Chapter Eight
C HAPTER E IGHT
There was a tea set on the desk, and Talasyn brewed some valerian root that she rummaged from the herb chest. Alaric would be pretty out of it, but it would help with the pain, and he drank from the cup that she held to his lips willingly enough—albeit with a somewhat disgruntled expression that spoke volumes about her tea-making abilities, or lack thereof. She also found bandages, washcloths, and a truly foul-smelling pot of herbal salve in the bathroom, and she lugged these into his chambers along with a bucket of hot, soapy water.
The next hour passed mostly in silence, in stillness, punctuated by faint ripples as she dipped the cloths into the bucket to clean his wounds, and by his harsh intakes of breath as she gingerly spread the salve over them.
She had done this before for many others during the war, in those grimy trenches and razed forests where the healers were too far away or all dead, but it was a new thing with him. It was almost an act of revelation, to be able to slowly map him out like this, unlike the frenzied touches of their wedding night. Her fingers pressed into his broad back, learning the strength of his sinews and where the hurt began.
When she turned him over to work on the injuries to his chest and abdomen, she found herself tracing the remnants of a much older wound—the pinkish, knotted line of skin right below the edge of his clavicle, all that was left from when she’d stabbed him the night they met.
Alaric wasn’t so dazed that he failed to notice where her attention had drifted. “Don’t tell me you’re feeling guilty after all this time,” he said flatly, and yet there was an edge of bitterness to his comment. He’d gone all stiff, the way she had when he fell silent after she told him about her early life in the slums. The way she had reacted when she assumed that he was pitying her.
It’s not pity for you that I feel, he’d said back then. Rather, anger on your behalf.
How she yearned to echo those words to the proud, broken man lying before her now. But to do so would mean acknowledging the part that he hadn’t said out loud. She had no idea how he would respond to her giving voice to the inconvenient truth that they were more alike than was sane to admit when it came to the things that they carried.
They were alike in another way, too. There was a long, faded line of white on her left arm from the only cut that had left an imprint out of the many shallow ones that his war scythe had inflicted during that first battle. It was hardly visible unless one knew to look for it, but it was her own permanent reminder of that night.
“Of course I don’t feel guilty for defending myself from you,” Talasyn muttered. She soaked another washcloth in the now-lukewarm water and resumed tending to him.
And it was—different—with him looking at her while she worked. More dangerous, with the rise and fall of his sculpted chest beneath her hands as she mopped up the blood and applied the dressings, cautiously navigating a labyrinth of wisteria bruises on moon-kissed skin. It was even worse when necessity dictated that her ministrations move lower down his body and his defined abdomen contracted slightly at her every touch.
It brought back memories of how her fingers had slipped under his shirt and skated along these same muscles while he kissed her neck. Memories of what she would find if she went even lower still, past that dusting of dark hair bracketed between his lean hips.
You horrible girl, some aghast inner voice chided. The man is covered in bandages and you’re thinking about his—
Cringing, Talasyn darted a furtive look at Alaric’s face. Her heart slammed against the bones of her rib cage when she saw that he was already peering down at her through half-lidded eyes.
Upon closer inspection, though, she saw that his gaze was unfocused, probably from the valerian root. She cursed inwardly, realizing that she should have treated his head injury first. She scooted further up the bed and dabbed at the gash on his brow.
“It’s not as deep as I feared,” she assessed, bandaging it as best as she could, “but if your head aches or you feel faint at any point over the next few days, you really should consult a healer.”
His charcoal gaze studied her drowsily from beneath the careful motions of her hand. “Is that a command, Empress?”
She lifted her chin stubbornly even as she flushed at her new title. At the raspy, teasing way in which it was drawled. “Yes, it is. I can’t hold back the Voidfell without you.”
“I’ve survived worse than this.”
She wiped away the bloodstains on his sharp cheeks and his long nose, and then the ones located lower still, at the side of his mouth. Her stomach roiled. “Why did your father do this?”
“I disappointed him.” It was a blunt, honest answer. One that Alaric would never have willingly given if he weren’t under the effect of anesthetic tea and dizzy from blood loss. His lips brushed whisper-soft against Talasyn’s thumb as he spoke. “The attack nearly succeeded because I was unprepared. I was weak. That rebel I didn’t kill … Someone saw and told my father.”
