Chapter Twenty-Three
C HAPTER T WENTY -T HREE
Urduja Silim returned to Iantas in all her pomp and splendor four days later to observe the last practical demonstration of the shield amplifiers. Aside from the fact that Alaric was sailing back to Kesath tomorrow, there would be no more eclipses before the sevenfold one on the night of the Moonless Dark; this was the last chance to fine-tune, to get it right.
So, no pressure, Alaric thought wryly as he and Talasyn headed down to the shoreline after Urduja wished them luck. He could feel the Zahiya-lachis’s flinty stare boring into his nape from where she and Elagbi stood at the front of the crowd of spectators that had gathered on the castle steps.
Ishan Vaikar and her Enchanters, busy arranging the glowing metalglass jars on the smooth white sand, were all smiles for Talasyn when she approached. By contrast, they afforded Alaric the barest hint of acknowledgement, clearly still miffed by his outrage a fortnight prior.
Not that Alaric cared. As far as he was concerned, he’d been well within his rights. He greeted the Ahimsan Enchanters with frosty sarcasm, and he smirked when Talasyn shot him an admonishing look.
“This is really it this time,” Ishan proclaimed. “If it isn’t, I’ll cover myself in thornfruit and vanish into the woods.”
The daya’s resolve was commendable. And as darkness washed over most of Lir’s seventh moon, leaving behind only a glimmer of silver, and the shield went up, hope stirred within Alaric that it wasn’t out of place.
Light and shadow covered the whole island, stemming from where he and Talasyn stood. The newly modified aether cores groaned but the jars and wires held, and those glimmering nets of black and gold skirted around the shoreline, over the treetops, amidst that starry night.
The barrage began. The smattering of warships brought over from Eskaya for this purpose that were currently surrounding the island all fired at the same time. Streams of amethyst magic roared through the night air, one by one harmlessly vanishing the moment they crashed into the barrier.
Through the haze of combined Lightweave and Shadowgate, Alaric watched the void blasts spark and flare and fade, and he remembered fireworks blazing over Eskaya. He remembered that rooftop in the Dominion capital, the feel of Talasyn’s bony shoulders as he dug his fingers in, as he lowered himself enough to almost plead.
Whatever better world you think you’ll build, she’d told him then, it will always be built on blood.
If they pulled this off—if they saved Nenavar and the Continent from the Voidfell—would it be the same as wiping the slate clean? Once the waves of death magic receded, would people be able to blink in the light of a new world, safe for another thousand years, and believe that it was possible to start again?
Alaric had no answers for that, but he had never been more sure of one thing: he had to try to make it so. If they emerged unscathed out the other side of the Moonless Dark, Kesath would not fight another war. It was a resolve that went beyond the awful pit in his stomach at the prospect of taking Talasyn’s magic away. It was an earnest desire to live, finally, in a time of peace. To preserve this beautiful, enigmatic place that was his wife’s nation—and to rebuild his own.
No more, Alaric vowed to himself from where he stood at Talasyn’s side, the two of them holding back the amethyst bolts, holding back the rot, keeping their island safe. I will go against my father to make it so. After the Sardovian rebels, no more.
It was around the forty-minute mark that Talasyn began to flag. The warships had long ceased their simultaneous barrage and were now taking turns firing a cannon each; the Dominion was rationing its aether cores since no new magic could be extracted from the Void Sever until it stabilized. On the Night of the World-Eater, though, the Voidfell would not retreat, not until an hour had passed. She needed to hold on for that long.
Aethermancing nonstop for such an extended period of time was akin to climbing an endless flight of stairs. Effortless at first, the body going through rote motions of muscle memory. An action so intrinsic that the exact moment fatigue started sinking in was difficult to pinpoint, and before long limbs throbbed and lungs shrank, squeezing out air in splinters, a taste of rust in the back of the mouth, and there was no choice but to keep going because it was too late to turn around.
