And, as a final insult to injury, she was getting married to someone who hated her—someone whom she would one day betray, for the sake of everyone else.
It was too much. Everything was too much. It all weighed down on her like a stone.
Talasyn furiously blinked away the tears that were threatening to spill. Not a moment too soon, as it turned out, because a shadow fell over her and she looked up to see Alaric’s sullen features, stark and pale in the moonlight. For such a tall, wide bulwark of a man, he stood on the precarious rooftop ledge with minimal effort, studying her quietly.
When he spoke, it was in a tone that carried a trace of unease. “Is something the matter?”
She wanted to laugh. Where should she start?
“Why didn’t you kill me when we first met?” Talasyn burst out, because it was what she’d always wondered, because there was no better time to ask it than here and now, when the moonlight could hold secrets and it was just the two of them above the city, amidst the rooftops, in a sea of weathervanes. “That night on the frozen lake outside Frostplum, before we knew I was the Nenavarene Lachis’ka, before we knew we could merge our magic. I’ve replayed that battle over and over. You could have easily killed me then. Why didn’t you? You even parted the Shadowgate barriers so that I wouldn’t run into them. And you shielded me from the falling column and you let me go the day the Heartland fell. Why did you do all of that?”
“Why are you bringing it up now?” he countered, looking defensive.
Her temper spiked. She didn’t know, either. She had no idea what she’d been hoping to find.
Several flares of light shot up from the streets to the north of the rooftop. They exploded at their zenith in whorls of green and violet and pink and copper, exhaling wisps of potassium smoke as they blossomed against the starry sky. Talasyn stared numbly at the conflagration that was meant to celebrate her betrothal, and she thought about how much she longed to scream. To let all of her fears and frustrations be swept into the light and noise.
She gave a start when Alaric spoke into the stillness that ensued after the fireworks had died down. “I think that I was curious, the night we met,” he admitted. His voice cut through the gloom behind her in a low rasp. “I’d never encountered a Lightweaver before. I wanted to see what you were made of.”
“And at Lasthaven?”
“I rather felt that it would have been—unceremonious. If you’d died like that.”
Strangely enough, she understood. Nothing less than a well-earned ending, by his blade or hers, would suffice. It wasn’t as disconcerting a realization as it should have been. At the very least, it was something to belong to, something that was just theirs. Even if there was no other way for it to end but in blood and a fallen empire.
She gazed out over joyous, gilded Eskaya. With their fireworks and their feasting, it was so different from what she’d known back then.
“All the cities on the Continent will look like this one day,” Alaric said quietly, as though reading her thoughts. He, too, was studying the scene below them, and she thought about the pudding, how he’d finished every last drop, something as simple as soybeans and sugar a revelation. “I will see it done.”
“The cities of the Allfold could be well on their way to looking like this, if Kesath hadn’t invaded,” Talasyn muttered.
He regarded her with disbelief. “You speak so highly of Sardovia.”
“It was my home.”
“No homeland should allow its people to drink in the troughs with the horses,” Alaric said coldly. “The Allfold did not deserve your loyalty, nor anyone else’s.”
Talasyn stood up and took the couple of steps that would bring her toe to toe with him, walking swiftly and surely over the rooftop tiles, too preoccupied with ridding him of his self-righteousness to worry about falling. And maybe there was a part of her that was scared, too, to let his words sink in too deep.
“If I could go anywhere in the world right now,” Talasyn told Alaric, looking up at him with narrowed eyes, her voice low and deadly, “I would take you to the Wildermarch, where we buried everyone who died at Frostplum. I would take you to every battlefield where I saw my comrades fall. I would take you to every village flattened by Kesathese stormships, to every town ransacked by your legionnaires. That was where my loyalties lay. That was why I fought for as long as I did.”
That’s why I’m still fighting. That’s why one day I will see Sardovian banners fly over the Continent once more, and I will gaze down on your father’s corpse and smile.
Alaric’s hands dropped onto her shoulders. It was a gentle pressure, but it went through her heart like a shockwave. He leaned in, so close that their foreheads were almost touching. “I wasn’t—I didn’t mean—” He took a deep breath. He looked, she thought, very tired. It had been a long day for them, and the ones that would follow promised to be just as grueling.
“My allegiance is to my nation,” Alaric finally said, “and I also dislike thinking about what you went through. Surely those two things can both be true at the same time.”
“They can be, but I’m allowed to call you a hypocrite,” Talasyn retorted, even as some tiny corner of her soul reached out with greedy arms to the siren song of someone being angry on her behalf, angry about what she’d suffered. The people in her life who actually gave a damn about her—Vela and Khaede and Elagbi—had been spared the gritty details.
Why had she told Alaric about the troughs, about the knife? In the end, he’d only used it as ammunition against her, provoking her to question the acceptance with which she’d played her part in the war.
His jaw clenched. His hands slid from the tops of her shoulders to curl around her upper arms in a loose grip. “It was for nothing, then. The accord that we found over the last few days, while aethermancing.”
“I will still work with you,” Talasyn said, hating how she couldn’t bring herself to so much as squirm away from his grasp. “But you won’t ever convince me that the Night Empire saved Sardovia from itself. I told you once that vengeance isn’t justice, and I hold to that. Whatever better world you think you’ll build, it will always be built on blood.”
His hands fell to his sides, and every inch of her that he had touched cried out at the loss. Fuming, she made her way back down the building while he followed without another word. She navigated a moonlit path to the limestone bluffs of the Roof of Heaven, and he trailed after her in silence, through city streets that resounded with a merry mood that neither of them could take part in.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
In the moment, Talasyn had hoped that setting her anger loose on Alaric might provide some catharsis. But it had only done the opposite. She kept replaying their conversation in her mind, the reckless insults paired with hesitant confessions. She had come far too close to exposing the truths that lay at the center of her heart. Truths that protected not only herself, but the people she cared about. Alaric had a way of getting past her guard, even when she knew that one wrong step could prove fatal. Her determination to speak with Vela only became more urgent.
She hadn’t seen Alaric since they returned from the night market, but a steady stream of Kesathese officers had marched in and out of the guest wing well into the afternoon, wearing on Urduja’s last nerves. Talasyn knew that she couldn’t risk sneaking out via the garden path between her and Alaric’s rooms again—but, then, how—