Chapter Thirteen
C HAPTER T HIRTEEN
Alaric could still smell the dragon long after it had slunk back into the Eversea. By the time night fell over Nenavar, he could still feel traces of dragonfire against his skin, mingling with the ghost of Talasyn’s touch.
In a few minutes, the night would bring with it the first eclipse of the month. The shores of the tiny island bustled with activity.
In Kesath, outdoor aethermancy training tended to garner its fair share of spectators, all of whom afforded the Shadowforged Legion the respect that was their due by observing quietly, careful to keep an appropriate distance and to refrain from doing anything that could be considered a distraction.
As Alaric found out, much to his displeasure, that was not the case in Iantas. The villagers and the castle staff had trooped out to the beach in full force. There was a bonfire. People passed around bottles of distilled coconut liquor and, for the younger ones and the teetotalers, the coconuts themselves, the tops lopped off to reveal creamy white flesh and sweet, clear juice to be imbibed through bamboo straws.
At first, the intrigued crowd gathered closely around the Ahimsan Enchanters, who were arranging the jars and wires on the moonlit sands, but they good-naturedly retreated further up the shore after some words from an amused-sounding Talasyn. It was a far cry from the Dominion court’s fear of only months ago—the gazes straying every so often to the sariman cages as though they were protective talismans, the panicked screams when Alaric channeled the Shadowgate at the banquet.
“People are afraid of what they don’t know,” Talasyn said, noticing his bewilderment. “They know us now. They know that our magic will stop the Voidfell. So they’ve come to accept us, I think.”
Alaric had a feeling that it went beyond that. It was plain to him, in the light of the flickering fire and the seven moons, that the Nenavarene regarded their Lachis’ka with fondness. And for good reason. Not only had Talasyn opened her home to those in need without hesitation, but the two days that Alaric had spent on this island thus far had been enough for him to see that she treated the servants kindly and as equals. It was no difficult thing to accept someone like her.
“Your Majesties!” Sevraim wandered over to them with a somewhat unsteady gait, holding out a bottle. “May I tempt you?”
“Why are you drinking on duty?” Alaric growled.
The legionnaire pouted. “There’s nothing to protect you from here, and it’s an insult to the Lachis’ka’s hospitality to assume otherwise.” He waved the bottle under the aforementioned Lachis’ka’s nose in offering, and even Alaric could smell the potent burn of fermented coconut sap from where he stood.
Talasyn paled slightly and took a step back. Not sparing a second thought for the oddness of her reaction, reacting purely on some nebulous primal instinct, Alaric darted between her and Sevraim, baring his teeth at the other man.
Sevraim fled. Perhaps he was drunk, or perhaps it was the first time in a long while that Alaric had responded to his antics with anything more than grudging tolerance; whatever the case, the legionnaire beat a hasty retreat toward the safety of the bonfire, stumbling all the while.
When Alaric turned to his wife, whatever anxiety had gripped her appeared to have passed, but he still needed to check. “Is everything—”
“I’m fine,” Talasyn interrupted. “It’s—I just don’t like the smell of that particular liquor.”
While her reasoning made sense, it was starting to occur to Alaric that he had never actually seen her take anything more than sparing sips of wine, not once finishing a glass. At supper last night she’d drunk only water. Before he could delve into the matter, though, Ishan Vaikar beckoned them over to the amplifying configuration.
“I’m really rather pleased with this!” True to her word, the daya was practically bouncing up and down in glee, as much as her prosthetic leg would allow her to on the soft sand. “We had the idea to increase the area of effect by adding a few strands of the Tempestroad to the aether cores. It’s produced promising results, thanks to the ability of lightning and thunder to travel. If we are successful, Their Majesties’ eclipse magic should be able to wholly surround the chasm from which the Voidfell springs! But,” she said, beaming at them, “let’s start with this strip of beach first.”
Alaric eyed the jars dubiously. They held the shining, molten combinations of sariman blood and rain magic that he had first seen in the Roof of Heaven’s atrium. This time, however, something was different. This time the ruby-flecked sapphire cores were marbled with the white heat of the Tempestroad, and they crackled unnervingly within the crystalline walls that caged them.
