He could barely remember his mother holding him, and his father certainly never had. He possessed no frame of reference for the feeling of someone in his arms, and someone’s arms around him. He had never expected that it would be as though the cold inside him had begun to thaw, everywhere he and Talasyn touched, dragging him headlong into the gladness of summer.
He didn’t know—would probably never know—what it was, exactly, that caused them to return to themselves, a stark awareness creeping in along with the indigo of dusk.
Perhaps it was the ache in their backs and their still-crossed legs due to the awkward angle of the embrace. Perhaps it was the tree trunk they were sitting on shifting dangerously. Perhaps it was even the drowsy hoot of a roosting bird from some unseen perch in the jungle canopy around them.
Whatever the case, Alaric and Talasyn slowly extricated themselves from each other. It went beyond the novelty of experiencing something for the first time—even though the moment had passed, he could still feel her waist encased in the curve of his arm, could still feel her arms around his neck and the imprints of her fingers on his bicep. She wouldn’t meet his gaze while he couldn’t seem to stop staring at her. Tucking a loose strand of chestnut hair behind her ear, she licked her lips nervously, and he really wished that she hadn’t, his gaze lingering on her pink tongue as it ran over the swell of her bottom lip.
“You, um . . .” She trailed off. Licked her lips again, because she’d been put on this earth to torture him. “You’re a good instructor,” she said hoarsely, her brown eyes trained on the craggy patterns in the tree trunk’s rough bark. “You’ve been very patient. So—thank you.”
Alaric wasn’t prepared for this, for her shy, faltering praise. Warmth flooded his cheeks and crept all the way up to the tips of his ears. He was grateful that the sun had set, grateful that it would be difficult for her to see how she’d reduced him to a blushing moron with a handful of kind words.
He mustered a grunt of acknowledgement and they clambered down from the tree. He kept a wide berth from her as they prepared their supper and ate in stifling silence.
By the time they bedded down, the awkwardness had worn off a little. To be more precise, Talasyn had stopped jumping out of her skin whenever Alaric moved or even so much as glanced her way. Enough time had passed since the hug to make clear that he had no intention of discussing it, which suited her just fine.
She couldn’t stop thinking about it, though, which was why she was currently sprawled flat on her bedroll and glaring at the night sky as though it had caused offense.
A shame, really: as far as night skies went, this one was resplendent. A circle of moons, ranging from full to crescent to gibbous, lay embedded in a field of stars that rained down their light in glimmering pulses, so densely clustered that to look at them was almost to fall forever into all that lovely silver and black. She traced constellations that she’d grown up with and ascribed to them the names that she’d only learned months ago. The group of stars that formed what Sardovia called Leng’s Hourglass was known here in Nenavar as the Plow, its appearance signaling the start of planting season. Then there were the Allfold’s Six Sisters, reborn here in the Dominion as the far-less-poetic Flies, hovering over the celestial carcass of the Horned Pig.
At the periphery of her vision, the lump that was Alaric on his bedroll stirred.
They turned to each other at the same time, eyes locking in the gloom, over an arm’s length span of stone tiles.
“Tell me about Bakun,” he said. “The World-Eater.”
“Don’t we have an early start tomorrow?”
“I can’t sleep.”
“Because you’re talking.” Still, Talasyn couldn’t sleep either, so she launched into the story. Taking refuge in it, in fact, in the hope that a conversation would fully restore the equilibrium that her ill-advised hug had upset. “Back when the world was new and had eight moons, Bakun was the first dragon to tear through aetherspace and make his home on Lir. He laired somewhere on these islands, eventually falling in love with the first Zahiya-lachis, whose name was Iyaram. Dragons live hundreds of years longer than humans do, so Iyaram eventually passed from old age. The grief in Bakun’s heart turned into anger, which then turned into a hatred of this world for giving him his first taste of sorrow, for making him the only one of his kind ever to mourn. He swallowed one of the moons and would have eaten the rest, had Iyaram’s people not waged a great war against him and driven him back to aetherspace.”
Talasyn paused for breath. Alaric was listening intently, moonlight-tinted gaze fixed on her. For a moment, she was reminded of the orphanage in Hornbill’s Head, the other children exchanging stories on thin pallets while waiting for sleep to claim them. She had always just listened as stone and straw dug into her back. She’d never had a story of her own to share.
