One day after another passed without incident, and it spoke volumes about the state of Alaric’s life that he was somewhat shocked by that. With Dominion escorts ever on the alert for signs of trouble, Kesathese forces combed through their assigned sections of the archipelago and reported nothing of note save for the occasional dragon sighting.
Mathire had been correct in her estimations; by the second afternoon of the search, the various teams had all but wrapped up their respective routes. All that was left on the agenda was the Deliverance’s straight shot across Nenavarene airspace, which at this point was more ceremonial than anything else.
While Mathire finished up traipsing through the jungles with her men, Alaric and Sevraim left for his stormship a few hours ahead of Talasyn and her father. Alaric was eager to leave the cloying walls of the Roof of Heaven. The bulk of the would-have-been invasion force had been sent back to Kesath days ago, and only his and Mathire’s fleets remained, and—as his convoy tore away from the Nenavarene coastline, as the hot tropical sun shone on the sight of familiar ironclads proudly bearing the Kesathese chimera hovering above the Eversea—Alaric breathed easy for what felt like the first time in a long, long while.
The Lachis-dalo were on edge as they disembarked from the skerry that had ferried them from the diplomatic schooner to the Deliverance. Talasyn couldn’t say that she blamed her guards. While they were technically not in enemy territory owing to the terms of the agreement, the sight of hordes of Kesathese soldiers assembled in the hangar bay for their arrival was still unsettling. In fact, Talasyn herself had spent most of the schooner voyage from Eskaya running through escape scenarios in her head.
Granted, the dress that Jie had wrangled her into wasn’t particularly conducive to escape. While the saffron-yellow bodice was so liberally embellished with seed pearls and quartz crystals that it could probably deflect an iron crossbow bolt, it was . . . staggeringly low-cut. One sudden move on Talasyn’s part would give the Kesathese fleet the type of eyeful that nobody wanted. The skirt was very stiff, too; it hugged her hips and her thighs, flaring out slightly below her knees, gathered here and there into large fan-shaped pleats. If she tried to run, she’d rip a seam.
Talasyn therefore felt rather constrained and unhappy as she stepped into the hangar bay of Alaric’s stormship. He headed up the vanguard, with Sevraim behind him.
“So many soldiers, Your Majesty,” Prince Elagbi mused as he and Talasyn approached Alaric. “One might think that you don’t trust your allies.”
Alaric ignored the slight. “Welcome aboard, Your Highness, Your Grace.”
He looked at Talasyn, really looked at her, for the first time since her arrival, and—
She didn’t know what happened, exactly. His gray eyes fell on her face first, then drifted lower. His gauntleted fists clenched at his sides and, for the briefest of moments, a look darted across his pale features that put her rather in mind of someone choking to death on their own tongue. But it was gone as quickly as a flash of lightning, as soon as he drew a swift inhale.
Alaric turned on his heel and marched out of the hangar bay. Talasyn and Elagbi were left with no choice but to follow him, trailed by the Lachis-dalo. Talasyn was puzzled by Alaric’s behavior and she made to ask her father about it, but changed her mind. Elagbi, too busy studying his surroundings with awe, had clearly not noticed that anything was amiss. The interior of the Deliverance was nothing compared to the floating castle that was the W’taida, but the Nenavarene prince had never been on a stormship before, and Talasyn supposed that, for him, every inch of the austere space carried a certain novelty.
Sevraim fell into step beside her. His handsome face was hidden by his obsidian helm, but Talasyn could practically hear the unctuous smile in his voice when he said, “How wonderful to have you onboard, Lachis’ka. It certainly livens up this drab old place.”
“I don’t doubt that you are alone in such a sentiment,” Talasyn said archly.
He waved a dismissive hand in Alaric’s direction. “Pay His Cranky Majesty no mind. He’s not so bad once you get to know him.”
“Sevraim,” Alaric warned. “Do not bother Her Grace.”
“Is the privilege to bother her reserved only for yourself, Emperor Alaric?” Sevraim quipped, and Talasyn’s jaw dropped.
But, instead of smiting the legionnaire where he stood, Alaric merely tossed Talasyn a long-suffering glance over his shoulder as he kept on walking. “My apologies.”
Sevraim laughed. The manner in which he teased Alaric reminded Talasyn of how Khaede used to tease her, and there it was again, that abrupt jolt of the chasm of loss at Khaede’s absence, at not knowing what had become of her.
It was harder to set aside today than it had ever been, but Talasyn eventually managed—by ruminating on the very odd fact that Alaric could apparently tolerate one of his subordinates talking to him in that manner.
The thrum of aether hearts pulsed through the steel walls, accompanied by the groaning of machinery as the stormship began to move. At Alaric’s stern nod, Sevraim left, most likely to take up his position as the Deliverance cruised over the archipelago. Alaric led the Nenavarene delegation to the officers’ wing, where he stopped and turned to Talasyn and Elagbi.
