Chapter Nineteen
C HAPTER N INETEEN
Talasyn would never admit it to Alaric in a million years—not even if they lived long enough for all lands to sink beneath the Eversea—but she dozed off during her shift. One minute she was staring at the lake, and then the next she was jolted awake by a droplet of water that had most likely collected along the tip of a stalactite before splattering on her cheek.
Panic came first, a bright flare. Her limbs seized and she half expected to be neck-deep in the flood, but instead she opened her eyes to morning light and the absence of the lake.
She cautiously peeked over the edge of the rock shelf. The walls sloped down into a pit about ten feet deep; there was still water at the very bottom, but the rest had drained through the other tunnels that ringed the pit and flowed back out to sea with the retreat of the storm surge, on the inhale of low tide.
The lantern had burned all night. Its aether core was flickering, the magic close to spent. Talasyn turned to Alaric, who was fast asleep, half of his face hidden in the bedroll. A gentle shake to his shoulder was not enough to rouse him. He had been tired, despite last night’s proclamation. Stubborn man.
Granted, his profile looked more like that of a boy in this moment. His mouth was relaxed, rather than set in a perennial frown. A shock of black hair fell across his pale cheek, and her fingers twitched from how badly they yearned to brush it back.
I’m glad you’re alive.
The thought nudged at her heart so quietly, like a little thief hopping some garden fence. She was thankful that the storm hadn’t claimed him, thankful that the ocean hadn’t taken its due. She didn’t know what she would have done if …
He cracked one eye open.
Before Talasyn could back away, before she could come up with a plausible explanation for why she’d been staring at him all mooncalfed, Alaric smiled.
It was nothing more than a drowsy lifting of the corner of his mouth, offering only the briefest glimpse of a slightly crooked incisor.
It was devastating .
Talasyn was rooted to the spot. The sight of Alaric’s lazy grin went through her like thunder. It was a lesson in being careful what she wished for. She had been curious to see that smile, hadn’t she? And now her brain had stalled and her stomach was doing somersaults.
“Morning,” he murmured, his voice raspy from sleep. He lifted one hand toward her face, but it froze halfway, the bliss in his expression replaced by something not dissimilar to horror.
She was slower to recoil. And that, too, was its own kind of defeat.
“Had a pleasant dream, did you?” Talasyn opted for flippancy as she began packing up their campsite. It had to have been very good indeed for him to smile like that.
“My dreams are none of your concern.”
And who exactly had starred in them, eliciting such groggy tenderness from the fearsome Night Emperor? Who had he mistaken her for when he woke? Who had he wished her to be?
Because there was no possible way he’d been thinking of her when he smiled like that. She wasn’t that person to him.
Talasyn kicked a piece of eggshell into the pit. Alaric had sworn to her, on Belian, that he would be faithful despite the solely practical nature of their marriage, but that hardly meant that his affections didn’t lie elsewhere, even if he never acted on them. One of these days he was going to regret his vow. If he didn’t already.
She shouldn’t care. She shouldn’t. But she couldn’t figure out how not to.
She made him turn around while she swapped his tunic for yesterday’s clothes. They were damp and somewhat stiff from all the salt, but they would do. She averted her gaze as he changed into a fresh black undershirt and kept it averted because the defined muscles of his bare arms and the way the fabric clung to his chest drove her to distraction.
“We ought to leave while the way’s clear,” Talasyn said, after she’d tossed Alaric’s tunic into the leather pack that he was now slinging over his shoulders. “No telling if the storm will pick up again.”
The Shadowgate whizzed past her in the form of a grappling hook, sinking into the wall by the grotto entrance. Alaric held out his free hand expectantly, only to blink as Talasyn forged her own radiant version.
“I had a good instructor,” she couldn’t resist teasing.
And it wasn’t that she was holding out for some compliment on her prowess, but it would have been nice to hear. However, he just grunted, and the proffered hand swept out in a curt “after you” gesture.
