It was rare for Talasyn to regret losing her temper, least of all when Alaric was involved, but by the next morning she had to admit that she’d messed up. There were only eleven days left until the eclipse, and she was nowhere close to weaving a decent shield.
As she marched into the council room after breakfast, Talasyn resolved to be on her best behavior. Not only during the negotiations, but also during the training in the afternoon. As far as promises went, she deemed it rather noble of her. However, it was a promise that took a severe beating when Urduja announced that there would be a banquet later that night with all the noble houses in attendance, to celebrate the Lachis’ka’s engagement to the Night Emperor.
Still, Talasyn managed to give a stiff nod of acquiescence and do nothing more impolite than avoiding Alaric’s eyes, which were regarding her dispassionately from across the table, with no trace of his own outburst yesterday.
Remembering that outburst elicited a most peculiar feeling in the pit of her stomach. Alaric usually had supreme control over his emotions, unlike her. The only times he’d appeared truly furious with her were yesterday and that night in the bamboo cell at the Belian garrison. In those instances, she’d needled him about Ozalus and Gaheris, respectively. His family was clearly a touchy subject.
And, yet, no matter how furious he was, he had never shouted at her. In fact, the angrier he got, the lower his voice became. Now that she thought about it, it was the one trait of Alaric’s that recommended him to her. Yelling meant the orphanage, the caretakers. Talasyn yelled when she was angry because yelling for her was what anger was, how she understood it. There was something fascinating about Alaric’s quiet rage, about how easily he could restrain himself.
It made her feel—
Safe?
All around her, the negotiators were talking. Bartering, compromising, laying out the road for the future. Talasyn was barely listening. Her new epiphany pounded in her ears like blood.
Yesterday, when the Shadowgate had roared forth from Alaric, she’d moved away slightly, but only so that she’d have enough ground to fight back if it came to that. But those had been a soldier’s instincts. She hadn’t flinched. She hadn’t, even just for a moment, been afraid of him.
Talasyn darted a furtive glance at Alaric, hating that she was physically incapable of stopping herself from doing so. All of his attention was on Lueve Rasmey as the daya talked the Kesathese contingent through each step of the wedding ceremony and its corresponding cultural significance in Nenavar, fielding questions and objections from Commodore Mathire all the while. Alaric’s black-gauntleted fingers drummed idly on the table, the motion a focal point with the rest of him being so still. For Talasyn, nonsensical observations and memories began to creep in—the sheer size of his hand, the way it had felt clamped around her waist the time he lifted her away from the edge of the pool—and she hurriedly shifted her focus to Lueve before these could consume her.
Lueve’s multitude of opal rings glinted in the sunlight as she held up a piece of parchment covered in gold-flecked, wavelike script. It was her marriage contract, which she’d retrieved from the Dominion’s archives high up in the mountains for the panel’s edification; Alaric and Talasyn would sign a similar document at the dragon altar on their wedding day.
“The contract is in Nenavarene, so allow me to translate,” said Daya Rasmey. “Lueve, daughter of Akara from the Veins of Cenderwas, daughter of Viel from the Fastness of Mandayar, daughter of Thinza’khin from the Sundered Plains, is joining hands with Idrees, son of Esah from the Banks of the Infinite, daughter of Nayru from the Serpent’s Trace—”
“I think that Kesath has gotten the idea,” Urduja interrupted. “Anyway, the gist is that it goes back three generations along the matrilineal line.”
Alaric was already shaking his head, even before she’d finished speaking. “My mother was a traitor to the Crown. Her house was expunged from the Kesathese peerage and both my father and I have renounced all affiliation with her. It would be dishonest to enter into a marriage on those terms.”
Talasyn was bewildered. As infuriated as she was with Urduja and Elagbi at present, she couldn’t imagine reaching a point where she would actually renounce them, not when she’d been looking for her family all her life. The only thing that she knew about Sancia Ossinast, Gaheris’s wife and the former Night Empress, was that she had disappeared a few years before the Hurricane Wars began. There were even rumors that Gaheris had killed her. And now Talasyn wondered what Sancia had done to make her son so clearly repulsed by the mere mention of her name.
Alaric’s family really was a touchy subject for him.
“I believe that it would be for the best if we skipped the contract.” Prince Elagbi broke the uneasy silence. “Hanan and I didn’t sign one, either, because it isn’t the custom on the Dawn Isles—”
“And because you were married in a witch’s hut, with only one member of court to bear witness,” Urduja groused, narrowing her eyes at her son.
