Chapter Nine
C HAPTER N INE
“Emperor Alaric, forgive me, but I don’t understand.”
The unctuous, nasal tone sank barbs into the base of Alaric’s skull, threatening a headache far worse than any that his father’s lesson a few days ago could have inflicted. When he looked up from the map of the Continent’s former Sardovian territories that he and Kesathese High Command were poring over, he was frowning at the officer who had spoken.
“And what nuances of rice distribution are so esoteric to you, Commodore Lisu?” he demanded.
Slender and pointy-faced, with spiked black hair and skin the color of hemlock wood and eyes like darkened amber, Lisu was the youngest member of High Command—a position he had achieved through a blend of sheer cunning and leveraging of his family’s influence.
In the past, Alaric’s sentiments toward Lisu had amounted to nothing more than fleeting contempt. Now that Alaric had ascended to the throne and was forced to work closely with the commodore on a regular basis, however, he was fairly certain that he loathed the man.
If the feeling was mutual, Lisu made no show of it, ducking his head in a slight bow. “I merely wish clarification, Your Majesty, as to why we are distributing rice when we should be focusing on matters of national security. The insurgents—”
“—can be tracked down and dealt with at the same time that we feed our people,” Alaric countered. “One of the many advantages of having thousands of soldiers is that we are able to delegate tasks, Commodore. Not to mention that a starving populace will be more likely to side with these rebels.”
Lisu was unperturbed by Alaric’s reprimand, a vaguely conciliatory smile flashing across his thin lips. “While I defer to His Majesty’s judgment, of course, surely it is within the bounds of duty that I attempt to verify that such a judgment remains unclouded by … more recent allegiances.”
Alaric glanced around the table. The nine other members of High Command sat still, gazes lowered deferentially. He wondered which of them had connived with Lisu to test him like this. His eyes hardened as they darted to Commodore Mathire, who was a foregone conclusion; she had delivered the sariman to Gaheris behind Alaric’s back, and during the gala she’d had no scruples about amusing herself with that grand statement that shadow and light would work together, knowing full well that Gaheris and his Enchanters were scheming to take away Talasyn’s magic.
But Alaric couldn’t discount any of the officers present. They all had their own ambitions, and he knew that they doubted his ability to lead Kesath into a new age. His choice of wife had only made matters worse.
He nearly gave a start when another officer spoke—to rush to Talasyn’s defense.
“Damn shame that your common sense has yet to catch up with that borderline treasonous tongue of yours!” General Vim barked at Commodore Lisu. “Or were you cowering in some little hidey-hole during the attack? Because the rest of us witnessed it, plain as day, when Empress Alunsina slaughtered the insurgents with her magic!”
Vim was a bumbling lout on his best day, but Alaric had never felt better disposed toward him than now. Especially when more than a few officers looked like they might actually agree with the general’s statement.
Alaric pressed his advantage. “The Night Empress is as bound by the terms of the marriage treaty as I am,” he told the room at large. “While she may have once fought for the Allfold, she gave that up when she reclaimed her birthright as the Nenavarene Lachis’ka, and I do believe that any lingering loyalty she might have had to them vanished when they tried to kill her. In addition, she swore before all of you that she would stand with me against my enemies, and it has been made abundantly clear to her what will happen to the Dominion should she renege on that vow. You may trust in her common sense, if nothing else.”
He felt uneasy discussing Talasyn so callously, as though she were a chess piece, but it did the trick and some officers nodded along, Vim the most eagerly. Lisu appeared somewhat incensed that he’d been made the butt of the joke, but Alaric simply considered that a bonus.
The Night Emperor steered his council back to the logistics of providing sacks of rice to the territories whose fields had been destroyed during the war, but it wasn’t long before he was once again interrupted. This time, the culprit was Nordaye, who timidly shuffled into the meeting chamber looking nothing short of terrified.
“I gave strict orders that I was not to be disturbed,” Alaric said coolly.
“Yes, Your Majesty. Apologies, Your Majesty.” There was a slight tremble in the aide’s voice, but he otherwise refrained from dissolving into a puddle of nerves. “However, you instructed us to treat all messages from or pertaining to the Nenavar Dominion as first priority regardless of the circumstances. A messenger eagle has arrived, sir.”
