Chapter Ten
C HAPTER T EN
One month later
“What are the chances,” Sevraim drawled, “that this is some kind of ambush in the making?”
He was lounging against the railings on the deck of a black Kesathese shallop gliding over the islands of Nenavar on fumes of emerald-green wind magic. He had threatened to throw a fit if Alaric made him wear his helm in this humid weather, and so his bare face was tipped up to the tropical sun, his eyes half shut in languid contentment.
From where he stood at the airship’s prow, Alaric shot Sevraim a glare that spoke warning in volumes, but the latter was undaunted. “Do think about it,” he went on. “We were supposed to meet the Lachis’ka in Iantas, but Dominion coracles intercepted us, and now we’re following them somewhere else, all while our stormship is at their mercy, docked at their port. It’s suspicious.”
The legionnaire’s words were belied by his teasing grin. Alaric couldn’t resist pointing out, “It’s going to be your problem if your suspicions turn out to be correct, you know.”
“A bodyguard’s work is never done,” Sevraim agreed. “His Majesty ought to grant me a title.”
“On top of all the other names I already call you?”
Sevraim threw back his head and let out a guffaw that was even more spirited than usual. Alaric could blame neither him nor the shallop’s crew, who looked over in amusement, as they would never have done within the borders of the Night Empire. There was a certain lightness in being here in Nenavar—the crisp blue skies and balmy winds, the glowing sands and gilded cities and rainforests as thick as storm clouds—after the cold and damp of a Kesathese spring.
It would have been picturesque, if not for the … audience .
The previous times Alaric had sailed over this archipelago had either been at ungodly hours or when civilian airships were grounded for security reasons. It was afternoon now, however, and the Dominion had apparently come to the conclusion that Alaric wouldn’t do anything as gauche as shoot down random Nenavarene vessels when he was married to their Lachis’ka.
Granted, the Iantas squadron of moth coracles, with their opalescent hulls and winglike sails and bronze cannons, was sufficient to deter other airships from gliding too close. But it didn’t stop the people on the assortment of dugouts, pleasure yachts, and cargo freighters from gawking at Alaric even as they kept a wide berth. He could see a great number of them whispering among themselves as their ships, with sails in a rainbow of colors and emblems fluttering in the breeze, darted along hopelessly disorganized lanes, cutting one another off, racing forward with neither rhyme nor reason.
Alaric was glad for the wolf’s-snarl mask that granted the illusion of armor to protect against Nenavarene gossip, but he also wondered if he would be better off without it. He wasn’t difficult to spot, even from this distance. Curiosity and apprehension colored the commonfolk’s faces while they tried to reconcile this monstrous image with their Lachis’ka’s consort.
And speaking of Talasyn …
Her face filtered into his thoughts like sunlight through a window. He frowned at the fluttering sensation in his chest. Though it had happened every time he thought of her in the last month, it remained odd to him all the same.
Alaric chalked up his discomfort to nerves. He was anxious, certainly, about his father’s plans. There was still time to dissuade Gaheris, especially since Kesathese experiments with the sariman had yet to yield any promising results, but Alaric was also worried about how Talasyn would react if she ever found out.
She would never believe that he’d had nothing to do with the experiments. And even if the gods smiled upon him and he managed to keep it from her, it was still an immense betrayal, stealing that sariman from its native shores and subjecting it to such cruelty. But there was a way to make amends. There had to be. He just had to find it.
So many things were up in the air. So many possible paths the future could take—most of them disastrous. But at the center of it all was the present moment, his nervousness at the prospect of seeing her again. The former enemy who had saved him on the battlefield. The first person to ever tend to him after his father’s lessons. The wife he kept dreaming about in a blurred vision of freckles and golden eyes and gentle hands.
After a while—after several more terrified looks from passing airships—Alaric came to a decision. He removed his mask and handed it to one of the crew, for storage with the rest of his personal effects. The mask was a lethal promise to the Sardovian Allfold, but a true alliance with the Nenavarene could not stem from fear.
Also, the rush of fresh air fanning over his newly bare face was a relief in the sweltering heat, although he would never admit it to Sevraim.
The moth coracles holding up the vanguard eventually pulled into a swift descent, with the rest of the convoy following, over Vasiyas, centermost of the seven main islands—and the island where the Void Sever was located. A sense of foreboding slowly began to prickle at Alaric’s spine. The Voidfell had flared up earlier that day, its amethyst glow illuminating the dawn. He had seen it as his stormship approached Nenavarene waters. Had something happened to Talasyn? Had she gotten caught up in the outburst somehow? Was that why his ship had been rerouted?