She hastened to leap off the rock shelf and swing over the pit to the grotto entrance so that he wouldn’t see how puzzled and put-off she was by his behavior. He had been free enough with his praise when she aethermanced that first solid shield …
Without the flood currents to carry her through the Mouth, Talasyn found the trek arduous, a combination of scrambling over rockfalls, crouching when the limestone ceiling hung low to the floor, and shimmying up narrow vertical shafts. Through it all, Alaric was a dour presence behind her, always there to give her a boost whenever she needed it but otherwise as stiffly silent as the grave.
The storm surge had left the cave system smelling like salt and fish. Tendrils of seaweed clung to Talasyn as she walked. Higher up, closer to the exit, there were shallow, overflowing pools where the ocean had not completely receded. They eventually led to the river trickling in from the cave entrance, which was now a peaceful, almost somnolent thing ringed in daylight.
The light didn’t hurt Talasyn’s eyes as much as she’d thought it would after spending so much time in the darkness of the Mouth. On the contrary, she had the sensation of soaking it up, as though she were a plant in the early morning. Her visits to the Light Sever had bestowed on her a higher tolerance of sun, in the same way that Alaric could navigate without it.
It made her think, with sadness, of Ideth Vela. All of the Continent’s Shadow Severs were located on the Kesathese half, and the Sardovian Amirante had never been able to refine her shadow magic to the point of gaining that ability. An aethermancer was nothing without their nexus point.
Alaric and Talasyn walked along the river and out of the Mouth of Night. It had stopped raining and the wind was less bitter, although the heavens remained relentlessly iron-gray.
The Kesathese shallop, predictably, had been tossed onto its side when the storm surge flooded the beach and the gale tore through, and a mooring rope had come loose. The vessel was a limp, pathetic sight on the white sand, against a backdrop of uprooted coconut palms.
It was too heavy for two people to upturn. They would break their backs even trying. And Talasyn’s moth coracle—hopefully still safe where she’d docked it atop the cliff—couldn’t accommodate both of them in its well.
“I’ll contact Lady Bairung for assistance,” said Talasyn. Chal was House Matono’s domain, and Bairung would be all too eager to ensure that the Night Emperor and the Lachis’ka were indebted to her—as well as to have another tidbit of juicy gossip to share with the other noblewomen.
At Alaric’s nod, Talasyn hoisted herself up the shallop’s now-horizontal mast, using it as leverage to clamber up railings flipped sideways until she reached the aetherwave transceiver on the quarterdeck.
“You’re going to fall,” Alaric called out, sounding markedly unhappy. He dropped his pack and readied to catch her.
“Bet?” From where she dangled on one arm, Talasyn reached out to turn a knob on the transceiver. “I used to climb all the time, this is hardly—”
The transceiver sparked .
Perhaps waterlogged, perhaps jostled within their nest of circuits or damaged in the crash, the Tempestroad-infused aether hearts within the device emitted a miniature lightning storm that flowed out through the hinges. A sharp shock shooting up Talasyn’s right wrist jolted her, and suddenly, just like that, she was plummeting to the ground, the world a rush of sand and ocean.
Alaric seized her out of the air and pulled her to his chest, with one arm wrapped around her torso and the other tucked under her knees. It was as though the lightning had lingered in her system, spun out into threads of static. She felt small and safe in his grasp.
“Thanks,” she said, breathless.
Alaric swallowed.
Then he scowled , hastily deposited her onto her feet on the sand, and stepped away.
“The transceiver’s broken.” Talasyn was stating the obvious, but she was rattled. He’d barely said a word to her after waking up. “We can use the one on my ship, but it’s all the way up there.” She gestured to the clifftop.
“Don’t let me keep you.” His gaze swiveled to the ocean, where it stayed. “After you make contact, you may go ahead. Back to Belian, or Iantas, or wherever you please. I’ll wait for help to arrive.”
“I am the help that arrived,” Talasyn wryly pointed out. “Besides, don’t you want company?”
