Chapter Twenty-Six
C HAPTER T WENTY -S IX
When Alaric returned to the Nenavar Dominion a month later, he returned to a land of ghosts. After exiting an otherwise empty port and then leaving the Deliverance ’s hangars, the black Kesathese shallop had sailed alone over still cities, quiet villages, and the empty roads in between that once bustled with merchants’ carts. The azure horizon was lined with the backs of ships, receding into the clouds, that carried the last wave of Nenavarene evacuees. They would journey on as far as they could before the Moonless Dark, their chances of survival measured by the distance they traversed through sky and over water as aether fumes bore them further and further away from the homeland that would spell their end should Alaric and Talasyn prove unsuccessful.
We’d be the first to die if that happens. The thought raked across Alaric’s mind as he stood on the wooden deck above sprawling vistas of rainforest and white sand. He tried to ignore it—fear being anathema to the Shadowforged—but it gnawed at his heart with icy teeth. Grotesque images ran rampant in his mind—standing at the edge of the Voidfell’s crater with Talasyn … being swallowed by the amethyst haze … the magic dissolving their two forms before spreading across their world …
Tonight. It all came down to tonight.
The spike of anxiety only served to worsen Alaric’s black mood of the past month. Rebel activity had died down in light of the Continent’s mass evacuations, but he would have preferred the simplicity of combat to the bureaucracy he’d had to endure. A month of squabbling with his officers, of dodging his father’s verbal blows, of wrangling with the sheer logistics of moving millions of people and the necessary supplies …
They hadn’t been able to move everyone in the end, not even all of those not on the exclusion list. There had simply not been enough ships.
A month of failures and dead ends, all while the sariman’s song had echoed within the walls of his bedroom.
Freed from constant blood extractions and the darkness of Gaheris’s private hall, the bird had regained its strength, as well as its fiery plumage. However, like most Nenavarene creatures, including Alaric’s wife, it seemed to take vicious delight in causing him trouble, forever chirping and trilling and beating its wings against the bars of its cage when all Alaric wanted was to rest.
He’d named it Guava in the privacy of his own head. A little joke that only Talasyn would understand.
Not that he could ever tell her about it.
They’d written to each other somewhat frequently, the bulk of the letters carried across the Eversea by Kesathese skuas, which were better suited to long-distance flights than Nenavarene eagles or House Ossinast’s ravens. Brief missives, formally worded, more argumentative than not, detailing little of consequence other than Talasyn’s progress reports on her aethermancy. But Alaric had savored every line from her, spending hours trying to read between them and imagining how the words would sound in her voice, even as her horrid penmanship strained his eyes.
He couldn’t wait to see her. It was a very strange feeling. Anxious and excited all at once.
As the shallop glided lower over the Eversea and Iantas’s finer details came into view, Alaric spotted people on the landing grid waiting to receive him and others on the beach, either dragging fishing nets to shore or scaling the coconut palms to pick their woolly brown fruits. It could have been any normal day on the island, not the one with the potential to end everything.
Talasyn was conspicuously absent from the welcoming committee, though. Alaric felt a sliver of annoyance as he disembarked. This was a grave breach of protocol.
Jie stepped out from the throng to greet him, her dark curls bobbing.
“You’re all still here.” Alaric wasn’t quite able to keep the question out of his tone.
“Oh, Her Grace urged the entire household to leave,” Jie chirped. “The villagers’ children were sent away at her insistence, but as for the rest of us—we rather felt that our place was with her.” The lady-in-waiting’s demeanor was as sunny as these shores and her eyes were bright, belying the difficult choice that she’d made. “The kitchen staff was particularly concerned that she wouldn’t be able to eat her favorite meals in their absence. Prince Elagbi is here, too,” she added as they walked into the spiny castle while the servants boarded the shallop to handle his luggage, “but he is napping, and Her Grace is occupied as well, so if I may escort His Majesty to the royal chambers—”
“You may escort me to her instead,” said Alaric.
Jie turned her pert nose up at him. “The Lachis’ka is resolving a delicate matter in the aforementioned kitchens—”
“So take me to the kitchens.”
