Talasyn was actually quite worried about it, but their relatively brief time together had enabled her to form a comprehensive picture of this man who was her father. As the younger son, Elagbi was the despair of Urduja’s eye, a laidback sort of fellow who possessed no grand ambitions and absolutely none of the cunning that the Nenavarene aristocracy was infamous for. He was, in Talasyn’s very affectionate opinion, flighty, and it was endearing.
“What sort of happier things should we talk about, then?” she gamely asked.
Elagbi looked proud of himself. “I found some more old aetherlogs.”
In the Nenavarene prince’s study, a beautiful woman cajoled the squirming infant in her arms to look at some unseen nearby lens, a moment immortalized in grainy black-and-white flickers on a field of canvas.
Talasyn would never cease to be amazed by the Dominion’s ingenuity. Back in Sardovia, aethergraphs were not unheard of, although rare. These were contraptions mounted on wooden tripods that used the light of a Firewarren-imbued aether heart to transmit an image onto a sheet of silver-plated copper. Here in Nenavar, the aethergraph had been modified to be capable of imprinting a series of images in strips of cotton film that could then be projected in rapid succession on a flat surface. The result was that the subject of the images looked as if it was moving.
This, then, was the sort of thing that could be created in a nation whose inventors and Enchanters weren’t devoting all their time and energy to the war effort. These days, Talasyn often found herself feeling a twinge of melancholy for what Sardovia could have become without the shackles of a ten-year conflict.
But, on this particular morning, she focused on nothing else beyond the woman and the child on the canvas.
No matter how many times Talasyn beheld her mother’s likeness, the eerie resemblance always caught her off-guard. It was as if she were peering not at the past but at the future, at an older version of herself. In all the oil portraits and aether-graphy, though, Hanan Ivralis’s smile tended to be brittle at the edges. She had not been very happy at court, preferring instead the jungles that reminded her of her homeland and the ruins of the Lightweaver temple on Mount Belian, where she could commune with the only Light Sever to be found in the country.
In the aetherlog, Talasyn was only a few months old, yanking at strands of her mother’s hair with chubby fingers and her features scrunched up, her mouth open in a soundless wail. It was so close to being familiar, like a word on the tip of her tongue. If she strained harder, if she dug deeper, surely she could discover this half-minute in the depths of her memories. Surely she would be able to recall what it had felt like to be held in her mother’s arms.
Prince Elagbi cranked a lever on the aethergraph, rewinding the film without having to be asked. Talasyn could have watched it forever. Just this moment, just this sliver of love, on a loop. Somewhere out on the Eversea the Night Empire fleet was amassing, but it took no great effort on her part to push that concern aside for now. For just a little while longer. The Hurricane Wars had taught her that these moments of grace were few and far between and she had to take what she could get. When she could get it.
“Tell me again how you and Hanan met,” Talasyn requested, not taking her eyes off the canvas.
Even though Elagbi had repeated this story quite a few times over the months, he was glad to indulge her once more. “I traveled often in my younger days, exploring Lir and learning about other cultures. I was still the second son then, with no major responsibilities to my name.” A shadow fell over his features, the way it always did when he thought of Sintan, the brother he had killed in battle, but it passed quickly, with an acceptance that time had taught. “On one such sojourn, I stumbled upon a group of islands west of Nenavar, where the sky constantly blazed with Light Severs.”
“The Dawn Isles,” Talasyn breathed.
“How did you guess?” Elagbi teased gently. “My airship was caught up in one of the discharges and we crashed. The crew and I survived the impact, but we were stranded in the middle of the jungle for days. I thought that it was rather miserable luck at first, but then I bumped into your mother beneath the trees. I startled her, to be more accurate—she nearly ran me through with a light-woven spear.”
“She had a temper,” Talasyn said with a grin.
“A formidable one,” Elagbi confirmed, chuckling. “We couldn’t understand each other initially. Sailor’s Common is not widely spoken in the Dawn Isles. Through an inspired combination of pantomime and drawing in the dirt with a stick, I was able to convince her to bring me and my crew back to her village. Her mother was the clan matriarch, and we were begrudgingly offered shelter and assistance. It took almost a month to repair the airship, during which time Hanan and I got to know each other better.”
“And fell in love,” Talasyn supplied, her smile widening.
Elagbi smiled back. “It was a whirlwind romance. When I finally left the Dawn Isles, she went with me. We were married within days of our arrival in Nenavar. The Zahiya-lachis as well as the whole court didn’t take too kindly to an outsider joining the royal family, especially since Hanan refused to be proclaimed the Lachis’ka and it jeopardized the succession because Sintan had yet to take a wife. But mine and Hanan’s marriage remained steadfast. After a year, we had you.”
In the aetherlog, Hanan Ivralis’s slim shoulders shook with silent laughter as she tried to extricate strands of her hair from where they’d wrapped around a three-month-old Talasyn’s curious fingers. This time, the twenty-year-old Talasyn, who was watching the scene, registered the vague scent of wild berries and knew, without a doubt, that this was what her mother had smelled like.
It was a start. It was enough for now.
She and her father never talked about the role that Hanan had played, however inadvertently, in the civil war. For Urduja, Hanan would probably always be the naive, easily manipulated woman who had nearly destroyed the Dominion. Elagbi, on the other hand, held his wife’s memory sacred, and even though the Nenavarene civil war had consigned Talasyn to a life of hardship for several long years, she chose to believe in the recollections that were borne of love.
“I want that for you, too, you know.” At Elagbi’s cryptic statement, Talasyn turned to him, not understanding what he meant. He cupped her face between both hands. “Whirlwind or not, be it a lightning bolt or a slow fall, I want you to someday have what your mother and I had.”
“I don’t think there’s time for that,” Talasyn said dismissively. Romance was a foreign concept to her. And, from what she’d learned about them, the majority of the Nenavarene lords and ladies didn’t seem to set much store by it either, focused as they were on power plays and financial gain. Urduja’s marriage to Talasyn’s grandfather, who had died before Elagbi was born, had been a purely strategic choice, a consolidation of territories between two noble houses to resolve a centuries-old border dispute.
Elagbi was the outlier, and perhaps there was no greater proof that Talasyn was his daughter because there was a small part of her that was curious about it. About how it felt to love somebody so much that you could defy tradition or leave behind everything you had ever known.