“Would you care for some refreshment?” he asked.
Talasyn gave a start. “Refreshment?”
“You have been very gracious in adhering to my request that you accompany me outside Eskaya. It would be the height of rudeness to put you up in the lounge without offering the finest vintage that I have on board.” The invitation was extended without a semblance of warmth. It was clear that Alaric was going through the motions of social niceties, fully expecting his guests to refuse. “I understand if my presence would be intolerable, given the situation. You may feel free to make yourselves comfortable while I’m overseeing the search.”
It was impulsive and ill advised, but Talasyn decided to call his bluff. “Some wine would be lovely. And I must insist that you join us, Your Majesty.” Petty triumph sparked in her veins as surprise and annoyance flickered over her betrothed’s face. “Surely you can delay pressing your nose to the windows and squinting down at the ground for an hour or so.”
Alaric glanced at Elagbi as if half hoping that the latter would help him out of the mess that he’d gotten himself into. Instead of courteously declining, however, the Dominion prince was content to follow Talasyn’s lead, flashing a brilliant, toothy smile. “Yes, yes!” Elagbi boomed. “Her Grace and I would be most honored to drink with you, Emperor Alaric. Thank you!”
“The honor is mine,” Alaric gritted out. “Please follow me.”
After the Sardovian Allfold’s crushing defeat, the majority of Talasyn’s daily routine had been spent in the marble halls and extravagantly furnished rooms of the Roof of Heaven. Thus, the lounge that Alaric showed them to was rather underwhelming, even though the bottom-dweller that Talasyn had once been would have swooned at the luxury of upholstered furniture and windows that spanned the length of the entire wall on one side, displaying a breathtaking panorama of Nenavar’s green mountains and sandy beaches sprawled beneath clear blue skies.
With the Lachis-dalo stationed outside, the three royals took their seats—Talasyn and Elagbi on the settee, Alaric in a black leather armchair that appeared too small for him, as Talasyn suspected most standard-sized seating would be. He hunched in on himself and stretched his long legs out further than was strictly decorous. It would have been endearing if he’d been anyone else.
A mousy aide brought in a bottle of wine and three slim flutes carefully balanced on a tray, which he set down on the table. He uncorked the bottle and was about to start pouring, when Alaric stopped him with a crisp “We’ll help ourselves, Nordaye.”
Giving a deep bow, the aide scurried out of the lounge.
“Ah, cherry wine.” Elagbi sounded reluctantly impressed, eyeing the label on the bottle. “Imported from the Diwara Theocracy. This is a rare treat, Emperor Alaric. You have good taste.”
Alaric blinked, as though the compliment had thrown him off-balance. “Thank you,” he said at last, awkwardly. “It is nothing, of course, compared to Nenavar’s currant red.”
“The Lachis’ka doesn’t care overly much for the red. She finds it too astringent,” said Elagbi. “Perhaps the cherry wine will be more to her taste.”
And it was, as it turned out. The purplish beverage was earthy and sweet, and Talasyn tried not to let on how much she delighted in each sip. Not even the Dominion with all its wonders had made her any more well disposed toward the bottle, but the cherry wine might as well have been a particularly rich juice.
Alaric, for his part, drank sparingly, more interested in swirling the liquid around in its flute. He was probably waiting for the whole ordeal to be over, counting down the minutes in his head.
“It is good that we have the chance to talk in private, just the three of us,” Elagbi ventured after a drawn-out silence. “I thought that I should prepare you both for a certain topic that will doubtless crop up over the coming days as we plan for the wedding. I speak of consummation—”
Talasyn choked on her wine. Alaric’s fingers tightened around the stem of his glass so violently that the fine crystal seemed in danger of snapping in half.
“There will be a feast after the ceremony,” Elagbi soldiered on. “At some point, the two of you will be expected to abscond to the Lachis’ka’s chambers, where you will spend the night in accordance with Nenavarene custom.”
“There is no need for that,” Alaric said quickly. “I do not expect Her Grace to—” He stopped, clamping his lips together, just the slightest tinge of pink leaching into his pallor.
“Naturally there will be no coercion involved,” Elagbi declared in stern tones, giving Alaric such a forbidding look that a lesser man would have flinched. “However, the union will not be valid in the eyes of the court until you share your wife’s chambers.”
“But that is so unnecessary!” Talasyn cried. “The Dragon Queen herself knows that this will be a marriage in name alone . . .” Something about her father’s grave expression caused her to trail off.
“To be sure, there is no pressure on you as of now,” the Nenavarene prince said carefully. “It will be a different story once you have ascended to the Dragon Throne and there is need for a new Lachis’ka, but I believe that is a matter best saved for another time. What the two of you need to discuss now is your wedding night and how to handle the issue.”
