“Do not,” she snarled, “say anything.” Her cheeks were flushed with embarrassment but it only added to the gorgeous sight so appealingly arranged before him.
“I wasn’t going to,” Alaric forced out through gritted teeth. He cautiously stepped further into the room and her gaze flickered over his white linen shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and his loose black trousers. He wondered what kind of man she saw, suddenly self-conscious of his features. The nose that was too prominent, the mouth that was too wide, the graceless asymmetry of cheekbones and chin and jaw.
Desperate to do something, anything, that didn’t involve gawking at her, he glanced around her chambers in a futile search for somewhere to sleep. There was a chaise longue, but it would barely accommodate three-quarters of his height and half his width. The floor it is, then, he thought with resignation. “Shall I just grab some extra bedding?”
“What?” Talasyn asked.
Alaric turned to her. She was staring at him, and he experienced a moment of déjà vu—the night of the banquet, the altercation in his room, her hands on his chest, how she’d forgotten his question.
And then he remembered his father sneering, The Lightweaver will never return this bizarre infatuation that you have for her.
“Extra bedding,” Alaric repeated tersely.
“Oh,” Talasyn said. “No, there are no extras; you’re not sleeping on the floor. Someone will come in the morning to wake us. They’ll talk if you aren’t in bed with me. We can share for the night. It’s no trouble.”
I beg to differ, he almost snapped, but at that precise moment she moved, unfolding herself from her kneeling pose and scooting over to one side of the mattress, leaning back against the ornately carved headboard. He was treated to the stretch of her long, long legs, with their toned calves and their dainty ankles, and any protests that he might have had vanished into the aether.
Feeling very far away from his body, Alaric joined Talasyn on the bed, mimicking her position. His shoulder bumped against hers with a rush of heat and static and he quickly widened the space between them, the eiderdown mattress bobbing at the shift in weight.
At first, this new position seemed more tenable because her distracting face wasn’t in his line of sight. Much to his chagrin, he soon realized that he had an unparalleled view down her legs. They were slender and they went on for miles beneath the scattered lace dustings of leaves and hibiscus blossoms. He wondered what those legs would look like when fully bared. How they would feel wrapped around his waist.
“No more talking.” Talasyn extinguished the candles and lay down, drawing the covers up to her chin, hiding those incredible legs from view, much to his—relief? Or was it disappointment? “I have lessons tomorrow, once you’ve gone back to Kesath. I need to sleep.”
Fine by me, Alaric thought. He stretched out on the mattress beside her, careful to maintain distance between their bodies.
It took what felt like an eternity of staring up at the tapestries hung over the bed for him to admit that drifting off was impossible.
“What sort of lessons?” he heard himself ask.
“I said no more talking.”
“You also said that you needed to sleep. Unless you possess the previously unheard-of ability to carry on a normal conversation while you’re sleeping—”
Talasyn sat up. Alaric supposed that it was battle instinct, more than anything, that made him do the same. If he had remained supine it would have been far too easy for her to reach over and stab him in the throat.
But then she tugged at the sheer bodice of her nightdress, in an obvious attempt to get its delicate appliqués to lend more modesty, and he was seized by a wave of the same sympathy that she had been steadily unearthing in him ever since they met, much to his alarm.
“If you’re uncomfortable wearing”—he waved vaguely at the barely-there silk that hugged her form while trying to keep his gaze chastely on her face as much as possible—“things like that, why not tell your lady-in-waiting?”
“Jie is very sweet,” Talasyn said slowly, “but she’s also very chatty and she has certain fixed notions of what married life is like. If I were to do anything that ran contrary to those notions, even the blacksmith’s washerwoman three cities over would have heard about it by tomorrow afternoon. Sometimes it’s just easier to take the path of least resistance.”
I wish that you could take it with me, just the once, Alaric thought. Out loud, he continued, “With all due respect to her giggly young ladyship, she has no idea what our married life is like.”
“Not even the tiniest bit,” Talasyn agreed. “Anyway, this is hardly the most onerous of the things I have done for the sake of everyone else.”
She unleashed that last bit pointedly enough that her meaning—their marriage—was clear.
“Are your lessons as the Lachis’ka onerous?” he asked, quirking an eyebrow at her. “Or is it just telling me about them that you find so dreadful a task?”
“If you really must know, my lessons concern politics,” she snapped. The belligerence in her expression deepened. “The Zahiya-lachis’s brand of politics, anyway.”
“You disagree with Queen Urduja’s methods? They’re efficient.” Some of his residual annoyance leaked into his next words. “You have certainly been content to go along with whatever she commands thus far.”
Talasyn twisted the section of duvet on her lap between her fingers, as though imagining it was his neck. “And what are you implying by that?”
“You know exactly what I’m implying,” Alaric bit out, and it was as though some dam had broken, the thread of tension strung through him since the Belian amphitheater finally stretched taut enough to snap. Come on, darling, some darkly wicked, impulsive part of him thought, one last fight before I leave you. “You wear dresses you hate, you don’t commune with your magic’s nexus point because Her Starlit Majesty forbids it, you behave according to her specifications, you let this court keep secrets from you, you stay in this palace like a songbird in a gilded cage. Even before that, you ignored your yearning to be with your family because it was what Ideth Vela asked. Do you know, Lachis’ka,” he concluded with a sneer at her rapidly paling face, “it occurs to me that you’re the sort of person who needs to be told what to do. You’re too afraid to do anything for yourself.”
Her brown eyes flashed. She bared her teeth at him in the moonlight. “You dare say these things to me,” she snarled, “when you’ve lived your whole life under your father’s thumb? Studying and training to be the perfect heir, swallowing all the lies he and your grandfather spouted about the true cause of the Cataclysm—”
“They aren’t lies,” Alaric hissed. “It’s Sardovia that lied to you—”
“Oh, I’m sure! If Gaheris says so, then it must be true.” She lifted her chin. “Did you even decide to treat with Nenavar for a marriage alliance by yourself, or did you have to ask his permission? Shall I send him a token of my gratitude?”
Alaric stiffened as the barb hit home. He made to turn away from Talasyn, perhaps to even scramble out of the bed, but her hand clamped around his bare wrist and he was frozen in place.