He grabbed her wrist before she could draw it back. “I liked you better when you were afraid of me,” he drawled.
“Well, I liked you better when you were unconscious. And I should never have been afraid of you at all,” she retorted, flushing at the reference to their first encounter. “You’re just your father’s dog. I bet you’ve never had an independent thought in your head—”
Alaric stood up, crowding Talasyn in the space that she refused to cede to him. She attempted to pull her hand out of his grip but he tightened it, nearly hard enough to bruise. He was so close that she could smell him, the sweat and smoke of battle mingling with the lingering balsamic spice of sandalwood water. It was a heady combination and, coupled with the wrath in his star-cut eyes, she felt as though she was drowning, would drown in him—but she held her ground, lifting her chin, baring her teeth.
“You’ll pay for that, Lightweaver,” he said. It was a raspy promise, rolling off his tongue on the fumes of a simmering, contained rage.
She balled her free hand into a fist and punched him square across the jaw.
Alaric reeled backward and Talasyn advanced. “Tell me who the traitor is.” She had some hazy idea of beating the information out of him if he didn’t cooperate. They were stuck in a cell, after all, and there was nowhere for him to run. “Be good for something, for once in your miserable life—”
He pounced too fast for her to react. Before she knew it, he’d swept her onto her back on his mattress and he’d pinned her down, the cot groaning under their combined weight. He clasped her shoulders loosely as she lay sprawled beneath him. The clawed tip of one gauntleted finger dragged along the side of her neck, raking a path of heat and static across her skin. “Knowing the identity of some random informant won’t do you any good.” His eyes caught the moonlight, blazing silver like a knife’s edge. “The Sardovian Allfold is on the verge of being eradicated. Nothing you do can stop it, especially now that you’re so far away from home.” The corner of his lush mouth twitched in a sardonic half-smile. “It’s too late.”
She stared up at him. Was he hinting at an impending attack? She had to go back. She had to warn everyone.
The door to the cell creaked open, and the officer who had apprehended them at the ruins walked in. He stopped in his tracks, raising an eyebrow at the sight of Alaric frozen above Talasyn on the cot.
“It would seem that this is a habit for the two of you,” he commented wryly.
The prisoners were to be interrogated separately and Talasyn had the dubious honor of going first. Her wrists cuffed behind her back with steel restraints, she was escorted by no less than five Nenavarene soldiers, two of them gripping each of her arms and one nudging an iron tube—cannon—thing at her spine. The other two flanked the group, hemming her in, those birdcage-like contraptions strapped to their shoulders.
Talasyn snuck surreptitious glances as the officer led the way down a narrow corridor of split bamboo lashed together with rattan vine. One of these birdcages had also been hung outside her and Alaric’s cell and she suspected that whatever lay within was responsible for suppressing their ability to tap into aetherspace. She had never thought that such a thing would be possible, and she itched to know what lay within the cages, but they were covered with panels of opaqued metalglass shielding the contents from view.
Eventually, she was ushered into an austere lamplit chamber and made to sit at a table over which the pack that she’d brought with her from her coracle had been emptied, her supplies and navigational equipment arranged in neat rows. There was also water, a pewter cup full of it, outfitted with a wooden drinking straw. The soldiers placed the two birdcages in opposite corners of the room and filed out, leaving Talasyn alone with the officer, who took the chair across from hers and pushed the pewter cup closer to her.
The Nenavarene were benevolent captors, at least. Or they just didn’t want her to drop dead of thirst before they finished their questioning. In any case, she was hardly going to refuse.
With her hands still bound behind her back, Talasyn leaned forward as best as she could and sealed her lips around the straw, drinking greedily. There was nothing subtle or polite about it. She drained the cup in seconds, not stopping until she was slurping loudly on air.
The officer observed her with a trace of amusement, but he didn’t say anything. In fact, the amusement soon vanished after she’d straightened up. His dark eyes raked over every inch of her face until she fidgeted from the intense scrutiny and he cleared his throat in a manner that could have been considered apologetic.
Talasyn decided that, if she had to sit with her hands bound in an interrogation chamber, she might as well let loose with some questions of her own. “Those tubes your men carry—”
“We call them muskets,” said the officer.
“All right, muskets,” she said flippantly, trying her very best to not stumble over the unfamiliar word. “What was that magic that they fired? That was from aetherspace, wasn’t it?”
“I gather that the Northwest Continent has yet to discover the Voidfell dimension,” said the officer. “It is a very useful type of necrotic magic. It can kill, and it can also be calibrated to merely stun,” he added, casually enough, but his meaning was clear. The next time his men fired at Talasyn if she tried anything funny, their muskets would not be set to stun.
The muskets . . . Her brow furrowed. The crystals that both Kesath and Sardovia mined to contain energy from the dimensions that they had discovered were the size of supper plates. Aether magic destabilized if it was contained in anything smaller. Not anything small enough to fit into those slim iron tubes. “What kind of aether hearts—”
The officer spoke over her with the air of one who had indulged somebody else long enough. “I am Yanme Rapat, a kaptan of the patrol divisions, charged by Her Starlit Majesty Urduja of House Silim, She Who Hung the Earth Upon the Waters, to keep our borders safe,” he announced in a formal tone of voice. “The remnants of the Lightweaver shrine on Mount Belian are under my jurisdiction and, as such, the judgment for your trespass falls to me. Foreigners are not permitted in the interior without a dispensation from the Zahiya-lachis.”
“And yet here I am,” Talasyn muttered. “Where’s here, exactly?”
“The Huktera garrison on the Belian range.”
Talasyn had gleaned from Bieshimma’s dossier that Huktera was the collective name for the Nenavarene armed forces. And it was a relief to learn that she wasn’t all that far from the ruins. Once she escaped, it would be easy to lose any pursuers in the dense jungle, regain her bearings, and make her way back to the cave where she’d stashed her wasp coracle.
But perhaps there was no need to escape. Perhaps this officer, this kaptan, could be reasoned with. “Look,” she said, “I’m sorry for trespassing. I truly am. I meant no harm.”
Rapat leaned forward and plucked the map from the assortment of Talasyn’s belongings. “This, relatively speaking, is very detailed, considering that we are not in the habit of disseminating our nation’s layout to the rest of the world. Aside from marking the Light Sever’s location, whoever made this also charted the entire route from our harbor to our capital city. So that you could engineer your course to avoid the busy thoroughfares, I think. The most recent outsider to have gotten that far inland—thus, the only one who could have drawn up this map—was General Bieshimma of the Sardovian Allfold, who flouted our laws by not remaining in port and attempting to infiltrate the Roof of Heaven. The royal palace,” he clarified, noting the confusion on her face. “A fortnight later, here you are, wreaking havoc at one of our most important historical sites. These are not the actions of a people who meant no harm.”