“Even now, that great battle is fought in the heavens time and time again,” Talasyn continued. “Whenever there’s a lunar eclipse, the Nenavarene say that it’s Bakun returning to Lir and trying to devour another one of the moons, until he is defeated by the spirits of the ancestors who fought in that first war.”
“And I suppose that once every thousand years he almost wins,” said Alaric. “Hence, the Moonless Dark.”
“The Night of the World-Eater,” she agreed.
“It’s interesting how the same phenomenon is explained by different stories from one land to the next,” he remarked. “I like the Continent’s eclipse myth better, I think.”
“What, the sun god forgetting to feed his pet lion so it swallows the moons?” She snorted. “Why do you like that better?”
His reply was quiet and solemn. “Because it’s not about the loss of someone who was greatly loved.”
The breath caught in her throat. It formed a tangle of things she had no idea how to express in words, confronted as she was by the mask of his features straining to contain a soft pensiveness. His mother—he was talking about his mother. In the faint tremble of his bottom lip, in the loss that shaded the spun silver of his eyes, she thought she saw something she recognized.
“Who would have ever thought,” Talasyn blurted out on a shaky exhale, “that you and I would end up here? Betrothed and working together?”
Alaric nearly smiled. “Certainly not me.”
“Sorry you missed out on your better options on my account.”
She had meant it in jest. Truly, she had. But the act of bringing up the snide remark that he’d made on his stormship somehow excavated the same wound to her pride—to her feelings?—that she thought she’d moved past, and her tone was more bitter than good-natured.
He went tense. She was seized by the urge to burrow into her bedroll, absolutely mortified.
But she couldn’t look away from him. And it wasn’t long before he spoke.
“I was angry when I said that. There were no better options; there weren’t any options at all. I had no plans to marry anyone. Until you.” Alaric’s pale brow knitted as he measured out his words with care. “And even though ours will be a marriage in name alone, there will still be no other options for me after we pledge our troth. You will have no cause to feel dishonored. I swear it by your gods and mine.”
Talasyn hadn’t known that Kesath used the same oath as Sardovia, and that Alaric could sound so wrenchingly sincere that it sent an odd thrill down her spine. She opened her mouth to tell him that there was no need to make such a promise, but then the image of him turning his vague almost-smiles on some other woman flashed through her mind and something in her chest cracked open.
“Yes,” she said instead. “We must behave ourselves. Keep up appearances, I mean. It’s not like the Dominion nobles need any more reason to run you through.”
“How unfair, considering that the Kesathese High Command is ecstatic that I’m marrying you,” he drawled.
Talasyn laughed. Alaric’s features softened. And, as they lay there in their separate bedrolls underneath a crown of stars, she found herself wondering what it would be like to close the distance between them once more. She wondered this with a curious yearning that, for a moonlit moment, went as deep as the Eversea.
In the middle of the night, Alaric was jolted out of slumber by a tugging at the edges of his mind. The stars overhead began to blur as the Shadowgate cast its inky nets around him, hauling him into aetherspace.
Gaheris was calling.
In hindsight, it should have been expected, but Alaric had been so focused on his betrothed—on her training—that this felt almost like an intrusion. As though some bubble had been pierced by a dose of cold reality.
Alaric looked over at Talasyn. She was an unmoving, curled-up lump on her bedroll, snoring lightly. He couldn’t walk the In-Between now. What if she woke up and he was gone or, worse, she caught him vanishing and reappearing like one of her blades?
It was a security concern. Gaheris would understand. Perhaps.
Alaric skirted out of his father’s grasp. He blocked him off and fell back into an uneasy sleep, suspecting that he would pay for this a thousand times over.
The second morning of aethermancing at the Lightweaver shrine saw Talasyn produce three more vaguely shield-shaped blobs of light, in addition to two accidental blast-marks on a very old, very historically significant wall. The exhilaration that she had felt yesterday had completely dissipated. What if blobs were all that she would ever be capable of?
At around noon, with the temperature and humidity soaring as the sun approached its zenith, she conducted her meditation exercises beneath the shade of a grandfather tree while Alaric went off to do some exploring.
