Her breathing shallowed. Alaric studied her warily, the beginnings of a frown tugging at his lips.
Urduja broke the regal silence with which she’d been presiding over the negotiations. “Emperor Alaric is correct, Alunsina. Your father and I will, of course, accompany you to Kesath for your coronation. As for your subsequent visits, I am sure that His Majesty will allow you to take whoever you wish to make your stays more . . . bearable.”
Alaric nodded. “Each and every one of Her Grace’s courtiers will always be welcome at the Citadel.”
I don’t want to go anywhere with you, Talasyn wished she could snap at her grandmother and her father, still smarting from their subterfuge. Nor with you, she wished she could hurl at her betrothed, still frustrated with his existence in general.
You have to do this, she reminded herself. She brought the faces of Vela and the other Sardovians to the forefront of her thoughts. She grasped for strength in her memories of Khaede and Sol and Blademaster Kasdar. She envisioned death’s amethyst light washing over the darkened shores of this land and its people who had welcomed her back and called her their own.
You have to do this.
Talasyn subsided, leaning back in her seat, features composed in front of the Dominion nobles and the Kesathese. Her claws retracted.
This way, everyone gets to live.
She was dawdling, surely.
That was the only explanation. No one would take over an hour to eat lunch and change into training clothes unless they were doing it on purpose.
Alaric forced himself not to fidget where he sat on the grass. In truth, it came as no great shock that Talasyn was making him wait. Earlier in the council room, she’d turned quite pale when her return to the Continent became the subject of discussion. It made sense, he supposed, that she was in no hurry to see him again.
Or to go to Kesath, for that matter.
A distant roar like the sound of a stormship being torn apart pierced the afternoon stillness. Alaric looked up, and awe blossomed within him. A dragon was flying miles and miles above the Roof of Heaven, its mighty wings silhouetted against the hot sun. The green-scaled length of it snaked through the clear blue sky in an undulating ribbon, forming loops and whorls as it soared ever on.
When it disappeared from view, Alaric’s gaze fell back to earth—and landed squarely on Talasyn.
She had paused in her approach to track the movements of the great beast, but now that it had gone, her eyes met his, golden sunlight lancing through their depths to bring out the same wonder he felt. Scrubbed free of powders and pigments, her freckled features and the line of her pink mouth had gone soft. And for a brief moment, there amidst the orchids, by the waterfall, he forgot that they were anything other than two people who had just shared a marvelous sight.
Then she lifted her chin and stalked over to him in a huff, and the illusion dissipated. But perhaps a part of him was in it, still, because, once she had closed the distance between them and gracelessly settled into a meditation pose that mirrored his, he asked, “Do they truly exude flames?”
Talasyn subjected him to a penetrating stare, as though searching for the trick up his sleeve. Alaric had none, and she must have eventually realized it because she gave a stiff nod. “The orange seaweed that I’m sure you’ve been served here on more than one occasion, it’s called breath-of-fire. It grows only in Nenavarene waters, near where the dragons like to lair. The fire in their bodies heats up the current, making that particular variety of seaweed thrive.”
“The dish is rather good,” Alaric ventured. Breath-of-fire was silky with a hint of crunch, and had a briny flavor that the palace cooks enhanced with a piquant sauce of rice vinegar and chilies. “The same can be said for Dominion cuisine in general, I find.”
“Agreed. So much better than the food back home—”
Talasyn broke off abruptly, but it was too late. The word hung in the space between them, as ominous as a thundercloud.
Home.
“We were fighting a war.” In his haste to cover up the silence before it could turn awkward, Alaric blurted out what first came to mind. “Everything was rationed. It stands to reason that our food can’t compare to . . .”
He trailed off, realizing that he, too, had made a mistake.
The Continent that they both called home, the war that they’d both fought—on opposite sides. It all came rushing back, bringing with it echoes of the sore point in the negotiations earlier.
I don’t want to go to Kesath.
Alaric’s common sense screamed at him to direct the conversation to safer waters. To begin today’s training, which was what they were here for in the first place. But Talasyn had gone stiff with combativeness, a stubborn set to her olive-toned jaw, and she was going to be his empress and he needed to make her understand—
The glimpse into her early life had filled him with cold fury, as overwhelming as it was impotent. It was long in the past. Hornbill’s Head was gone, and, with it, all the squalor that had marked her early years.
Still, he was seized by the fanciful urge to resurrect Hornbill’s Head just for the pleasure of having his stormships flatten it again.
He had never before felt so wounded for someone else. The girl was bewitching him.
“I know that you had a hard childhood,” he told her. “But we are rebuilding. The Great Steppe, and the entirety of the land formerly known as Sardovia—it will all become better than it ever was.”
“At what cost?” she snarled.
Unbidden, the aftermath of Kesath’s final triumphant push into the Sardovian Heartland rose to the surface of the darkness behind Alaric’s eyes. The sea of debris, of corpses. He blinked those images away. “The Night Empire was forced to destroy the Allfold before they could destroy us,” he tersely explained, “but, under Kesathese stewardship, the Continent will improve. When you go back, you’ll see. You might disagree with Kesath’s methods, but in the end this conflict turned out to all be for a cause greater than any of our individual selves.”
To Alaric’s disbelief, his attempt to reason with Talasyn only made her angrier. “You and Commodore Mathire say that a lot, that you had to destroy the Allfold before they destroyed you. But since when did the Allfold ever give any indication—”
“When Sunstead attacked,” Alaric interrupted, his grasp on his own temper slipping as past pain was excavated, laid bare beneath the tropical sun. “When Lightweavers killed my grandfather, the king. When the other Sardovian states did nothing to stop them.”
Talasyn’s brow furrowed at the reminder that her breed of aethermancer was responsible for his grandfather’s death. However, her unease didn’t last long, her shoulders soon squaring as she let loose with another retort. “The Lightweavers of Sunstead wanted to stop Ozalus from building the storm ships. They knew, as well as everyone outside Kesath knows, that a weapon like that has no place in this world. But Ozalus wouldn’t listen to reason, and that’s why Sunstead did what they did. They had no choice!”
Rage erupted from within the depths of Alaric’s soul. It was startling how swiftly it built up, rising like the tide along with his magic. The air in the immediate vicinity darkened and Talasyn scooted back, planting her hands in the grass as though prepared to spring to her feet at any moment, and Alaric knew that his eyes were blazing silver, the Shadowgate wrapping around his heart.