“I’m almost afraid to ask what’s going on but, unfortunately, I have to,” Vela interrupted. “Sit down, both of you. Talasyn, please explain.”
Vela listened to the entirety of Talasyn’s debrief with far more composure than Khaede had shown. She showed no reaction to Darius’s betrayal, which wasn’t to say that she took it in her stride; a mask slammed over the Amirante’s features, as inscrutable as any crafted from obsidian metal that the Shadowforged Legion would wear.
After Talasyn had finished speaking, the silence that hung over the office was so thick that it could have been cut with a knife. Summer silence, she thought, a little frantically. The tense, oppressive stillness of high noon, when everything went dormant in the stifling heat that baked the Great Steppe. Only, this time, she was in the canyon of the Wildermarch and it was early in the morning, faint beams of sunlight filtering in through the windows, falling on furniture and charts and Vela’s lone eye, which was staring at her as she fidgeted in her seat. Khaede had reverted to her usual bored, caustic self, slouching in her own chair and crossing her arms.
“I can’t even begin to guess how your and Alaric’s magic combined,” Vela finally said. “I’ll ask our Enchanters if they’ve ever heard of such a thing happening before. It might also be possible for you and me to replicate the effect, so we’ll work on that as well. What I do know, for certain, is that aetherspace holds all the dimensions—including time. Perhaps that’s why, as you got closer to the nexus point, you began remembering things a one-year-old would have forgotten.”
“Perhaps.” Talasyn was uneasy. It was all conjecture. What specific knowledge the Sardovians had amassed pertaining to the Lightweave over the centuries had been lost when Kesath invaded Sunstead.
“But Nenavar has to help us now, right?” said Khaede. “Elagbi, at least—his daughter grew up here and Tal’s fighting for us, so—”
“Unfortunately, the Dominion prince doesn’t make the decisions. That’s the Zahiya-lachis’s job.” Vela pursed her lips. “And, after all the havoc that Sardovia has wrought within her borders, I am not so certain that Urduja will be inclined to assist us. Even if we are harboring her granddaughter.”
“I would just like to state, for the record, that it was all Alaric Ossinast’s fault,” Talasyn said with as much dignity as she could manage.
The Amirante cracked a fleeting smile. “True enough, I suppose. Maybe we can try sending envoys again, when the situation has calmed some. At the moment, though, we need to concentrate all our resources on repelling whatever the Night Empire has planned.” She appeared almost conflicted for several long moments, eyeing Talasyn with something like sympathy. Eventually, though, her features hardened into the resolute practicality that had been a major factor in Sardovia surviving for as long as it had.
“It’s not a coincidence that Darius broke down when you spoke to him and that he disappeared just as Kesath’s forces began massing at the borders of the Allfold. Not to mention the proof of both espionage and an impending large-scale attack that you obtained while you were in Nenavar,” Vela told Talasyn. “Alaric Ossinast had no reason to lie—he believed in that moment that you were at his mercy. We should deal with that first, before anything else.”
Talasyn understood. Sardovia’s resources were stretched thin enough as it was; they had none to spare to help her in this matter. She was their Lightweaver and it was her duty to fight with them, and so she had to put the Dominion out of her mind for now. She’d already botched the mission to access the Nenavarene Sever—she couldn’t botch this.
But still . . .
“There are other Lightweavers. Other nexus points,” she heard herself say. “Prince Elagbi told me that his late wife”— Hanan, the woman he thinks is my mother—“is from somewhere called the Dawn Isles.”
“Too far away,” Vela pointed out. “Even in a wasp, the journey would take a month at the very least. With Kesath on the move, it’s time that we can’t afford to spare. We’re on our own.”
Talasyn hesitated. She was gripped by a soul-deep ache. She wanted to talk to Vela about what it would mean if what Elagbi believed were to end up being true.
But one look at the tense strain in the older woman’s posture was all that was required to dissuade Talasyn from this notion. The Amirante was visibly exhausted and, while she would probably never admit as much, Darius’s betrayal must have cut deep. He had been her friend for years, and now so much information about the Sardovian regiments was compromised because of him.
Ideth Vela carried the Hurricane Wars on her shoulders more than anybody else. Talasyn couldn’t add to her burden.
So she nodded, and she didn’t say another word as she and Khaede waited for their new orders.
Chapter Ten
Although Talasyn and the Amirante attempted it many times, they were never able to replicate the barrier of light and darkness that had been woven in Nenavar. They couldn’t reestablish contact with the Dominion, either, because the fighting came hard and fast, from all sides.
In the end, a month was all it took.
A month to bring a decade-long war to its conclusion. A month to tear down what was left of what had once spanned an entire continent. A month to destroy the idea of a nation and its states.
This isn’t happening.
Moments pulsed like heartbeats, glinting in the arterial red light that flooded the world as a Sardovian stormship fell from the sky in a deluge of metalglass shards that cratered the streets of Lasthaven, the Allfold’s vast capital and its final bastion in the Heartland. The Kesathese stormship that had dealt the final blow arced up, victorious, and drew parallel with the city skyline, unleashing a fresh barrage of ammunition over it. The enormous cannons embedded in its underbelly spat out lightning strike after lightning strike, etching swathes of rooftops in white heat before setting them ablaze. The sky of early evening rained cinders and smoke, obscuring the pale silhouettes of all moons except the Seventh, which was in eclipse, burning red-gold over the war-torn land.
On the other end of Lasthaven, it was actually raining. A second stormship, its midnight-black hull proudly bearing the silver chimera of House Ossinast, unleashed magic from the Rainspring and the Squallfast in the form of downpours as thick as sleet and gales so strong that they uprooted trees and houses, whisking them every which way while Sardovian soldiers and cityfolk scrambled to safety amidst storm and darkness.
This isn’t happening.
The stray thought flitted across the surface of Talasyn’s mind every now and then, as if the hundredth time would be the charm and she’d wake up to a reality where it hadn’t taken Kesath only a fortnight to overwhelm the Coast and then another fortnight to sweep through the Heartland, effectively surrounding Lasthaven.
No one had expected Gaheris to use all of his stormships and his entire army in such a devastating assault. Kesath had grown in wealth and power precisely because of its strategy of accumulating resources from conquered Sardovian states, but the Night Emperor had apparently decided that wiping out all form of resistance was a greater priority. Most of the Heartland had been completely flattened, with countless dead. The Sardovians’ base in the Wildermarch was gone and the last stand that they were mounting here in the capital was in the process of being utterly crushed.