Red-gold sunset was pouring over the ancient ruins in a molten haze by the time Alaric and Talasyn made it to the mountaintop. The Lightweaver shrine had been a vast, ethereal thing when she’d first seen it, silvered in moonlight; in the fiery glow of a dying day its weathered sandstone facade contrasted starkly against the rolling dark green jungle within which it reclined, solemn and immense, like a forgotten god on a long-lost throne, the faces of its multitude of carved dancing figures peering out from vines and bramble with enigmatic half-smiles wherein lurked the secrets of the past.
Alaric regarded the dancers on the entrance arch with interest. “These are?”
“Tuani.” Talasyn summoned the term from one of an endless array of history lessons. “Nature spirits. You’ll find reliefs like these in a lot of millennia-old structures. They were worshipped by the ancient Nenavarene.”
“And now the Nenavarene worship your grandmother.” Alaric’s gray eyes were fixed on the carvings, their flowing manes forever wild in the wind, their sleek limbs forever raised to some long-ago melody. “And, eventually, you.”
Talasyn offered a halfhearted shrug. She didn’t like thinking about this—about what would come after. She was run ragged enough worrying about the present as it was.
“There’s not much worshipping involved,” she muttered. “Here in Nenavar the Zahiya-lachis is sovereign because she is the vessel of the ancestors who watch over the land from the spirit world. There are no . . . prayers or rituals, or anything. People just have to do whatever she says.”
“As the would-be consort of a future Zahiya-lachis, I’ll already be expected to do just that, won’t I?” He sounded faintly amused. “Husbands defer to their wives here, from what I’ve gathered.”
There was a fluttering in the pit of her stomach. There was a skip to her pulse, a shortness of breath. The way he spoke so casually of their impending marriage, when he looked like he did now—
Logically, Talasyn had always known that Alaric had a body hiding somewhere under all the black fabric and leather armor. She had even been taken aback by the sheer size of it on numerous occasions. It shouldn’t have come as such a shock.
But he had emerged from behind the tall reeds in an undershirt that bared his sharp collarbones and broad shoulders, that clung to his defined chest. Paired with trousers that were hung low on his lean hips and emphasized the considerable length of his legs, and black armguards hinting at the solid muscle beneath them . . . the effect had been quite dizzying. It still was.
At least his hair had long since dried and he wasn’t raking his fingers through it with a casual, smarmy elegance, and she’d stopped feeling as if she was on the brink of combusting. Sort of. Maybe.
“There you go again, talking about being married to me,” she scoffed with a bravado that she hoped he wouldn’t see through. “You are excited.”
“Given your proclivity for pointing it out,” Alaric countered, “I’d hazard a guess that you’re excited that I’m excited.”
“You,” she hissed, “are the most ornery man that I’ve ever—”
“Been betrothed to?” he suggested helpfully.
“Will you stop talking about that!”
“No. Annoying you is in my ornery nature, Lachis’ka.” His tone was even. Perfectly calculated, she thought, to rile her.
And it worked.
Glowering, she made her way into the complex. So did he, this time keeping pace with her instead of trailing behind. They both knew the way to the Light Sever, after all.
Talasyn was no stranger to handsome men with excellent physiques. There had been plenty in Sardovia and there were plenty here in the Dominion. But she had never before experienced this . . . pull in the company of anyone else. Her eyes kept flickering to Alaric, mapping him out. Her every nerve ending sparked at his nearness.
In truth, it was the same set of reactions she’d had to him ever since they met, but amplified, somehow. As though in the peeling off of his layers, some of hers had been removed as well.
It scared her, this epiphany that he wasn’t unattractive. Or perhaps epiphany wasn’t the right term. Perhaps it had been something that she’d always known, deep down, and it had been lying in wait for the right moment to surface and wallop her over the head.
The right moment being Alaric wet from the stream, all tousled sable mane and sun-flushed skin stretched over sculpted muscle, drops of water tangled in his long lashes.
Talasyn’s face grew hot, and she was exceedingly grateful for the gloom that shrouded the dusty, crumbled corridors they were traversing. Gods, there seemed to be nothing more humiliating than being attracted to someone who didn’t feel the same. Alaric had told her, in such a cruel and biting manner, that she cleaned up well. There was no mistaking his implication; the only times he ever found her tolerable to look at was when her face was painted and she was draped in silk and precious gems. Without these trappings, he obviously had no impetus to view a former wartime enemy as anything other than a cave troll.
A shrewish cave troll, at that.
She felt nauseated. Was this what attraction normally entailed—suddenly caring if the other person found one pleasing to the eye?
The Dominion court was influencing her in the worst of ways, Talasyn decided. The emphasis that the Nenavarene placed on fashion and cosmetics had cultivated in her a vanity that had been absent for twenty years. She resolved to work on that, on quashing this new and highly frivolous aspect of herself.
