Perhaps she had been seducing him to bend him to her will.
Even as that thought filtered into his head, Alaric’s instincts warned him that it was spoken in Gaheris’s voice. Last night had felt honest and raw. It had to have been real.
But since when had his father ever been wrong? Who was Alaric, with all his shortcomings, with all the traits inherited from a weak and long-vanished mother, to contest the man who had brought Kesath back from the brink of destruction?
When the last of the dishes had been cleared, Alaric bade his painfully polite farewells to a frosty-looking Urduja and an only slightly less frosty-looking Elagbi, and Talasyn reluctantly walked with him out the front doors of the palace, Jie and Sevraim and the Lachis-dalo trailing behind. The shallop that would take him back to the Deliverance gleamed in the morning sun, and at first it was only Alaric and Talasyn who moved toward it.
He turned back to their companions, puzzled. They had all stopped walking, maintaining a courteous distance with expectant looks on their faces.
“They’re giving us privacy,” Talasyn explained with a long-suffering demeanor. “To say our goodbyes.”
Alaric’s gaze strayed to the upper levels of the white palace. A host of servants were huddled at the windows, their noses pressed to the glass, avidly watching.
“You should probably shed a few tears and beg me not to leave, Lachis’ka,” Alaric wryly remarked. “Else the blacksmith’s washerwoman three cities over will be disappointed.”
A smirk fought its way across Talasyn’s painted lips, but she was quick to suppress it. “Listen, about last night—”
“I know,” he interrupted, alarmed and trying not to show it, which translated into a churlishness that must have surprised her, because she jerked her head back. “There is no need to spare my feelings.” He cursed inwardly as he heard himself make a conscious effort to gentle his tone. He was a fool. She had twisted him into knots. “I am well aware that you hold no affection for me, and I’m not so green as to believe that all acts of that nature have to mean something. Our emotions were simply running high and there was no other outlet.”
She cocked her head, as though considering. Then she repeated the words from the Belian ruins. “Hate is another kind of passion.”
“Two sides of the same coin,” Alaric confirmed, even as his heart twinged in a manner that he was in absolutely no hurry to examine. “We were fighting and we got carried away. No further discussion is required. I realize, like you must also, that we can’t allow it to happen again.”
Talasyn’s gaze dropped to her feet. An awkward silence ensued.
Finally, she nodded.
Alaric decided that it was well past time to cut this encounter short. “Your coronation as the Night Empress is in a fortnight. I will see you in Kesath then, my lady.” He couldn’t resist needling her with the reminder that she was now his lady, that they were bound by law.
Talasyn glowered at him. “I shall wait on tenterhooks for our happy reunion, my lord,” she all but snapped, her voice dripping with sarcasm, and she once again looked so much like a disgruntled kitten that he nearly smiled.
He turned to go, but then stopped. There was something about the way Talasyn looked, prickly and endearing all at once. He wouldn’t see her for a while. He couldn’t bear to leave things like this.
“Talasyn.” Alaric whirled back to face her. “I will inquire regarding your friend Khaede’s whereabouts at the Citadel.” Her eyes widened in panic and he almost flinched, hastening to add, “If she is being—detained there, I will arrange for the two of you to meet when you come to Kesath.”
It was clumsy, it was fumbling, it was a reminder that her former comrades were being held in his prisons. It was, in short, the worst possible thing he could have said in this moment, and Alaric wholeheartedly prepared for Talasyn to punch him, knowing full well that he deserved it.
But she didn’t punch him. Instead, she exhaled as though she were letting something go. “Thank you,” she said—a bit stiffly, but there was a wrenchingly sincere note to it. Her expression was wary but tinged with hope. “If she is there, I’d like . . .” She faltered. He watched her hope turn into hesitation, then harden into resolve. “I should like to bring her back with me to Nenavar.”
The very blood in Alaric’s veins went still. He couldn’t permit that. He couldn’t free a Sardovian soldier, a prisoner of war. He—
His mind was already racing with ways to accomplish it. He could pass it off as an act of conciliation. A grand gesture to herald the new age of peace. A wedding gift.
He swallowed. “I’ll see what I can do.”
It was a simple enough statement, but it tinged the air with a hint of treason. It looped them both into the barest bones of some kind of furtive plan. As if they were conspirators now.
Still, when Talasyn’s features lit up with a small but genuine smile, dimples peeking out at the corners, Alaric felt that it was somehow worth it.
A flickering burst of amethyst to the far south drew their attention. The Voidfell had activated, causing a conflagration of the shivering magic to sear across the horizon in whorls of violet smoke. It looked—angry, and Alaric found himself thinking of a frieze of carvings that he’d studied at the Lightweaver shrine on Belian. Warriors in bark-woven breechcloths with feathered bands around their heads, winding along one of the walls leading to the campsite, riding elephants and swamp buffaloes, brandishing swords and spears as they charged at a serpentine leviathan with a crater-pocked moon in its jaws.
An eternal battle fought in the spirit world of the Nenavarene ancestors, to stop Bakun before he could destroy all life.
A battle that Alaric and Talasyn would have to fight themselves a little over four months from now.
As he watched the Voidfell now, noting how intensely it flared even from across such a distance, it seemed impossible that the odds would be in their favor. But they had to try—and, if Alaric knew anything about the scrappy soldier girl who was now his wife, she would try.
She was pale and tense, her shoulders squared as she warily regarded the amethyst glow. Her lovely smile had faded and he was all of a sudden incensed by what had caused it to vanish from her face.
Right. He had to leave now, before he promised to fight the Voidfell with his bare fists for her.
Alaric turned on his heel and strode swiftly up his airship’s ramp. He didn’t look back. It took everything in him to not look back. The flare of the Void Sever screeched one last time and then it was gone, with no sign to mark that it had ever been there at all, save for the echoes of sound that lingered in the air like a dragon’s roar.
Talasyn returned to Jie and her guards as the shallop prepared to sail, Alaric a solemn, black-clad figure on the deck. Aether hearts glowed a rich emerald and the vessel was lifted into the air on the crackling currents of wind magic, peeling away from the Roof of Heaven, away from the limestone bluffs.
Like the guards, Jie seemed somewhat apprehensive at the Void Sever’s fleeting discharge. Not apprehensive enough, however, to refrain from teasing; whatever she saw on Talasyn’s face made her ask, with an impudent twinkle in her eyes, “Are you missing His Majesty already, Lachis’ka?”