At least one of us is having fun, she grumbled to herself. He’d been all but glued to the carvings on the entrance arch and he was always studying the ones in the courtyard. She was beginning to suspect that her betrothed was possessed of a rather bookish nature.
But she really shouldn’t be thinking about him when she was supposed to be working on her aethermancy.
Talasyn created several more pallid incarnations of a shield, each one petering out after mere seconds without ever solidifying. She was missing a final piece of the puzzle, the piece that would give her magic shape.
Alaric returned just as her latest attempt vanished. “Still no luck?” he asked, looming over her.
“What do you think?” She scowled at him, the effect quite ruined when the breeze sent a strand of hair tumbling down her forehead and past her jaw, and she scrunched up her nose and blew it out of her face.
He smirked, leaning down and chucking her under the chin. It happened so fast that she would have believed it to be a figment of her imagination, if not for the way that her skin burned where his bare fingers had brushed against in a fleeting ghost of a touch.
“Cheer up,” he said, unfolding himself to his full height once more. “I have an idea.”
He held a hand out to her. She stared at it, confused. A faint pink flush seeped onto the tops of his cheeks and his hand dropped back to his side. It was only then that she realized he’d been aiming to help her up.
Talasyn felt her own face growing warm as she scrambled to her feet. “Where are we going?”
“I found an amphitheater.” Alaric didn’t look at her as he went over to his pack and rummaged through it for his gauntlets. “Let’s spar.”
The amphitheater was a perfect circle sunk into a stretch of overgrown wild grass, its sloping walls composed of sandstone steps and hundreds of carved seats. The floor at the bottom was covered in deep gouges, the remnants of Lightweaver duels past.
Amidst the marks of old battles, they faced each other from across a distance. Talasyn seemed a little tentative, a little uncertain, fidgeting with the brown leather gloves and arm wraps that she’d donned for this session.
“I haven’t sparred in months,” she went on to explain. “Not since—that day.”
The day Sardovia fell.
She didn’t say it out loud. She didn’t need to. The unspoken weight of it darkened the air, another dose of reality piercing Alaric’s sun-drenched bubble just as much as his father’s summons had.
“Then it is all the more imperative that we do this,” he said, before the atmosphere could get too tense and accusing. “Sharpening old skills might allow you to tap into new ones. We’ve already tried everything else.”
Talasyn blew out a breath. She rolled her graceful neck and stretched her slender arms, a spark of that old familiar annoyance with him lurking behind freckled features that were making a valiant attempt to remain neutral.
It’s for the best, Alaric thought. She could channel those emotions into their duel, maybe even successfully shield because of it. This was all working out according to plan.
What Alaric hadn’t planned on was Talasyn shucking off her tunic, revealing her breastband and the upper half of those infernal tight breeches. His gaze flickered over the hard plane of her bare midriff and the slight flare of her hips and all that lustrous olive skin, slicked with the beginnings of sweat in the merciless sunlight.
He was well aware that she only meant to move more freely in the tropical heat.
But there was a part of him that couldn’t help but think that she was tormenting him on purpose.
He opened the Shadowgate, shaping it into a curved sword in one gauntleted hand, a shield in the other. She spun her usual two daggers with a glare that dared him to say something about it.
“You’re free to do whatever you wish, but at least try to transmute that”—he gestured at the blade in her left hand—“into a shield when you can. And keep it up. Now, since it has been a while, shall I go easy on you, Your Grace?”
He’d added that last part for no reason other than to make her mad, and he would have felt vaguely ashamed of himself if she hadn’t risen to his challenge, sweeping her right foot back, arcing one dagger over her head and lifting the other in front of her, one side crackling toward him with lethal promise.
“Have at it, old man,” she spat.
He fought back a grin.
They lunged at the same time, Alaric swinging his sword to meet Talasyn’s dagger as she brought it down in an overhead strike. She turned on her left heel and he sprang away just in time to avoid her right leg smashing into his ribs, countering with a thrust that she blocked with her other dagger.
“Bit rusty,” he quipped, meeting her gaze through the sheen of light and shadow.
