Alaric had never kissed anyone before and he certainly hadn’t planned on kissing Talasyn. There was an entire host of reasons not to.
But all logic, any reservations that he might have had—they vanished into the aether the moment that he slanted his mouth over hers. The shadow-sword in his hand was extinguished at the same time as her golden dagger, and she turned fully into his arms and he tugged her close.
He might not have planned on it, but he had wanted it. So badly. He could admit it to himself now, now that her skin was heated and slick against his, now that she was returning his kiss with a clumsy, untutored desperation that mirrored his own.
The sun bore down upon them. It burned against his lids, long after he had closed his eyes. In obeisance to some age-old impulse, his tongue lapped at the seam of her lips and they parted for him in a gasp, allowing him to slide further into her mouth.
This, to him, was a continuation of their duel. It felt the same—angry and frenetic, blood roaring in his ears, passion blotting out all else. Talasyn tasted like iris petals and ginger tea. She was molten light in his hands, all slender planes and soft angles, her fingers tangling in his hair.
I never knew, Alaric thought, kissing her harder, holding her tighter. I never knew that it could feel like this.
It was not a sweet kiss. Talasyn would have been foolish to deem Alaric Ossinast capable of sweetness, but she’d heard that first kisses were supposed to be sweet. This was violent, almost brutal. His lips were as soft as they looked, but they were relentless. Furious. And she couldn’t help but give as good as she got, just as she’d done her whole life.
It was sloppy at first, their teeth clacking together, leading her to suspect that he probably also hadn’t done much of this before, if at all. But eventually they fell into a rhythm, they let instinct be their guide. After all, this was just another kind of war. His tongue tangled with hers and he nibbled at her bottom lip and a pair of hands so much larger than her own were wandering down her torso, fumbling and exploring.
Take off your gauntlets, she wanted to command, because she needed more of this skin-to-skin feeling, she needed everything, but words were impossible when his eager mouth was swallowing every sound she made. And perhaps there was something to be said for the leather, the roughness of it on her spine, on the jut of her hips. Another layer of sensation adding to the wicked onslaught. There was a dark thrill building up inside her; there was a dampness between her legs. His hand slid down her backside and cupped her there and she moaned against his lips; in response, he kissed her so deeply that she could no longer tell where she ended and where he began, and her heart was unfurling in her chest, opening itself up to the high dive, the free fall—
A sound like rolling thunder broke the stillness of the mountaintop.
She wrenched her mouth from his. At first, Talasyn believed that it was her pulse she was hearing, pounding in her ears as Alaric held her captive in his arms. But then she saw the splinters of gold reflected in the bright steel of his irises, and they both turned their heads in the direction of the cacophony.
From their campsite—from the courtyard—a pillar of molten radiance the color of the sun shot up to the azure heavens, gilding the treetops and the weathered stone. Filling the air with its raw hum for miles upon miles around.
The Light Sever was discharging.
Talasyn pulled away from him in an instant, and Alaric reeled at the sudden loss of her, his body impulsively bowing forward to find her again. But she was gone, racing back to the campsite, her eyes only on the soaring column of light. Alaric followed her on shaking legs that felt barely attached to his body. He felt as if he were floating—and not in a good way. He was disoriented from how quickly his blood had flowed south.
When they stepped into the courtyard, the whole place was ablaze, the pillar of golden magic at its center so bright that it hurt to look at, so tall that it disappeared into the clouds. However, its width at the base was precisely contained within the fountain, bright fumes spilling like water from the stone jaws of the dragonhead spouts.
The fountain’s structure was completely undamaged by the magic. It was nothing short of an architectural feat. The ancient Lightweavers of Nenavar had to have painstakingly mapped out every inch of where aetherspace tore into the material world, crafting the stone around it. They were the same people who had covered this shrine in intricate reliefs, lovingly telling the stories of their land in joyful detail.
It was difficult to believe that they were the same breed of aethermancer who had killed Alaric’s grandfather and nearly destroyed Kesath.
Alaric pushed these thoughts that bordered on treason to the back of his mind, but that only allowed more space to recall Talasyn’s body, how she had fit against him like a missing piece.
He stopped a few paces behind her as she approached the Light Sever slowly, so slowly, as though she were in a trance. If it was anything at all like a Shadow Sever, the magic would be tugging at her and her heart would be lifting like that of a mariner spying the gleaming shores of home.
But, only a breath away from the radiant pillar, she stopped. She looked back at him, her chestnut hair blowing in an unnatural breeze. She seemed unsure, almost frightened.