Talasyn’s thoughts were clearly running along a similar vein to his. “Is it safe?” she asked Ishan.
“It wasn’t initially,” Ishan replied with great cheer. “Almost blew my assistant’s fingers off. Worse than firecrackers! However, I believe we’ve figured out the proper dilution.”
Talasyn glanced at Alaric with a small, wry smile. “It was nice knowing you.”
“Likewise,” he quipped.
The Ahimsan Enchanters first wanted to test if Talasyn could cast eclipse magic with another Shadowforged. Thus, as Lir’s seventh moon turned blood-red, Sevraim gamely threw a knife at her.
It was a shadow-smithed knife. Slender and deadly, weightless like the air through which it sliced. It spun toward Talasyn, its path erratic, the edge of its dark blade rippling with the silver threads of aetherspace.
Instead of shielding, she conjured a blazing sword and slashed at the knife as it spiraled within inches of her chest. Shadow split into two at the onslaught of light and then vanished. Rather than being enveloped by a black-and-gold sphere of combined magic, Talasyn was left holding her radiant blade, meeting Sevraim’s gaze over the fiery haze of it.
No barrier. Not even beneath the eclipse.
The legionnaire threw up his hands good-naturedly. “Looks like your wife only knows how to cast the light-and-shadow shield with you ,” he told an intently watching Alaric.
“Very curious indeed,” muttered Ishan. “Something in the blood, no doubt. Though whether House Ossinast or Ivralis, I couldn’t say.”
Talasyn couldn’t say, either. But as Alaric stepped forward and faced her within the amplifying configuration, she was all too aware of the odd sense of relief running through her. Relief that the shield remained something that was theirs alone.
Afterwards, Talasyn would wonder what it had looked like from afar, that veil of Lightweave and Shadowgate unfurling from the water’s edge, stretching and arching until it contained the beach and everyone on it within its shimmering sphere. The aether cores blazed and crackled within their jars, and Lir’s moons danced on in the heavens above, their seventh sister half shrouded in crimson.
“Wonderful, wonderful!” Ishan had her arms outstretched along with the other Enchanters, carefully controlling the energy that surged through the incandescent wires linking one jar to the next. “Let’s see how long we can keep this up!”
It was the first time that people other than Alaric were inside the light-and-shadow sphere with Talasyn. Ishan was close enough for her instructions to be heard over the roar of magic, but it was impossible to make out what the spectators further away from the waterline were saying. With the barrier dulling the moon’s rays, with ribbons of Shadowgate obfuscating the bonfire, she could see the other Nenavarene only in brief flashes of aether as they looked around in awe. She caught a glimpse of the boyish fascination on Elagbi’s face before the Lightweave shifted and he was gone from her sight.
Alaric, though, was right beside her. She saw him all too clearly, his eyes gleaming an ice-bright silver, his form tangled in nets of chiaroscuro, as ethereal as a dream that she might have once had.
“Talasyn, you’re not focusing,” he snapped, thoroughly shattering the illusion of dreaminess.
She scowled, irritated with him all over again, but she dutifully shut out all distractions. The magic that poured from her fingertips took on more solid shape and soared through the veil on the crests of the amplifiers. Sand whirled around her feet, stirred by an unnatural wind.
The last time Talasyn had cast the barrier with Alaric within the amplifying configuration had been in the Roof of Heaven’s atrium, when it had felt like her magic was taking wing, becoming greater than the sum of its parts. Here and now on Iantas’s beach, with the aether cores modified to project the barrier over a greater distance, it was the same but also— different . The longer Talasyn aethermanced, the more something seemed to open up inside her, beneath her heart, along her spine.
She couldn’t let anyone down; she had no choice but to ride it out, this sensation that was like dread but not quite, this feeling of something being awakened. Sweat beaded at her temple, and a quick glance at Alaric—his complexion sallow, his jaw clenched—revealed that he was doing no better.