Talasyn felt all this and more. Rivulets of sweat ran down her spine. She ached all over. By some miracle, she managed to keep her focus, drawing on the spate of concentration exercises she’d done with Alaric, and she kept her strength, buoyed by the hours she’d spent tapping into the primordial thread of the Light Sever.
It was with ten minutes left on the clock that something began to go horribly wrong.
The feeling—Talasyn could compare it only to when the aether cores inside the jars burst, back during the month’s first trial. But the shattering came from inside her. It was her body hitting a critical point. Her magic—pushed to the limit, amplified by rain and blood and tempest—redirected inward .
It had nowhere else to go within the barrier. A radiant blaze engulfed her outstretched hand, strands of Shadowgate clinging to it like smoke. Her arm burned and froze all at once, the sensation quickly spreading through the rest of her, pouring into the stitch in her side, into every fault line of her shaking frame.
Another bolt of void magic slammed into the shield. Beside her, Alaric let out a hiss. The shadows were wrapping around his own arm, threaded through with the Lightweave.
He looked at her, a question in his silver eyes.
He wanted to put a stop to the exercise. He wanted to bring down the sphere.
But he would only do it if she agreed.
Talasyn couldn’t stand the thought of him getting hurt. But she needed to believe in him, and in herself, and in what they were capable of together. The fate of their world depended on that belief.
She shook her head. “We can’t stop now.” Her voice was strained, almost drowned out by the roar of magic, but the expression on his face told her he was hanging on her every word. “This is the last chance. If we really can’t maintain the shield for an hour, then we have to come up with another plan. We need to know now .”
“All right,” Alaric said softly. “Breathe with me.”
And Talasyn did. The minutes wore on and she coaxed air through her body the way he’d taught her to at the Roof of Heaven and amidst the Belian ruins. She felt a calming, a centering. It took the edge off somewhat, at first, but the burning freeze never subsided and eventually grew worse.
No one knew they were in trouble. The Enchanters were controlling the amplifiers from a hovering ship, beyond the sphere. Everyone else was too far away to see what was happening to them.
Talasyn watched in horror as her splayed fingertips and Alaric’s turned blue. Then their skin rippled with red blisters. She felt no pain from them, which meant that the nerves were deadened, but everywhere else in her body—everywhere else was ice and inferno. The eclipse magic was eating away at them both, even as amethyst cannon fire continued to ram into it.
Then, in a moment of double vision, she was looking at her hand afire with blackened light, but she was also looking at that gnarled, aged hand as it dug into the snowy ridge, as it unfurled beneath the sun. Had it been her hand all this time? Had she been seeing what was yet to come to pass?
She thought that she might understand now what had happened to Gaheris. The Shadowgate had consumed him, demanding its due in exchange for power. One could gaze only so long into aetherspace before something lunged from its depths.
This was the price for meddling with the unknown.
It went on and on, the waves of black and gold and amethyst, and just when Talasyn couldn’t take it anymore—
—just when she was fit to collapse, to lose herself in this ice-tinged death of a sun’s scorching heart—
An hour had ticked by.
The void blasts stopped coming. The Ahimsan Enchanters brought down the amplifying configuration’s nets, and the sphere of eclipse magic dwindled in size, receding from the space around Iantas until it eventually collapsed into nothingness as Alaric and Talasyn cancelled their aethermancy.
They stumbled together, catching each other with their uninjured arms, and swayed over the moonlit sands. People were cheering in triumph, but for her there was only exhaustion and inferno and the broadness of him, his arms clasped around her waist, cooling the fever in her bloodstream. Her face was buried in his shoulder, but out of the corner of her eye she watched her right hand. Watched the blue fade from its fingertips, leaving behind only the angry red blisters on her palm.
“I think, perhaps,” Ishan Vaikar said much later, in the dining room, “we must prepare for the possibility that the after-effects will be … long-lasting.”
