Chapter Twenty-Seven
C HAPTER T WENTY -S EVEN
The Nenavarene were determined to send their Lachis’ka to her potential grave in style. That was the only reason, Talasyn thought, for the ceremonial armor that Jie had brought out before she spent ages securing Talasyn’s hair in a tight braid.
It was certainly the most practical of the garments that the Dominion had foisted on her thus far. A high-collared leather tunic, dyed blue, the bodice closely fitted, slashes running from thigh to knee to allow movement. Pauldrons that cascaded down her shoulders like laurel leaves. Pleated blue trousers tucked into a sturdy pair of gold-embellished boots. Talasyn almost felt like a soldier again.
From Iantas she and Alaric flew to the main island of Sedek-We, on the same pleasure yacht that the warship had fired void bolts at during aethermancy training last month. It was a narrow vessel with an asymmetrical mainsail that folded and rippled like a butterfly wing emerging from its cocoon; more style than substance, and slower than a coracle, it was completely devoid of weaponry. But they weren’t defending themselves from anyone, nor were they running from anything—except from what midnight would bring, and they couldn’t even run from that for long.
Elagbi, Jie, and the Lachis-dalo had wanted to accompany them, and Iantas’s helmsmen had offered to crew a larger ship, but Talasyn had put her foot down in this regard. She wouldn’t be able to concentrate with her people so near the eruption; at least on Iantas they would have a chance of avoiding the amethyst light, even if a slim one. While the Voidfell had historically left metal and mortar untouched, it slipped into the cracks of every building like the wind, like sound, rotting all living things within.
Stop picturing it, Talasyn chided herself. It will not come to pass. She had to be confident. She had to be centered.
As did her husband, but she was currently a little worried about him. Even though Alaric was wearing his wolf’s-snarl mask, along with the rest of his battle armor, she could tell from the narrowing of his gray eyes that he had been scowling ever since he joined her on Iantas’s landing grid. When Elagbi had shaken his hand and wished him luck, rather than dispensing some polite rejoinder, Alaric had merely grunted.
He had been in a decent enough mood during lunch. Then again, Talasyn supposed that even the fearsome Night Emperor was not above the occasional attack of nerves.
Talasyn landed the yacht on one of the empty docks that ringed the Nenavarene capital of Eskaya. She and Alaric set forth, on foot, in the general direction of the Roof of Heaven, its alabaster facade gleaming in the moonlight, as pristine as a statue of ice and snow crowning the steep limestone cliffs. They walked in silence for a while, both of them lost in their own thoughts, adrift in a deserted city. There were no patrols, no night markets, no ships streaking overhead, no strains of music and indistinct conversation, no drunks spilling out from the darkened taverns. Eskaya was so still that it seemed one wrong move could shatter it like glass.
Talasyn stopped walking halfway across a stately marble bridge that rainbowed above the city’s main canal. She leaned over the railing, bracing herself on folded arms. Alaric followed suit, their elbows almost touching. Were this in the time before, she might have snapped at him to not stand so close to her, but it was a rather moot point now, after all that they’d done to each other.
The waterway sparkled with reflections: the rippling moons in full and crescent and gibbous, the stars like crumpled flecks of silver, the trees and rooftops flickering in the gentle current. And their own dark silhouettes, two people alone in an abandoned city.
But they weren’t the only people left in Nenavar. And that was what weighed on Talasyn’s mind.
“I keep thinking,” she said, “about everyone who stayed. That Daya Vaikar and her Enchanters didn’t leave I understand, even if I don’t like it. We need them for the amplifying configuration. But my father and everyone else back at Iantas—they didn’t have to. Even the refugees from the village stayed.”
“They love you,” Alaric said quietly. Her heart skipped a beat to hear the word love from his lips. “That’s why. I think that’s worth something. As is loyalty. Even Sevraim and the twins—” He cleared his throat with a hint of awkwardness. “They wanted to accompany me. I had to order them not to.”
Talasyn had no opinion on the well-being of Ileis and Nisene one way or the other, but it did amuse her to imagine the kind of arguments Sevraim must have put forward. “Hopefully the Continent’s evacuation went smoothly, despite those three’s best efforts.”
Alaric flinched. She saw it in the water. “We couldn’t get everyone out,” he said, his tone brusque. “There weren’t enough ships.”
A pang went through her. “You should have asked Nenavar for help. We would have sent—”
“I floated such a possibility before Regent Gaheris.” His broad shoulders dropped, as though in shame. “He had no wish to be beholden to the Dominion any more than necessary.”
Brow knitting, Talasyn made to launch into her usual refrain that it was Alaric who was the Night Emperor—and maybe this would be the time that it got through his thick skull at last—but then he continued. “Most of High Command shared my father’s opinion.”
