“You clean up well,” he told her, not as coolly as he would have liked, far more hoarsely than he wanted. But it did the trick and she reeled back as if he’d struck her, and she didn’t say anything, and how, he wondered, could everything in him feel so sharp and so empty all at once?
“Isn’t it for the best that we’re being honest with each other?” Alaric goaded. “This arrangement is complicated enough as it is without us having any illusions.”
He saw it, the moment that Talasyn hit boiling point, the moment that she lost whatever semblance of caution she was holding on to. He saw it play out all over her face.
“I’ve never had any illusions about you,” she growled. “You are exactly who I thought you were from the very beginning—a vile, arrogant, cruel, despicable asshole. For all your grand talk about securing peace, one day people will have had enough of you, do you hear me? And when they finally denounce you and your despotic goons, I swear to you, I won’t think twice before joining them!”
The thread that Alaric had been hanging on to since his and Mantes’s duel finally snapped. He was upon Talasyn in a flash, his fingers clamping around her hip almost hard enough to bruise.
“While I share your contempt for this situation in which we find ourselves, do not mistake it as apathy,” he hissed. “I hardly expect your disposition to sweeten, but I will be damned if I allow my future empress to behave in a manner that reflects poorly on my reign.”
“If you allow?” Talasyn wrenched free of his viselike grasp, batting his hand away for good measure. “I don’t belong to you. I don’t belong to anyone.”
His sardonic gaze flickered over her silk dress and the pearls in her hair. “You are the Lachis’ka, and the Lachis’ka belongs to the Nenavarene. Their fate is entirely in your hands. Should you cross the line, it is they who will suffer for it. Am I making myself clear?”
“I hate you,” she spat.
Alaric sneered at her. “See? Already you are acclimatizing so well to married life.”
“This isn’t a marriage.” Talasyn stepped back, widening the distance between them. “It’s a farce.”
“As opposed to all the other marriages out there, brimming with devotion and contentment?” Alaric frostily countered. “You have been several months at court. You should know better. I neither expect nor want your love or your friendship, but I will require your cooperation. And you need mine in order to stop the Voidfell. Do you understand?”
She glared daggers at him.
“Good.” Alaric inclined his head in a mocking parody of a bow. “I’ll show Prince Elagbi back in, and then I must attend to the search that I’ve been sorely neglecting thus far.”
When Alaric joined Sevraim on the metalglass-enclosed bridge of the stormship, the legionnaire took one look at his face and said, “You fought with her again, didn’t you?”
“She is the most frustrating—” Alaric cut himself off sharply, then took a deep, centering breath. “It is a lost cause. The advice you previously gave will never be of use. She has made up her mind about me and she will never be able to separate me from the war. So be it. There are more important matters.”
Sevraim offered a sympathetic hum. He took off his helm, tucking it under one arm as he leaned against the railing overlooking the busy but well-ordered activity of the Deliverance’s crew. “If I may be frank—considering that Nenavar doesn’t appear to be deceiving us, as there is neither hide nor hair of the Sardovian Allfold here on their shores—your relations with the Lightweaver might turn out to be the most important matter in the future. You need heirs—”
Alaric felt a vein throb at his temple at the sheer rush of stress brought about by the other man’s words. “If you value your life, you won’t finish that sentence.”
“I’ll start a new sentence, then,” Sevraim said with unabashed cheer. “Judging from the scene I walked into beneath the plumeria trees, I truly believed that you were well on your way to the business of heir-making. I was so proud.”
“Do you prefer to die by my magic, or shall I toss you out of my ship?” Alaric blandly inquired.
Sevraim’s guffaw tapered off prematurely when the Deliverance’s navigator joined them on the bridge, delivering news that they had cleared aerial reconnaissance of two of the seven main islands with nothing untoward to report. After Alaric dismissed the navigator, Sevraim proved himself capable of a rare display of seriousness; for several long minutes, he and Alaric stood side by side, unspeaking, watching the archipelago below them unfold.
“Talasyn was telling the truth, I think,” Sevraim ventured. “The Sardovian remnant isn’t here. We would have found them by now. They couldn’t have escaped at any point between our arrival and this sweep—we would have seen them.” He scratched his head. “So where are they?”
There was a taut and weighty sensation in the pit of Alaric’s stomach as he came to terms with the fact that he had been doing Talasyn a great injustice by treating her so harshly. Upon reflection, most of his anger toward her had stemmed from the possibility that he was allowing his guard to be let down when Kesath’s enemies could spring out from behind the sun at any moment.
But the Allfold was nowhere to be found. Talasyn might happily strangle him without a second thought, but she wasn’t deceiving him.
“The world is vast,” he finally told Sevraim. “We’ll keep looking. We’ll make it clear that any nation harboring our enemies will be crushed along with them.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The late evening found Talasyn tossing and turning in her bed in the Roof of Heaven, still in a snit.
She had to see her comrades. While the enemy was still unaware of Sigwad’s existence and had gotten nowhere near the strait, she couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d come very close to being found out. Harrowingly close. She was rattled, and it only compounded her doubt that she could see this terrifying long game through to the end. She was making mistakes, as she always did. She couldn’t do this alone. She desperately needed to talk to someone. She needed Ideth Vela in this moment, needed the Amirante’s resolute, no-nonsense leadership. They hadn’t spoken since the Kesathese ships had first been sighted on the horizon.
The residual wrath from her and Alaric’s vicious argument on the airship made Talasyn bold enough to take matters into her own hands for once. Kesath had come up short in their search—their guard was down more than ever now. Before she could second-guess herself, she stole out of bed and into her dressing room, changing into breeches and a tunic while mapping a mental exit route. Putting her predilection for gossip to good use, Jie had told Talasyn that Alaric had ordered the Nenavarene guards away from the guest wing after the altercation with Surakwel Mantes, so it would probably be best to creep along the battlements leading to his chambers and then drop down the palace walls from his balcony. Talasyn would just have to be as light on her feet as possible.
Then she could make her way into the city and find one of the seedier dugout proprietors who operated well into the night, who would lend her an airship without asking any questions. She would set course for Sigwad, and if all went well, she’d be back at the palace before early morning to catch up on lost sleep for the rest of the day while Alaric stewed over his reports.