Alaric was numb by the time the convoy docked near a dense grove of coconut palms at the outskirts of a small village. The landing grid already contained several moth coracles but was mostly occupied by an outrigger warship that dwarfed the Kesathese shallop. A member of Talasyn’s royal guard—distinguishable from the other soldiers milling about by her bulky armor molded to resemble dragon bones—was waiting on the ground. Once Alaric had disembarked, she closed a spike-knuckled, gauntleted fist over her chest in the characteristic Dominion salute.
“Where is she?” Alaric demanded, fear constricting the inside of his chest.
The woman arched a brow at his tone—a subtle reminder that, for the Nenavarene, Alaric was a consort within their matriarchal system before he was the Night Emperor of Kesath. She was almost his height, and her dark hair was pulled back severely from her square-jawed face. “The Lachis’ka has instructed me to bring you to her, Your Majesty. I am Nalam Gao, kaptan of Her Grace’s Lachis-dalo, at your service.”
Alaric and Sevraim followed Gao past the coconut palms and into the village, which was little more than a collection of huts with tall, steeply pitched straw roofs and walls fashioned from geometric-patterned bamboo mats woven together. The village had looked rather ordinary from the landing grid, but as they ventured further in, past the first few dwellings, it soon became apparent that something had gone horribly wrong.
It was the smell that hit Alaric first. A pervading rankness of sulfur and infection, haunted by a sickly sweet undercurrent. He knew it immediately; it was the stench of battle’s aftermath, as pungent as though the dead were festering in the heat of a Continental summertime. Made much, much worse by Nenavar’s humidity.
However, no combat had taken place in this little village. Its inhabitants had been running away. Their remains littered the dirt road winding between the huts. Chickens, pigs, goats, and humans, all desiccated husks of their former selves, charred black as though they’d been rotting for sennights, fallen over one another in the grisly aftermath of a futile stampede. Not a single blade of green grass remained; not on the roadside, not in the fenced backyards where fruits had blackened on the vine and flowers had shriveled in their beds.
In the distance was the sound of wailing.
“The crater where the Voidfell is located lies only a few kilometers to the north,” Gao quietly explained. “It activated shortly before sunrise, roaring through the villagers’ fields and then their homes. The Lachis’ka sailed from Iantas as soon as we heard. No one was expecting it. The scale of this conflagration, this far off from the sevenfold lunar eclipse, is unprecedented. I’m afraid that it’s a sign of things to come.”
This year promises to be the worst one yet, Queen Urduja had told Alaric. Only two months from now, the Void Sever would have grown only more and more volatile, affecting a wider and wider area, until it crossed the Eversea and subjected the Continent to the same fate as this village.
Trailing after Gao along a bend in the road, Alaric finally saw his wife. With the Lachis-dalo and other Dominion soldiers hanging back to form a secure perimeter, the survivors had gathered in the village square and Talasyn was in their midst, speaking softly to them as they wept and wrung their hands and tried in vain to console their crying children. Dressed in a cotton smock and breeches, her chestnut braid draped over one shoulder, she hardly looked the part of royalty, but there was no mistaking how the equally bedraggled people clustered around her, hanging on her every word, watching her every move with both hope and despair on their faces.
Those at the edge of the crowd noticed Alaric first. Word of his appearance then spread like a wave, the turning heads, the widened eyes, the harsh intakes of breath. He wanted to reassure them that … that what ? That he meant no harm? Wouldn’t his fleet have done this, and more, had Urduja Silim not offered up the heir to her throne in marriage? Hadn’t his father’s stormships already inflicted death and destruction on the many civilian settlements of the Continent?
What right did Alaric have to promise these people that they were safe with him around?
But when Talasyn spotted him across the sea of villagers, her countenance showed none of the anger, none of the fear. Something soft and tentative broke across her features, and he was walking toward her before he even realized it, caught in a waking dream. Somewhere at the edges, the Nenavarene scurried aside and tugged one another out of his way, as though he carried the plague, but he knew only her.
He came to a stop in front of her and had no idea what to do next. She stared up at him as though they hadn’t seen each other in years.
“How are—” he started to ask.
“I thought—” she said at the same time.
They faltered into silence. The tips of Alaric’s ears burned as he gestured for her to go ahead.
“I thought it would be better to have you brought here,” Talasyn mumbled, “rather than have you wait around in Iantas suspecting that you were going to get ambushed.”
He resolved never to let her find out what Sevraim had japed about earlier. He nodded instead.
Talasyn’s brow furrowed slightly at the villagers’ wary expressions. Then she squared her shoulders and looped her arm through Alaric’s. A show of unity , he realized, almost dazed by her sudden touch. By the feel of her tucked against his side.
She addressed the villagers in the Dominion tongue, all flowing syllables and lilt. Alaric caught his name, as well as Iantas , but not much else. And he watched as the audience’s wariness transformed into cautious optimism that grew the more Talasyn spoke. A few even cheered.