“Yes, you are,” she loftily agreed without missing a beat. She used their blade-lock as leverage to launch away and then assaulted him with a barrage of strikes so quick and ferocious that he was soon left with no other option but to shove her from him with a shapeless blast of shadow magic.
She skidded backwards several feet.
“You could have fended that off with a shield,” he smugly informed her.
“Noted,” she said through clenched teeth, before charging at him once more.
For Alaric, it was a beautiful, terrible thing, he and Talasyn dancing around each other and meeting in the middle, again and again and again, fiery little charges of static exploding between them every time their bodies brushed. His veins were alight with a wild exhilaration that he saw mirrored on her face beneath the brilliant sun of afternoon. They anticipated each other’s every move and they pushed each other to the limit, the ancient amphitheater reverberating with the roar of magic, the raw power that came bursting in from aetherspace.
Now he understood why she fought as she did—after the life she’d had. In his mind’s eye she was a child, scrappy and defiant, stealing out the door with a kitchen knife under her threadbare coat that offered poor protection from the howling ice-winds of the Great Steppe. Here and now, amidst the ruins, she was a war goddess, moving to the beat of a primal hymn.
You’re just like me, Alaric thought, uncertain whether the revelation soothed or unsettled him. We’re both hungry.
We both want to prove ourselves.
Talasyn felt happy.
No—happy couldn’t even begin to describe it. This was ecstasy, pure and unbridled, light screaming against shadow, her body falling into all the old forms as she was pitted against another aethermancer after so, so long.
At some point down the line, she and Alaric had abandoned chasing each other all over the amphitheater. Now they were fighting in close quarters, loath to separate, the combined heat from their magic within millimeters of singeing her skin. His gray eyes blazed silver and his smirk was wicked; he was taking a twisted delight in this, just as she was. She knew that she should at least attempt to shield, but what if it faltered again and the shadows hurt her? And besides, there was some yawning abyss in her soul that insisted she could overpower him if she just moved a little faster, struck a little harder—
But there was such a thing as striking too hard.
Her dagger slammed into his shield and he stepped away faster than she expected. She’d put all of her strength into the blow and so she stumbled, one of her two blades disappearing at the loss in concentration. Alaric had stretched out his blade arm just behind her in preparation for his next attack, and she ended up turning into the crook of his elbow.
Talasyn’s waist was suddenly encased in the steely curve of Alaric’s arm, her side pressed up against his hard chest, her dagger humming at his neck, his sword almost cradling her chin. The two of them were flushed and panting. His skin was hot and sweat-damp against hers. This is what it’s like to burn, she thought, listening to the growl of the Shadowgate, the high hum of the Lightweave, the skittering rhythm of Alaric’s ragged breath above her ear.
“You’ve been fighting your whole life,” he rasped in a low, unsteady voice that sounded not quite like his own and also, somehow, like the truest version of him. “Your instinct is to strike first, before anyone can hurt you. But sometimes it’s the blow that molds us.” The words were traced in vibrations of air that fanned against her temple as his sword inched up, narrowing the distance between its serrated shadowy edge and the line of her jaw. “Taking it. Letting it ring against our defenses, until we are assured in the knowledge that, when it’s over, we will still be standing.”
Her toes curled. She shifted her dagger closer to his throat, the motion echoed by her hip sliding against his groin. The shield in his left hand disappeared—why, after all that talk of defenses?—and then he was touching her, the leather of his gauntlet splayed out on her stomach, his thumb grazing the edge of her breastband.
What if he removed his gauntlets?
How would his bare fingers feel, spanning her like this?
Talasyn couldn’t think clearly. The thrill of combat had morphed into something infinitely more dangerous. She was so aware of Alaric, of how his frame engulfed hers, of how tense his sinews were next to her own.
He exhaled. She turned her head to peer up at him, and the sight stopped her heart.
The look on his face was winter storm and wolf song.
“Your move, Lachis’ka,” he murmured, his silver eyes flickering to her mouth.
“You first, Your Majesty,” she whispered, without knowing why she was whispering or even why she’d whispered that, and in the end—
In the end, it didn’t matter. They moved at the same time, her dagger sliding against the flat of his sword, sending up a spray of static and aether sparks. He leaned down and she surged up and their lips met, in the glow of light and darkness, over the keening of their crossed blades.
