Chapter Five
C HAPTER F IVE
Time slowed to a crawl, the click of the crossbow’s trigger reverberating through the space between Talasyn’s heartbeats. A curved, spike-tipped sword materialized in her hand, and she swung it in a wide arc, slicing the iron bolt Hiras shot at her in half. Epiphany sank in, like the chill of a fever from which no relief can ever be found.
The helmsman steering the wasp coracle from earlier had recognized her. The Sardovians who’d been left behind on the Continent had learned of her marriage to Alaric, but they didn’t know about the deal that Ideth Vela made with the Nenavar Dominion. They assumed that Talasyn had betrayed them.
They wanted her dead.
“Wait!” Talasyn cried out as Hiras’s comrades converged on her. She summoned a shield to block the hunting knives, and her light-spun blade loped the head off one pickaxe. Her maneuvers were purely defensive, her aethermancy muted. She couldn’t hurt any of her assailants. Their names eluded her, but up close they were all familiar. She had fought at their side and shared barracks and meals in mess halls with them, united by a common cause. “Wait,” she tried again, when they’d backed her against the wall and the man with the remaining functional pickaxe was digging its point into her shield, looking for an opening in the already weak magic, “please, you don’t understand—”
“What I understand ”—spittle flew from the man’s lips—“is that you were our Lightweaver, but now you’re the Night Emperor’s whore. And the two of you will be dead soon enough.”
His fist slammed into her cheek, over the blazing edge of her shield. He had a farmworker’s brawny build, and as Talasyn’s neck twisted to the side with the force of the blow, her vision blurred from the agonizing pain. Sword and shield flickered out of existence as she sagged against the wall, sinking to the ground, ears ringing, her mind a fog, no defenses left. The rebels lunged with their weapons from all sides all at once, and there was no way out, except—
To be most useful, the Lightweave needed to be honed into tools reflecting the wielder’s intent. The mind had to be sharp so that the magic could be sharper still, whether the intent was to spare or to destroy. But sometimes the mind knew only desperation, knew only to save the body.
An eruption of golden radiance seared the battle-torn air, washing over the four rebels as swiftly as day washed into a room the moment the curtains were drawn back. Four silhouettes, freezing where they stood. Devoured by flashes of sun and aether, their blackened forms illuminated from within.
It’s coming from me, Talasyn realized in a daze. Her magic was blazing forth from her veins, gathering around her at the same time that it engulfed those it had marked as her foes. It whirled and raged, outlining with each actinic pulse the contours of bones, the skeletons of grimaces. The rebels’ screaming split the air, and her eyes filled with tears. Four silhouettes, crumbling to the ground, burned into her memory. Adding to all her other sins.
The Lightweave left dark spots in her vision after it had ebbed. The ringing in her skull subsided, but the world remained vaguely blurred through her wet gaze. Hiras was trembling at the sight of his fallen comrades, at how their blistered skin had peeled all the way to ashen bone. Eaten away by light.
“ Why? ” The plaintive note in his scratchy voice made him sound less like a soldier and Talasyn’s would-be killer and more like the child he had never been, the boy growing up in the shadow of the hurricanes. “You were supposed to—to save us …”
He raised the crossbow again, sobbing, and Talasyn could only stare up at him through her own tears, her back to the wall, the plaza filled with smoke and the last currents of lightning fizzling out as the Chiton exhausted the Tempestroad in its cannons. It was the end of the line, for the stormship and for her, because she couldn’t kill Hiras, there was no way …
Then a snarl of fury, issued from between bared teeth, a shriek of aether as the Shadowgate was opened, the swirl of a tattered formal cape, as Alaric leapt in front of her, swinging his war scythe at the crossbow in Hiras’s hands.
Hiras let out a panicked cry as his weapon was cut in half. He dodged Alaric’s next strike, moving to the side, but his fear eventually rooted him to the spot. Talasyn saw them both in profile. Hiras shook like a leaf in the wind, and there was nothing but icy rage in the Night Emperor’s silver eyes as he brought the scythe down on the rebel’s head.
“ Alaric, don’t! ” Talasyn screamed.
Alaric froze. The scythe vanished, a mere hair’s breadth from making contact with its target. He turned to look at her fully.
A rebel’s sword rose behind him.
And because Alaric’s back was to this new assailant, because it was too late for anything else, because they needed him alive—
—because she needed him alive—
Talasyn used the last vestiges of her strength to fashion a spear from the Lightweave. She hurled it at the Sardovian rebel sneaking up on Alaric. The blade sank into the man’s chest and the life faded from his eyes, and he fell to the ground at the same time that Hiras was tackled by two helmed figures in black armor. Out of the path of a Shadowforged throwing knife.