The table’s other occupants—Urduja, Elagbi, Talasyn, and Alaric—stared at her blankly. Talasyn was famished after the taxing exercise, but she paused mid-chew, willing the daya to admit that her statement had been made in jest.
A vain hope, as it turned out.
“The amplifying configuration has clearly influenced Their Majesties’ aethermancy on a molecular level,” Ishan went on to explain. “I believe that our experiments have magnified your connection to each other.”
“Connection?” Alaric repeated, frowning.
“Whatever it is that enables your magic and the Lachis’ka’s to merge, Emperor Alaric,” Ishan clarified. “If only there was a way for Enchanters to manipulate the Lightweave and the Shadowgate as well. Then I could study it better.” She gave a wistful sigh. “But back to the matter at hand. The amplifier’s effects could act like a poison, slowly leaving the system as they’re processed. Or its effects could become a chronic condition in which the changes are more … permanent. It’s impossible to determine which way they’ll resolve at this time.”
“But either option sounds positively delightful,” Talasyn sniped.
“Well, let us hope that it is the former,” Elagbi said with a scowl that matched Alaric’s as the two men exchanged contentious looks.
“There is no help for it, I suppose,” said Urduja. “It is the trade-off for saving us from Dead Season.”
Like her father and husband, Talasyn felt a scowl tug at her lips. The Zahiya-lachis seemed rather cavalier about the prospect of her granddaughter accidentally forging a chronic connection with the enemy. Then again, having one more thing to hold over the Night Emperor’s head nicely suited Urduja’s plans.
Shouldn’t they be my plans as well?
Another wave of guilt turned the food to dust in Talasyn’s mouth. She and the Zahiya-lachis were supposed to be working together, pressing every advantage so that the Sardovian Allfold could take back the Continent before the year was out. It was the right thing to do, the only thing, and she still hadn’t made up her mind where Alaric fit into it. She still didn’t know if she could do what needed to be done when it came to him, when the time came for it.
“As for the injuries sustained during the casting,” said Ishan, “there is clearly a threshold to this type of aethermancy. Aktamasok’s crater is a little smaller than this island, but the amount of magic needed to repel the Void Sever will be tenfold. So I suggest … keep practicing.” Ishan looked down at her plate dejectedly. “That’s really all I’ve got.”
Alaric opened his mouth, no doubt to give the daya another piece of his mind, but Talasyn placed a hand on his thigh under the table. An unmistakable command to stand down.
“It’s too risky,” Elagbi declared. “We should think of another plan to stop Dead Season.”
“This is the best one we’ve got, Amya,” Talasyn countered. She held up her right palm. “See? The blisters are already gone. Emperor Alaric and I have magical resistance on our side. We’ll pull it off—especially now that we know what to prepare for.”
Despite her words, Talasyn was nervous. Alaric was leaving tomorrow, and she would have to figure this out without him.
An attendant scurried into the room with a bottle of fermented pearl-barley wine and poured out generous amounts for Urduja, Elagbi, and Ishan, decorously bypassing Talasyn since her aversion to liquor was well known among the castle staff. As he hovered at Alaric’s elbow and made to tip the bottle, however, gray eyes flickered in Talasyn’s direction. Alaric covered the glass with his hand.
“Water,” he told the attendant curtly. The latter bowed and went to fetch the jug from the other end of the table.
Some choices were cautious, arrived at after a lengthy weighing of pros and cons as meticulous as the dispersal of casongka stones. Other choices took hold with the fever of an impulse, unearthed like sparks that flew when a singular moment raked over the embers of the human heart.
Even if he hates me in the end—
The sparks swept through Talasyn as she sat there at the dining table, staring across at her husband long after he’d looked away, and channeling all her political training to not let an ounce of emotion show.
Even if they hang me for it—
There was fear, yes, but there was exhilaration, too. The defiant kind. The thrill of making a decision that was wholly her own.
I will save him.