The girl was so mad at him.
Alaric found it amusing at first, but soon enough he had to admit that he was quite possibly in trouble.
The ivory-hued hull of the Dominion coracle was constructed from an opalescent, lightweight material that made it a dream to maneuver. It was roughly cylindrical and tapered at both ends, with blue-and-gold sails that flared out from port and starboard like wings and another set of sails that extended from the vessel’s stern in the shape of a fan. After a few seconds of fiddling with the controls, Alaric discovered the levers that operated the airship’s weaponry—only, instead of ribaults or repeating crossbows, what opened fire was an array of slender, swiveling bronze cannons. And instead of iron projectiles, they shot those strange bolts of shivering violet magic that lit up the night, their glow more intense than that which the soldiers’ tube-shaped devices had fired.
This coracle was a marvel of engineering. An elegant yet deadly weapon.
The problem lay in the fact that the Lightweaver was currently manning one as well.
She chased him over the woods. Aetherspace surged through her vessel’s cannons, pelting him with wave upon wave of amethyst that took all of his skill and cunning to dodge. She was out for blood and he couldn’t resist goading her, and another round of fiddling granted him access to the aetherwave. “This hardly seems like the time and place to have it out,” he remarked into the transceiver.
“Shut the fuck up.” Talasyn’s voice echoed through the well, a growl of static-tinted rage. She set her cannons to stutter-fire and clipped at Alaric’s sails. For him she existed as a silhouette against the moons in their different phases, sliding along the crescent of the Second, vanishing briefly into the eclipse of the Sixth, coming at him from the shadows of the Third’s waxing gibbous.
“Aren’t you in the least bit curious about that barrier that we created?” he asked.
“I am,” she said silkily. “Retract your cannons and stop moving around so we can talk about it.”
A chuckle rose in his throat, unbidden, but he hastily swallowed it back down. “Nice try.”
He let her have her fun firing at him for a while before he pulled into a sharp ascent, spiraling in the air and then dropping back down behind her. He’d hoped to have the element of surprise on his side but, unfortunately, Talasyn’s reflexes were razor-sharp, bringing her coracle into an abrupt about-face that he was mildly surprised didn’t snap her pretty little neck. They hurtled toward each other, the strange magic spouting from the cannons meeting in violent conflagrations that trailed sparks down onto the jungle canopy, withering every leaf and branch that they came into contact with.
They were on a collision course. His brow knitted as he realized that she wasn’t going to give way any time soon. Sardovia’s lone Lightweaver had no sense of self-preservation. It was a miracle that she’d survived this long into the war.
Alaric swerved to the right mere seconds before what would have been a devastating impact. His head spun with the dizzying move, but he managed to activate the transceiver again. “See you at home,” he drawled, for no purpose other than to rile her, and then he darted up into the star-strewn heavens.
Talasyn didn’t give chase, which was a rare show of common sense on her part, Alaric thought. After all, they were still deep in what had become enemy territory. Unless he missed his guess, the Nenavarene were not going to take kindly to their historical ruins being vandalized, their soldiers maimed, their airships commandeered, and one of their bird things set loose from its cage.
Remembering the bird made Alaric shake his head at how odd this country was. Shortly after Talasyn had been led away for questioning, he had pounded on the door of the cell, demanding to use the facilities. There had only been one guard stationed outside, young and spotty-faced and far too confident in the fact that the prisoner was cut off from the Shadowgate. It had been easy to take him by surprise, to wrestle his weapon out of his grasp and fire at the cage hung outside the cell. Alaric had feared that aether-based weaponry wouldn’t work, either, but the nullifying device apparently only affected aethermancers, and the cage was blasted off its hinges and sent rolling to the floor by unchecked streams of magic that he didn’t know how to control. He certainly hadn’t been prepared for the twisted golden beak and the blaze of red-and-yellow feathers that had come into view as the cage shattered and the bird glided away with an affronted chirp, but the Shadowgate had reopened for him by then and he’d knocked the guard unconscious and crept through the garrison in search of the exit—until the alarm was raised and he’d had to fight his way through.