“Perhaps a simpler version of the contract?” Commodore Mathire suggested—to the room at large, but her gaze lingered on Alaric and it seemed all too knowing, and Talasyn was so, so curious, but she’d vowed to behave and that involved keeping her mouth shut rather than demanding answers. “Just the names of the imperial couple and their titles?”
The Nenavarene side of the panel begrudgingly accepted Mathire’s proposal. From there, the talks dragged on well past noon. Once they were adjourned, Talasyn left the council room, both glad that today’s negotiations were over and uneasy about once again having to spend the next few hours alone with her confusing betrothed and all the secrets that lurked in his gray eyes.
Talasyn was about to head into the orchid garden for the afternoon’s training session—truly, she was—when one of her guards came knocking on her bedroom door with an announcement, in compliance with the only direct order Talasyn had ever given since she settled in at the Roof of Heaven. The order to let her know when—
“The pudding merchant is here, Your Grace.”
Even though she’d made a vow to behave, it took Talasyn exactly the length of a heartbeat to decide to let Alaric wait a bit longer. With the contingent of Lachis-dalo trailing after her, she scurried out of her wing of the palace, through the marble hallways, and down the front steps of the Roof of Heaven, where a small crowd of servants had gathered to greet the merchant who sailed up the limestone cliffs on his dugout twice a month.
He was a skinny man who wore a perennial betel-nut-stained smile beneath his wide-brimmed straw hat. On his spry shoulders he balanced a bamboo pole with large aluminum buckets dangling from each end. One bucket contained fresh soybean curds kept warm by a Firewarren-infused aether heart; the other, tiny pearls of palm starch suspended in brown sugar syrup.
Most of the nobles within the palace were too stuffy for street fare, but Talasyn had no such qualms. Servants bowed and curtsied to her, but they had long since learned that she preferred to wait her turn like everyone else. They did become a little quieter, though, a little less rowdy as they chatted among themselves and with the merchant. Talasyn rather suspected that they’d been bringing him up to speed about news from the palace and the upcoming wedding before she arrived.
She stood awkwardly in the middle of the throng. It was as though she were an island, surrounded by waves of camaraderie that steered clear of her shores. It was a sensation that she was all too familiar with from her time at Hornbill’s Head and in the Sardovian regiments.
No matter her status, it seemed that it would always be her lot in life to feel alone.
Suddenly, the various streams of lyrical chatter cut off. Talasyn looked around, a nervous little flutter running through her at the sight of Alaric making his way down the palace steps.
Sevraim was never far behind his liege, but today he hung back, with Talasyn’s own guards. The hushed servants scattered before the Night Emperor as he strode toward her. Some appeared afraid, others resentful—but it couldn’t be denied that typical Nenavarene inquisitiveness overrode all other emotions. They stared and they stared, whispering behind their hands.
Alaric’s pale features grew stonier at being on the receiving end of such unabashed scrutiny. “We have an appointment,” he reminded Talasyn.
“We do,” she said in even tones. “Beforehand, however, I would like some pudding.”
“Pudding?” he repeated blankly. His gray eyes flitted to the merchant, whose sunny smile had faded, replaced with an expression that suggested he was tempted to dive behind his buckets for cover.
The wall of people that had previously stood between the merchant and Talasyn had melted away. “Two, please,” she said kindly in Nenavarene, handing him a silver coin that she fished out from her pocket. A cupful of pudding was worth only three brass pieces, but she figured that the man deserved extra for having to put up with her betrothed.
“Y-yes, Your Grace,” the merchant stammered. He retrieved two wooden cups from his dugout and ladled generous amounts of snow-white soybean curd and dark sugar syrup into them, sticking a wooden spoon into each mixture before passing both cups to Talasyn.
She held one cup out to Alaric with an air of challenge. The spectators leaned forward eagerly, waiting to see if the fearsome Night Emperor from the land across the Eversea would partake of such a humble repast.
Alaric took the cup from Talasyn as gingerly as though it were a venomous snake. The sun-warmed leather of his gauntlet brushed against her bare fingers as he did so, and that nervous little flutter coursed through her again. Where was that coming from?
Shrugging it off, she brought her cup closer to her lips and scarfed down a spoonful of pudding. The starch pearls burst between her teeth and the silky soybean curd melted on her tongue in a warm wash of sweet syrup. She nearly closed her eyes at how delicious it was. This had definitely been worth being late for training.