Talasyn wondered if Urduja had put Elagbi up to this: the Zahiya-lachis often employed back-channel negotiations. She would have appreciated some warning beforehand; but, then again, it was highly likely that she would have refused to set foot on the Deliverance if she had known.
Talasyn snuck a glance at the dark-haired emperor, her mind wandering down a dangerous path that she couldn’t keep away from now that the topic had been broached. A flicker of something wild and nervous curled in her abdomen. She took in his massive frame, his thick fingers, his lush mouth. She remembered how she felt whenever their bodies were close together, the warmth and the danger and the butterflies—
No. She was not going to think about him in those terms, least of all when her father was in the room.
Unfortunately, Elagbi chose that moment to stand up. “I’ll leave the two of you to it, then, shall I?”
Alaric started from whatever strange reverie he’d been brooding in for the past few moments. “To it?” he repeated, somewhat faintly.
Elagbi scowled. “To talk,” he stressed, his hard eyes boring into the younger man, “about your situation, in your very much separate seats.”
Talasyn contemplated pitching herself overboard.
As Gaheris’s sole heir, Alaric had devoted his early years to studies and aethermancy training. Then he had spent the last decade fighting a war. There had never been time for women. He’d always considered himself above the bawdy pleasures that people like Sevraim took so much delight in.
Today, however, his very alluring, very infuriating betrothed had the nerve to show up on his ship in that dress—that revealing dress which hugged her slender form like molten sunshine, its low neck framing the swell of her cleavage in pearls and quartz—and all Alaric could think about was how her breasts were the perfect size for his hands.
To make matters worse, he’d been trying not to salivate over her while her father was in the room, and now the man was taking his leave after telling them to discuss how to handle their wedding night.
Why has my life come to this? Alaric wondered angrily. I didn’t ask for any of it.
As soon as the door creaked shut behind Prince Elagbi, Alaric leapt to his feet with a frustrated hiss of breath and stalked over to the window, fists clenched at his sides.
“I wouldn’t be averse to sharing a room,” he heard Talasyn say. “To keep up appearances. It’s just for one night.”
True enough. He was heading back to the Continent the day after the wedding, and she wouldn’t be joining him there until her coronation a fortnight later. After that, he had a hard time imagining that they would be seeing each other any more than was strictly necessary.
“I can take the settee,” he mumbled. “What is one more inconvenience, after all?”
“You don’t have to sound like it’s my fault,” she admonished.
It is, he almost snapped, only for a potent dose of shame to wash over him, white-hot in its intensity. She was not to blame for the fact that he couldn’t control his physical reactions to her.
Alaric stopped glaring a hole into the window and whirled around to face his betrothed once more. Talasyn sat ramrod-straight, fiddling with the fan-shaped folds of her skirt, sunlight dancing over the ropes of pearls braided through her chestnut hair, enveloping her in radiance. Her neck was bare—the perfect place, he thought bitterly, to press his lips against.
The Lightweaver will never return this bizarre infatuation that you have for her, but she will in time learn to wield it against you if you don’t nip it in the bud.
Bile rose in Alaric’s throat. Like magic that became a blade, it transmuted into cutting words. “How should I sound, then? Like I’m excited about the consummation?” He flashed her a thin, humorless smile.
“There won’t be a consummation, you dolt, that’s the point!” Talasyn’s anger came on like a gust of coastal wind, too sudden, too swift. Her cheeks were quick to stain red, too, underneath the sheer veil of powder. It would seem that he’d struck another nerve in addition to her anger; it took him a beat to identify it as embarrassment. “I wouldn’t sleep with you if you were the last man left alive on Lir!”
The barb shouldn’t have sunk as deep as it did, slicing into Alaric’s skin, to the bone. If he were a stronger man, it wouldn’t have. But his father was right and he was a fool. “The feeling is mutual,” he hissed. “As far as I’m concerned, this alliance has nothing to recommend it to me, save for securing peace. Else I would have had better options, and none so shrewish.”
Talasyn scrambled off the settee and advanced upon him in a flash of yellow silk, invading his space, crowding him up against the window. There was just the slightest flare of gold in her brown irises as her magic roared in its banks, her features twisted with fury and . . . hurt? Why did he think that she looked hurt, that she cared a whit for his opinion of her?
“You didn’t mind me all that much when you were calling me beautiful a few nights ago.”
Her tone was riddled with contempt, and it was all he could do not to wince. It was all he could do to flatten his spine against the stormship’s window, because if he didn’t and she leaned in any closer, the inviting swell of her décolletage would very nearly graze his own chest, and he didn’t think he could survive that.