Alaric’s mission had turned out to be quite the catastrophe and he didn’t even have a dead Lightweaver to show for it. He would pay dearly upon his return to Kesath.
But, now that he was well away from the garrison and its hostile forces, he had the opportunity to reflect on what the Nenavar Dominion’s unique arsenal meant for the Night Empire. In addition to their lightweight but deadly coracles, their aethermancy was highly advanced; it had to be, seeing as they had tapped into a dimension of death magic that he’d never even heard of. They’d somehow outfitted even their smaller munitions with it when the only weaponry in Kesath built large enough to hold the required number of heartstones were the lightning cannons of the stormships. As if that wasn’t enough, the Nenavarene also had creatures that could block both the Lightweave and the Shadowgate.
Even if the Zahiya-lachis was willing to let bygones be bygones with regard to this incident, Nenavar could still pose a problem in the future.
At least the dragons seemed to be a myth. For what felt like the hundredth time since he’d made landfall on Dominion shores, Alaric furtively scanned the skies and found nothing of interest.
He had docked his wolf in a clearing near the coast. No sooner had he entertained the notion of retrieving it when he began to consider the airship that he was currently steering. How fast it was, how gracefully it moved. How its dizzying array of controls could unleash magical beams a thousand times more powerful than iron projectiles. Beams that shriveled every living thing that they touched.
This was valuable technology. It would be the height of stupidity to let it go to waste.
And he had to hurry to tell his father about how his and the Lightweaver’s magic had combined. He’d never heard of that before, either.
Alaric set course for the Night Empire.
Talasyn landed on a riverbank, thumping the control panel once the stolen Nenavarene airship had powered down. That failed to take the edge off her frustration, so she screamed, the wordless sound ear-splitting in the coracle’s dark and silent well.
Abandoning the vessel, she navigated the moonlit jungle on foot, steadily retracing her steps back to her wasp. Occasionally she would hear the drone of aether hearts overhead and duck beneath the tree cover to avoid being spotted by what were most certainly search patrols. Part of her desperately wanted to return to the garrison and demand more answers from the Dominion prince, but another part was . . .
Afraid. It took a few more minutes of stumbling through the undergrowth for her to figure out that she was afraid. What if there was a thorough investigation and it revealed that she wasn’t of Elagbi’s blood, that her resemblance to that woman—Hanan Ivralis—was pure coincidence? After all, the whole thing was too outlandish to believe. She was a bottom-dweller; she was a soldier; she was no one. She was definitely not a long-lost princess.
Was princess even the right term? Elagbi had called her something else. He had called her the Lachis’ka.
The heir to the throne.
Talasyn shivered in the humid breeze. If she was Alunsina Ivralis, that seemed more ominous, somehow.
If they find out, you will be hunted.
Who had told her that? Was she simply mixing up Vela’s warnings about the Lightweave with this startling new revelation? Or had it been the Nenavarene who brought her to Sardovia? Why had they brought her to Sardovia, to Hornbill’s Head, of all places, instead of her mother’s homeland?
So many questions, and not a single answer in sight.
Talasyn found Alaric’s wolf coracle first, at the edge of the jungle, black and sleek against the moss and the leaves. Aside from giving the hull a petulant kick as she passed by, she left well enough alone. Let there be proof that the Night Empire had trespassed on Dominion territory.
Another hour of hiking brought with it the faint beginnings of sunrise and led her to the cave where she’d stashed her wasp, which was now playing host to a gaggle of alarmingly large fruit bats that darted away shrieking at her approach. Once inside her own airship, Talasyn stared at nothing for a good long while as she went over the events and weighed her options. But there really was no question as to what she was supposed to do, was there?
“I have to go,” she said out loud, testing the words on her tongue. She balked at the prospect of leaving without a resolution to the mystery of her past, but the Sardovian Allfold needed her. She had to tell them that there was a traitor in their midst and that the Night Empire was planning . . . something. There was the family she’d wanted to find and there was the family she’d found along the way, and she knew where she had to be right now. She dreaded having to admit her failure to commune with the Light Sever to Vela, but there was no point in returning to the shrine. The Nenavarene were already on high alert.