Alaric left the room at a brisk pace, telling himself that he was simply in a hurry to get back to business. In a way, this was true, because he didn’t wish to give High Command the opportunity to gossip and scheme for a second longer than necessary, but he was also eager to hear from Talasyn, who was the only person on Lir who could possibly be sending him letters via the Nenavarene messenger birds.
No, not eager … curious. Yes, that was it. He was curious . He wondered what she could possibly want. That was all. Nothing more.
A few days ago, he’d woken up to find her gone, along with her retinue. Thanks to the valerian root, he had only the haziest recollections of her tending his wounds. But he’d been talkative; he remembered that much at least, how words slipped easily past his lips at each touch of her gentle hands. He was certain that he’d told her the reason for his father’s punishment at some point, before the night had fully blurred into oblivion.
A horrific possibility occurred to Alaric. What if this message wasn’t even from Talasyn? What if something had happened to her on the journey southeast? Another rebel attack—
He walked faster, heart pounding.
The Citadel’s rookery was a tower attached to the High Command building. This domed edifice was honeycombed with holes that let in air and sunlight and through which the skuas of the Kesathese regiments and the ravens of House Ossinast could come and go as they pleased or as communiqués demanded. Inside, the high walls were dotted with craggy ledges tufted with dozens of nests, and most of the space from floor to ceiling was crisscrossed by wooden beams where the birds could perch.
It was a rare commotion that greeted Alaric when he strode in. Over the course of the tower’s long history, the ravens and the skuas had arrived at a begrudging coexistence, but today feathers were flying. A Nenavarene eagle had landed in their midst, and now its wickedly curved talons were wrapped around one of the lowermost perches, a roll of parchment tied to one leg. Several ravens and skuas surrounded it in a whirl of glossy black and dusky brown plumage, cawing and screeching, beating their wings in warning.
The lone eagle was ready for a fight. It was almost the size of a small canoe, easily dwarfing its opponents. The white feathers cresting its head flared out as it moved its neck in snakelike motions. Snakelike, too, were the hisses that it emitted, adding to the deafening cacophony that echoed off stone and wood. Its blue-gray eyes surveyed the other birds with a raptor’s deadly intent.
Nordaye rushed forward, making shooing noises and waving his arms. The ravens and the skuas scattered, gliding all the way up to the ledges, but the eagle—with the murderous rage typical of Nenavarene beasts, from the dragons to the damn cows— lunged .
Nordaye recoiled with a shrill scream, narrowly managing to avoid being disemboweled by the large, powerful beak. The eagle flapped its enormous wings as though about to fly at the aide and peck him to death, but Alaric wisely chose that moment to draw near. The bird went still, cocking its maned head, staring at him. Threads of silver aether flashed within its black pupils, like lightning in the night.
Then it held out its leg and waited with an air of general impatience while Alaric retrieved the message it had carried across the Eversea.
My lord, Talasyn had scrawled on the parchment, in the clumsy Sailor’s Common of one unused to corresponding in that alphabet. Her upbringing would have offered her precious little opportunity to write, perhaps just enough to get by. I am writing because there will be three eclipses next month, in quick succession, and it will be a good time for His Majesty to come to Nenavar for an extended stay as we prepare for the Moonless Dark. I have taken up residence at the castle at Iantas, and it is well equipped to receive you and your household. Some ink stains followed, as though she’d held the stylus over the parchment for a beat too long, torn about what to scribble next, and then: I hope you are feeling better.
She’d signed it with her birth name. Alunsina Ivralis. Alaric frowned as he studied the unfamiliar shape of it, a screen slid between them to obscure her from his sight, just like when he’d met her as the Lachis’ka in the Roof of Heaven’s throne hall after the Hurricane Wars.
The letter was stilted. Formal. Had her grandmother told her what to write? Had she told her family what Gaheris had done to him? Prince Elagbi seemed harmless enough, but it was a given that Queen Urduja would file it away as ammunition.
Talasyn wouldn’t have been inclined to keep it a secret from her grandmother and her father had Alaric asked her to, anyway. Their marriage was purely a strategic maneuver, one in which both their courts would happily seize any opportunity to gain the upper hand, and that was simply the way of it. He didn’t need their alliance to be anything more than that.
He only wished that he felt a little less vulnerable. A little less bereft.