Jie opened her mouth to argue, but Alaric’s stern glare was an effective deterrent. There was a definite stomp in her gait while she led him to a wing of Iantas’s first level that he’d never been to before.
Whatever Alaric had been expecting when he entered the kitchens, it was not the sight of his empress covered in thick, sticky pink liquid. Talasyn was standing, eyes squeezed shut, in front of a potbelly stove atop which perched an overflowing saucepan. Two similarly drenched cooks dabbed at her with hand towels while the rest hung back, looking terrified.
“Honestly, it’s fine,” Talasyn was attempting to soothe them, blindly gesturing in their direction, “it’s all my fault, I’m the one who suggested the recipe, but who knew salamander currants would be so volatile—”
“ I told her they were,” Jie muttered to Alaric.
He clapped a hand over his mouth in order to suppress the chuckle threatening to burst from his throat. Cake batter plastered Talasyn’s loose brown hair to her forehead; it dripped from her chin and trickled down the front of her sequined bodice. Although her eyes were closed, she stiffened at the sound of his aborted laugh and then his footsteps as he made his way over to her.
“Don’t start with me,” she growled.
Something in Alaric’s chest began to thaw—an arctic tightness that he didn’t even realize had been there in the first place, having lived with it for so long. The two cooks hastily backed away and he grabbed a fresh hand towel, using it to wipe the pink batter from Talasyn’s face. This was not how he’d imagined their reunion going, but she’d always been something of an expert in throwing him for a loop.
“Dabbling in the culinary arts now, are we?” he quipped.
“We were testing dessert options for the masquerade,” Talasyn grumbled. “The cake mix exploded right as you arrived.”
Alaric frowned. “You were not scalded—”
“Not at all, we’d barely fired up the stove.”
There was an edge to her assurance, the way there always was whenever he professed concern for her. As though she couldn’t understand what he got out of it. He held back a sigh as he patted the bridge of her nose clean, as well as the skin around her eyes. Her lashes fluttered tentatively, and then brown irises were peering up at him from a face still smeared with pink batter at the sides. She presented an absurd picture, and yet—
“Um.” Talasyn bit her lip. “Welcome back. Hi.”
The moment spun through time in a thread of gold. As Alaric stared down at his wife, all of the stress that he had felt over the past month—all of his fears for tonight—melted away. “Hello.”
The Talasyn of nearly a year ago, that war-torn orphan, would never have dared to let Alaric Ossinast move through a room while her eyes were closed and she wasn’t aethermancing. That she did so now was an irony far from lost on her. After recovering from her embarrassment—she really should have left the cooking to the kitchen staff—she furtively watched her husband, reacquainting herself with his careful movements, his sharp features. Trying to determine if anything about him had changed since they last saw each other.
They sparred on the beach in the late morning, when the sun shone fiercely and the granite castle in the distance blazed almost the same bright silver as Alaric’s eyes. Rather than being tired after the long journey from Kesath, he was as strong and agile as ever, not letting up in the least as they took turns shielding and striking. She noticed, though, that he clenched his teeth harder than usual, and she wondered if it was possible for someone to run on sheer determination alone. Or perhaps it was spite.
Finally they banished the last of their weapons and collapsed onto the sand, sprawled out side by side. Talasyn gazed up into the burning heavens, the surf crashing in her ears. She was winded, but not as exhausted as she would have been before her constant trips to the Light Sever. The sun’s rays poured through her body as though embracing it.
She had changed so much here in Nenavar. Her magic had changed.
And speaking of things that were out of the ordinary, Sevraim should have popped up with some irreverent remark by now. Too many hours had passed since the Kesathese ship’s arrival. “You didn’t bring your better half, my lord?” Talasyn asked.
Alaric was red-faced from exertion, gasping like a sea creature wilting in the tropical heat, but he mustered enough energy to turn his head and glare at her. “ Better? ” he echoed stiffly, reddened cheek pillowed on the soft white sand.
She grinned. He blinked, as though taken aback, then his brow wrinkled in annoyance. Now this was a change she could get used to—being comfortable enough to tease him.
“I have no use for my legionnaires here,” Alaric said. “Sevraim’s fleeing north with the rest of them, although my father and a few of my officers were against it.”