As the wasp sailed out of the cave and into the dawning skies, Talasyn thought of Elagbi and the unceremonious way that their reunion, if that was what it was, had ended. She wondered if he could see her at this very moment, if she was a comet trailing emerald fumes away from where he stood on the Belian mountain range.
I’ll come back, she vowed. Someday, when the Hurricane Wars were over and she owed nothing more to the bonds that it had formed. I promise.
Day bled into evening and then day again as Talasyn sailed northwest over the Eversea and made landfall in Sardovia. The wintry air was a shock to her system after Nenavar’s muggy tropical heat.
There was more activity in the Wildermarch than was usual for such an early hour. Shipwrights were running checks on the carracks and the large-caliber siege weapons were being oiled and restocked. The distant horizon behind a cluster of outlying buildings glowed a nebula of various colors, which meant that the Enchanters were inspecting the stormship hearts. The air swam with the rustle of feathers as messenger pigeons carried important missives to and fro.
“Tal!” Khaede strode up to her just as she was about to head into the building that housed the offices of the Sardovian War Council. “You’re alive!”
“You don’t have to sound so surprised.”
“It’s far too easy to get a rise out of you, you know,” Khaede remarked with a smirk. It was nice to see her playful, even if it was at Talasyn’s expense. “How was your little trip? See any dragons?”
“No.”
“See anyone, then?” Khaede pressed.
Talasyn lowered her gaze.
“What’s that expression? What’s wrong? It’s all right if you weren’t able to commune with the Light Sever. Honestly, it was a fool’s errand—I always thought that. What matters is that you made it back safely and now you can go on more fool’s errands—”
“It’s not that.” Talasyn stopped walking and Khaede followed suit. “I mean, I wasn’t able to commune with the Light Sever, but that’s only part of it.”
“Well, go on, tell me everything,” Khaede ordered. “But make it quick. The whole base is in an uproar. Not long after you left, we started getting reports of significant Kesathese movement, ironclads amassing on the border and all that. To top it off, Coxswain Darius has vanished; there’s no sign of him anywhere in this entire blasted canyon—”
Talasyn blanched as realization set in. “It’s him,” she blurted out, seeing in her mind’s eye the abject defeat on Darius’s weathered, bearded face. Remembering how his voice had cracked when he spoke of how they were all going to die. “He’s the traitor.”
She told Khaede the whole story as quickly as she could, barely pausing for breath between sentences, not particularly caring that she would have to repeat herself to the Amirante in a few minutes. She wanted her friend to be the first to know everything. At first, Khaede listened stone-faced, nodding in all the right places, but the more that was recounted to her, the further her jaw dropped, until she was outright gaping at Talasyn.
“You’re a princess?”
“Not so loud!” Talasyn hissed. She glanced around to check if anyone had overheard, but the few people that were also outside the officers’ building seemed to be too preoccupied with their own tasks to care about a conversation between two helmsmen. “We don’t know that for sure. And this is very sensitive information, don’t go around shouting it—”
“Well, can you blame me? That was a lot of unexpected news to get in such a short amount of time,” Khaede grumbled. She set off at a brisk pace, past the entryway and down the narrow brick corridors, Talasyn falling into step beside her. “Incidentally, I hope that Darius dies a slow and painful death. May Enlal’s griffins feast on his liver until the Unmaking.”
“I could tell something was wrong with him,” Talasyn muttered over the hollow ache in her chest. “Before I left.”
“Guess that makes you smarter than Vela.” Khaede rapped sharply on the door of the Amirante’s office, flinging it open without waiting for permission to enter. “Darius has defected—again—and Talasyn’s a princess,” she announced as she strode into the room.
“Khaede!” Talasyn scurried over the threshold as Vela blinked at her. “I told you, keep your voice down—”
“Oh, I’m so sorry, Your Majesty—”
“Don’t call me that!”
“I’m almost afraid to ask what’s going on but, unfortunately, I have to,” Vela interrupted. “Sit down, both of you. Talasyn, please explain.”