Her lips were still swollen from his kisses.
“It’s all right,” he said thickly over the roar of the Lightweave. How strange it was, to be sought out for reassurance. How new it was, to be looked at as anything other than a conqueror. “Just walk into it. You’ll know what to do once you get there.”
Talasyn nodded, holding Alaric’s gaze for a few moments before turning back to the Light Sever. But his gaze remained fixed on her until she vanished from sight, her slight figure swallowed up by magic.
To enter a Light Sever was to dive headfirst into an ocean of sunshine.
And it was—wonderful.
Talasyn was submerged in light. It warmed every inch of her skin and flowed into her veins. It bathed her soul in radiant splendor.
And yet it was also a rush to the head, magnified. It was her aethermancy in its purest form, the rapture that swirled through her so intense that she was almost terrified of it. Of how much her heart could hold.
But fear was a fleeting, paltry thing in this place. She felt as if she could do anything. She could do anything.
She understood.
From afar, the nexus point had looked like a solid column of light, threaded through with aetherspace’s silver fumes. Now that she was right in the thick of it, Talasyn saw that it was composed of thousands, millions, of fine golden strands. She touched them and they sang like harp strings. She coaxed them in any direction that she wished, all of it shifting and shining and dancing in luminous tapestries everywhere she turned.
And from each string, a memory unspooled.
Alaric had once predicted that the heart of a nexus point could tether an aethermancer more strongly to the past, and he had been right. Moments long forgotten, things she had wanted to forget— they were so much more solid now. They came flooding back to her with sharp clarity; they came to life in whorls of aether’s thread. Scenes from her childhood, no longer diluted by time. A lullaby in what she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was her mother’s voice, clear and pure. Hunger pangs in her belly and her fingertips made of ice in the winter. Her boots hitting the ground after her first aerial battle, quickly followed by a splash of vomit, and Khaede patting her back in wordless reassurance. The first time Sol ever spoke to her, marking their beginning as amiable moons in Khaede’s orbit—and the ending of that story, his body unmoving on the airship deck.
And then she saw Alaric. Not the man she had left waiting in the courtyard, but the skeletal figure with the snarling wolf’s mask and the clawed gauntlets that she’d fought at Lasthaven. The Shadowgate swirled around him, etched in distant lightning, the air cold with the oncoming rains. His crackling blade was tinted crimson in the glow of the eclipse, as red as the blood of everyone who’d died.
“It’s over,” the apparition said, the words drawn up from the deep well of the past, his voice so strangely soft. At the time, she had puzzled over that tone, unused to anything but lethal calculation from the Kesathese prince. Now she knew him better.
It’s over. He had been imploring her to surrender as the Allfold’s last bastion fell to the hurricanes.
But he had been wrong. It wasn’t over, yet. Not for Sardovia. Not for Nenavar. Not for her.
Show me, she thought. Teach me how to not strike first. I want to learn to take the blow. I want to protect everything I hold dear. I won’t let the Shadow fall.
Be it World-Eater or Night Empire.
And the Lightweave hummed and raged. It did as she commanded.
Light magic is evil, Alaric’s father had told him when he was a boy. It is the weapon of our enemies. It burns and it blinds. This is why we destroyed the Light Severs on the Continent; they fueled those who sought to steal our stormship technology and bend us to their will. The Lightweave cannot be gentled or appeased. It won’t be content until it has cast its harsh glare over everything.
Alaric had always believed that, and he could still see it here and now on Belian in the way that the Light Sever seared his skin and eyes even from across a distance. It was too sharp, too unforgiving. Nothing at all like the soft coolness of the Shadowgate.
He reviled this form of magic—he should revile it—but—
—when the Light Sever finally began collapsing in on itself, folding down from the heavens and back into the earth—
—when the girl in the middle of the fountain turned to him with golden eyes and golden veins running throughout her olive skin, the strands of chestnut hair escaping her braid suffused with light as well—
—when she held up her hand and conjured a solid, blazing shield, not teardrop-shaped like the ones of the Continent but long and rectangular and forked with prongs atop and at its base, like those the Nenavarene wielded—
—he could only think that she was beautiful. Every part of her was beautiful.
When Talasyn returned to the world of the overgrown stone courtyard on Belian, the high hum of the Lightweave was still pounding in her ears.
Alaric stood where she’d left him. The molten glow of her light-spun shield flickered over his silhouette, memory and reality juxtaposed like spots behind her eyes. His Shadowforged armor, his weapon, his father’s stormships, everything that had been lost.