“You clean up well,” he told her, not as coolly as he would have liked, far more hoarsely than he wanted. But it did the trick and she reeled back as if he’d struck her, and she didn’t say anything, and how, he wondered, could everything in him feel so sharp and so empty all at once?
“Isn’t it for the best that we’re being honest with each other?” Alaric goaded. “This arrangement is complicated enough as it is without us having any illusions.”
He saw it, the moment that Talasyn hit boiling point, the moment that she lost whatever semblance of caution she was holding on to. He saw it play out all over her face.
“I’ve never had any illusions about you,” she growled. “You are exactly who I thought you were from the very beginning—a vile, arrogant, cruel, despicable asshole. For all your grand talk about securing peace, one day people will have had enough of you, do you hear me? And when they finally denounce you and your despotic goons, I swear to you, I won’t think twice before joining them!”
The thread that Alaric had been hanging on to since his and Mantes’s duel finally snapped. He was upon Talasyn in a flash, his fingers clamping around her hip almost hard enough to bruise.
“While I share your contempt for this situation in which we find ourselves, do not mistake it as apathy,” he hissed. “I hardly expect your disposition to sweeten, but I will be damned if I allow my future empress to behave in a manner that reflects poorly on my reign.”
“If you allow?” Talasyn wrenched free of his viselike grasp, batting his hand away for good measure. “I don’t belong to you. I don’t belong to anyone.”
His sardonic gaze flickered over her silk dress and the pearls in her hair. “You are the Lachis’ka, and the Lachis’ka belongs to the Nenavarene. Their fate is entirely in your hands. Should you cross the line, it is they who will suffer for it. Am I making myself clear?”
“I hate you,” she spat.
Alaric sneered at her. “See? Already you are acclimatizing so well to married life.”
“This isn’t a marriage.” Talasyn stepped back, widening the distance between them. “It’s a farce.”
“As opposed to all the other marriages out there, brimming with devotion and contentment?” Alaric frostily countered. “You have been several months at court. You should know better. I neither expect nor want your love or your friendship, but I will require your cooperation. And you need mine in order to stop the Voidfell. Do you understand?”
She glared daggers at him.
“Good.” Alaric inclined his head in a mocking parody of a bow. “I’ll show Prince Elagbi back in, and then I must attend to the search that I’ve been sorely neglecting thus far.”
When Alaric joined Sevraim on the metalglass-enclosed bridge of the stormship, the legionnaire took one look at his face and said, “You fought with her again, didn’t you?”
“She is the most frustrating—” Alaric cut himself off sharply, then took a deep, centering breath. “It is a lost cause. The advice you previously gave will never be of use. She has made up her mind about me and she will never be able to separate me from the war. So be it. There are more important matters.”
Sevraim offered a sympathetic hum. He took off his helm, tucking it under one arm as he leaned against the railing overlooking the busy but well-ordered activity of the Deliverance’s crew. “If I may be frank—considering that Nenavar doesn’t appear to be deceiving us, as there is neither hide nor hair of the Sardovian Allfold here on their shores—your relations with the Lightweaver might turn out to be the most important matter in the future. You need heirs—”
Alaric felt a vein throb at his temple at the sheer rush of stress brought about by the other man’s words. “If you value your life, you won’t finish that sentence.”
“I’ll start a new sentence, then,” Sevraim said with unabashed cheer. “Judging from the scene I walked into beneath the plumeria trees, I truly believed that you were well on your way to the business of heir-making. I was so proud.”
“Do you prefer to die by my magic, or shall I toss you out of my ship?” Alaric blandly inquired.
Sevraim’s guffaw tapered off prematurely when the Deliverance’s navigator joined them on the bridge, delivering news that they had cleared aerial reconnaissance of two of the seven main islands with nothing untoward to report. After Alaric dismissed the navigator, Sevraim proved himself capable of a rare display of seriousness; for several long minutes, he and Alaric stood side by side, unspeaking, watching the archipelago below them unfold.
“Talasyn was telling the truth, I think,” Sevraim ventured. “The Sardovian remnant isn’t here. We would have found them by now. They couldn’t have escaped at any point between our arrival and this sweep—we would have seen them.” He scratched his head. “So where are they?”
There was a taut and weighty sensation in the pit of Alaric’s stomach as he came to terms with the fact that he had been doing Talasyn a great injustice by treating her so harshly. Upon reflection, most of his anger toward her had stemmed from the possibility that he was allowing his guard to be let down when Kesath’s enemies could spring out from behind the sun at any moment.
But the Allfold was nowhere to be found. Talasyn might happily strangle him without a second thought, but she wasn’t deceiving him.
“The world is vast,” he finally told Sevraim. “We’ll keep looking. We’ll make it clear that any nation harboring our enemies will be crushed along with them.”