And soon some critical point was reached and the jars burst. One after the other, their wires shorting out, the world blurring into glass shards and rain and lightning. Startled, Talasyn’s concentration broke and the light-and-shadow barrier collapsed in on itself, dissolving into wisps and then nothingness as the Enchanters redirected the mass of burst aether cores into the ocean before anyone could get hurt.
“Not as stable as I thought,” Ishan grumbled. “But it held for half an hour, so we are getting somewhere. Only a few more minor adjustments …” She trailed off in a renewed surge of alarm. “Your Grace? You’re shaking—”
Talasyn was burning up. Had it really been just thirty minutes? It had felt much longer. Her throat was parched and every inch of her body was on fire. Heatstroke, she thought groggily. Like the relentless summers on the Great Steppe. Too much light, too much warmth. She took a step toward the waterline with some hazy thought of drowning herself in the Eversea. She would do anything for even a moment’s relief, but the treacherous sand shifted under her feet and she couldn’t correct, she was falling—
And Alaric was catching her. Strong arms wrapped around her, hauling her up against a broad, hard frame. The relief was instantaneous everywhere his skin touched hers, her fevered brow to the hollow of his throat, his bare hands on her shoulder and the small of her back. It spread, this cooling, the roar of light receding.
And Alaric was shaking, too. No, he was shivering . His teeth were chattering and he was ice-cold. Talasyn burrowed deeper against his chest, tightening her own grip on him, no thought left to her but to offer him some measure of comfort. Her left hand slipped underneath the hem of his shirt, palm flat on the heaving muscles of his abdomen. His tremors abated and his breathing evened out at the same time as hers.
Talasyn blinked up at the eclipse over Alaric’s shoulder, at a loss as to how to rationalize what had transpired. The world came rushing back in all its chaos—people crowding around them and voicing concern … Ahimsan Enchanters yelling at everyone to steer clear of the broken glass that littered the sand and reflected the starlight in their jagged edges … the waves crashing against the shore.
Elagbi shoved his way to the front of the throng and grabbed Talasyn by the arm, gently pulling her out of Alaric’s grasp. “My dear, what happened?” He held her by the shoulders, scrutinizing her from head to toe. “Are you ill?”
“Hot,” Talasyn croaked. “I felt too hot.”
She looked at Alaric. “Cold, for me,” he said. “Like—like winter in the mountains.”
If it had been as intense a sensation as she’d felt, and yet he’d somehow found the strength to steady her …
But the Shadowforged were used to pain. Vela had told her that. Talasyn was seized by the urge to throw her arms around Alaric again, and for a horrible moment she resented her father for tugging her away.
Ishan was outright scratching her head. Talasyn felt a familiar twinge of guilt at being the source of all the daya’s problems for as long as they’d known each other.
“Eclipse magic, amplifiers—this is all new terrain in Enchantment. There is no existing literature,” Ishan said at last. “It’s possible that the configuration we devised has affected Their Majesties’ aethermancy on an internal level.”
“And no one saw fit to inform me of such a risk?” Alaric’s tone was sheer, quiet fury. It made Talasyn think of the seawater bubbling around the dragon’s snout earlier that day. The surface rippling that was a paltry hint of the inferno from which it sprang. “In all this time that I have been submitting to these experiments, no one deemed it advisable to warn me that my magic would be altered?”
Ishan seemed rather taken aback at being chastised by a man, but she recovered and drew herself up straighter. “I cannot preemptively inform you of risks that I was not aware of, Emperor Alaric. As I said, this is still very new to us as well.”
“And yet you had the temerity to act as though you knew what you were doing,” he hissed. “Shadow magic is what stands between my people and the threats at our door. If my aethermancy is compromised in any way, I can’t protect them. If the Lachis’ka and I are killed by these contraptions of yours, all of our plans will have been for nothing. We have foolishly placed it all in the hands of a—”
“My lord.” Talasyn clutched at his sleeve before he could call one of the most powerful nobles in the Dominion a charlatan, or worse. When Alaric transferred his glare to her, she could see the fear that lurked behind its virulence, and she could understand where it came from. But the situation needed to be defused, and she tried to think of something to say, tried to paste an expression on her face that wasn’t alarm.