The reliefs that lined the shrine’s interior walls almost appeared to move in the half-light, their stone eyes following the intruders. Through it all Talasyn’s veins hummed with the golden strings of the Lightweave, beckoning to her as it strained against the veils of aetherspace. However, when they reached the courtyard, all was still, the Light Sever dormant.
The tree that Alaric’s magic had felled a little over four months ago was still there, gnarled trunk cracked like an egg over the stonework. Alaric and Talasyn stared at it, and then at each other.
“They’re called lelak’lete—grandfather trees,” she said, more out of a desire to avoid any discussion of their shared rancorous past, which would undoubtedly lead to another ferocious argument, than a pressing need to tutor him in the finer points of Nenavarene botany. “They’re believed to house the spirits of the dead who weren’t given proper burials.”
Alaric’s silvery gaze wandered to the stone rooftops surrounding the courtyard, chipped and slumped beneath the weight of the grandfather trees that had grown over them in profusions of twisted trunks and gray-green leaves and ropelike aerial roots. “A lot of restless souls around here, then.”
Talasyn cocked her head. “Scared?”
“Not of them. The animals will probably get me first.”
His delivery was so perfectly wry, so patently long-suffering, that she had to bite back a grin, thrown once again by the rare flash of his subtle humor.
They set up camp, which involved little more than dropping their packs and unfolding bedrolls near the sandstone fountain. Supper was a silent affair and Talasyn’s eyes were heavy by the end of it, the shadows of early evening pressing down on her lids, the fatigue that she’d been reining in since morning now let loose, washing over her bones.
She barely managed to stumble to her bedroll, to crawl into it. The last thing she saw before she sank into a deep sleep was Alaric standing by the fountain, head tilted to gaze at the darkening sky above the grandfather trees. At the pale beginnings of the seven moons, and the faint glimmer of the first stars.
“Wake up.”
Talasyn’s eyes shot open. The sky was a bright powder-blue and copious amounts of sunlight were pouring into the courtyard. She squinted against the glare, perplexed. Hadn’t it been evening mere minutes ago?
The fog of sleep cleared. She sat upright, her body groaning in protest, having become happily accustomed to nights ensconced in fluffy pillows and silk sheets atop an eiderdown mattress. There was no one to blame but herself for getting soft, but it made her feel better to scowl at the man who had roused her, anyway.
Alaric’s expression was impassive as he crouched beside her, his shadow sharp on the ancient stone floor. “We have to get started. I let you sleep in a bit because you seemed tired, but we can’t afford to waste any more time.”
“So thoughtful.” Much to her chagrin, the bite that she’d intended to make apparent in her tone was swallowed up by a gusty yawn.
Breakfast consisted of more rice cakes and some alarmingly potent coffee, brewed from grounds that Rapat’s garrison had provided. It smelled faintly like the creamy yellow thornfruit that could clear a room when cut open, but it tasted of smoke and chocolate—and it was so strong that Talasyn’s heart was beating faster in her chest after only a few sips.
Alaric was unimpressed. “This stuff could strip paint from an airship hull.”
Talasyn secretly agreed with him, but principle dictated that she defend Nenavar’s honor. “Does the rustic taste offend your royal sensibilities?” she sniped.
“You’re royalty, too,” he pointed out. “Or has that slipped your mind?”
She blinked. It had slipped her mind, actually. And he was arching one dark brow at her and his sensual lips were curved into a smirk and he was wearing that stupid undershirt—
His smirk widened in amusement as the seconds passed. “You look like you want to kill me.”
“You look like you enjoy it,” she snapped.
His eyes were silver in the sunshine; for a fleeting moment, they held an enigmatic sort of mischief that she would never have believed he had in him, had she not witnessed it before it faded, its glint retreating behind the usual steel and frost.
She leaned forward, some small suspicion taking root. “Do you enjoy it?” she demanded bluntly. “Getting a rise out of me, I mean?”
He ducked his head, suddenly very intent on his coffee, peering into its depths as though it held arcane secrets. “It’s not that I enjoy it, but it’s different. My father’s—my court”—his pale brow furrowed as he painstakingly corrected himself, and he looked so young—“they bow and they scrape. My legionnaires stand on less ceremony, especially Sevraim, as you’ve doubtless noticed. But they are still aware that I am their master. You, on the other hand, don’t fear to truly speak your mind. I find that interesting.”
“I thought you liked me better when I was still afraid of you.” Talasyn couldn’t resist throwing back in his face his declaration from their night as prisoners. Until today, she’d had no idea that she even remembered what he’d said.
“To quote an esteemed philosopher,” Alaric told his coffee, “I say things when I’m mad.”
There it was again, that grin tugging at her lips, unbidden. And, once again, she fought it back. “Well, the next time you wish to be disrespected, you know where to find me.”