“We have to leave one alive for questioning!” Sevraim yelled at the weapon’s source as he helped Ileis pin Hiras to the ground. “ Honestly. ”
Standing a few feet away, Nisene shot him a rude gesture. In the sky above her, beyond the Chiton ’s hull, five squadrons of Kesathese wolf coracles closed in on the plaza, along with the grim specter of a Night Empire stormship.
Hiras was lying on his stomach; Ileis and Sevraim were practically sitting on him, twisting his arms behind his back.
I should kill him.
The words pierced through the haze that was Talasyn’s mind. Hiras would prefer that brief moment of agony to days at the hands of Kesathese interrogators. It would be a kindness.
And what’s one more?
“Do it,” he said through clenched teeth, and at first Talasyn thought that he was speaking to her.
But Hiras had turned his head to look up at the Chiton .
“Do it,” he repeated, his bitter gaze fixed on that dread silhouette like a deep-sea creature risen to the heavens. “For everything we have lost.”
The Sardovian stormship, its Squallfast-imbued aether hearts glowing a brilliant, venomous green, plunged , away from the oncoming Kesathese fleet and down toward the plaza. Thousands of tons of steel frame and metalglass panels swooping down upon them all. Large enough to flatten a quarter of the Citadel, large enough that it was too late to run.
Talasyn finally saw the rebels’ plan in its entirety. All of the Night Empire’s political and military leadership had turned up for her coronation. Everyone on board the Chiton would die, yes, but they’d take House Ossinast, Kesathese High Command, and the Shadowforged Legion down with them.
And there was nothing anyone could do to stop the assault. Legionnaires cast their inky shields over their heads, bracing themselves, while military officers and their subordinates abandoned the fight and fled to whatever paltry cover they could find in the surrounding buildings, which would soon all be smashed into dust. Talasyn stood too slowly, too shakily, as Alaric ran to her, wild-eyed.
She would have called out to him, would have told him to either shield or get inside, to protect himself, but the words evaporated halfway up her throat, lost in the screaming all around her, in the certainty of death, in the daylight fading and the Chiton diving down.
Darkness erupted from the northeast. A few towers in that direction had been demolished by the lightning waves, leaving Talasyn with a clear view of one of the Citadel’s drab stone buildings. It was quivering at the very foundations as the Shadowgate poured forth from the openings in its roof.
The magic was so thick that it initially seemed as though the building was on fire from within. But all the black smoke soon swept toward the falling stormship, in a tidal wave of night, and took on the hazy shape of chimeras, those creatures on Kesath’s imperial seal that were long gone from the Continent but today had been brought back to phantom life. Obsidian energy from aetherspace twisted into eel-like bodies that unleashed the guttural shriek of the Shadowgate with lions’ maned heads and galloped through the air on antelopes’ hooves. The chimeras filled the sky, all black smoke and nightmare, a feat of aethermancy that Talasyn would never have believed possible if she had not been witnessing it herself.
Alaric reached her at the same time that the stampede of inky chimeras consumed the Sardovian stormship. He pressed her up against the wall, covering her with his body as a rain of metalglass and steel blanketed the plaza. As the Shadowgate tore the Chiton apart.
Overwhelmed with relief, Alaric stared at the wall while his father’s magic raged above the capital. He didn’t have to look around to know what was happening; the chimeras would be winding around the stormship, ripping through its hull and devouring everything— everyone —within. Unleashing such power was not without cost, but it was a necessary sacrifice. Today the Citadel would not fall.
Alaric felt Talasyn take a shaky gasp of breath against him, and he hunched further down, further into her, stirred by an instinctive protectiveness that was all he had to give for now. He was rattled by how close she’d come to getting killed—by her former countrymen, no less. He could barely comprehend that she had saved his life, that she had killed a former comrade in order to do so. He was struck by anguish at how he and his people had been sitting ducks, wholly unprepared for a surviving Sardovian stormship.
Just as the Citadel had been unprepared for the attack of the Sunstead Lightweavers all those years ago.
Alaric watched dust stream down the wall as he caged Talasyn in his arms the way his mother had held him while his father bled and his grandfather died somewhere beyond the bolted door, in this very city where war and ruin were raging anew. This is why we have to keep fighting, he thought over the cacophony of twisting steel and shattering metalglass and imploding aether hearts. Everything can be snatched away in the blink of an eye. It will never stop.