Now that she was all too familiar with. That maze of careful politicking to keep everyone happy—or at least content enough to not plot against you. That balancing act of considering all ulterior motives as you furthered your own goals. Urduja always had her hands full with her council of nobles, but she’d had decades of practice, whereas Alaric had only recently stepped into his role.
“I have failed them. My people.” It was a hoarse confession. He looked so young in the moonlight. “I want to make a new world, but I share power with those who won’t let the old ways go. Sometimes I think—I think it would be better to start over. Tear it all down.” His eyes met hers. “And sometimes I think you and I could do that. If we make it through tonight.”
His statement was so quietly spoken, but it seemed to ring throughout the abandoned city. It seemed to bring illumination with it—the way out of the tunnel, out of the labyrinth.
Join me, then. This was how a thought could strike like lightning, burning a path through the soul, shedding stark clarity on the next step to take. Ideth Vela is alive. We have allies. We’re ready to make our move after the Moonless Dark. Join us.
Let’s tear it all down.
And let’s build a life together.
The words were on the tip of her tongue. She drew a breath to say it. She almost said it.
And then—
“We can stop all of this, this never-ending fight for power,” said Alaric. “We’ll crush the Sardovian resistance first, hunt down their leaders. Then we’ll deal with the Kesathese old guard, who are opposed to progress. Once all threats to the Continent are stamped out, we can rebuild it together and truly begin to change things.”
There was a horrendous, crushing pain in Talasyn’s chest. She breathed through it slowly, secretly. As secretly as she’d carried her hope.
He shifted closer, turning his broad body to her, removing his mask. Determination flashed across his pale face as he leaned in.
He’s going to kiss me, Talasyn thought.
She shouldn’t let him.
But she couldn’t will herself to move away. This might be the last time.
She stared at him as he bridged the distance. How the moonlight on the water caught in his gray eyes before he shut them, every hint of softness on his sharp features, every beauty mark—she committed it all to memory. There might never be an after.
Only when his lips met hers did she close her own eyes, surrendering to the feeling. Here and now, it felt like a glimpse of what could have been.
Halfway across the channel between Sedek-We and Vasiyas, there was a stirring in the water miles below. Talasyn cranked the lever that slowed the wind magic fueling the yacht, and she and Alaric peered over starboard. And down into a strange, strange sight.
The dragons were surfacing. Dozens of them, their frilled heads jutting out from the Eversea’s dark depths on necks like rough-barked tree trunks, their serpentine bodies twisting amidst the waves. Their movements would have been reminiscent of the feeding frenzy of an eel farm if not for the fact that the dragons went still as soon as they saw the little yacht, only their jeweled eyes tracking its every movement.
“Simply another day in Nenavar?” Alaric ventured hopefully.
“No.” Talasyn spoke out of the corner of her mouth, as he did. The alertness of the leviathans was unsettling. Even the smallest one was big enough to swallow their ship in one gulp. “I don’t understand. I assumed they all started moving south last sennight, accompanying the evacuation vessels.” She’d watched several flank the W’taida , Urduja’s flagship, never leaving its side until the fleet disappeared into the horizon.
Alaric flexed his gauntleted fingers, preparing to aethermance. “Stay close to me.”
“They won’t attack anyone of Nenavarene blood,” said Talasyn. “If anything, you should stay close to me .”
It was at that moment that no fewer than four dragons elected to take wing and surround the yacht, and Talasyn gulped. Would the last words she ever heard in this life be a sarcastic You were saying? from Alaric Ossinast?
But no. The beasts slithered into a formation similar to that of their compatriots when they escorted the W’taida to safety. One flew overhead, one flew beneath the yacht, one flew on either side, and each took great care not to graze the vessel with their enormous wings. As Talasyn continued steering toward the shadowed ridge of the Vasiyas coastline, Alaric’s gaze was uncharacteristically soft with awe, transfixed by the swirl of scales all around. The beating of leathery wings thundered in Talasyn’s ears, the gusts of breath from fire-warmed lungs as sibilant as a hard rain.
And it wasn’t long before this cacophony heightened, punctuated by the din of colossal bodies thrashing in the ocean, and she looked behind her to see the rest of the dragons rising from the Eversea. Trailing the yacht, keeping their distance as though in an effort to avoid colliding with it.
“Talasyn.” Alaric’s voice was raspy behind his mask. “What is this? What’s going on?”
“I …” She made eye contact with the dragon to her left. A black slit of a pupil set amidst a field of amber, glowing like the sun even this close to midnight. Something unfurled within her, something far older than her magic. The creature tossed back its head and let out a roar, exuding a cloud of bright orange flame that drowned the stars.
