from the joyous meeting of her childhood fantasies that she felt cheated—and furious.
“You can’t be my family,” she snarled at Elagbi as a horrible aching sensation burned through her chest. “Because that means—look, people dump their children all the time because they can’t provide for them or keep them safe. You’re—you’re royalty.” She practically spat out the word. “So, either you left me behind in Sardovia or you sent me there because—because you didn’t want me.”
It was a possibility that she’d always secretly feared but couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge. She’d had to live on hope as she fought over scraps in the dirt with the other bottom-dwellers. The hope that her family loved her, that surely there was someone out there who loved her.
“You can’t be my family,” she repeated. “I won’t believe it.”
“Alun—Talasyn,” Elagbi corrected himself, seeing her hackles rise as he started to call her by the name that was not hers, “please allow me to explain. Let’s sit down. Rapat, take those blasted restraints off her. It is exceedingly bad form to treat the Lachis’ka like a criminal.”
Lachis’ka? Had she just been insulted in the Nenavarene tongue? Talasyn glared at Elagbi as Rapat cautiously approached, sidling around her to unfasten the restraints. She shook feeling back into her wrists and stretched arms that had been locked in one position for too long, but she stayed where she was, on her feet. She might need to make a break for it should things go downhill.
No, she needed to make a break for it anyway. If the Sardovian Allfold was about to come under some brutal assault, as Alaric had insinuated, then she needed to go.
If he was bothered by her refusal of his invitation to sit down, Elagbi didn’t show it. Instead, he remained on his feet as well, casting an imperious look at Rapat and inclining his head in the direction of the door. The beleaguered kaptan opened his mouth as if to argue, but then he appeared to think better of it, shooting one last searching glance at Talasyn over his shoulder as he left the room.
“Yanme Rapat is a good man,” Elagbi remarked once he and Talasyn were alone. “A fine soldier, if still smarting a bit from his demotion nineteen years ago.”
Talasyn couldn’t figure out why she was supposed to care about Rapat and his erstwhile career in the regiments. Was Elagbi attempting to make small talk? Now, of all times?
He sighed. “I want to tell you everything, Talasyn, and I very much wish for you to let me, someday. However, given your current mood and the circumstances, I think that it would be best to skip ahead and address the issue of why you were sent away. Believe me, if there had been any other option . . .”
The prince trailed off, staring into the distance at some harrowing event in the past that only he could see, before speaking again. “When you were a year old, a civil war broke out here in Nenavar. My older brother, Sintan, led a rebellion. He amassed many followers, and they believed in their cause strongly enough to kill anyone who got in the way. They attacked the capital and routed our forces, and you and Her Starlit Majesty were evacuated in separate airships. I would have given anything for us to stay together, but I had to defend our homeland and our people.”
Elagbi’s voice grew low and tense. “You were in so much danger. You were the Lachis’ka, the heir. Only women may ascend to the Dragon Throne and Sintan would never have spared your life, no matter how young you were, no matter that you were his niece. His ideology had twisted him, rotted him from the inside. I killed him myself a sennight later on the Roof of Heaven and, with his death, the tide of war changed and the Huktera managed to retake the capital and crush the rebel forces. Queen Urduja returned, but you did not. We couldn’t find you. Your airship had gone dark over the aetherwave.”
“Who else was on board?” Talasyn asked in little more than a whisper.
“Accompanying you were your nursemaid and two members of the Lachis-dalo—the Royal Guard,” said Elagbi. “They were supposed to bring you to the Dawn Isles, your mother’s homeland, but you never made it there. It’s halfway across the world from Sardovia. I don’t know how you ended up in the latter.”
“My . . . my mother”—how strange those words felt on her tongue—“she’s not Nenavarene?” Elagbi shook his head, and Talasyn continued, “Where is—”
She stopped. She already knew, didn’t she? She’d heard Elagbi talk to Rapat about his late wife. Perhaps that was one of the reasons she hadn’t wanted to believe him in the first place. If he truly was her father, that meant that her mother was dead.
“Hanan passed away shortly before you were spirited out of the capital,” Elagbi replied, his sorrow shining through the span of years in such a manner that one could clearly imagine how it must have blazed when the wound was still fresh. “It was an illness. A swift fever. She succumbed before the healers even knew what to make of it.”
Talasyn couldn’t react to that. She couldn’t pick apart the tangled thread of her mixed emotions and attempt to understand what she felt—grief? nothing?—for a woman she didn’t know. Not now, on top of everything else. She didn’t have the space.
So, instead, she asked, “How did the civil war start? Why did Sintan rebel against Urduja?”
It had happened around the same time as the Cataclysm between Kesath and Sunstead. Were the two events connected? Did the Nenavarene civil war have something to do with the airships that the Zahiya-lachis hadn’t wanted to send to the Sunstead Lightweavers’ aid?