Talasyn listened, stricken. He’d only spared Hiras because she’d begged him to. No matter what she did, someone always got hurt. She was trapped in a labyrinth. She couldn’t see the way forward.
Alaric relinquished the last of his defenses with a sigh, the planes of his chest heaving slightly. “I’m— tired . I suppose it was naive to hope that the fighting would end after Lasthaven …”
The war isn’t over. Talasyn’s fingers twisted into the bloodstained washcloth. Not while there are things still left to fight for, and people to fight for them.
Against your father.
Against you.
A sense of wrongness ate at her for harboring these thoughts of her inevitable betrayal in this place of silk sheets and lamplight, when he was soft-eyed and vulnerable, laid up in linen bandages, confessions spilling from that usually stern mouth.
At a loss for how to react, Talasyn seized hold of the practical. She rose to her feet with the intention of putting away the used cloths and the bucket, but Alaric grabbed her elbow, despair surging from him in waves, and pulled her to him. She let out an indignant squeak as she found herself sprawled on top of his bare chest, her nose inches from his. She held still, careful not to disturb the bandages, and his hand darted from her elbow to her lower back, exposed by the cut of her blue dress, his warm fingers trailing static charges along the base of her spine. She hadn’t realized that she was so sensitive there.
“Don’t go,” he murmured hoarsely, fitfully, a man caught in a fever-dream. “I won’t bring up the rebels again. I won’t breathe another word. Just—don’t leave me, Tala.” The name he had first called her on their wedding night sent a mess of starlit recollections swirling through her at the same time that it caught in his throat, along with what he said next. “Please.”
Talasyn stared into the hollow desolation in Alaric’s gray eyes, the utter defeat. She knew this loneliness. She understood it in the marrow of her bones. “I was going to clean up, that’s all,” she whispered. “I’m not leaving. It’s just—the bucket and—”
“Forget the bucket,” he told her, a hint of his usual imperiousness breaking through the valerian fog. “Stay here.”
“All right.” Not her wittiest moment, but it was difficult to think when she was pressed up against his solid body, his hand on the small of her back. “I’ll stay.”
He looked like he didn’t believe her, and it pierced her heart. She wondered if this was a common occurrence: Alaric crawling back to his chambers after Gaheris’s punishments and nursing his injuries while he dreamed of not being alone.
Talasyn suddenly wanted nothing more than to assure Alaric of her presence. She sank fully against his form, holding him down with her weight, burying her face in the side of his neck in a chaste imitation of what he had done to her once, in another bed.
“I’m here,” she vowed into his smooth, overheated skin. “I’m not going anywhere.”
A sound between a groan and a hitch of breath caught in his throat. The hand on the small of her back rubbed compulsively, tracing the notches of her spine, and his arm tightened around her. His other hand tangled in her hair.
“I couldn’t kill that rebel.” It was a choked, bewildered rumble in her ear. “One word from you and I let my guard down. I couldn’t kill you , either, all those times before … What am I, if I’m not a weapon? What have you done to me?”
It shouldn’t have mattered what he was saying, trapped as his consciousness was in valerian dregs. But there was a kernel of truth in his bleak questions. This time the voice that crept into Talasyn’s head was not Urduja’s, although it was definitely telling her what Urduja would have taken away from the situation.
He cares what you think. It was Talasyn’s own inner voice, from some dark part of her. You can use this.
She blocked it out, this epiphany. She focused only on Alaric, on how his words reminded her of the orphanage at Hornbill’s Head, the keepers’ brutal fists, how they’d spat out that she and the other children would never amount to anything more than the bottom-dwellers they’d been born as. Her body was melting against her will into Alaric’s arms, rationality giving way to the urge to comfort. To do for someone else what nobody had ever done for her.
“You’re not just a weapon,” she mumbled into his neck. “You have a sweet tooth and sometimes you make me laugh. I tell you things that I’ve never told anyone else.” The very air seemed to spin golden with each surge of memory, aether humming between their forms. “You helped me with my magic. You tackled me out of the way of that void bolt. Today you made sure I could run and fight. All of these things—they’re not what a weapon is, or does. You’re so much more than a weapon. You could be more.”
She meant it, she acknowledged to herself, their past interactions blurring together. It caused a sensation that felt like surrendering, there in the hollows of her heart. She meant every word.
