“Sounds tedious,” she grumbled.
“When I began aethermancing under my grandfather’s tutelage, I would spend whole sennights doing nothing but meditating,” he snootily informed her.
She should have taken umbrage at his tone, but . . . “I didn’t know that your grandfather was the one who taught you.”
“As I’ve mentioned before, my abilities manifested at an early age.” Alaric traced a circle in the dust of ages with his forefinger, without even seeming to realize that he was doing it. “He was very proud of me. He made the time to oversee my training, until . . .”
He never finished the sentence, but Talasyn could guess. Until his obsession with the stormships grew, or Until the war began. It all amounted to the same thing, didn’t it?
She only knew King Ozalus as the one who’d started it all. Who had been possessed by a dream of lightning and destruction that culminated in the shadows of the stormships falling over the Continent. She had certainly never before pictured him as anyone’s grandfather, tutoring a solemn dark-haired boy in the ways of magic.
How unsettling, that evil could have a human face. She thought back to what had been, by Alaric’s standards, an explosion of rage when they argued over the true instigator of the Cataclysm. She understood it better now. How unsettling, that an evil man could have had people who cared for him so.
It wasn’t long before Alaric emerged from his private reverie and began the day’s training. They went through the stationary breathing meditations first, and then he taught her more of the moving forms—this time keeping a careful distance, not once arranging her body with his hands the way he’d tried to in the plumeria grove. She wondered if this was a conscious decision on his part, but caught herself. If it was a conscious decision, it had been made so he could avoid the awkwardness that had occurred then, when she walked back into him. She was the only one whose heart had taken a long time to stop racing in her dressing room afterward, because she hadn’t ever known touch like that before.
The sun was high overhead by the time Talasyn learned all the meditations by rote. Alaric went from instructor and observer to fellow aethermancer, executing the various forms by her side. Despite his solidly muscled frame, he was light on his feet, flexible, executing each step with panther-like grace. He set the pace and she kept up, the two of them traveling in parallel lines across the length of the courtyard, amidst all those old and crooked trees. Legs sweeping back and forward. Arms slashing and pushing and rising to the heavens; wrists like paper cranes soaring and then gliding back to earth. Air flowing through the lungs, urged on by the contractions of chest and stomach, by the twisting of hips and the billowing of the spine.
And Talasyn’s magic flowed along with it. For the first time, she could sense every single pathway taken by the aether in her veins. For the first time, she could see her fingertips and her heart and the hidden facets of her soul as nexus points, bound into a constellation by the Lightweave’s golden thread.
For the first time, she felt connected to the man beside her in a way that went beyond begrudging tolerance or those surprising little moments of softening, of opening up. She and Alaric moved together, seamless and in fluid tandem, as though they were each other’s mirrors, as though they were waves in an ocean called forever, their shadows lengthening on the stone.
Such a blissful state of affairs ended too soon, however.
By sunset, Talasyn was frustrated beyond belief.
She still hadn’t managed to spin a single shield. In principle, it was the same as forging a weapon—and yet here she was, perched on a section of the fallen grandfather tree’s twisted trunk, once again attempting to visualize something that she couldn’t replicate. She’d been at it since late afternoon and the results were minimal at best.
Alaric was probably as mystified as she was, but he was far more patient than Vela had ever been, and he tirelessly approached the problem from different angles. In truth, thanks to the meditations, she could feel the magic within her slowly being coaxed toward the desired effect. She just couldn’t bring it to the surface.
The trunk creaked beneath an added weight. Talasyn cracked one eye open; Alaric had sat down in front of her, mirroring her pose. He gestured for her to continue with an imperiousness that made her bristle, but she begrudgingly complied, retreating into the darkness behind shut lids once more.
“You told me that the first weapon you ever spun was a knife, like the one you stole to protect yourself,” he said, and she nodded. “Aside from blades, a shield can protect you, too,” he continued. “Build it in your mind, as you did with that first knife. Inch by inch. Carve the hardwood into the shape of a teardrop. Paint over it with resin. Soften the grip with leather. Reinforce the surface with metal. Polish it until it gleams bright in the sun, or the starlight.”
His tone was low and deliberate. It sank into her bloodstream, all honey and wine and oak. She had to fight the urge to open her eyes in a frantic attempt to quell the goosebumps that prickled the back of her neck, that danced down her spine.
Talasyn imagined making a shield. A material one, from hickory and cowhide and iron, using Alaric’s words as her guide. This time she was also thinking about that first knife, how she’d called it forth at the outskirts of a military encampment in the Sardovian Heartland, with Vela looking on. She had been so desperate to prove herself back then. Desperate to earn her keep. This was the same thing, wasn’t it? She needed to master this new skill to prove to the Dominion that she was worth the risk of concealing the Sardovians. She needed to save both the Sardovians and the Nenavarene from the amethyst night, from the jaws of the World-Eater.
And she was almost there. Her magic was straining to reach its goal, pushing up through doubts and old habits and learning curves the way a green sprout pushed up through the earth.
When she opened her eyes, a translucent blob of light magic that could be a shield if one squinted was shimmering in the grasp of her fingers, growing more and more solid as Talasyn beheld it with wonder.
Alaric was leaning slightly forward, wearing an expression she’d never seen on him before. He looked—pleased. Boyish, almost, some of the sternness lifting from his perpetually sullen features. Once again, as she had that day in the Roof of Heaven’s atrium, she wondered what it would be like if he actually smiled.
And, with that break in her concentration, the shield winked out of existence. Leaving her with her fingers clutching empty air.
Talasyn’s disappointment at the short-lived nature of her competence was similarly fleeting. What quickly took its place was exhilaration of the purest form. It felt as though she had taken the momentous first step on a path that had once been impossible to find. The ability to make a shield was inside her, she just needed to push a little bit more; there was hope like sunbeams at the end of a long darkness. Hope that the world as she knew it would not be devoured.
“I did it,” she breathed out, but then caught herself. “I mean, I almost—”
“No. You did it.” Alaric’s voice was soft and raspy. His gray eyes were warm in the fading daylight. “You’re doing very well, Talasyn.”
And the moment was golden between them, a victory to be shared in this place of stone and wood and spirits, and her magic was blazing high in her heart and the look on his face was open and unguarded, and this was the first good thing to happen in such a long time—