Vela listened to the entirety of Talasyn’s debrief with far more composure than Khaede had shown. She showed no reaction to Darius’s betrayal, which wasn’t to say that she took it in her stride; a mask slammed over the Amirante’s features, as inscrutable as any crafted from obsidian metal that the Shadowforged Legion would wear.
After Talasyn had finished speaking, the silence that hung over the office was so thick that it could have been cut with a knife. Summer silence, she thought, a little frantically. The tense, oppressive stillness of high noon, when everything went dormant in the stifling heat that baked the Great Steppe. Only, this time, she was in the canyon of the Wildermarch and it was early in the morning, faint beams of sunlight filtering in through the windows, falling on furniture and charts and Vela’s lone eye, which was staring at her as she fidgeted in her seat. Khaede had reverted to her usual bored, caustic self, slouching in her own chair and crossing her arms.
“I can’t even begin to guess how your and Alaric’s magic combined,” Vela finally said. “I’ll ask our Enchanters if they’ve ever heard of such a thing happening before. It might also be possible for you and me to replicate the effect, so we’ll work on that as well. What I do know, for certain, is that aetherspace holds all the dimensions—including time. Perhaps that’s why, as you got closer to the nexus point, you began remembering things a one-year-old would have forgotten.”
“Perhaps.” Talasyn was uneasy. It was all conjecture. What specific knowledge the Sardovians had amassed pertaining to the Lightweave over the centuries had been lost when Kesath invaded Sunstead.
“But Nenavar has to help us now, right?” said Khaede. “Elagbi, at least—his daughter grew up here and Tal’s fighting for us, so—”
“Unfortunately, the Dominion prince doesn’t make the decisions. That’s the Zahiya-lachis’s job.” Vela pursed her lips. “And, after all the havoc that Sardovia has wrought within her borders, I am not so certain that Urduja will be inclined to assist us. Even if we are harboring her granddaughter.”
“I would just like to state, for the record, that it was all Alaric Ossinast’s fault,” Talasyn said with as much dignity as she could manage.
The Amirante cracked a fleeting smile. “True enough, I suppose. Maybe we can try sending envoys again, when the situation has calmed some. At the moment, though, we need to concentrate all our resources on repelling whatever the Night Empire has planned.” She appeared almost conflicted for several long moments, eyeing Talasyn with something like sympathy. Eventually, though, her features hardened into the resolute practicality that had been a major factor in Sardovia surviving for as long as it had.
“It’s not a coincidence that Darius broke down when you spoke to him and that he disappeared just as Kesath’s forces began massing at the borders of the Allfold. Not to mention the proof of both espionage and an impending large-scale attack that you obtained while you were in Nenavar,” Vela told Talasyn. “Alaric Ossinast had no reason to lie—he believed in that moment that you were at his mercy. We should deal with that first, before anything else.”
Talasyn understood. Sardovia’s resources were stretched thin enough as it was; they had none to spare to help her in this matter. She was their Lightweaver and it was her duty to fight with them, and so she had to put the Dominion out of her mind for now. She’d already botched the mission to access the Nenavarene Sever—she couldn’t botch this.
But still . . .
“There are other Lightweavers. Other nexus points,” she heard herself say. “Prince Elagbi told me that his late wife”—Hanan, the woman he thinks is my mother—“is from somewhere called the Dawn Isles.”
“Too far away,” Vela pointed out. “Even in a wasp, the journey would take a month at the very least. With Kesath on the move, it’s time that we can’t afford to spare. We’re on our own.”
Talasyn hesitated. She was gripped by a soul-deep ache. She wanted to talk to Vela about what it would mean if what Elagbi believed were to end up being true.
But one look at the tense strain in the older woman’s posture was all that was required to dissuade Talasyn from this notion. The Amirante was visibly exhausted and, while she would probably never admit as much, Darius’s betrayal must have cut deep. He had been her friend for years, and now so much information about the Sardovian regiments was compromised because of him.
Ideth Vela carried the Hurricane Wars on her shoulders more than anybody else. Talasyn couldn’t add to her burden.
So she nodded, and she didn’t say another word as she and Khaede waited for their new orders.
