Chapter Eighteen
C HAPTER E IGHTEEN
Once she had gotten her emotions under control and they’d both retreated to their respective ends of the rock shelf, there wasn’t a whole lot to do in the flooded grotto. Alaric kept an eye on the waterline and dwelled on his grim thoughts. He occasionally caught Talasyn toying with the wedding band on her ring finger. Perhaps out of boredom, yes, but also perhaps wishing to be free of it. He couldn’t blame her. She wouldn’t be in this situation if not for him, if he hadn’t ignored Jie’s warnings in his eagerness to get away from a castle that had felt so empty.
The already wan daylight weakened even further when more rain poured into the cracks overhead, accompanied by the growls of thunder muted through stone. The lake sloshed worryingly within its banks, the cascade at the grotto entrance picking up speed. Alaric squinted at the ceiling, their only means of escape.
“If I bring it down,” he said, “would you be able to shield us both from the debris?”
“Yes,” Talasyn replied without an ounce of hesitation. “I suppose you’ll use the same technique as Gaheris when he destroyed the rebel stormship.”
“I’ve never actually tried,” Alaric admitted. “If the lake overflows, then we’ll see if I’m my father’s son.”
“You’re not, though.”
She said it so quietly beneath the faint susurrus of the gale whistling through the world above. When he turned his head to stare at her, she bit her lip, as though regretting her words, but she soon plowed ahead with the stubbornness that he knew so well by now.
“You’re nothing like him. You would never hurt your own child the way he hurts you.”
How deep such a simple statement cut. A blade through the heart. With the pain came the anger, and he opened his mouth to tell her off, but something about the way she was huddled against the wall, so small in his tunic, her brown eyes faintly luminous in their earnestness, even as she seemed to steel herself … but for what?
Alaric momentarily stopped breathing.
Talasyn expected him to retaliate. Every time she brought up the subject of his father, he only ever responded with rage and threats. The way she watched him carried echoes of the way his mother had watched Gaheris, waiting for the inevitable explosion.
I want to be better than the past, Alaric thought. In this, and in so many other ways.
He quirked a brow. “My own child?” he repeated dryly. “That’s in our cards then, Lachis’ka?”
This had the desired effect of reducing Talasyn to indignant sputters. Alaric blithely continued: “Come to think of it, our respective courts would appreciate some heirs. Shall we while away the hours picking out names?”
She stood up, her face pinched like she’d swallowed a whole calam-lime, no longer expecting to bear the brunt of his darkness. Her apprehension forgotten.
“On second thought,” he said, relieved, “I shall take charge of the names. No son of mine will be called ‘Watermelon Ossinast.’”
“That’s—that’s not what I meant, and you know it!” she snarled.
He cocked his head. “Were you planning on ‘Guava’?”
“Argh!”
She tackled him. The hotheaded little Lightweaver actually tackled him. Alaric let out a grunt as his back collided with the damp, hard ground. By contrast, he held a warm, soft armful, one that was proclaiming him the worst sort of scoundrel in a breathless screech.
Perplexed by the uncharacteristically refined insult, he gave Talasyn’s braid a light tug. She lifted her face from his chest and peered down at him, the dying light barely strong enough to reveal that her freckled cheeks were dark with embarrassment.
“Have you forgotten your Continental expletives?” he inquired.
“Oh, shut up.” Her blush deepened. “ You try living in a foreign country with a different language for nearly a year. I already called you an asshole earlier and I couldn’t think of anything else—”
She broke off as it clearly occurred to her, at the same time that it did him, that there wasn’t an inch of space between them from the neck down. Her legs were locked around his hips, his chest rose and fell underneath hers. His hand curled around her bare thigh, fingers grazing the edge of the tunic—the tunic that he never should have lent her, because she was sprawled on top of him and she was wearing his clothes, and her lips were all that he could look at, and she was all that he could feel.
“You have me on my back.” Alaric was shocked by the hoarseness in his own voice. “Now what?”
“I don’t know,” Talasyn mumbled. Her gaze was also focused on his mouth. Her heart was beating a wild, violent rhythm in tandem with his. “I didn’t think that far ahead.”
“Pity.” His fingers ventured higher up her thigh, caressing the silky flesh. She swallowed, her hand sliding down his abdomen in silent invitation.
A fresh torrent of water rushed into the grotto. The lake rippled and churned, and Alaric saw the wave form at the periphery of his vision. He clamped his arms around Talasyn, intending to roll to safety, but it was too late—the wave broke over the rock ledge. Drenching them both in the cold and the wet and the salt.
They sprang away from each other—rather, Talasyn thought sourly, like the tussling alley cats that the residents of Hornbill’s Head would dump buckets on from their windows. They pressed themselves against the grotto wall, warily watching the waterline. It stirred precariously for a few alarming beats but then went calm, having risen by only a couple of inches. The cascade at the mouth of the grotto ceased.
The chill set in again, now that she was drenched anew.
Talasyn attempted to make a fire.