“What did you tell them?” Alaric asked out of the corner of his mouth.
“I said that we ”—Talasyn’s grip tightened on his arm—“insist that they reside with us at Iantas, where they shall want for nothing, until their fields are arable again. And I also promised that you and I will do everything in our power to stop the Voidfell on the night of reckoning.”
Talasyn put her soldiers to work. The Lachis-dalo and the coracle helmsmen and the crew of Iantas’s lone warship were all dispatched to help the villagers pack up their personal effects and bury their dead. The animal corpses could be taken care of later by the battalion that would be sent to clean up, but over twenty people had died and Talasyn wasn’t about to force their bereaved families to evacuate without the proper rites being observed.
They had to move fast, though. There was no telling when the Voidfell would flare up again.
Kaptan Gao had more than a few reservations about the survivors transferring to Iantas. “Your Grace, shouldn’t the Zahiya-lachis be consulted first?” she asked as Talasyn bustled past her with a shovel.
“What for?” Talasyn shot back, hardly breaking stride. “The castle was ceded to my husband as my dowry, so it’s ours to do with as we please.”
Besides, she’d already sent an aetherwave transmission to the Roof of Heaven, and no one had come out here to join her from there. The silence probably meant that she had her grandmother’s blessing to deal with this situation by herself.
Alaric and Sevraim had retreated to the northern edge of the village. Talasyn approached to find the two of them wordlessly studying the brown-black expanse of sugarcane fields spread out before them, gone to rot. On the horizon, wreathed in clouds, was the imposing, roughly cone-shaped silhouette of Aktamasok—the Dragon’s Fang, the ancient volcano that spewed out void magic instead of ash and lava. Its rugged slopes were a deep coal-tar hue, with no sign of the rich foliage that carpeted other Nenavarene peaks.
And now that lifelessness had spread, decimating the land that was the village’s main source of income and wiping out their livestock.
“Here.” Talasyn thrust the shovel at Sevraim. “They’re digging graves. Go and help.”
For once, the legionnaire had no witty remarks. He took the shovel from her and left to do as she instructed, and she replaced him at Alaric’s side.
“Are you angry?” Talasyn ventured. “That I’m bringing the villagers to the castle?” It was technically his castle, after all.
Alaric’s gaze flickered to her, irises flashing silver in the places where they caught the sunlight. “I’m not angry.”
“Annoyed, then.”
“No. You’re doing the right thing. The fair thing.” He nodded toward the ruined fields to emphasize his point. “Compared to what they’ve suffered, us being a little crowded at the castle is of no consequence.”
She hadn’t realized until then how badly she’d been hoping that he would agree with her decision. There’s a heart there, somewhere, she mused as her own twinged with a poignant ache. Maybe the Amirante is wrong. Maybe he can still—
“How can I be of assistance?” There was a piercing note of earnestness in Alaric’s tone. “What do you need me to do?”
Be on my side at the very end.
Talasyn swallowed. She forced herself into the present, into the sea of death, into the shadow of the Dragon’s Fang.
“Come on.” She turned away from him, away from things she could never say, and back to the task at hand. “We need to help load the ship.”
Although the hundred surviving villagers could theoretically squeeze into the Iantas warship, there were their rattan baskets and bulging cloth packs to consider, as well as the livestock that had managed to outrun the Voidfell’s wrath.
Talasyn solved the problem by decreeing that half of the luggage and a few of the animals would be stored on the Night Emperor’s shallop for the duration of the journey.
“We’ll tip over,” Sevraim opined as he stood on the landing grid and watched with an air of unbridled skepticism while a Kesathese crewman timidly led a sun buffalo up the ramp. “I’m not sure if we’ll even be able to launch.”
“It’ll be fine.” Alaric wasn’t all that convinced either, but with a rattan basket filled with damp laundry clutched in one arm and a disgruntled chicken tucked under the other, he had no patience for trying to allay Sevraim’s fears. “Stop complaining and help me with … this.”
Sevraim took the orange-and-white chicken. He glanced up at Talasyn on the deck of the Nenavarene warship; she was hauling packs into the cargo hold and barking orders at her men in the same breath. “Our new empress is rather bossy for someone so short.”
The color drained from Alaric’s face as the memory of his wedding night blazed to the forefront of his mind with all the force of a punch to the gut. He knew just how bossy Talasyn could be; he had firsthand experience—
“And now I’ve just been shat on,” Sevraim grumbled. The chicken nestled in his sleeves issued a satisfied little cluck.
Alaric followed Sevraim up the ramp and onto the shallop’s deck, where he navigated a careful path through the maze of luggage and farm animals until he found a place to sit—on a pile of rattan baskets, beside the tethered sun buffalo. Talasyn joined him a few minutes later, plopping down beside him with an exhausted huff.