“I don’t need it,” he said tersely, almost snapping at her. “And you have better things to do.”
“I can’t just leave you here—”
“You have managed to before. I’ve no doubt that you will again with little trouble.”
Regret spasmed across his features the moment the words left his mouth. His hands clenched into fists.
I’ve missed something, she thought. Something important.
She stepped into his field of vision. He could have just continued looking over the top of her head, but he didn’t. His gray eyes flickered to her face, as though he was surprised that she’d come near.
“Alaric,” Talasyn said cautiously, “what’s wrong? You’ve been in a mood all morning.” He made no response. She brightened at a possible solution. “We haven’t had breakfast yet, we should—”
“I’m not hungry.”
Talasyn was fast coming to the unfortunate conclusion that she couldn’t stand it when Alaric was mad and she had no idea what she could have done to goad him. At a loss, she recalled Niamha’s lesson on how to make a man melt. She was hardly dressed for the occasion in her salt-encrusted garments, with her bedraggled hair and the cave grime sticking to her skin, but the Nenavarene Lachis’ka was still the Lachis’ka no matter what she looked like. She could do this. She could harness her people’s legendary charm and soften her husband’s temper.
“Maybe you’ll be less cranky once you’ve had something to eat,” Talasyn suggested. Remembering what Niamha had taught her, she allowed a vague smile to soften the corners of her lips as she peered up at Alaric through her lashes.
The stare that he leveled at her was one of abject confusion. “What’s wrong with your face? Are you in pain?”
She had experienced her fair share of embarrassing gaffes where he was concerned, but this was by far the absolute worst of the lot. This went beyond the hot flush of humiliation and beyond the paralyzing stab of regret and all the way out the other side into the desire to immediately become one with the spirit world.
It was also the end of her patience. Not that she’d had a lot to begin with.
“Never mind!” Talasyn snapped. “You’re impossible!”
Alaric’s brow creased. “What—”
“You don’t—you don’t react appropriately to anything!” Her irate tone mingled with the beating of the waves. “I bandage your wounds and you kiss me, then fall asleep when I kiss you back and you forget it ever happened. I write you a letter and you have your aide reply. I go to rescue you and you call me asinine”—she was jabbing an accusing finger at him as she listed his transgressions—“and you get annoyed because we didn’t discuss the time we humped each other while half-asleep, but when we finally do start discussing it, you talk about other women. I wake you up and you smile because you’re dreaming I’m someone else, I show you how you’ve really been helping my aethermancy improve and you grunt, I thank you for catching me and you practically drop me, I offer a way out of our predicament and you tell me to leave , I invite you to eat and you get snippy, I flirt with you and you ask me what’s wrong with my face —” She threw up her hands. “I’ve had it! Stay here and rot for all I care!”
Shaking, Talasyn spun on her heel and stomped away along the waterline, kicking up spray and wet sand. The wind picked up again, dragging brisk fingers over her form as a wash of dark clouds spread from the horizon. The surface of the Eversea was speckled with a million goosebumps as the clouds headed inexorably toward the coast.
Talasyn glanced over her shoulder with the intention of yelling at Alaric to get his fool head to shelter before it poured, but then she stopped walking and turned—he was running to her. The shifting sands made his frantic pace difficult, but he charged through with bullheaded determination and reached her just as it began to drizzle.
“ Now what?” Talasyn grumped.
Alaric worked a muscle in his sharp jaw. “First of all,” he said through gritted teeth, “I don’t know how to react to you. You are infuriating and self-righteous and you get under my skin. Secondly, there have never been any other women—there was never anyone before you—and much to my dismay you have provoked me so much that you’ve wormed your way into my dreams. You are the only one who plagues them. And one last thing”—his voice lowered into a growl—“the next time I kiss you, I want to remember it.”
Raindrops dotted his cheek as he bent down. Lightning streaked the sky as he pulled her to him. The Eversea’s dark waves slammed against the shore as he crushed his lips to hers.