Alaric’s fingers tightened in her hair, a gentle tugging that lifted her head from the crook of his neck. She blinked down at his pale, anguished features, her pulse quickening as it was caught in the stormy undertow lurking in the haze-ridden depths of his dark eyes.
“Be kind to me, wife,” he said.
It was a gruff entreaty wrapped up in a voice like smoke, all gravel and valerian, curling halfway between yearning and madness. She froze at being called that , but then a not altogether unpleasant shiver rippled through her veins as his palm slid along her hair, cupping her nape, exerting just enough pressure to urge her lower.
Talasyn let herself be moved, just as she had done at the Roof of Heaven, in that place of sunlight and snow-white plumerias. Here and now, however, there was no Sevraim to interrupt them as her mouth slanted over his and the world went— soft . Like summer rain.
It was a bad idea. It would always be a bad idea. But Alaric’s lips pressed against hers with quiet hunger, his hands were hot and heavy on her, and his callused fingers curled around the back of her neck, tracing staticky patterns on her spine. He smelled like herbs and sweat, and he was so broad beneath her, offering a taste of an end to loneliness. She surrendered, relaxing in his strong arms, unthinkingly chasing his mouth with her own.
Then he went still.
Am I doing it wrong? In a burst of panic, Talasyn broke the kiss in order to cautiously check on Alaric. His eyes were closed, his breathing even, the line of his mouth slack.
He was asleep.
“You’re an asshole,” she snapped. It echoed through the quiet, lamplit room, but he didn’t so much as stir.
Despite her annoyance, perhaps there was some tenderness in her touch as she reached down to brush strands of his wavy black hair away from his bandaged forehead. She allowed herself this one small gesture, because no one would ever know. Especially him.
Talasyn was awakened by the sound of a Shadow Sever, a faint, sputtering screech, like icefall.
She bolted to a sitting position in Alaric’s bed and peered out the open window into the distance, where the Shadowgate billowed in plumes of smoke at the stark gray edges of the Citadel.
Alaric’s chambers overlooked the building from which the horde of inky chimeras had spewed forth the day before. From its rooftop, a black ship was taking to the air, and it wasn’t long before it glided in the direction of the active Sever. Amidst the slew of legionnaires on the deck, Talasyn could make out a stooped, dark-robed figure with fingers as pale and brittle as twigs clutching the railing.
Gaheris.
It had to be. The Shadowforged circled him protectively, all of them facing outward. Before Talasyn could get a closer look, they cast a dome of obsidian magic, obscuring the entire deck from view.
The emaciated figure remained burned into her mind long after the ship had become a speck sailing past the Citadel’s walls. Talasyn had seen aethergraphs of Gaheris from before the Hurricane Wars, then no more after that. She now saw why. The change in the Night Emperor from those earlier images to this wraithlike Regent was alarming. The might of Gaheris’s aethermancy and the frailty of his physical form were incongruous.
Alaric stirred beside her.
His brow was knitted even in sleep, speaking to the immense pain that he was in. One look at the multitude of bandages she’d done her best with was enough to ignite an ember of fury within her, to have her clenching her fists. She should have hurled a light-woven dagger into his father’s chest while she’d had the chance. She should—
— be leaving now.
Her gaze had happened to slide over the clock on the nightstand, only to zero back in on it with disbelief. Her delegation was supposed to set sail for Nenavar in two hours, and any minute now Jie would be wandering into her room to help her get ready. If Jie found the Lachis’ka missing from a bed that hadn’t been slept in at all, the day after a devastating attack …
Scrambling off Alaric’s mattress, Talasyn had never moved so fast in her life, but she also had never before been stopped from moving so fast, with Alaric lacing their fingers together as soon as her hand brushed against his.
“Where’re you going?” he mumbled into his pillow, eyes still shut. He ran his thumb over the back of her hand in a drowsy caress.
Was this her heart, this racing thing? Her cheeks turning warm, her stomach caught in free fall like a coracle mid-spin—could she still blame the vegetable roll from yesterday?
“Back to Nenavar,” Talasyn whispered. It somehow felt like the hardest thing she’d ever had to say. She extricated her hand from his as gently as she could. “I’ll—I’ll see you there?”
“All right.” His voice was small. Almost boyish. He sounded forlorn and resigned, and she had no idea whether he was dreaming or not. Whether he would remember this exchange upon waking. “See you.”
Talasyn padded quietly out of the room. She didn’t look back, afraid that what she’d find would make her want to stay.