“My ship’s full,” she said in response to his questioning look. At the sound of her voice, the sun buffalo lowed softly, and Talasyn laughed. “Well, this is familiar.”
The sun buffalo was half the size of the swamp buffalo, its wild, semi-aquatic cousin that had chased Alaric and Talasyn through the Belian jungle in a murderous rage. Instead of the colossal and sickle-shaped horns of that beast, the sun buffalo’s horns were slanted daggers pulled back flat against its broad skull. The swamp buffalo’s red eyes would lock onto its target with eerie menace, but this tame relative regarded its surroundings with an affable mien, happily chewing on its cud as the shallop lifted into the air.
Alaric spent the next half-hour staring at his booted feet. The silence between him and Talasyn had become suffocating, punctuated only by the hum of wind magic, the footsteps and brisk communication of the crew, the steady clucking of myriad chickens, and the occasional goatish bray. He yearned to talk to her, but what could he say to his wife of political convenience, a wife he had already inconveniently orgasmed with? A wife he had let tend his injuries and to whom he had revealed his deepest secrets when he should have been keeping her at arm’s length?
He couldn’t even take any cues from Sevraim; the infinitely more socially adept legionnaire was all the way across the deck, sunk into a state of complete and utter despondency as chickens and ducks pecked at him.
“I’m glad it didn’t scar,” Talasyn blurted out.
Her fists had been curled in her lap, and when Alaric turned to her, she brought one hand up to her forehead, indicating the spot where his father’s magic had cut him.
It stung, the reminder that she’d seen him at his lowest, his most humiliated. He thought about all the other scars on his body, all the times that his failures had left a permanent mark. Had she been disgusted by them, that night in his chambers? Who wouldn’t be?
“Yes, a husband grizzled with battle scars might be a point of pride on the Continent, but it’s not quite all the rage here in the Dominion,” he remarked in caustic words dredged up from the dark within him that had no place here in these sundrenched heavens, next to a girl lit from within.
Talasyn blinked, her pink lips parting in confusion. It couldn’t have been clearer that such a sentiment had never crossed her mind, and Alaric fought back a stab of regret. He braced himself for her ire, for yet another heated quarrel.
She crossed her arms and— looked at him. “Those weren’t battle wounds.”
He grimaced. She wasn’t allowing him to sink into self-pity, but neither was she letting him off the hook for thinking so poorly of her. He could appreciate that, and even be grateful for it, but it was still hard to force out the “I apologize” that eventually emerged, half choked.
“Thank you,” Talasyn said stiffly.
“Thank you ,” he countered in a rush, desperate to make her forget his surliness of moments prior, “for what you did at the Citadel. I hope that I wasn’t too difficult a patient. If I said or did anything foolish—”
“You don’t remember ?”
“Not much after the valerian,” he admitted. Her nose scrunched up and he continued, with some alarm, “Was I untoward in any way?”
She looked incensed , and he started to panic, thinking he’d somehow made things worse, but it must have only been a trick of the light, for her expression was quick to smoothen and she shook her head.
“No,” Talasyn mumbled. “You were no more cantankerous than usual.”
Alaric’s lips gave a reluctant twitch. “What you did,” he repeated, overcome by the sense of vague affection that he only ever felt around her, “that was more than anyone else ever …”
She bit her lip, her features crumpling with a pained sorrow that went far too deep for what she knew of his situation. Then she placed her hand over his, where it lay on the strips of woven rattan between them. He was struck dumb by the gentleness of the gesture, by how each touch of her slim fingers burned right through the leather of his gauntlets.
“Alaric,” she began, and his heart soared at the sound of his name in her voice. Yes, what is it? every drop of blood in his body seemed to ask, one finger lifting as though of its own accord to curl around hers, What is it, anything—
A crewman beat the gong mounted on the quarterdeck by the ship’s wheel, releasing a metallic bellow that thoroughly shattered the moment while signaling the beginning of the descent.
Talasyn stood up and, after wrestling his whirling mind into some semblance of order, so did Alaric. They clutched the railing for balance as the shallop pulled into a slow dive ahead of the warship, approaching a small island just off the Vasiyas coastline. Iantas’s shores of quartz and coral sand gleamed snow-white against the azure waters of the Eversea. At its center, surrounded by stately coconut palms, was the eponymous castle of pink-veined granite, bristling with spires and pointed arches and flying buttresses. The riotous facade resembled an ocean’s worth of spiny murex shells clumped together, laden with carvings of dancing nature spirits and opalescent mother-of-pearl windowpanes.
Talasyn flashed Alaric a small, hopeful smile. “Pretty, isn’t it?”
Strands of chestnut hair had spilled loose from her braid and were blowing in the wind. The sun brought out the gold in her eyes and danced atop the freckles on her softly rounded cheeks. He was looking at her when he said, “Yes.”