It was a greeting, not a warning. The dragon’s roar felt like her own heartbeat. She felt its fire as though it were the heat of the blood running through her veins.
The world had shifted yet again, as it did when she first stepped into the Light Sever. As it did when Alaric first kissed her and the air simmered with shadowed radiance.
Was it her fate to keep on changing, swapping one life for another like the coats of different seasons here in this land of eternal summer? Was she doomed to one day no longer recognize the girl from Hornbill’s Head, the same way no snowy winter carried a trace of the scarlet autumn that came before?
“I think,” Talasyn said, “that they’re watching over me.”
Not only did Ishan Vaikar agree with Talasyn’s assessment, but Alaric found the daya remarkably unfazed by the host of dragons that rolled in like the tide along with the Lachis’ka and the Night Emperor’s airship.
“I thought something like this might happen!” Ishan crowed. “The dragons will always protect the Nenavarene people, but some of us stayed behind, so it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that some of them stayed behind as well? How did they decide who would migrate and who would remain? Fascinating beasts!”
Excited chatter came from the yacht’s transceiver—it was Ishan’s voice crossing the Tempestroad from her moth coracle. Each Ahimsan Enchanter present tonight, riding their own ghostly craft, was floating in a circle around the crater of Aktamasok.
Hovering directly over the crater—directly above its deep abyss—was the yacht.
It’s a very small yacht, Alaric thought uneasily. And the amplifying configuration that had been laid out on the deck, the assemblage of jars and wires, seemed far too breakable when its backdrop was a yawning, bottomless pit.
He was Shadowforged. He shouldn’t have been scared of the dark. But within this darkness lurked a horror that Alaric couldn’t face alone.
Ishan was somehow still gabbling on, speculating about the dragons’ method for communicating among themselves. Talasyn leaned well away from the aetherwave transceiver’s mouthpiece. “Imagine if the Void Sever triumphs because of Daya Vaikar’s unpredictable attention span,” she muttered.
“At least it will be no fault of yours or mine,” said Alaric, “and the survivors will remember us kindly.”
Talasyn snorted. She shone in her blue-and-gold armor, in the moonlight, her dragons spinning above her. Some had dug their claws lower down the volcanic slopes, as though preparing to pounce at whatever emerged from the crater. Four of Lir’s seven moons had already disappeared from the sky.
Ishan eventually stopped talking, perhaps realizing that no one on the other end was listening to her. And in the silence …
“I just wanted to say—” Alaric broke off. What did he want to say?
Talasyn blinked up at him. “Yes?”
I am sorry for everything.
I liked writing to you.
I won’t let my father hurt you.
I know we agreed that it’s simply physical attraction between us, but sometimes—sometimes I think—
Ever since we met, I have lived in a dream of what could be.
But he could never tell her any of this. Saying any of it would make dying tonight the better option. He could never confess about the stolen sariman and Gaheris’s plans before he figured out how to fix all of it.
“If this is farewell,” Alaric began, aping his father’s words because that was affection as he knew it, and that meant something, too, “then it is—”
“It’s not farewell,” Talasyn interrupted fiercely. “You said so yourself, on Belian, remember? When I asked if you really thought we could stop the Voidfell, you said, Yes. Otherwise, we’re all dead. You may have been a smart-ass about it, but you were right. We will make it through. We’ll fight to live. You taught me how.” Two more moons vanished, leaving only the Seventh, but all the light that he needed was in her eyes, the shards of gold within them fervent with conviction. “So stop moping and let’s get this done .”
Alaric smiled behind his mask. He reached out to tuck that particular strand of chestnut hair that was always escaping from Talasyn’s braid back behind her ear, moving carefully so that the clawed tips of his gauntlet didn’t rake into her temple. She shivered at his touch, the seventh moon’s wan silver glow dusting her freckled cheeks.
He drank it all in.
“If there’s anything I believe in,” he said, “it’s your stubbornness. It annoys me quite frequently, but it can move mountains. I would have no one else by my side tonight.”
Talasyn rolled her eyes. “I’ll hold you to that the next time we argue.”
Alaric shrugged. “I’m just glad that there will be a next time.”
The aetherwave transceiver crackled to life. It was Ishan again, asking them if they were ready. Shadows were steadily creeping over the last remaining moon, like ink spilled from its bottle, over fresh parchment.
“We’re ready,” Talasyn confirmed into the transceiver’s mouthpiece.
Ishan replied in Nenavarene before signing off. Alaric and Talasyn stepped closer to each other, facing each other within the amplifying configuration. “What did Daya Vaikar say?” he asked.
Talasyn’s lips curved into a small, wistful smile as she translated for him. “‘I’ll see you on the other end of this, or in the Sky Above the Sky where our ancestors sail.’”