Alaric tentatively spooned pudding into his mouth, skepticism radiating from his form. One of the serving-girls giggled and was promptly shushed by another, who was desperately trying to muffle her own giggles.
“Well?” Talasyn demanded as Alaric chewed thoughtfully.
He was a proper little lord, she would give him that. He waited until he’d swallowed to respond. “It’s interesting.”
Offended on behalf of her beloved pudding, she turned her nose up at him before moving away so that everyone else could get to the merchant. Alaric followed her and they finished their cups in silence, facing each other beside the docked dugout ship. In spite of his bland assessment of the pudding’s qualities, Alaric ate every last bit of soybean curd and drank the remaining syrup.
Talasyn found it surreal that the Master of the Shadowforged Legion had a sweet tooth. Then again, it must have been a novelty to him, as it had been to her when she reclaimed her birthright. Back on the Northwest Continent, sugar and soybeans had been strictly rationed due to the war effort.
They returned their spoons and empty cups to the pudding merchant. The high sun of early afternoon beat down on the limestone cliffs, alleviated by a fresh, brisk breeze blowing in from the distant Eversea. And it was some impulse—some abrupt yearning to not spend the afternoon cooped up inside the palace walls—that made Talasyn ask Alaric, “Do you want to aethermance out here today?”
He shrugged. The plush swell of his bottom lip glistened with a hint of syrup, and her gaze lingered for far too long. “Wherever you like, Lachis’ka.”
Alaric could still taste brown sugar on his tongue as Talasyn led him to a grove of plumeria trees that carpeted the space between the southernmost wall of the palace and the edge of the limestone cliffs. There were plumerias in Kesath, too, but their flowers were typically fuchsia in color. The blooms speckling the green leaves of the Nenavarene variety were as pristine white as the Roof of Heaven’s facade, with star-shaped splashes of yellow at their center.
Sevraim and the Lachis-dalo remained at the edge of the grove while Alaric and Talasyn wandered further in. The trees grew closely together, enough that their rounded crowns would shield the two aethermancers from view of the windows or the patrolling guards.
Alaric was glad to be free of curious stares from nosy Nenavarene, but something had been weighing on his mind all day thus far. Once he and Talasyn assumed meditation poses on the grass, beneath the plumerias, he could no longer stop himself.
“Is there something troubling you?” he asked, which marked the second instance in as many days wherein he regretted asking someone a question as soon as it left his lips.
From where she sat, framed against bark and leaves and white flowers, Talasyn blinked at him as though he’d lost his mind.
Perhaps he had, at that.
“I don’t think we heard a peep out of you all morning, during the negotiations,” he explained. “And you usually have quite a lot to say when you’re around me.”
Talasyn sneered and opened her mouth, then stilled as though remembering something. Finally, she said, “Let’s focus on training.”
Her manner was that of someone who had been told to stand down—or perhaps told herself, as the way she treated everyone on the Nenavarene panel these days made it clear that she wasn’t on speaking terms with them. In any case, she was being cooperative, and Alaric wasn’t about to scorn a miracle when it was right in front of him.
“Very well,” he said. “We’re going back to the basics today. I’ll teach you some Shadowforged breathing meditations. The principle should be roughly the same.” He had no wish to admit to anything in common with Lightweavers, but there were some truths that couldn’t be denied. “Aethermancy comes from the center, the place in one’s soul that is similar to a nexus point, where the wall between the material realm and aetherspace is thin. The hidden, more stubborn aspects of one’s magic can be coaxed forth by mastering how to let it flow through your body in the correct way.”
For the next hour, Alaric took Talasyn through the seated meditations. He taught her how to hold air in her lungs and expel it slowly, rhythmically. How to gather it behind the navel, push it out through the nose, and tuck it into the tongue. How to let the Lightweave build up and swell on the crests of it, seeping into the spaces between blood and the soul.
She was a quick study in terms of mimicking his postures and the expansions and contractions of chest, abdomen, and spine—but it was as plain as day that she had trouble clearing her mind long enough for the practice to take full effect. She was a restless thing, her coltish frame thrumming with nervous energy, and he had half a mind to leave her alone for a bit, because maybe she would be able to focus better without him.
But he didn’t leave her alone. He stayed where he was. For once the blue-skied afternoon wasn’t beastly hot due to a pleasant breeze that stirred the plumeria blossoms. The gaps between the trees offered glimpses of the sweeping city of Eskaya miles below, with its golden towers and its bronze weathervanes. He could almost call it relaxing, sitting here in this place of leaves and earth, secluded from the rest of the palace at such a great height. There was no political maneuvering to worry about, no specter of wars past or future. It was just them, and breath and magic.