“Write back to the Night Empress,” he instructed Nordaye. “Tell her that I will join her at Iantas in a month’s time.” He noticed that the eagle had now fixed its keen gaze on the skua nests above, where plump, fuzzy, straw-colored chicks were blithely chirping away, and he added, “You’d better feed her messenger first, though.”
Nordaye gulped, turning as white as a sheet.
From a ramshackle assortment of nipah-palm huts, time had turned the Sardovian encampment in the Storm God’s Eye into a suggestion of a city. There were pastured animals and a communal longhouse at the very center, and most of the buildings now sported upper levels. But the hulking shell of the Nautilus still reigned supreme, casting a shadow over everything in the moonlight.
Talasyn had been too impatient to arrange for a clandestine meeting such as the one that took place in Lidagat. She’d sailed to the Storm God’s Eye on Surakwel’s yacht almost as soon as she returned to Nenavar and contacted him. Then she’d ordered the young lord to wait on the beach while she trekked through the mangroves alone. She needed to talk to Vela, just the two of them.
She’d sent one of the castle eagles ahead of the yacht; Vela was waiting for her at the edge of the settlement. The Amirante gave a brisk nod as Talasyn approached.
Talasyn proceeded to discuss her sighting of Gaheris—leaving the exact details vague—as well as her encounter with Darius and the presence of a resistance movement. Vela bore the news of Darius with her usual stoicism, but it was no easy task to describe the look that came over her face at the mention of the resistance. It was the exhaustion of someone who had been hiding in the mangrove swamps of the Storm God’s Eye for the last several months. It was the relief of someone learning that she and her cause hadn’t been forgotten by the people left behind.
Talasyn was loath to watch that softness vanish, but she had no choice. She couldn’t put it off anymore. “There’s something else that you should know, Amirante. The resistance attacked during my coronation.” Vela’s features froze, and Talasyn had to duck her head as she relayed the whole sorry tale, fear and shame eating away at her with every word. One of the three remaining Sardovian stormships gone. Dozens of rebels dead, five by her own hand, and Hiras and the rest captured. The losses were too harrowing to encompass in simple words.
“But we can break the prisoners out,” Talasyn hurriedly continued when Vela said nothing. “I learned that they’re being kept in the eastern wing. It’s heavily guarded, but there are no Shadowforged patrolling within, and it’s beside a mess hall, so I was thinking that we could sneak in through the kitchen cellars—”
“Talasyn.” The Amirante held up a hand. “It wasn’t your fault. There was nothing that you could have done, and you had to save yourself. And if you’d let Alaric Ossinast die that day, we would all be dead, come the Moonless Dark.”
“I can make up for it,” Talasyn said desperately. “I’ll join the rescue attempt—”
“There will be no rescue attempt,” said Vela. “Not on my end. We need to conserve all of our resources, and Kesath cannot know that I am alive and well in Nenavar until we make our move.”
Talasyn couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “But Hiras and the others, they’re being tortured even as we speak,” she protested. “We can’t just let it happen .”
“It’s unfortunate, but our hands are tied. Surely you must understand that, deep down.” It was jarring how much Vela reminded Talasyn of Urduja in this moment. Cold and resolute. Unyielding. “Their suffering won’t be in vain, and neither will the deaths at the plaza, because each fallen rebel helped you gain the Night Empire’s trust. They will all be avenged when we reclaim the Continent.”
We were chess pieces in her war, Talasyn remembered Darius saying. Purely expendable.
But she did understand Vela’s point of view, didn’t she? Pulling off a prison breakout would be a logistical and strategic nightmare. She’d only been pushing for it to make herself feel better. She hadn’t considered how much she would be asking of Vela, how grave the risk would be to Sardovia’s survival.
So she swallowed her retorts and her pleas to save Hiras and the other captives. And she knew full well that her silence damned them all, a burden that she would carry for the rest of her days.
There was something else she had to talk to Vela about.
“Amirante,” she began tentatively, “about Alaric …”
The way Vela’s right eye flashed would have made any soldier shake in their boots. But Talasyn was no longer a soldier—Vela had said so herself—and she plunged ahead. “He was about to kill Hiras, but I begged him not to, and he didn’t. And his father tortured him for it. With shadow magic.” She hadn’t told anyone else this. It felt wrong to reveal Alaric’s secret now. But Vela might have some insight. “His body was covered in wounds. Gaheris is cruel even to him, and …”
She trailed off, because the Amirante looked— unsurprised .