Before she could manage either, he shrugged off her grip and stalked away.
Alaric stormed up the sweeping granite stairs. The Shadowgate crackled from his fingertips, chipping the marble banister. At least he could still do that .
He had no idea what the plan was. He knew only that he never wanted to feel anything like that ever again.
Not the cold that had made him believe he was dying, and not the way Talasyn’s touch had channeled warmth into his veins like salvation.
Because she was not his salvation, she was the wielder of a dangerous age-old magic that had nearly destroyed his country, and what had he been thinking , letting her and her cohorts manipulate the very fabric of his aethermancy, as unintentional as it purportedly was?
He had been too complacent. He had let her get too close. She would be his undoing. Light and shadow couldn’t exist together without one destroying the other.
“Alaric!”
Talasyn was chasing him up the stairs, taking them two at a time. He stopped begrudgingly and waited as she caught her breath a step below him.
“Look.” She swallowed. He watched the butterfly-wing pulse of her throat and thought about how alone they were in the stairwell. “What the amplifying configuration did to our aethermancy, I know it bothers you—”
“An understatement—”
“—but it affected my aethermancy as well. We have to keep on going. It’s still our best chance at stopping the Voidfell.”
“ We are the best chance to stop the Voidfell,” he said. “That’s why we can’t risk our own lives before the time comes.”
“It was temporary. We’re both fine,” she argued. Then she noticed the shadow-gouged cracks in the banister, and her hands clenched into fists. “You can’t just go around demolishing things! Someone will have to fix that—”
Alaric was torn between a bitter laugh and a disbelieving groan. Never runs out of fight, this one. No matter the situation, his wife’s claws always came out eventually.
But maybe that was what he needed right now.
He needed to quell the anxiety and frustration building up inside him, and he needed to check that his magic had not been compromised.
For what was he without the Shadowgate? How could he lead and protect the Night Empire without it?
You’re not just a weapon. Talasyn had told him that. He hazily remembered her words, spoken softly in the lamplight while she held him. You could be more.
He fought back a shiver that had nothing to do with that strange chill from before. New wisps of shadow magic leaked from his fingers clutching the banister. The marble splintered at the onslaught.
“What are you going to do about it?” Alaric asked quietly.
Talasyn’s eyes narrowed. In recognition, and in challenge.
“I,” Sevraim announced, “am too drunk for this.” He kicked at the moonlit sand. “Much too drunk.”
“Shut up, Sevraim,” Alaric and Talasyn chorused. They’d taken up position a few feet from each other, shielded from prying eyes by a thick wall of coconut palms. The lunar eclipse was over and the other residents of Iantas had retreated indoors. The castle’s spiny silhouette was riddled with dark windows.
“The Lachis’ka needs to improve her focus,” Alaric drawled. “She’s still so easily distracted. No amount of amplifying configurations can fix that .”
“And the Night Emperor needs to be knocked down a peg or two,” Talasyn spat.
“It’s very confusing because you both sound like you’re talking to me, but you just keep staring at each other,” Sevraim said mournfully, shuffling to Alaric’s side.
It wasn’t long before the night air blazed with magic. An ever-transmuting assortment of shadow-spun weapons crashed into a light-woven shield in rapid succession and with startling ferocity, the three combatants’ complicated footwork kicking up clouds of white sand with each sinking step.
Talasyn was fairly certain that things would be going better for her if she were to fight back. But she wasn’t allowed to. The point was to keep up her shield, come what may.
Which meant that Alaric and Sevraim were attacking her one after the other, using a different weapon each time, and she could do nothing but dig her bare soles into the sand and do her very best to not let her only defense falter even as her teeth rang with the force of their blows.
“Good show, Lachis’ka!” Sevraim called out with a grin after Talasyn had fended off his shadow-sword. “His Majesty is simply too much of a worrywart, if you ask me.”