All around us are enemies.
The wrenching sobs sounded as though they were coming from a long way off, despite the fact that the sitting room in which the Nenavarene contingent was barricaded wasn’t anywhere near large enough to account for such a distance.
Talasyn worried—vaguely, somewhere deep under layers of numbness and fading adrenaline—that the sobs were coming from her , but upon taking stock of her surroundings, she saw that Jie was hunched over in the adjacent armchair, weeping violently, while Elagbi patted her back in a befuddled attempt at consolation. He kept glancing over at Talasyn as though he couldn’t believe that she was alive. It had been awful, earlier, when Alaric brought her to Elagbi and the Dominion prince had wrapped his arms around her and cried into her neck. Now Jie was the one having a breakdown.
“What kind of country is this?” the poor girl wailed, trembling from head to toe. “Ancestors, I want to go home!”
In an old life, Talasyn would have been bewildered and quite possibly downright annoyed by all this carrying on, but now she knew something of what people were like when they had been brought up in luxury rather than in wartime. Moreover, Jie was only sixteen. To be that young, to hail from that sort of background, and to be so abruptly confronted by the sort of violence that could erupt outside of the Dominion’s harmonious isles must be hard to bear.
Urduja had seen war, however, and she was quick to take matters into her no-nonsense hands. “Chin up, Lady Jie. This is just like court politics back in Nenavar, with different factions vying for power—albeit using more barbaric methods. You are the Night Empress’s lady-in-waiting. If you are to survive this new game, you have to be strong.”
Jie blew daintily into a silk kerchief. “I’ll …”—she hiccupped, eyes watery and red—“I’ll try, Harlikaan.”
Talasyn would have taken umbrage at how callously her grandmother had written off the Allfold’s struggle to reclaim their homeland, but she was having difficulty feeling much of anything. She was dimly aware that she was in shock. Everything sounded a bit muffled to her ears, and she couldn’t stop fixating on her hands, couldn’t stop thinking about what those hands had done earlier. All the people they had killed.
“Lady Jie is not far off the mark,” Elagbi pointed out. “We must set sail for the Dominion as soon as possible. We can’t stay here. Who knows when more fighting will erupt?”
“I fully intend on us leaving within the hour,” said Urduja. “While I do believe that the rebels risked everything for a gamble that didn’t pay off, there’s no telling what else can happen on these strange shores. However, there is one upside to this dreadful situation—it lays to rest any Kesathese concerns over whether there is any lingering fellowship between Alunsina and the Allfold.”
That’s not my name, Talasyn thought with a faded ember of mutiny. Alunsina Ivralis was the Night Empress, the traitor. She didn’t want to be her. She wanted to go back to the days when Hiras was telling jokes around forest campfires.
Gods, Hiras … They’d dragged him away once the dust had settled. He was probably in the bowels of the Citadel’s prison now, awaiting his fate along with the other surviving rebels. He wasn’t much older than Jie.
Hearing voices behind the door and the sound of unbolting, the Lachis-dalo stationed inside the room reached for their weapons, relaxing only marginally when Alaric entered.
“Ah, Your Majesty, there you are,” said Urduja. “If you would be so good as to clear us to sail, we’d like to leave posthaste. I’m sure you understand, given the situation—”
“Which has been contained,” Alaric tersely interrupted. “The coronation gala has been postponed to later tonight, but it will be held, and I need Talasyn in attendance. You may leave in the morning.”
“Preposterous!” Elagbi thundered. “Have my daughter be paraded around only hours after a deadly attack took place? I won’t allow it.”
“The alternative,” Alaric retorted, “is for my wife to make her way to the docks when our interrogators have yet to extract any useful information on rebel movement and our sky patrols haven’t finished their search for more enemy ships. I would much rather not give the Sardovians the opportunity to ambush your convoy. There is currently no safer place in Kesath than the Citadel.”
“Then I must have been mistaken,” said Elagbi, “and it is some other city with a center lying in ruins.”
At this display of cutting sarcasm, Alaric shot Talasyn a pointed look. “Now I know where you get it from.”
He didn’t bother explaining what he meant to the other people in the room. Instead, he went on to counter the Dominion prince’s argument. “Only the plaza complex was destroyed, and you saw how efficiently we dealt with those who destroyed it. You saw my father’s power. There is no reason to cancel the gala.”
“So that’s the plan, is it?” Urduja huffed, guessing his intent, seeing ahead and through as always. “You wish to celebrate not only your new empress but also your victory over the rebels and the fall of a Sardovian stormship?”