Alaric had brought along some kindling and flint. Now Talasyn piled the kindling atop discarded banana leaves, to insulate it from the soaked ground, and struck the flint shards against each other with gusto. But with the leaky ceiling and the lapping ocean, it was too damp in the cavern. Whatever sparks were produced soon petered out, and before long the kindling was soaked, too.
Still, she persisted, because it was a suitable enough distraction from Alaric. He’d retreated to the opposite end of their campsite, but as far as Talasyn was concerned, no distance would be too great. Not after that near-miss, that near-kiss.
About half an hour passed before he called out, “Lachis’ka.”
She didn’t look up from her task. If anything, she bashed the stones together even harder.
“It’s not going to happen.” Alaric’s tone was stern. “You’ll only end up hurting yourself.”
And maybe that was true, maybe her pruned fingers were starting to ache, but there was something freeing about such a mindless task. She could channel all her frustrations into brute force. She could ask her stinging skin and each failed spark of resounding stone why she couldn’t control her reactions to her husband, why her will could not seem to surmount her craving for his touch. Why he made it so easy for her to throw everything else away.
The answer is simple, really, surfaced from the mire of her racing thoughts, like a rotting carcass dredged from the depths. The rebels were right about me. I’m a traitor. Once Sardovia claimed victory, she would probably be executed unless she hid behind her grandmother’s skirts.
Talasyn finally gave up on the fire, her hands scraped almost raw. She and Alaric sank into sullen silence, avoiding each other as best as they could in the narrow space.
When night fell, the grotto was plunged into total darkness, all seven of Lir’s moons unable to penetrate the thick clouds. The temperature dropped even further. Talasyn’s nose and the tips of her fingers felt as though they were made of ice.
She heard Alaric rooting around among his supplies, then the thud of something metallic on the rock shelf and the click of a lever. The grotto was illuminated in the warm, reddish glow of the Firewarren, emanating from a bronze lantern. The aether heart contained within its glass burned like a lone ember.
“You can see in the dark,” Talasyn said.
Or tried to say, anyway. She stammered out each word, her teeth rattling as she shook from the cold that she’d been enduring all this time.
“To an extent. It improves with more and more exposure to the Shadowgate’s nexus points.” Alaric laid out his bedroll. “We both need to warm up, so come here.”
His intent was obvious. Her response was immediate. “N-n-no. I’m f-f-ine.”
He pursed his lips. “ I need to warm up, then.” When she didn’t say anything—when she continued staring mulishly at him while she shivered—he added, “Surely you won’t let me freeze to death before we can stop the Voidfell.”
It was a sham, but Talasyn was suffering too much to inspect his reasoning more closely. She went over to where he now lay on his side, holding the blanket open for her. She crawled under it, stretching out over the small bedroll, facing away from him. His arm draped across her midriff. They were in too much like the disastrous, compromising position they’d woken up in yesterday, but she was hungry for the warmth. She scooted back against him, soaking up the heat that emanated from his body, with the blanket drawn over her nose.
“Go to sleep,” he ordered. “I’ll take first watch.”
“Wake me up in four hours so I can take your place.”
“Six. I’m not tired.”
“Yes, you clearly have enough energy to argue.”
He squeezed her hip in warning. She made a face that he couldn’t see, then burrowed deeper into the shelter of him. She watched the lantern cast flickering patterns on the grotto walls as she began to drift off.
And in that split-second before oblivion, the crystal imbued with the light of the Firewarren became a red sun, and the limestone surroundings morphed into a brilliant sky, and the Eversea was gliding below her again, just as it had in that vision from a month ago. This time scaled coils pulsed with breath, revolving over the blue waters, and that gnarled hand was reaching for the heavens as something roared like thunder—
“What’s wrong?” Alaric asked.
Talasyn realized that she’d gone stiff in his loose embrace. It was difficult to come back from the vision, from the images of air and sky and her soul racing toward some nebulous precipice, but eventually she scaled that cliff and she was in the real world again, the firelight chiseling at the sinews of Alaric’s forearm as he held her.
“Do you ever—see things?” She swallowed. “When you’re not communing with the Shadow Sever, I mean.”
“No,” he replied. “What kind of things do you see?”
“Memories. I assumed for a long time that they were solely mine, that it was my magic connecting me to my past, but lately …” She told him about the rushing ocean, the wizened hand, the snowy mountain ridge.
Alaric was quiet for a while. Talasyn could practically hear the gears whirring in his head.
“I’ve never heard of anything like that among the Shadowforged,” he finally said. “Visions might be a Lightweaver trait. There’s no way of knowing.”
Because your country killed them all.
Now they both went tense, as though the thought striking out from the darkness had assailed him, too.
No matter where they found themselves, the war was always waiting at every corner, dragging them back down. But perhaps these constant, bitter reminders were what Talasyn needed. Even as she lay here in Alaric’s arms, sharing in his warmth.
She closed her eyes and let herself be carried off to an uneasy slumber by the beating of his heart and the distant roar of the storm.