The corner of Alaric’s mouth twitched, as though he was suppressing a smile of his own.
After breaking their fast, they took turns washing up in a spring that Rapat had told them was located on the shrine’s grassy grounds, a few twisting corridors away from the campsite. Talasyn went second and, while she cleaned her teeth with a powder of salt and dried iris petals and crushed mint leaves, she reflected on the disturbing camaraderie that she had fallen into with the Night Emperor.
Was it a by-product of the previous morning’s events, an unlikely bond forged by the act of escaping death? Or was it this place, so hauntingly picturesque, so remote that they might as well have been the only two people in the world?
Whatever the case, Talasyn had to admit that it was probably a good thing. She had nearly slipped—nearly lost this long game—when she railed about the Continent rising up and her joining them one day. If she’d already been the Night Empress, her words would have counted as treason. Her temper had endangered both Nenavar and Sardovia, as well as her own life.
She was incredibly fortunate that Alaric didn’t seem to be holding her stormy declaration against her that much.
When she returned to the courtyard, he was sitting, legs crossed, in the shade of a grandfather tree that had sprouted right up against one wall, its branches pushing at the old stonework. Talasyn joined him with some reluctance, dropping down across from him closer than she would have preferred due to the thick, protruding roots taking up most of the space. He smelled like the calam-lime soap from the garrison.
“We’ll focus solely on meditation well into the afternoon,” he announced. “The objective is for your breathing, your magic, and your body to be so in tune with one another that molding the Lightweave into whatever you want—in this case, a shield—will be effortless. Why are you making that face at me?”
“Sounds tedious,” she grumbled.
“When I began aethermancing under my grandfather’s tutelage, I would spend whole sennights doing nothing but meditating,” he snootily informed her.
She should have taken umbrage at his tone, but . . . “I didn’t know that your grandfather was the one who taught you.”
“As I’ve mentioned before, my abilities manifested at an early age.” Alaric traced a circle in the dust of ages with his forefinger, without even seeming to realize that he was doing it. “He was very proud of me. He made the time to oversee my training, until . . .”
He never finished the sentence, but Talasyn could guess. Until his obsession with the stormships grew, or Until the war began. It all amounted to the same thing, didn’t it?
She only knew King Ozalus as the one who’d started it all. Who had been possessed by a dream of lightning and destruction that culminated in the shadows of the stormships falling over the Continent. She had certainly never before pictured him as anyone’s grandfather, tutoring a solemn dark-haired boy in the ways of magic.
How unsettling, that evil could have a human face. She thought back to what had been, by Alaric’s standards, an explosion of rage when they argued over the true instigator of the Cataclysm. She understood it better now. How unsettling, that an evil man could have had people who cared for him so.
It wasn’t long before Alaric emerged from his private reverie and began the day’s training. They went through the stationary breathing meditations first, and then he taught her more of the moving forms—this time keeping a careful distance, not once arranging her body with his hands the way he’d tried to in the plumeria grove. She wondered if this was a conscious decision on his part, but caught herself. If it was a conscious decision, it had been made so he could avoid the awkwardness that had occurred then, when she walked back into him. She was the only one whose heart had taken a long time to stop racing in her dressing room afterward, because she hadn’t ever known touch like that before.
The sun was high overhead by the time Talasyn learned all the meditations by rote. Alaric went from instructor and observer to fellow aethermancer, executing the various forms by her side. Despite his solidly muscled frame, he was light on his feet, flexible, executing each step with panther-like grace. He set the pace and she kept up, the two of them traveling in parallel lines across the length of the courtyard, amidst all those old and crooked trees. Legs sweeping back and forward. Arms slashing and pushing and rising to the heavens; wrists like paper cranes soaring and then gliding back to earth. Air flowing through the lungs, urged on by the contractions of chest and stomach, by the twisting of hips and the billowing of the spine.
And Talasyn’s magic flowed along with it. For the first time, she could sense every single pathway taken by the aether in her veins. For the first time, she could see her fingertips and her heart and the hidden facets of her soul as nexus points, bound into a constellation by the Lightweave’s golden thread.
For the first time, she felt connected to the man beside her in a way that went beyond begrudging tolerance or those surprising little moments of softening, of opening up. She and Alaric moved together, seamless and in fluid tandem, as though they were each other’s mirrors, as though they were waves in an ocean called forever, their shadows lengthening on the stone.
Such a blissful state of affairs ended too soon, however.
By sunset, Talasyn was frustrated beyond belief.
She still hadn’t managed to spin a single shield. In principle, it was the same as forging a weapon—and yet here she was, perched on a section of the fallen grandfather tree’s twisted trunk, once again attempting to visualize something that she couldn’t replicate. She’d been at it since late afternoon and the results were minimal at best.