Could I have lived like this? Alaric found himself idly wondering. Without a throne to someday inherit, with the stormships remaining his grandfather’s impossible dream, would he have been content with this kind of life, his days passing slow and easy in some mundane pastoral setting?
Would he have been all right with never meeting her?
A strange thought, that. It stood to all reason that his life, whatever iteration of it, would be so much simpler without her in it. Talasyn—in all her prickliness, with that face that his gaze somehow always lingered on—was a ceramic shell hurled into his carefully laid plans.
She was currently squeezing her eyes shut, her freckled nose all scrunched up. Sunshine illuminated the golden undertones of her olive skin and her unkempt chestnut braid spilled over one shoulder. She looked fetching, and Alaric grimaced. What was it about her that reduced him to such nonsensical adjectives?
And then, because the gods had a twisted sense of humor, he was suddenly falling into the depths of Talasyn’s honeyed eyes as they flew open, too quickly for him to abolish the grimace on his face.
“What?” she muttered with deepest suspicion. “Am I doing it wrong?”
“No.” Alaric seized the first excuse that he could come up with. “I was just thinking.”
“About?”
Well, he certainly wasn’t going to reveal that he’d been ogling her. He grasped around wildly for a suitable evasion, and stumbled upon something that he had in fact been ruminating on earlier in the day. Something that had been revealed during the talks. “Your mother was from the Dawn.”
Talasyn blew out a measured breath that had nothing to do with the meditations he’d taught her. “Her name was Hanan Ivralis. My father met her on his travels and brought her with him when he went back to the Dominion. She died during the civil war.”
Alaric’s brow creased. “The people of the Dawn Isles are powerful warriors, by all accounts. What could kill a Lightweaver hailing from there?”
“It was a mysterious illness. And it was fast. She slipped away in only a sennight, before anyone could figure out what was wrong. I don’t—” Talasyn broke off sharply, her gaze flicking from him to the waterfall. “I don’t really like talking about it.”
“I apologize for bringing it up,” Alaric said, soft and solemn and far too sincere. Dangerously so. The defiant tilt of her chin and the way her fists clenched in her lap elicited a pang of guilt that he’d inadvertently forced her to relive her sorrow. It was a sorrow that had no root, for she would have been too young to have any clear memories of her mother. Communing with the Light Sever might be able to change that, but the Zahiya-lachis had declared Belian off-limits for now.
Talasyn’s pink lips quirked. “Never thought I’d live to see the day you apologized to me.”
“I know when I’ve overstepped,” Alaric stiffly replied. “While I’m at it, I would also like to apologize for losing my temper yesterday. I hope that you weren’t too—perturbed.”
“I wasn’t.” She was still avoiding his eyes, but some of the tension had drained from her form. “I was wrong, too. For yelling and storming off. We have a common goal now. We should be working together. So let’s just . . . do that.”
For several long moments, Alaric was so stunned that it defied all speech. Could it be that being nicer to the Lightweaver made her nicer to him as well? Could Sevraim, in fact, be a genius? He could never tell him he was right.
It was only when Talasyn turned to him with a slight frown that Alaric realized he’d been silent for too long. “Yes,” he said quickly. “Focusing on working together. I am amenable.”
Her frown transmuted into another upward twitch at the corner of her mouth. He had the distinct and unsettling impression that she found him amusing.
Alaric stood up, motioning for Talasyn to follow suit. He demonstrated the simplest of the moving meditations—feet apart, inhaling deeply as one palm was placed in front of the stomach and the other over the head, exhaling as the right knee was bent as far as it could go without the body toppling over. Slow and gradual movements, like a gentle ocean wave.
At first, Talasyn gave the exercise her utmost attention, with the furrowed brow and the wrinkled nose that he was starting to find so alarmingly endearing, but it soon became obvious that she was preoccupied, a distant look in her eyes. Her expression flitted to uncertainty, and then to solemn determination, and Alaric could only marvel at how unguarded she was, at how she let various emotions play across her face without thinking, the way that clouds shifted through the heavens, at turns hiding and revealing the sun. She was so different from everyone else he’d ever met in both the Night Empire and the Dominion courts.
“What happened to your mother?” she blurted out in the middle of another attempt at the pose.
Alaric would normally never have any desire to talk about it but, to his own surprise, he found he wanted to with her. Parting with each word more willingly than he ought to have, because fair was fair and Talasyn had shared such a dark shard of her past with him, too.
