They strained into each other. For Talasyn, the rest of the world faded, eclipsed by Alaric in all his danger, hawklike gray eyes burning down at her above the obsidian half-mask.
“Nice to see you again.” His sarcasm cut through the air as precisely as any knife, the lethal edge of the shadow-falchion almost grazing her neck.
“Why, did you miss me?” she retorted, trying her very best to angle one of her blades in such a way as to stab him in the throat.
Alaric scoffed; then he pushed her away from him. She staggered back, regained her footing to fly at her opponent once more. They fell into a frenetic sequence of blows and parries and counterattacks, their footwork carrying them all over the ruins of the industrial district. Lightning rolled on beneath the Seventh moon’s blood-red eclipse.
Talasyn was eventually forced to concede that she needed a new strategy. Alaric kept her on her toes while simultaneously being a brick wall who refused to budge, and she couldn’t duel him forever. Not when Sardovian troops badly needed her help to retreat elsewhere. She banished the shorter of her two swords and transmuted the other one into a bear spear, its enormous blade shaped like a bay leaf and the length of its handle quite suitable for fending off a bear of a man while waiting for the opportune moment to escape.
Alaric regarded her quietly. His gray eyes were inscrutable, but he had to know as well as she did that the war was over. Talasyn’s fate along with that of her comrades was written in each peal of thunder, in each collapsing building, in each wasp cornered overhead, in each crossbow bolt piercing through an Allfold emblem. After this battle, there would be nothing left of Sardovia.
“Perhaps you should just yield,” Alaric said. His deep voice was hoarse at the edges.
Long day of shouting commands to kill people, Talasyn thought with a scoff. She brandished her spear, poised to attack.
He came at her with shadow-smithed sword and shield, and the next time his weapon clashed against hers it was devoid of the usual brute strength. Almost as if his heart wasn’t in it, which was ridiculous—wasn’t it? He dove beneath her swing and then they were putting each other through their paces, light and darkness and aether illuminating their gloomy surroundings as the sky continued to fall.
She lured him away from the direction of the Allfold’s rendezvous point. Their lethal dance of spinning, slashing magic carried them from one demolished street to the next, until they stumbled into a ground skirmish between Sardovian and Kesathese infantrymen. The space sang with crossbow bolts and ceramic shells as soldiers from both sides scrambled to get out of the way of the two aethermancers cutting a path through the field of combat. Light and darkness sparked and shrieked along with the metal zipping through the air, the bodies all around them slumping to the ground. The hulking shadows of the stormships drew ever nearer with each jumbled, blood-soaked moment that passed.
It was when Talasyn had to skirt around a splinter of a newly crashed wasp coracle that Alaric leapt at her in an overhead strike. Her spine nearly bent in half as she blocked with the handle of her spear, the intersected beams shrieking at her throat.
“It’s over, Talasyn.” His gaze was blank but he sounded—odd. Too quiet, somehow, too lacking in the triumph that such a declaration should have warranted.
She almost fell backward in shock. It was the first time he had ever said her name. He held it carefully on his tongue, as though testing the weight of it, his tone at odds with the mask that he wore, with its carven grimace of wolf’s teeth, with the way that their weapons crackled violently mere inches from each other’s skin.
“It’s over,” he repeated. As though he was attempting to calm her down, or to come to terms with something himself.
“And?” she bit out sharply. “Let me guess—if I surrender, you’ll let me live?”
Alaric’s pale brow creased. “I can’t do that.”
“Of course not,” she mocked. There was a well of bitterness building up inside her. “You’ll kill me quickly, then? A merciful death? The Shadowforged Legion loves promising me that.”
He just stared at her. She had the distinct and unsettling impression that he didn’t know what to say. She split her spear into two daggers and kicked his legs out from under him and, as he fell, she lunged . . .
Only to freeze as a stray ceramic shell rolled over the ground nearby and burst, the incendiary mixture within it hitting its critical point. A mighty stone column in front of her was blasted off its plinth, falling forward with a horrible, crumbling lurch.
Talasyn hated herself for what happened next. She hated how instinctive it was, how she didn’t think twice. She glanced over at Alaric and some—understanding—passed between them, swift and white-hot like a lightning bolt. She hurled one of her daggers at the falling column and he followed suit with a shadowy knife of his own. The two weapons dissolved into each other and there it was again, that black-gold sphere, that radiant night, unfolding in rippled currents with a sound like silver glass. The column disintegrated upon contact with the barrier, splintering into thousands of tiny shards. The sounds of battle became muffled, as though Talasyn were hearing them through water.
Alaric got to his feet, his every move slow and measured as his predatory gaze stayed fixed on her. She clenched her fists at her sides as nets of magic glimmered around their forms, casting a charged veil through which the Seventh in its blood-red eclipse still managed to burn bright.
He was far enough away from her that the column wouldn’t have so much as grazed him. He had helped her. The epiphany brought with it such confusion that Talasyn’s mind all but blanked. She once again remembered that first chase over the ice, how he’d parted each ribbon of Shadowgate so that she could pass through unscathed.
What was his game plan? She was Sardovia’s Lightweaver. If he killed her, he would avenge his family and make Kesath’s inevitable victory all the sweeter.
Maybe he was just savoring the moment.
A deep furrow carved its way between Alaric’s sweeping dark brows. It occurred to Talasyn, distantly, that he might look conflicted behind the mask.
“You could come with me.” His words tumbled out too quickly to have been thought through. “This phenomenon—this merging of our abilities—we can study it. Together.”
Talasyn’s jaw dropped. The man was two sails short of a full rig. And she was, too.
Because it was her turn to speak without thinking.
Because, instead of telling Alaric that she would rather eat dirt than go anywhere with him, what she said was . . .
“Your father would never allow that.”
His gaze flickered. He almost, very nearly, seemed to flinch.
What a strange person, she mused, with no small amount of awe at his gall. It wasn’t that she wasn’t curious about these barriers that she could apparently only create with him, but—
“Do you honestly expect me to believe that the Night Emperor will welcome a Lightweaver into his ranks with open arms?” Talasyn demanded. It suddenly hit her that this was what said Night Emperor’s son had to be up to, and she narrowed her eyes. “Did you really think that I would fall for such an obvious trap? That I’d be so grateful for the chance to save my own skin that I’d throw away all common sense?”