But he didn’t leave her alone. He stayed where he was. For once the blue-skied afternoon wasn’t beastly hot due to a pleasant breeze that stirred the plumeria blossoms. The gaps between the trees offered glimpses of the sweeping city of Eskaya miles below, with its golden towers and its bronze weathervanes. He could almost call it relaxing, sitting here in this place of leaves and earth, secluded from the rest of the palace at such a great height. There was no political maneuvering to worry about, no specter of wars past or future. It was just them, and breath and magic.
Could I have lived like this? Alaric found himself idly wondering. Without a throne to someday inherit, with the stormships remaining his grandfather’s impossible dream, would he have been content with this kind of life, his days passing slow and easy in some mundane pastoral setting?
Would he have been all right with never meeting her?
A strange thought, that. It stood to all reason that his life, whatever iteration of it, would be so much simpler without her in it. Talasyn—in all her prickliness, with that face that his gaze somehow always lingered on—was a ceramic shell hurled into his carefully laid plans.
She was currently squeezing her eyes shut, her freckled nose all scrunched up. Sunshine illuminated the golden undertones of her olive skin and her unkempt chestnut braid spilled over one shoulder. She looked fetching, and Alaric grimaced. What was it about her that reduced him to such nonsensical adjectives?
And then, because the gods had a twisted sense of humor, he was suddenly falling into the depths of Talasyn’s honeyed eyes as they flew open, too quickly for him to abolish the grimace on his face.
“What?” she muttered with deepest suspicion. “Am I doing it wrong?”
“No.” Alaric seized the first excuse that he could come up with. “I was just thinking.”
“About?”
Well, he certainly wasn’t going to reveal that he’d been ogling her. He grasped around wildly for a suitable evasion, and stumbled upon something that he had in fact been ruminating on earlier in the day. Something that had been revealed during the talks. “Your mother was from the Dawn.”
Talasyn blew out a measured breath that had nothing to do with the meditations he’d taught her. “Her name was Hanan Ivralis. My father met her on his travels and brought her with him when he went back to the Dominion. She died during the civil war.”
Alaric’s brow creased. “The people of the Dawn Isles are powerful warriors, by all accounts. What could kill a Lightweaver hailing from there?”
“It was a mysterious illness. And it was fast. She slipped away in only a sennight, before anyone could figure out what was wrong. I don’t—” Talasyn broke off sharply, her gaze flicking from him to the waterfall. “I don’t really like talking about it.”
“I apologize for bringing it up,” Alaric said, soft and solemn and far too sincere. Dangerously so. The defiant tilt of her chin and the way her fists clenched in her lap elicited a pang of guilt that he’d inadvertently forced her to relive her sorrow. It was a sorrow that had no root, for she would have been too young to have any clear memories of her mother. Communing with the Light Sever might be able to change that, but the Zahiya-lachis had declared Belian off-limits for now.
Talasyn’s pink lips quirked. “Never thought I’d live to see the day you apologized to me.”
“I know when I’ve overstepped,” Alaric stiffly replied. “While I’m at it, I would also like to apologize for losing my temper yesterday. I hope that you weren’t too—perturbed.”
“I wasn’t.” She was still avoiding his eyes, but some of the tension had drained from her form. “I was wrong, too. For yelling and storming off. We have a common goal now. We should be working together. So let’s just . . . do that.”
For several long moments, Alaric was so stunned that it defied all speech. Could it be that being nicer to the Lightweaver made her nicer to him as well? Could Sevraim, in fact, be a genius? He could never tell him he was right.
It was only when Talasyn turned to him with a slight frown that Alaric realized he’d been silent for too long. “Yes,” he said quickly. “Focusing on working together. I am amenable.”
Her frown transmuted into another upward twitch at the corner of her mouth. He had the distinct and unsettling impression that she found him amusing.
Alaric stood up, motioning for Talasyn to follow suit. He demonstrated the simplest of the moving meditations—feet apart, inhaling deeply as one palm was placed in front of the stomach and the other over the head, exhaling as the right knee was bent as far as it could go without the body toppling over. Slow and gradual movements, like a gentle ocean wave.
At first, Talasyn gave the exercise her utmost attention, with the furrowed brow and the wrinkled nose that he was starting to find so alarmingly endearing, but it soon became obvious that she was preoccupied, a distant look in her eyes. Her expression flitted to uncertainty, and then to solemn determination, and Alaric could only marvel at how unguarded she was, at how she let various emotions play across her face without thinking, the way that clouds shifted through the heavens, at turns hiding and revealing the sun. She was so different from everyone else he’d ever met in both the Night Empire and the Dominion courts.
“What happened to your mother?” she blurted out in the middle of another attempt at the pose.
Alaric would normally never have any desire to talk about it but, to his own surprise, he found he wanted to with her. Parting with each word more willingly than he ought to have, because fair was fair and Talasyn had shared such a dark shard of her past with him, too.
“My mother abandoned Kesath when I was thirteen.” Abandoned me was what some part of him longed to say. She abandoned me. “I haven’t heard from her since. I assume that she sought refuge in Valisa, where her ancestors originated.” He ran a critical eye over Talasyn’s stance. “Don’t put all your weight on one knee. Balance it out and keep your back straight.”
“Valisa,” she mused. “That’s all the way west, on the edge of the world.” She aligned herself to Alaric’s specifications and he walked around her, saying nothing, searching her form for what needed improvement.
“Do you miss her?” Talasyn asked, in a much quieter tone.
Alaric was caught off-guard. He stopped in his tracks behind her, glad that she couldn’t see his features as he struggled to compose them. “No. She was weak. She faltered in the face of what it meant to be the Night Empress. I am better off without her.”
Come with me.
My son. My baby.
Please.
“Sometimes I wonder . . .”
Alaric trailed off, embarrassed. He had been so cautious all his life, always weighing his words before he spoke them. Why could he never seem to do the same around Talasyn?
“If she ever thinks of you,” she finished for him in a soft voice. “I wondered that every day, back in Sardovia, before I knew who I was, before I knew that my mother was dead. I wondered if she ever regretted leaving me.”
There was a tightness in his throat, a certain rising lightness in his chest. Someone finally understood. Someone could give voice to all the things that he could never put into words. Talasyn was still in meditation stance, still facing away from him, and he was seized by the urge to sweep her into his arms. To embrace her in reassurance, in solidarity.