She dropped her arm and the shield dispelled. The rush of the Light Sever went quiet, and the afterimages vanished.
Alaric became solid again. He was watching her closely, beads of sweat from the Sever’s heat glinting on his pale brow. This wasn’t the deadly specter from Lasthaven. Yet, she could only stare at him in dawning horror.
He was a few paces away, waiting for her to make the first move. He looked as if he wanted to ask her what had happened—but she couldn’t explain all that she had seen. Those memories belonged to her alone. And even more, they had reminded her of the horrible misstep she had just made.
What had she done?
There was no rational explanation for that kiss. None of it could be forgiven. She would have to return to Eskaya burdened by the knowledge that she’d had the Night Emperor’s tongue in her mouth. The next time she faced the Sardovian remnant, it would be with the memory of the Night Emperor’s hand on her ass.
And she’d liked it.
Gods, what had possessed her, what was possessing her, why had it turned out this way?
“I . . .” Talasyn scrambled for something to say to make him stop looking at her like that. “I made a shield.”
Alaric nodded, the corner of his mouth ticking downward. Almost as though he’d wanted her to say something else. “You did.”
“I’ll try to make one again.”
So she spent the rest of the afternoon coaxing the Lightweave into shields of various shapes and sizes. For the sheer joy of doing it, of finally being able to do it, yes—but also for the more than reasonable excuse it provided to not acknowledge Alaric’s presence.
For his part, he kept well to the other side of the courtyard, as far from her as possible. She thought she could feel his gaze burning against her back, but whenever she darted a glance his way, he was carefully occupied with something else. She surmised he was doing his best to ignore her existence as well. She even surreptitiously caught him trying to clear their campsite of fallen leaves with a stick. Eventually he gave up and left, vanishing into one of the shrine’s many half-collapsed corridors with some excuse about exploring the ruins further.
Once the sky had darkened, Talasyn crawled into her bedroll, hoping to fall asleep before Alaric returned. Her mind was a torrent of conflicting emotions, and her magic thrummed, restless in her veins, as she tossed and turned beneath a diamantine panorama of moons and stars.
As she lay there, a tantalizing possibility broke through the mire of her confusion and her guilt. If she went on communing with the Light Sever, would she be able to go even further back? Would she be able to access more memories of her mother, beyond the scent of berries and the echo of a lullaby? Would Hanan Ivralis spring to life in her mind? Would it be enough?
She was still wide awake when the sound of Alaric’s footsteps padded into the courtyard. She squeezed her eyes shut, pretending to be fast asleep, listening to the rustle of fabric as he slipped into his own bedroll.
Then his deep, mildly admonishing tone sliced through the silence. “I can hear you thinking over there.”
She rolled onto her side so that she could glare at him, only to jolt when she found him already facing her. His gray eyes gleamed starkly against his pale face in the moonlight.
Another memory washed over her, far more recent. The amphitheater. His teeth nipping at her bottom lip. Each caress of his hands.
The smart thing to do now was to stop looking at him, because looking at him and the way he was too big for his bedroll did nothing to ease her racing thoughts. Instead, Talasyn continued staring into Alaric’s eyes, over stone and night, until he asked, “What is it?”
He sounded defensive, as though he already knew what was on her mind.
Willing herself not to blush, she blurted out the first safe topic that she could conceive of. “Do you really think that we can stop the Voidfell?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “You know how to weave a shield and we have a few months to prepare. It will be all right. Otherwise, we’re all dead.”
“How inspirational, truly,” she sniped.
“I try.”
A fraught quiet seeped in once more, and she turned back onto her side, peering up into the silver-black night. The minutes stretched on, and just when Talasyn thought that sleep had claimed him, Alaric spoke again. “I remember being lonely.”
She went still. “What?”
“You asked me, back when we began aethermancing at the royal palace, what I remember from my childhood. That is what I remember. Loneliness.” She craned her neck toward him again and he flashed her a rueful half-smile. “I am my father’s only child, and he demanded that I apply myself to my studies and my training. I was the Night Emperor’s heir, and so my companions could not truly be friends. Even Sevraim knows where the lines are drawn.” He paused, weighing his next words. And when they finally came, they sounded as though they were being drawn up from the deep well of an old heartache. “My mother was kind but unhappy. I think that she found it difficult to look at me and see what was tying her to her marriage.”