“No one asked you,” Alaric snapped. “No talking.” He flung a dark spear at Talasyn, who ducked behind her shield easily enough, shadow vanishing the moment it hit the golden barrier, but then Alaric was suddenly to her left, conjuring a second spear and hurling it at her unguarded flank.
She twisted in the nick of time, her shield intercepting the new projectile before it could run her through, but then both her opponents charged, from opposite directions. Talasyn instinctively pushed back against Sevraim and his axe, causing him to stumble, but doing so left her with no opportunity to brace herself for Alaric’s strike. Her shield flickered out of existence as it caught the brunt of his double-edged, wavelike kalis blade. His silver eyes widened and he scrambled to draw his arm back, but it was too late. She yelped at the kalis’s icy bite on her hip bone, cold enough to burn.
Alaric banished his weapon, his gaze fixed on the blood welling up on the strip of skin between Talasyn’s breastband and breeches. He stepped forward as though to reach for her, but then appeared to think better of it, swallowing.
“Get a healer,” he told Sevraim.
“It’s not that bad,” Talasyn protested, stopping the legionnaire before he could dutifully make his way back to the castle. “If we stop for every little scrape, we’ll never get anything done.”
Alaric glared at her, and she at him in abject puzzlement. They’d fought against each other during a war , both of them inflicting their fair share of cuts and bruises. How was this any different? And it had been his idea to spar in the first place.
“Fine,” he bit out. “Next time let your aethermancy do the work for you. When in a tight spot, modify your shield rather than physically dodge or block.”
She nodded. She could do that. They resumed training, with the two Shadowforged’s attacks more simultaneous than not, and she focused on altering her shield whenever necessary—from the teardrop-shaped war shields of the Continent to the forked rectangles of Nenavar, adjusting for different weapons, different angles. It was a bit of an excruciating process, Alaric and Sevraim showing her no mercy, but she gradually found her rhythm beneath the seven moons.
And there was relief, too—relief that her aethermancy still worked as it should. Relief that was mirrored on Alaric’s face.
It was going to be all right. It had just been a passing spell. Some quirk of the amplifiers.
Sevraim eventually fell back, and Alaric and Talasyn locked into a precise, deadly dance of swirling darkness and shifting light. He drove her all the way to the waterline, where the ocean lapped at her toes as she blocked his furious strikes. He was relentless, forcing her to move faster and faster until her arms were sore and her breath emerged in harsh bursts and all she could see was him, windswept black hair and broad shoulders and shadows against gleaming sand and moon-razed saltwater.
Given their closeness, it was all too easy for her to spot the moment a glint of cunning sparked in the silver depths of his eyes. The sword in his hands melted into a bullhook on a chain, and with a flick of his wrist the darkly crackling coils wrapped around her shield, rendering her immobile as the hook’s lethally sharp arrowhead point flew at her face in one smooth thrust.
Talasyn’s desperation echoed in her magic, her shield doubling in size and bursting free of the inky chain. Her arm bearing the shield swung up wildly, and the edge of it smashed into Alaric’s cheek.
He reeled back, the Shadowgate vanishing as his blood spattered the shallows.
A hoarse shout rent the air. Talasyn barely even registered the fact that it had come from her; she was too busy banishing the Lightweave and hurrying over to Alaric, seawater sloshing at her ankles, alarm spreading through her like wildfire.
“Are you—” She clutched at the side of his neck, giving him no choice but to turn his face toward her, and her heart dropped into her stomach at the sight of the crimson gash that ran along the edge of his cheekbone.
But they had fought a war against each other. Why was it so different this time? What was this regret, this urge to call for a healer like he almost had when he cut her hip?
If we don’t want to hurt each other, she thought, then where does that leave us?
What is the way forward?
Alaric’s brow furrowed at her touch. His hand came to rest over hers where it clasped his neck. Talasyn’s pulse skipped a beat at skin on skin, at his fingers curling against hers.
