She surged forward, almost tipping over on her precarious perch, and she looped her arms around his neck in a rush of gratitude, of triumph.
His swift intake of breath cut through her giddiness. It may as well have been the sound of cannon fire, for all that it induced her careening return to reality with the most terrible of jolts. Mortified, her whole face hot, she untangled herself from him.
Or she tried to, at least.
Alaric pressed a hand to the small of her back, sending her crashing into him, keeping her against him. His bare palm was a burning sensation, not in the least bit dulled by the thin material of her tunic. His chin came to rest on the spot where her neck curved into her shoulder, the ends of his hair tickling her cheek.
Talasyn blinked at the trees on the rooftop, dark against the dimming sky. It was a revelation, to be held like this, to have someone else’s warmth so near, surrounding her. It was hunger, the thing that made her tighten her arms around his neck until there was no more space between them, skin to skin, the urgency with which he had latched on to her echoing everything that her soul had cried out for all these years.
She relaxed into his embrace, breathing him in, the scent of sandalwood water and calam-lime soap and sun-flushed skin. His hand roved over the base of her spine in a slow caress, and she knew that she would feel him there long after he’d pulled away.
But she didn’t want him to pull away. She wanted more. Her right hand dropped to the collar of his undershirt and slid lower still, until her fingers traced the solid musculature of his exposed bicep. A shudder tore through his broad frame and he compulsively palmed her thigh with his free hand, so warm and big. All of him was so warm and big.
A stifled little half-sigh of sudden need escaped her lips, unbidden. He hummed, low and soothing, and they continued to touch, to hold, as the last of the sun sank below the horizon.
Chapter Thirty-One
He could barely remember his mother holding him, and his father certainly never had. He possessed no frame of reference for the feeling of someone in his arms, and someone’s arms around him. He had never expected that it would be as though the cold inside him had begun to thaw, everywhere he and Talasyn touched, dragging him headlong into the gladness of summer.
He didn’t know—would probably never know—what it was, exactly, that caused them to return to themselves, a stark awareness creeping in along with the indigo of dusk.
Perhaps it was the ache in their backs and their still-crossed legs due to the awkward angle of the embrace. Perhaps it was the tree trunk they were sitting on shifting dangerously. Perhaps it was even the drowsy hoot of a roosting bird from some unseen perch in the jungle canopy around them.
Whatever the case, Alaric and Talasyn slowly extricated themselves from each other. It went beyond the novelty of experiencing something for the first time—even though the moment had passed, he could still feel her waist encased in the curve of his arm, could still feel her arms around his neck and the imprints of her fingers on his bicep. She wouldn’t meet his gaze while he couldn’t seem to stop staring at her. Tucking a loose strand of chestnut hair behind her ear, she licked her lips nervously, and he really wished that she hadn’t, his gaze lingering on her pink tongue as it ran over the swell of her bottom lip.
“You, um . . .” She trailed off. Licked her lips again, because she’d been put on this earth to torture him. “You’re a good instructor,” she said hoarsely, her brown eyes trained on the craggy patterns in the tree trunk’s rough bark. “You’ve been very patient. So—thank you.”
Alaric wasn’t prepared for this, for her shy, faltering praise. Warmth flooded his cheeks and crept all the way up to the tips of his ears. He was grateful that the sun had set, grateful that it would be difficult for her to see how she’d reduced him to a blushing moron with a handful of kind words.
He mustered a grunt of acknowledgement and they clambered down from the tree. He kept a wide berth from her as they prepared their supper and ate in stifling silence.
By the time they bedded down, the awkwardness had worn off a little. To be more precise, Talasyn had stopped jumping out of her skin whenever Alaric moved or even so much as glanced her way. Enough time had passed since the hug to make clear that he had no intention of discussing it, which suited her just fine.
She couldn’t stop thinking about it, though, which was why she was currently sprawled flat on her bedroll and glaring at the night sky as though it had caused offense.
A shame, really: as far as night skies went, this one was resplendent. A circle of moons, ranging from full to crescent to gibbous, lay embedded in a field of stars that rained down their light in glimmering pulses, so densely clustered that to look at them was almost to fall forever into all that lovely silver and black. She traced constellations that she’d grown up with and ascribed to them the names that she’d only learned months ago. The group of stars that formed what Sardovia called Leng’s Hourglass was known here in Nenavar as the Plow, its appearance signaling the start of planting season. Then there were the Allfold’s Six Sisters, reborn here in the Dominion as the far-less-poetic Flies, hovering over the celestial carcass of the Horned Pig.
At the periphery of her vision, the lump that was Alaric on his bedroll stirred.
They turned to each other at the same time, eyes locking in the gloom, over an arm’s length span of stone tiles.
“Tell me about Bakun,” he said. “The World-Eater.”
“Don’t we have an early start tomorrow?”
“I can’t sleep.”
“Because you’re talking.” Still, Talasyn couldn’t sleep either, so she launched into the story. Taking refuge in it, in fact, in the hope that a conversation would fully restore the equilibrium that her ill-advised hug had upset. “Back when the world was new and had eight moons, Bakun was the first dragon to tear through aetherspace and make his home on Lir. He laired somewhere on these islands, eventually falling in love with the first Zahiya-lachis, whose name was Iyaram. Dragons live hundreds of years longer than humans do, so Iyaram eventually passed from old age. The grief in Bakun’s heart turned into anger, which then turned into a hatred of this world for giving him his first taste of sorrow, for making him the only one of his kind ever to mourn. He swallowed one of the moons and would have eaten the rest, had Iyaram’s people not waged a great war against him and driven him back to aetherspace.”
Talasyn paused for breath. Alaric was listening intently, moonlight-tinted gaze fixed on her. For a moment, she was reminded of the orphanage in Hornbill’s Head, the other children exchanging stories on thin pallets while waiting for sleep to claim them. She had always just listened as stone and straw dug into her back. She’d never had a story of her own to share.
“Even now, that great battle is fought in the heavens time and time again,” Talasyn continued. “Whenever there’s a lunar eclipse, the Nenavarene say that it’s Bakun returning to Lir and trying to devour another one of the moons, until he is defeated by the spirits of the ancestors who fought in that first war.”
“And I suppose that once every thousand years he almost wins,” said Alaric. “Hence, the Moonless Dark.”
“The Night of the World-Eater,” she agreed.