Any illusions Talasyn had about Alaric’s pampered childhood were being dashed. Now she understood why he’d spoken with such unbridled contempt for marriage that day on his stormship. And, gods, despite everything, despite knowing what a terrible thing she’d done when she kissed him, she was powerless in the face of his vulnerability; she was greedy for more. She didn’t think that she could bear it if he turned cold now.
“Why are you telling me this?” she heard herself ask.
He shrugged. “It’s only fair. You trusted me with that glimpse of you growing up, the knife . . . My experiences pale in comparison to yours, but they’re what I have. So I’ll trust you with them as well.”
A piercing bittersweetness twinged through her. She thought about the night of the duel without bounds, how alone he’d looked as he faced down Surakwel in front of the entire Nenavarene court. She attempted to gather herself, to focus on keeping her priorities straight, but it was all starlight and confession; it was as though a hand were reaching out to hold hers across all the wasteland years.
“I was lonely, too.” She was too afraid to add I still am. “I was on my own on the streets. I kept waiting for my family to come back, but they never did. Even when I joined the Sardovian regiments, I still waited. It’s probably not something that you ever truly grow out of.”
“Do you remember your mother?” His tone was wistful in the dark.
“Not really,” she said, but the sound of Hanan’s voice inside the Sever rushed back into her ears. She wasn’t ready to part with that secret yet, but it felt wrong to dismiss what little else she had. “I know what she looked like because of aethergraphs and formal portraits. When I think about her hard enough, I can smell wild berries. That’s mostly it. Although . . .” She blinked hurriedly, before a sudden rush of tears could wet her eyes. “The day I first set foot on Nenavarene soil, I had a—I’m not sure if it was a vision or a memory, or a waking dream, but there was someone telling me that we would find each other again. Maybe that was her, or maybe that never happened and I made it all up.”
“It was her,” Alaric said, with such gentle firmness, such surety that it couldn’t be otherwise, that it was as though a sun were rising in Talasyn’s heart. She wanted to stay forever in this tranquil night. She wanted to keep on talking to him about anything and everything, about their magic, about what they’d lost, about the stars and gods and shores they shared—
But she couldn’t talk to him about everything.
If Alaric ever found out that Talasyn’s mother had played an instrumental role in sending Nenavarene warships to the Continent nineteen years ago, to help the same aethermancers who had killed his grandfather—and once the Sardovian remnant made their move and he learned that Nenavar had been sheltering them in the Storm God’s Eye—that would be the death blow to any budding intimacy that Talasyn forged with him.
Here she was, letting her guard down with Alaric, panting after him, while her Sardovian comrades hunkered down on Sigwad. While the Continent suffered under his empire’s cruelty.
Wasn’t that what the Lightweave had been telling her, when it showed her that image from Lasthaven? He was the enemy. And he might have lost his mother and his grandfather, but she had lost people, too.
Because of Kesath. Because of him.
Enough now. The inside of her chest grew tight. No more.
You can’t have impossible things.
“In the regiments, I made one friend. Her name was Khaede. She was the one who told me that the Voidfell could be seen from the Sardovian Coast,” said Talasyn. “She didn’t connect it to the sevenfold eclipse, and I doubt she believed that the amethyst light on the horizon was anything more than an old wives’ tale until I came back from Nenavar with news of void magic. But we did make plans, years ago, for the Moonless Dark. If there was no battle, if we were stationed in the same place, we’d camp outdoors, in the woods or on a hill somewhere, and we’d stay up until the moons shone again.”
Talasyn spoke with the clarity of memory that the Sever had granted her. That day had long been buried by the endless horror and violence of the Hurricane Wars, but it was now solid and vibrant in her recollections—the crowded and noisy mess hall, Khaede speaking with her mouth full, alight with rare excitement as she talked about the night no moons would rise after the going down of the sun. About how she and Talasyn would experience this once-in-several-generations occurrence together. That plan had later changed to include Sol, months after he and Khaede had shot down a wolf coracle and he sailed past a jessamine tree, plucking one of the blossoms and handing it to her as their ships passed each other while their fallen enemy spiraled toward the waiting valley below.
“We won’t be able to do that now, of course,” Talasyn continued in what was barely above a whisper. “After the battle of Lasthaven, I never saw Khaede again. She was the only friend I ever made, and now I don’t even know if she’s alive, if the baby she was carrying is all right. Probably not.” The words hitched in her throat. It was the first time that she’d ever given voice to this fear. “Your soldiers killed so many of us, after all.”