Elagbi opened his mouth to respond, but it was at precisely that moment all hell broke loose.
Five women thundered into the interrogation chamber. Talasyn assumed that they were the Lachis-dalo that Elagbi had mentioned: statuesque and clad in heavy armor plate. They surrounded the Dominion prince in a well-practiced, protective circle, speaking to him in that lyrical language rendered fast-paced and urgent.
“Alaric Ossinast has escaped,” Elagbi translated for Talasyn. “He is no longer contained by the sariman cages. We have to get to safety—”
Talasyn grabbed her map and her compass off the table and shot out of the room like a crossbow bolt, stuffing the items into her pockets as she ran. She had to subdue Alaric or, failing that, she had to get back to the Continent as soon as possible. Sardovia was in danger because of the unknown traitor and whatever the Night Empire had planned. There would be time to process everything else later. She shoved past the guards, ignoring the cries that trailed in her wake, running as fast as her feet could carry her down the bamboo corridors where the air rang with warning gongs, running along with soldiers carrying muskets that she already knew wouldn’t do any good, not when Alaric had recovered the Shadowgate.
The Lightweave returned to her, too, about seven meters away from the sariman cages. It crashed through her in waves, bringing with it the burning. Some of the soldiers pouring out of the barracks tried to stop her—they probably thought that she was the reason for the alert—but she swept them aside with raw, shapeless blasts of blazing magic, their bodies slamming against the walls, their weapons clattering to the floor. Eventually she outpaced them all, darting from the garrison’s main building and into the warm night, where the overgrown landing grid was littered with the collapsed forms of badly wounded men, where a scythe made of shadow and aether shrieked beneath a net of silver constellations as it slashed at the last soldier standing.
The man fell to the dew-damp grass, chest shadow-scarred but still alive, like the rest of his injured comrades. Alaric was showing a restraint that Talasyn had never imagined the Legion capable of; then again, he probably didn’t want to put the Night Empire in hotter water with the Nenavar Dominion than it already was. Across the distance between them, she met his silver eyes, their corners crinkled with the smirk that she could tell hid behind the obsidian half-mask that he’d donned once more. She spun two daggers and ran at him while he stood and waited for her, his war scythe at the ready, crackling with deadly challenge.
He was so close, he was within striking distance, when she heard a multitude of footsteps clattering to a stop behind her. Followed by the low roar of the Voidfell and a searing flash of amethyst and a cry from Prince Elagbi.
Both Alaric and Talasyn turned to the stream of violet magic hurtling in their direction. Just the one, the other Nenavarene soldiers lowering their muskets as they heeded what appeared to be orders to stand down from both Elagbi and Rapat, but it was wide and unstoppable, nonetheless.
There was no time to dodge, no time to think. There was no time to do anything but act on instinct alone. Alaric transmuted his scythe into a shield and held it in front of him, while Talasyn—who had yet to master crafting shields or anything that couldn’t be used to stab or club someone—flung one dagger at the oncoming violet haze, hoping to intercept it.
Her plan didn’t work.
At least, not in any manner that she’d expected it to.
The instant that her light-woven dagger grazed the edge of Alaric’s shadow-smithed shield, they . . . merged. That was the only way that Talasyn could think to explain what happened. Shield and dagger blurred into each other and, at the point of contact, whorls of aether blossomed like the surface of a moonlit pond disturbed by a stone. The ripples grew in size as swiftly as lightning strikes, encasing Alaric and Talasyn in a translucent sphere that shimmered black and gold with a combination of Shadowgate and Lightweave. The current of void magic collided with the sphere and harmlessly washed over it, trailing to the ground in wisps of violet smoke.
And every blade of grass that the Voidfell touched turned brown and shriveled, forming withered patches amidst a carpet of green.
Necrotic, Talasyn remembered Rapat describing this new dimension, and that was as far as she got with regard to processing what had just occurred when the protective sphere surrounding her and Alaric vanished. He wasted no time in making a break for the nearest coracle on the grid and climbing into its well.
“Oh no you don’t!” she shouted, even though he wouldn’t be able to hear her over the roar of Squallfast-infused aether hearts whirring to life. She scrambled to commandeer a coracle of her own, and none of the Nenavarene tried to stop her. Indeed, when she glanced over at the soldiers, and at Elagbi and at Rapat, they were all frozen in what seemed like shock, looking as though they had just borne witness to something impossible.
But Talasyn barely spared a thought for any of the Nenavarene. The world of Lir had narrowed to encompass only Alaric’s stolen airship as he coasted over the treetops. It wasn’t long before she followed, her knuckles clenched white around the wheel, the ground falling away, the aether hearts shrieking, the jungle opening up into air and sky.
