But something had in fact motivated them to break tradition and lend aid to the Lightweavers of Sunstead, nineteen years ago . . .
“Have you ever heard of the Fisherman’s Warning?” Khaede asked.
Talasyn shook her head.
“No, I suppose that you wouldn’t have. You grew up on the Great Steppe.” Khaede worried her lower lip, uncharacteristically pensive. Perhaps even nostalgic. “It’s a Coast thing. A legend, of sorts. Once every thousand years or so, a bright glow the color of amethyst illuminates the horizon over the Eversea, heralding months of rough waters and meager catch. The last time it supposedly happened, the Sardovian Allfold hadn’t even been formed and we sure didn’t have airships yet. Most inhabitants of the Coast agree that the Fisherman’s Warning is simply a myth, but those who do believe—the older ones, and this used to include my grandfather, may his soul find shelter in the willows—they say that the glow comes from the southeast. From Nenavar.”
“Guess I’ll let you know if I find any strange purple lights hanging around there, then,” Talasyn quipped.
Khaede offered her a fleeting smirk. “Bring back a dragon instead. That would be more useful.”
We’d win the war with even just one, the bowman had said at the stone longhouse in Frostplum. The memory that was so innocuous on a surface level sent a pang through Talasyn. Everyone was tired, but they didn’t want the conflict to merely end—they wanted to emerge from it victorious. Because the alternative was to spend the rest of their lives bound by the chains of shadow and empire.
She would do her part. For Khaede, for the Amirante. For Sol, and for everyone else who had died to let the dawn break over Sardovia once more.
“How are you feeling?” Talasyn finally worked up the nerve to inquire.
Khaede went tense, her dark eyes narrowing into a glare. Then something in her seemed to crack, and she slumped as one would after an exhale that had been a long time coming.
“It’s hard to believe. That he’s really gone,” she admitted, her voice thick with grief. “I keep thinking that this is a nightmare I’ll wake up from at any moment. And then there are times when it hits me that I’ll never see him again, and I start missing him so much that it hurts to breathe.” Khaede twisted her wedding ring around her finger; the gold band glinted in the fading light. Her shoulders stiffened with determination. “But Sol would want me to keep moving forward. He went to the willows believing in the Sardovian Allfold, believing that we would triumph. And I’ll make sure that we’re going to. My child will grow up in a better world.”
“They will,” Talasyn said softly. She meant it with every fiber of her being, even if no one could tell the future. There were just some things that had to be true, because, if they weren’t, what was the point in fighting?
Khaede reached over and patted Talasyn’s knee. “Come back in one piece. I can’t lose you, too.” She leaned against the cypress trunk, withdrawing her hand to rest an open palm on her stomach. The sunset cast its burnished gloss over her face in such a way that it made the sadness lingering there all the more stark. Made her look older than her twenty-three years.
It was then that Talasyn truly understood: Khaede would be haunted by Sol’s death for the rest of her days. A part of her would always be missing, buried with him in the canyon, lost forever to the Hurricane Wars. And although Talasyn knew that it was selfish to take her friend’s pain and contextualize it in terms of her own self—although she knew that it probably made her a terrible person—she couldn’t help but be oddly grateful for the lack of belonging that had plagued her all her life, because it meant that she would never experience such a harrowing ache. She couldn’t help but think, Thank the gods that I will never love someone that much.
Talasyn met with Vela after supper. The Amirante provided her with a more detailed map and intelligence dossier courtesy of General Bieshimma, as well as a slew of last-minute instructions. Then Vela went over to the bow windows of her office, which offered a panoramic view of the Wildermarch in its moon-silvered splendor, her hands folded behind her back.
“I think that it will be all right,” she muttered. “Even if they catch you, there is no cell—no manner of restraint—that can hold a Lightweaver for long.”
“They won’t catch me,” Talasyn declared. It wasn’t that she had a wealth of confidence in her abilities. It was more the fact that she couldn’t allow herself to get caught, and so she wouldn’t be.
“You understand why you have to go, don’t you?” Vela held out an upturned palm. Wisps of shadow magic curled into the space above her fingers, the strands shifting and unfurling like smoke, swallowing up what rays of starlight were there to touch them. “It was a stroke of luck for us that the Lightweave and the Shadowgate can be summoned and manipulated with the same basic methods, but they are still fundamentally different in nature. There is only so much that I can teach you.”
“I’m well aware,” Talasyn quietly replied. “I need to do this so that we can win the war. Of course I’ll go.”
For Sardovia.
For Khaede’s child, who will never know a father.
For myself. Because I have to understand why Nenavar calls to something inside me, and because I have to give Alaric Ossinast the fight of his life the next time we meet in battle.
She just hoped it would be enough.
The Hurricane Wars were coming down to the line and the Allfold’s sole Lightweaver had to start doing something. At the moment, however, Talasyn knew only how to shape weapons and fight with them. According to the stories, the Lightweavers of Sunstead had toppled buildings and created barriers around entire cities and called down strikes from the heavens. The last time she had tried to create a protective barrier, she’d lost control and nearly zapped Khaede’s wasp out of the sky.
The Light Sever in Nenavar offered Talasyn a chance for her magic to reach the heights it was truly capable of. A chance for her to actually be useful.
The Amirante closed her fist around the swirling darkness and it vanished. “Get some rest, then. You’ll leave at first light tomorrow.”
Talasyn had one hand on the doorknob when a question occurred to her. One that she’d wanted to ask for years but hadn’t had the guts to until today, when it had never before seemed so stark that there might not be a tomorrow to ask it.
“Amirante? Before you defected—when you were still with the Kesathese army, I mean—why didn’t you join the Shadowforged Legion?”
The older woman didn’t respond for so long that Talasyn thought she never would.
“I was very young when I enlisted as a helmsman,” Vela finally said, still looking out the window. “My abilities manifested much later. But I made the decision to hide them because—well, I didn’t have a clear idea of what was right and what was wrong back then. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be the person that the Legion would have required me to become. Had I given in to that darkness, the Night Empire would have swallowed me whole.” Her gaze met Talasyn’s in the glass, in the vague shards of their star-etched reflections. “You have a chance to end this, Talasyn. To become the light that guides us out of the shadows, and to freedom.”