“My mother abandoned Kesath when I was thirteen.” Abandoned me was what some part of him longed to say. She abandoned me. “I haven’t heard from her since. I assume that she sought refuge in Valisa, where her ancestors originated.” He ran a critical eye over Talasyn’s stance. “Don’t put all your weight on one knee. Balance it out and keep your back straight.”
“Valisa,” she mused. “That’s all the way west, on the edge of the world.” She aligned herself to Alaric’s specifications and he walked around her, saying nothing, searching her form for what needed improvement.
“Do you miss her?” Talasyn asked, in a much quieter tone.
Alaric was caught off-guard. He stopped in his tracks behind her, glad that she couldn’t see his features as he struggled to compose them. “No. She was weak. She faltered in the face of what it meant to be the Night Empress. I am better off without her.”
Come with me.
My son. My baby.
Please.
“Sometimes I wonder . . .”
Alaric trailed off, embarrassed. He had been so cautious all his life, always weighing his words before he spoke them. Why could he never seem to do the same around Talasyn?
“If she ever thinks of you,” she finished for him in a soft voice. “I wondered that every day, back in Sardovia, before I knew who I was, before I knew that my mother was dead. I wondered if she ever regretted leaving me.”
There was a tightness in his throat, a certain rising lightness in his chest. Someone finally understood. Someone could give voice to all the things that he could never put into words. Talasyn was still in meditation stance, still facing away from him, and he was seized by the urge to sweep her into his arms. To embrace her in reassurance, in solidarity.
To no longer be alone.
“Keep your back straight,” he said instead. “And your elbows out.”
“I am!” she protested. Her shoulders visibly bunched underneath her thin white smock, as they always did when she was about to pick a fight.
“No—” Alaric stepped forward, impatient all of a sudden, eager to shake free of the chains of memory, to distract himself with something that wasn’t the terrible night Sancia Ossinast left Kesath. “Like this—”
He reached out to correct Talasyn’s posture at the same time that she straightened up with an exasperated huff, moving backward as she brought her feet together. His gauntleted hands closed on the tops of her shoulders and her spine pressed flush against his chest.
The world went still.
Mangoes was Alaric’s first coherent thought. That slick, succulent, golden fruit that graced every meal he had here in the Dominion, with its lush perfume of summer-warmed nectar. Talasyn smelled as if she’d been eating them, dusted in flaky sea salt. And that wasn’t all. Orange blossoms and the creamy floral note of promise jasmines wafted from her hair, tempered by cool green attar of lotus and the barest hint of cinnamon bark.
Alaric’s mouth watered. He wanted to bite down.
It didn’t help matters that Talasyn fit perfectly against him, that he could tuck her head under his chin, that her bottom was slotted between his hips and shapely enough to make the pit of his stomach clench. In a daze, he watched his leather-clad fingers spread over her shoulders. Watched his thumbs graze the sides of her neck.
He had never despised his gauntlets more. He longed to peel them off, to touch her sun-kissed skin. His thumbs moved in circular strokes, caressing the elegant slopes they rested against. She shivered, every tremor passing through him, touching off inner chords within him, and what was he hoping to achieve, why wasn’t he moving away, how had he never known that holding someone could feel like this?
The breeze picked up, shaking a rain of white petals loose from the plumeria trees. Amidst all those swirling snow-drop pieces of flowers that drifted on currents of faint perfume, she turned her head to look at him.
Her brown eyes were so wide in the sunlight, her breathing shallow, her pink lips slightly parted.
It overwhelmed him, then—a dark curiosity, a yearning to find out if those lips would taste like the pudding they’d just eaten.
Alaric leaned in. He lifted his fingers from Talasyn’s neck and curled them along the line of her jaw, gently nudging upward. She went willingly, relaxing against his chest, tilting her chin so that her mouth was suddenly so much closer to his than ever before. Petals whirling all around them, his heartbeat tremulous, he bowed his head further to bridge the scant distance. Her eyes slid to half-mast. She waited.
“Excuse me.”
Alaric and Talasyn sprang apart. Neither of them had even noticed Sevraim’s approach.
“What do you want?” Alaric growled at his legionnaire.
“I hate to interrupt—” And, the thing was, Sevraim really did seem abashed, conscientiously looking everywhere but at the two royals. “—but the Lachis’ka’s lady-in-waiting has just come to inform me that it’s time for His Majesty and Her Grace to prepare for the banquet.”