Alaric was probably as mystified as she was, but he was far more patient than Vela had ever been, and he tirelessly approached the problem from different angles. In truth, thanks to the meditations, she could feel the magic within her slowly being coaxed toward the desired effect. She just couldn’t bring it to the surface.
The trunk creaked beneath an added weight. Talasyn cracked one eye open; Alaric had sat down in front of her, mirroring her pose. He gestured for her to continue with an imperiousness that made her bristle, but she begrudgingly complied, retreating into the darkness behind shut lids once more.
“You told me that the first weapon you ever spun was a knife, like the one you stole to protect yourself,” he said, and she nodded. “Aside from blades, a shield can protect you, too,” he continued. “Build it in your mind, as you did with that first knife. Inch by inch. Carve the hardwood into the shape of a teardrop. Paint over it with resin. Soften the grip with leather. Reinforce the surface with metal. Polish it until it gleams bright in the sun, or the starlight.”
His tone was low and deliberate. It sank into her bloodstream, all honey and wine and oak. She had to fight the urge to open her eyes in a frantic attempt to quell the goosebumps that prickled the back of her neck, that danced down her spine.
Talasyn imagined making a shield. A material one, from hickory and cowhide and iron, using Alaric’s words as her guide. This time she was also thinking about that first knife, how she’d called it forth at the outskirts of a military encampment in the Sardovian Heartland, with Vela looking on. She had been so desperate to prove herself back then. Desperate to earn her keep. This was the same thing, wasn’t it? She needed to master this new skill to prove to the Dominion that she was worth the risk of concealing the Sardovians. She needed to save both the Sardovians and the Nenavarene from the amethyst night, from the jaws of the World-Eater.
And she was almost there. Her magic was straining to reach its goal, pushing up through doubts and old habits and learning curves the way a green sprout pushed up through the earth.
When she opened her eyes, a translucent blob of light magic that could be a shield if one squinted was shimmering in the grasp of her fingers, growing more and more solid as Talasyn beheld it with wonder.
Alaric was leaning slightly forward, wearing an expression she’d never seen on him before. He looked—pleased. Boyish, almost, some of the sternness lifting from his perpetually sullen features. Once again, as she had that day in the Roof of Heaven’s atrium, she wondered what it would be like if he actually smiled.
And, with that break in her concentration, the shield winked out of existence. Leaving her with her fingers clutching empty air.
Talasyn’s disappointment at the short-lived nature of her competence was similarly fleeting. What quickly took its place was exhilaration of the purest form. It felt as though she had taken the momentous first step on a path that had once been impossible to find. The ability to make a shield was inside her, she just needed to push a little bit more; there was hope like sunbeams at the end of a long darkness. Hope that the world as she knew it would not be devoured.
“I did it,” she breathed out, but then caught herself. “I mean, I almost—”
“No. You did it.” Alaric’s voice was soft and raspy. His gray eyes were warm in the fading daylight. “You’re doing very well, Talasyn.”
And the moment was golden between them, a victory to be shared in this place of stone and wood and spirits, and her magic was blazing high in her heart and the look on his face was open and unguarded, and this was the first good thing to happen in such a long time—
She surged forward, almost tipping over on her precarious perch, and she looped her arms around his neck in a rush of gratitude, of triumph.
His swift intake of breath cut through her giddiness. It may as well have been the sound of cannon fire, for all that it induced her careening return to reality with the most terrible of jolts. Mortified, her whole face hot, she untangled herself from him.
Or she tried to, at least.
Alaric pressed a hand to the small of her back, sending her crashing into him, keeping her against him. His bare palm was a burning sensation, not in the least bit dulled by the thin material of her tunic. His chin came to rest on the spot where her neck curved into her shoulder, the ends of his hair tickling her cheek.
Talasyn blinked at the trees on the rooftop, dark against the dimming sky. It was a revelation, to be held like this, to have someone else’s warmth so near, surrounding her. It was hunger, the thing that made her tighten her arms around his neck until there was no more space between them, skin to skin, the urgency with which he had latched on to her echoing everything that her soul had cried out for all these years.
She relaxed into his embrace, breathing him in, the scent of sandalwood water and calam-lime soap and sun-flushed skin. His hand roved over the base of her spine in a slow caress, and she knew that she would feel him there long after he’d pulled away.
But she didn’t want him to pull away. She wanted more. Her right hand dropped to the collar of his undershirt and slid lower still, until her fingers traced the solid musculature of his exposed bicep. A shudder tore through his broad frame and he compulsively palmed her thigh with his free hand, so warm and big. All of him was so warm and big.
A stifled little half-sigh of sudden need escaped her lips, unbidden. He hummed, low and soothing, and they continued to touch, to hold, as the last of the sun sank below the horizon.