“I know what his father does to him,” said Vela, and Talasyn reeled. “Apart from the Severs, pain is how Kesath’s Shadowforged tap into their aethermancy and grow stronger. You asked me once why I didn’t join the Shadowforged Legion, and I told you that I didn’t want to be the person that it would have required me to become. So I kept my abilities a secret.” She heaved a sigh at Talasyn’s stunned nod. “The whole truth is this: I’d been a helmsman for about a year when the Shadowgate first poured forth from my fingertips. I went to the Citadel to inform the Legion, as Kesathese law required.
“Gaheris and Alaric were sparring in one of the courtyards, and I stopped to watch. This was several years before the Hurricane Wars, and Alaric couldn’t have been older than ten. A child facing the Night Emperor at the height of his power. I watched as Gaheris’s magic overwhelmed his son. I watched as he yelled at Alaric to get up and fight like a man. And the crown prince did. Blood was running down his shirt, and it looked like his arm was broken, but he wasn’t even crying. Just bracing for more.” Vela was speaking in a near-whisper now, as though still aghast at the memory even after all these years.
Talasyn could see it, a little boy who had not yet grown into his sharp features, relentlessly assaulted by his father again and again in the midst of that drab gray city of unforgiving stone. She thought about the person that boy had become—her husband, with his sullen silences and occasional wry remarks, with his moments of gentleness that Gaheris had failed to stamp out. She thought about his cold anger, how he never raised his voice even when he was frustrated—such a strange thing to her once, but now she understood why.
Be kind to me, Alaric had said. He’d been at her mercy, broken and bruised and the valerian ensuring that he had no defenses left, and that was what he’d asked of her.
Be kind to me.
“Right then and there, I decided that I wanted to be no part of that,” Vela solemnly concluded. “I left the Citadel and went back to my post, and I aethermanced only in secret, never revealing to anyone that I, too, was Shadowforged—until the day I defected and used my magic against the soldiers chasing us.”
“Why didn’t you tell me the whole story before?” Talasyn couldn’t quite keep the accusation out of her tone. She was reminded too much of Elagbi and Urduja withholding information about the Voidfell from her, a fresh cut over an old scar.
“What good would it have done?” Vela countered. “That boy grew up to become the Master of the Shadowforged Legion, defeating all the others in trials that lasted for days. He finished his father’s war—or so he thinks—with little remorse. Regardless of how horribly he is mistreated, he is what Gaheris has made him. What would be the use of having sympathy for—” Whatever she saw on Talasyn’s face made her abruptly break off. “ Do you have sympathy for him?” she demanded.
“N-no,” Talasyn stammered. An inner voice screamed at her for the lie that it was, hollowing her out from within. “But since he didn’t kill Hiras, and given how Gaheris treats him, I was thinking that maybe—maybe he could be brought over to our side.”
She had never really given any thought to how ludicrous such a statement would sound. It hung between her and Vela awkwardly, her secret hope laid bare. So secret that she hadn’t even been able to admit it to herself until now.
Vela stared at her with nothing short of horror. “Do you honestly believe that a moment of humanity can overcome a lifetime of conditioning? That the Night Emperor will choose us over Kesath?”
Talasyn couldn’t bear to disappoint the Amirante. The woman who had taken her in, who had held Sardovia together for so long. Who was keeping the possibility of its continued survival alive still. The night in Alaric’s bedroom felt so far away, drowned out by harsh reality, by the burbling of the mangrove swamp and the aether flares.
But she had to at least try to make her case.
“He—he cares what I think,” she said. “He’s searching for Khaede at my request. He was telling me about his plans to … to improve the economy …” Oh, that was weak. Vela blinked, and Talasyn had never felt more stupid. “If I can just, I don’t know, convince him—”
“Listen to me.” Vela gripped Talasyn’s hand, tightly enough to hurt. “No matter what Alaric Ossinast says, no matter what understanding the two of you have reached, or might reach in the days to come, he will never go against his father’s wishes. His loyalty is to Kesath, as yours should be to Sardovia. Once he discovers that you—that we —have been playing him for a fool, he will not hesitate to kill you, as he tried to do the first time you met, and the next couple of times after. He can never find out, not until the final hour when it’s too late for him to do anything about it, or the consequences will be disastrous for all of us. Talasyn, please be careful.”