And it was, as it turned out. The purplish beverage was earthy and sweet, and Talasyn tried not to let on how much she delighted in each sip. Not even the Dominion with all its wonders had made her any more well disposed toward the bottle, but the cherry wine might as well have been a particularly rich juice.
Alaric, for his part, drank sparingly, more interested in swirling the liquid around in its flute. He was probably waiting for the whole ordeal to be over, counting down the minutes in his head.
“It is good that we have the chance to talk in private, just the three of us,” Elagbi ventured after a drawn-out silence. “I thought that I should prepare you both for a certain topic that will doubtless crop up over the coming days as we plan for the wedding. I speak of consummation—”
Talasyn choked on her wine. Alaric’s fingers tightened around the stem of his glass so violently that the fine crystal seemed in danger of snapping in half.
“There will be a feast after the ceremony,” Elagbi soldiered on. “At some point, the two of you will be expected to abscond to the Lachis’ka’s chambers, where you will spend the night in accordance with Nenavarene custom.”
“There is no need for that,” Alaric said quickly. “I do not expect Her Grace to—” He stopped, clamping his lips together, just the slightest tinge of pink leaching into his pallor.
“Naturally there will be no coercion involved,” Elagbi declared in stern tones, giving Alaric such a forbidding look that a lesser man would have flinched. “However, the union will not be valid in the eyes of the court until you share your wife’s chambers.”
“But that is so unnecessary!” Talasyn cried. “The Dragon Queen herself knows that this will be a marriage in name alone . . .” Something about her father’s grave expression caused her to trail off.
“To be sure, there is no pressure on you as of now,” the Nenavarene prince said carefully. “It will be a different story once you have ascended to the Dragon Throne and there is need for a new Lachis’ka, but I believe that is a matter best saved for another time. What the two of you need to discuss now is your wedding night and how to handle the issue.”
Talasyn wondered if Urduja had put Elagbi up to this: the Zahiya-lachis often employed back-channel negotiations. She would have appreciated some warning beforehand; but, then again, it was highly likely that she would have refused to set foot on the Deliverance if she had known.
Talasyn snuck a glance at the dark-haired emperor, her mind wandering down a dangerous path that she couldn’t keep away from now that the topic had been broached. A flicker of something wild and nervous curled in her abdomen. She took in his massive frame, his thick fingers, his lush mouth. She remembered how she felt whenever their bodies were close together, the warmth and the danger and the butterflies—
No. She was not going to think about him in those terms, least of all when her father was in the room.
Unfortunately, Elagbi chose that moment to stand up. “I’ll leave the two of you to it, then, shall I?”
Alaric started from whatever strange reverie he’d been brooding in for the past few moments. “To it?” he repeated, somewhat faintly.
Elagbi scowled. “To talk,” he stressed, his hard eyes boring into the younger man, “about your situation, in your very much separate seats.”
Talasyn contemplated pitching herself overboard.
As Gaheris’s sole heir, Alaric had devoted his early years to studies and aethermancy training. Then he had spent the last decade fighting a war. There had never been time for women. He’d always considered himself above the bawdy pleasures that people like Sevraim took so much delight in.
Today, however, his very alluring, very infuriating betrothed had the nerve to show up on his ship in that dress—that revealing dress which hugged her slender form like molten sunshine, its low neck framing the swell of her cleavage in pearls and quartz—and all Alaric could think about was how her breasts were the perfect size for his hands.
To make matters worse, he’d been trying not to salivate over her while her father was in the room, and now the man was taking his leave after telling them to discuss how to handle their wedding night.
Why has my life come to this? Alaric wondered angrily. I didn’t ask for any of it.
As soon as the door creaked shut behind Prince Elagbi, Alaric leapt to his feet with a frustrated hiss of breath and stalked over to the window, fists clenched at his sides.
“I wouldn’t be averse to sharing a room,” he heard Talasyn say. “To keep up appearances. It’s just for one night.”
True enough. He was heading back to the Continent the day after the wedding, and she wouldn’t be joining him there until her coronation a fortnight later. After that, he had a hard time imagining that they would be seeing each other any more than was strictly necessary.
“I can take the settee,” he mumbled. “What is one more inconvenience, after all?”
“You don’t have to sound like it’s my fault,” she admonished.
It is, he almost snapped, only for a potent dose of shame to wash over him, white-hot in its intensity. She was not to blame for the fact that he couldn’t control his physical reactions to her.
Alaric stopped glaring a hole into the window and whirled around to face his betrothed once more. Talasyn sat ramrod-straight, fiddling with the fan-shaped folds of her skirt, sunlight dancing over the ropes of pearls braided through her chestnut hair, enveloping her in radiance. Her neck was bare—the perfect place, he thought bitterly, to press his lips against.
The Lightweaver will never return this bizarre infatuation that you have for her, but she will in time learn to wield it against you if you don’t nip it in the bud.
Bile rose in Alaric’s throat. Like magic that became a blade, it transmuted into cutting words. “How should I sound, then? Like I’m excited about the consummation?” He flashed her a thin, humorless smile.
“There won’t be a consummation, you dolt, that’s the point!” Talasyn’s anger came on like a gust of coastal wind, too sudden, too swift. Her cheeks were quick to stain red, too, underneath the sheer veil of powder. It would seem that he’d struck another nerve in addition to her anger; it took him a beat to identify it as embarrassment. “I wouldn’t sleep with you if you were the last man left alive on Lir!”
The barb shouldn’t have sunk as deep as it did, slicing into Alaric’s skin, to the bone. If he were a stronger man, it wouldn’t have. But his father was right and he was a fool. “The feeling is mutual,” he hissed. “As far as I’m concerned, this alliance has nothing to recommend it to me, save for securing peace. Else I would have had better options, and none so shrewish.”
Talasyn scrambled off the settee and advanced upon him in a flash of yellow silk, invading his space, crowding him up against the window. There was just the slightest flare of gold in her brown irises as her magic roared in its banks, her features twisted with fury and . . . hurt? Why did he think that she looked hurt, that she cared a whit for his opinion of her?
“You didn’t mind me all that much when you were calling me beautiful a few nights ago.”
Her tone was riddled with contempt, and it was all he could do not to wince. It was all he could do to flatten his spine against the stormship’s window, because if he didn’t and she leaned in any closer, the inviting swell of her décolletage would very nearly graze his own chest, and he didn’t think he could survive that.