“It rather takes away from the message, having the guest of honor turn tail and flee back home,” Alaric said by way of confirmation. “It is also in Nenavar’s best interests to show the Continent that she and Kesath are united in the face of all dangers.”
He approached Talasyn where she sat. It was only then that she noticed that he was holding her crown, dangling from one black-gloved hand at his side. The platinum surface was slightly scuffed, and one of the rubies had a barely perceptible crack. When he held it out to her, she stared blankly at him. With a frown, he placed it on her lap with care.
Then he knelt before her so that they were almost eye level, his gaze lingering on her bruised cheek with an intensity that was both wrathful and startlingly possessive. His lips were set in a stern line, and his fingers clutched the chair’s armrest, grazing her elbow. The lips that she had kissed, the fingers that had been inside her …
The Sardovians she had killed to save herself.
The Sardovian she had killed to save him .
I am the Night Emperor’s whore, she thought bleakly. Her former comrade had called her that, before he died, and it was true. She was a traitor.
“Why did you run to them?” Alaric asked quietly. “Nisene said she saw you.”
Think. She had to think. Talasyn forced her sluggish mind to come up with a passable excuse, and it felt too long—it felt like ages before she spoke. “There wasn’t anything logical about it. I just—I knew them. From before. And I wanted to get them to stop. I couldn’t believe it when they started attacking me. I wasn’t being rational.”
A maze of half-truths, which all amounted to a lie. She could have taken a page from Jie’s book and wept with uneasy relief when Alaric seemed to accept her explanation.
“And now we know,” he said, “that Sardovia will stop at nothing to destroy us both. But you have my hand and therefore my protection, and there is no need to fear. Come to the gala tonight. You will be safe.”
Talasyn nodded slowly. What else could she do? It helped with her cover.
“Was this what you were hiding from us?” she asked. “A rebellion?”
A muscle worked in his jaw. “Yes. There have been a few small uprisings scattered throughout the Continent, but all quickly contained. We didn’t know until today, though, that they had organized. Or that they had a stormship.”
What would the Nenavarene Lachis’ka say? The one who’d been born to rule, who had no need to allay her husband’s suspicions? “This was a security threat.” She forced the words out through a throat clogged with thorny bramble. “And you kept it a secret from my delegation because …”
“My father didn’t trust you.” Alaric looked away briefly. “ I didn’t trust you. But you saved my life today.” He met her gaze again, and this time his own was open. “Everyone saw you use light magic to kill your attackers, as well as the rebel sneaking up on me.”
“He wouldn’t have been able to sneak up on you if I hadn’t distracted you.” Why was she arguing with him? Perhaps because some fury from him would make her feel better, would usher the two of them back to a place that she understood. Perhaps because nothing was worse than having gained his trust—at the expense of the Sardovian lives she’d taken.
Alaric shrugged. “You said it yourself—you knew them, you weren’t being rational. But it doesn’t change what today’s events showed us.” Earnestness was written all over his face. “We are stronger together, Talasyn.”
You shouldn’t trust me, she wanted to scream.
But if he didn’t, so many would have died for nothing.
And if he had been less quick on his feet, less adept with his magic, even for just a second—if a lightning strike or a crossbow bolt had hit true, if she had been too slow in striking that sword-wielding rebel down—Alaric would have been one of the Shadowforged dead today. The near-miss made her confront a question she’d been avoiding.
If in the end he had to die so that the Allfold could triumph, could she let it happen? Could she be the one to land the killing blow if it came to that?
The answer should have been obvious. It had been obvious months ago, before everything that had happened since. But now, gazing down at her husband, the grime of battle clinging to his pale features, which were soft with the solemnity of his promise, Talasyn realized that she was no longer so sure. And she was running out of time to figure it out.
“Khaede.” She clung to the name as though it were a lifeline. It burned on her tongue like damnation. “Have you found her? Or was she—” On the stormship, or in one of the wasp coracles, or there on the ground—
“I’ll keep looking,” Alaric said.
It wasn’t until he was at the door, about to leave the room, that Talasyn managed to break out of her stupor somewhat. She hurried over to him, ignoring Jie’s and her family’s dumbfounded expressions. There was one question burning in her mind. She needed to know the answer.
“Alaric.” Talasyn caught his arm. He looked back at her blankly. “The rebel with the crossbow—why didn’t you kill him?”
His gray eyes lingered on her hand on his sleeve, then drifted to her face. “Because you told me not to.”