A heavy silence fell. It dragged on for a long time, the charged stillness following a peal of thunder frozen into eternity. A sharp ache sank its hooked barbs into Talasyn’s being as she realized that, the night Surakwel smuggled her out of the palace and into the Storm God’s eye, she hadn’t even thought to ask Vela if the aetherwave had picked up any sign of Khaede.
At some point, without her even being fully aware of it, she had already given up her friend for lost.
That was what the war had done. It had turned people into statistics. It had taken away hope and turned it into something to be buried until there were only bones.
“Talasyn.” Her name was low and stricken on Alaric’s tongue. “I—”
Time moved again.
“No.” A rush of unshed tears pricked at her eyes, but she refused to let them spill. She would never cry before him; she owed Khaede and everyone who had died that much. How could she have forgotten, even just for brief moments over the last few days, that Alaric was the face of Sardovia’s downfall? How did the memories of Khaede and Sol and Blademaster Kasdar not burn with her every breath? “Let’s just not talk at all.”
He sat up, narrowing his eyes at her. They weren’t filled with the cold, quiet kind of anger that she’d come to associate with him and only him. There was a wild glint in them, a recklessness. “What about what happened in the amphitheater? Don’t you think we should talk about that?”
“There’s no need to discuss it,” Talasyn said stiffly. “It was an aberration.”
“An aberration that you enjoyed, if I recall.”
“I rather think that you were enjoying it more!” Incensed, she rolled over onto her other side so that she wouldn’t have to be plagued by the sight of him. Still, his piercing scrutiny raked pinpricks along the back of her neck. “Daya Langsoune once told me that hate is another kind of passion. I was carried away by the duel. I got my wires crossed. That’s all.”
“It was the same for me as well,” Alaric spat without hesitation, and, oh, how it hurt. Her chest rang with the blow. It was nothing more than an agreement with what she’d said, but she knew that there was one striking difference.
He was telling the truth. He didn’t even find her passing tolerable when she wasn’t dressed up.
Of the two of them, she was the only one who short-circuited every time the other drew breath. Or flashed a rare half-smile.
“Why did Daya Langsoune tell you that?” Alaric suddenly asked, his tone brimming with suspicion.
“She was teasing me,” Talasyn muttered. “About you.”
There was an elegant scoff from the silver-lit gloom behind her. It showed just how little he thought of that, and the ache inside her only heightened.
I am a traitor. Talasyn furtively, furiously scrubbed the welling tears from her eyes, before they could spill down her face and over the lips that still twinged with the memory of how Alaric’s had felt against them. Hanging is too good for me.
The too-bright sun of a Nenavarene morning pounded against his face, and Alaric woke up the same way he’d fallen asleep—bewildered, furious, and regretful.
Last night, he had allowed himself to get caught up in the moment, to fall under the sway of the false sense of closeness brought about by being alone with Talasyn amidst these isolated ruins. He had been lured into complacency by her lovely face, her sharp wit, her fire. By that searing kiss, and the scent of mangoes and promise jasmines. He hadn’t been thinking with his brain, as his father would have said. And thus he had lowered his guard, confessing harrowing truths to her that he had never told anyone else.
What had it all been for? What had been the point, if she couldn’t forget the past? If she saved it all up to confront him with it when he was at his most vulnerable?
Alaric was distantly aware that this line of thinking was nothing short of reprehensible in light of what Talasyn had gone through. He even understood, on some level, that he was hiding behind this smallness so that he wouldn’t have to confront the crushing guilt that she had brought out in him by giving the Hurricane Wars a human name. But he went ahead and thought these things anyway, because rulers of victorious nations did not grovel for forgiveness after the fact—and from former enemies whose side had been equally ruthless during a ten-year conflict, to boot.
He feared, though, that he would end up doing just that, or something similarly foolish, although few things could beat confiding to her about his parents and expressing sentiments that he had never voiced to another living soul—after he had kissed her until he was senseless. Alaric was genuinely worried as to what other acts of idiocy he would commit if he stayed any longer on this mountain, alone with his betrothed and her accursed freckles. Although surely there was nothing more idiotic than being attracted to someone who would, as he’d told Sevraim, never be able to separate him from the Hurricane Wars.
Thus, it was with some relief that Alaric watched Talasyn stash away her bedroll, the kettle, and all the camping supplies after their painfully silent breakfast and realized that she was packing up for good.
“We’re leaving?”
She jerked her head in a brusque nod. “We got what we came for. I see no reason to spend another day here.”
He ignored the flickering bloom of an ache that dug through him, as sharp as talons. “As you wish.”