“They probably wanted you to have some protection,” Talasyn surmised. “Just in case I kill you after we save the world.”
The corner of his mouth twisted in a rueful half-smile. “To tell you the truth, I’m more interested in the officers who didn’t put up a fuss.”
There was no need for him to elaborate. She’d learned enough from Urduja to know what he meant. She pictured him back at that cold obsidian fortress that was the Citadel, surrounded by people he couldn’t trust. Her gaze strayed to where his hand was mere inches from hers and she longed to reach for it.
But it wasn’t as though he could trust her , either. She didn’t want to take his hand with these thoughts in her head, as though to say she was better than his officers. She had her own hidden motives, too.
A shadow fell over them. It was Prince Elagbi, looking well rested from his nap. “I have marshalled the refreshments, Lachis’ka!” he proudly announced, indicating with a flourish the castle staff setting up a grand lunch beneath the coconut palms further up the shore. He peered down at Alaric with something like concern. “Not a moment too soon, it would seem.”
“I’m fine,” Alaric grunted.
“It’s understandable,” said Elagbi. “You were gone for a month, the humidity takes a toll on people not used to it—”
Alaric stood up. With some effort, but pointedly, he unfolded to his full height so that he towered over the Dominion prince.
Talasyn would have laughed at such a petty display of injured male pride if the sight of her father hadn’t darkened her mood. “I still can’t believe you stayed,” she scolded Elagbi as the three of them headed to join the staff. “Do you not understand the gravity of the situation—”
It was an old argument, but this time Elagbi flapped his hand at her in the same manner one would shoo away a cat wailing for scraps. “I don’t believe I shall be taking life advice from someone who thought it would be a good idea to apply heat to salamander currants, my dear.”
Alaric snorted . Talasyn quickened her pace, leaving the horrible men behind in a flurry of sand. She glanced behind her in time to see Elagbi suppress a chuckle and lightly clap Alaric on the back. Alaric ducked his head while she shook hers in disgust. It figured that these two would start acting companionable only at her expense.
While Alaric and Talasyn were sparring, the remaining denizens of Iantas had brought out a feast. Rabbitfish grilled in bamboo tubes, fermented crabs wrapped in silverleaf reeds, clay-pot chicken, balls of rice and pig’s blood—all laid out on trestle tables around the aforementioned pigs, which had been stuffed with lemongrass and roasted whole on spits. Everyone from the Lachis-dalo to the housemaids dug in with their fingers, making merry. As Alaric approached them, he was already resigned—for the chatter to stop and the staring to begin.
To his surprise, however, while there were a few uneasy glances, the majority of the crowd called out greetings, inclining their heads respectfully. A couple of people he vaguely recognized from the village rushed forward, passing him a clay pot and a coconut half-shell brimming with the sweet, clear liquid.
It was several beats before Alaric remembered how to move his hands in order to take the proffered items. “Thank you.”
The villagers responded in Nenavarene. They didn’t sound angry, or as though they were trying to poison him, so he gave a tentative nod and they melted back into the crowd. And soon enough Elagbi and Talasyn were leading him to one of the tables.
Elagbi pointed to the nearby roast pig in its bed of banana leaves. “I recommend the belly, Emperor Alaric. It’s the best part.”
Alaric stared at the pig. Its body had been carved up, but the head was intact and it stared back at him, lips curled into a frozen grin.
“Just grab a piece,” Talasyn instructed under her breath.
“It’s looking at me,” Alaric replied in kind. “Why are we feasting, anyway? The world as we know it might end tonight. That’s hardly cause for celebration.”
“You should have realized by now that the typical Nenavarene response to anything is to throw a party,” said Talasyn. “Remember when the Zahiya-lachis announced our betrothal?”
“Fair point.”
His serving of the roast pig was a sumptuous chunk of crispy skin and sweet flesh that coated his tongue in a wash of fat. He enjoyed the other dishes as well, observing Elagbi and Talasyn out of the corner of his eye so he could mimic how they ate with their hands, food compressed in the palm, the thumb pushing it into the mouth. He could have done without the perennial breeze making a mess of his hair and the sand that stuck to his clothes, and some cynical part of him surmised that Iantas’s residents were merely using up everything in the larders before they all died. Still, there was something idyllic about this gathering. It was the calm before the oncoming storm.