He squeezed her wrist, and she had the impression that there was something compulsive about the gesture, something starved—but then he was peeling her hand away from his neck with an alacrity that made it clear that the gentle pressure of moments ago had been nothing more than an accident.
“An inventive maneuver,” he said, “but hardly the point of our exercise.”
She turned her nose up at him as much as she could given the several inches he lorded over her. “You cheated.”
Alaric wiped the back of his left hand over his cheek, pale knuckles coming away smeared red, but the worst of the bleeding had stopped, much to Talasyn’s relief. “I was testing you,” he rumbled. “I’d venture to say that you cheated, as a matter of fact—unless you really are planning on punching the Voidfell with your shield.”
Talasyn would have gladly continued their bickering, if not for the fact that she had finally noticed that the hand Alaric had used to pry hers away from his neck still hadn’t let go. Their fingers remained intertwined at her side. He realized it a beat after she did, and for one blistering second he looked enraged—at her? At himself? He tried to wrench his hand away.
But she tightened her own grip, refusing to release him. The prolonged contact seemed to break through his defenses, laying bare the fatigue that had finally caught up with him. With them both. All the fight left his broad frame, and in response something like surrender rippled through her as well. They were each other’s mirrors, beneath the seven moons.
“You were burning up earlier,” he whispered. “I reached out to you, and for a moment you were like the dragon. Nothing but flame against my skin.”
She saw the fear then, fear that he had tried to hide before—not for himself, but for her. She reached out and touched his shoulder, and he melted, as though she really were fire, sinking his head toward her hand.
“I’m all right. Because of you .” Talasyn dragged her fingers down the muscled cords of Alaric’s bare arm. “As soon as you touched me, it drew out the fever. It felt …”
Like someone stopping her fall. Like the end of a long journey home. She didn’t know how to put it into words, these emotions that were bigger than her body, that ran deeper than her magic, that soared higher than the Sky Above the Sky.
“I felt it, too.” Alaric reached for her fingers before she could lift them away from his arm. “The light inside you, it poured into me. Banishing the cold.”
Both her hands were held by him now. He was all that she could see, etched in moonlight against the surf.
“I’m not sure what this means for us. For our magic,” Talasyn said. “But I think—I think, maybe, we can protect each other.”
Alaric closed his eyes briefly, looking almost pained by this sentiment. “You don’t know how badly I want to believe that, Talasyn. But we can’t run from what we are. Our history was one of war long before you and I ever met. Look what happened tonight—look at the consequences of light and shadow working together.” His gaze darted away as though he couldn’t stand the sight of her. “The toll it takes.”
She wanted to argue with him. She wanted to bring up the sense of oneness they’d felt with the dragon, how it had showed that even opposing forces could be connected. She wanted to remind him that he was the one who’d said they were stronger together.
But another war was on the horizon, unbeknownst to him. His doubts breathed life back into her own, her skin still crawling with the memory of the inferno from earlier—of how their combined magic had nearly destroyed them both.
She had to look at the bigger picture. She would have to give him up to the Allfold when the time came. There was no other way this could end.
They couldn’t protect each other. That had been Talasyn of the Great Steppe talking, the orphaned street rat who lived on dreams of what could be. She was Alunsina Ivralis now, and millions of lives were at stake.
Let him go, urged her sanity.
And yet her hands stayed where they were, clasped in his. He didn’t pull away, either. She couldn’t move. She was helpless in the face of all this yearning for what she couldn’t even name.
I don’t know what I want.
I know what Vela and Urduja want. I know what’s best for Sardovia and Nenavar.
But I didn’t know—no one told me—it would be this hard.
If Alaric just looked at her, though … if he would just say something … that might be enough to make it all make sense.
But he stayed silent, refusing to meet her gaze, and Talasyn’s heart sank. He would never choose her over Kesath. And she wasn’t strong enough to fight for this alone.
A soft moan shattered the moment. Sevraim was lying face down on the sand, several feet away. They’d forgotten all about him.
“Don’t mind me, Your Majesties,” he slurred pitifully. “Just trying to stop my world from spinning while you work through whatever that is.”