As lunch came to a close, Talasyn drifted away from the crowd and nearer to the waterline, nursing a half-shell of coconut juice. Alaric followed her with the air of someone who didn’t know what else to do, and soon enough Elagbi joined them, good-naturedly bellyaching about having lost a casongka game to one of the castle gardeners. The heat had dissipated slightly as the sun sank lower in the sky. In a few more hours, the day would end, and then the night …
The night might be the last.
“Amya.” Talasyn turned to her father. The relaxed smile that he flashed at her was so gentle, so utterly at peace, that the fear of never seeing it again sank in like winter’s chill in this golden land. “You should have gone with the Zahiya-lachis. What if the shield doesn’t work, what if—”
“It will,” Elagbi said firmly. “I have faith in you.”
“But if it doesn’t—”
“Then I will sail with the ancestors,” said Elagbi, “content in the knowledge that I didn’t leave my daughter alone at the very end.”
It was the same as it had been when he first saw her on her wedding day, when Talasyn was helpless, speechless, in the face of so much love. All their quarrels about this issue over the past sennight boiled down to this moment. She leaned into Elagbi’s space, resting her head on his shoulder, and he stroked her hair.
Alaric was gazing stoically into the distance, affording them what privacy he could. He was even more subdued than usual after they retreated into the castle. Talasyn’s own worries grew with the gathering dusk, restlessness haunting her every step, each fidgeting move. No one knew what would happen at midnight. They had all placed their faith in eclipse magic because hope was second nature, was the last good thing, but whether or not it would be successful, no one could actually say for sure.
Talasyn noticed a few of the servants hastily wiping away tears while they tidied up for the evening, and the sight brought her perilously close to the brink as well. Before Alaric could push open the door to their chambers all the way, she grabbed hold of the embroidered cuff of his sleeve, her fingers twisting into the skin-warmed silk.
“Do you want to go somewhere?” she blurted out. “A quick stop before the sevenfold eclipse?”
Gray eyes regarded her somberly. Glimmers of her own misgivings were reflected back at her, but she saw none of the wariness that she anticipated in response to her abrupt question.
Perhaps she wasn’t the only one who was changing.
“What do you have in mind?” he asked.
Talasyn wanted to visit Eskaya before they went to the Void Sever. Alaric agreed readily enough; there were still six hours to go before midnight and he was restless, too. It also struck him as oddly fitting, on what might be the final night, to go back to where this odd marriage began.
First things first, however. They had to prepare for battle.
In his dressing room, he donned his armor meditatively, clearing his mind the way he always did before an impending skirmish. The stakes were just as high.
He hadn’t been expecting his father to summon him, but there it was, the scrabbling at the edges, the thinning of the veil. Alaric entered the In-Between cautiously, wondering what Gaheris could possibly wish to see him about at this final hour. Silver eyes watched him from a throne of shadows, within walls of tremulous, staticky aether.
Gaheris seemed to be in no hurry to speak, so Alaric took it upon himself to break the silence. “You are well away from the Continent, Father?”
“We have sailed as far north as our ships would allow,” Gaheris replied. “The rest is in your hands, my boy.”
“I know.”
The Regent’s withered fingers twitched over the armrest of his throne. “If this is farewell, then it is farewell.” His expression was contemplative. “And our souls will find shelter in the willows until all lands sink beneath the Eversea and you and I meet again.”
It was shameful how these crumbs of affection went straight to Alaric’s heart, rendering him temporarily mute. Shameful how he longed for more. There was a time when he might have deemed it enough and been content, but he’d seen how Elagbi treated Talasyn and couldn’t shake the feeling that was what a father was supposed to be. Perhaps Gaheris could have been that, if not for the war.
Or perhaps Alaric was simply asking for too much.
“I won’t fail you,” Alaric vowed. “Or Kesath.”
His father nodded. “Remember,” he said, “when you turn your ship to home—bring your Lightweaver with you. Or don’t come back at all.”
The Shadowgate withdrew its icy claws, but the cold remained inside Alaric for a long while after.