Any illusions Talasyn had about Alaric’s pampered childhood were being dashed. Now she understood why he’d spoken with such unbridled contempt for marriage that day on his stormship. And, gods, despite everything, despite knowing what a terrible thing she’d done when she kissed him, she was powerless in the face of his vulnerability; she was greedy for more. She didn’t think that she could bear it if he turned cold now.
“Why are you telling me this?” she heard herself ask.
He shrugged. “It’s only fair. You trusted me with that glimpse of you growing up, the knife . . . My experiences pale in comparison to yours, but they’re what I have. So I’ll trust you with them as well.”
A piercing bittersweetness twinged through her. She thought about the night of the duel without bounds, how alone he’d looked as he faced down Surakwel in front of the entire Nenavarene court. She attempted to gather herself, to focus on keeping her priorities straight, but it was all starlight and confession; it was as though a hand were reaching out to hold hers across all the wasteland years.
“I was lonely, too.” She was too afraid to add I still am. “I was on my own on the streets. I kept waiting for my family to come back, but they never did. Even when I joined the Sardovian regiments, I still waited. It’s probably not something that you ever truly grow out of.”
“Do you remember your mother?” His tone was wistful in the dark.
“Not really,” she said, but the sound of Hanan’s voice inside the Sever rushed back into her ears. She wasn’t ready to part with that secret yet, but it felt wrong to dismiss what little else she had. “I know what she looked like because of aethergraphs and formal portraits. When I think about her hard enough, I can smell wild berries. That’s mostly it. Although . . .” She blinked hurriedly, before a sudden rush of tears could wet her eyes. “The day I first set foot on Nenavarene soil, I had a—I’m not sure if it was a vision or a memory, or a waking dream, but there was someone telling me that we would find each other again. Maybe that was her, or maybe that never happened and I made it all up.”
“It was her,” Alaric said, with such gentle firmness, such surety that it couldn’t be otherwise, that it was as though a sun were rising in Talasyn’s heart. She wanted to stay forever in this tranquil night. She wanted to keep on talking to him about anything and everything, about their magic, about what they’d lost, about the stars and gods and shores they shared—
But she couldn’t talk to him about everything.
If Alaric ever found out that Talasyn’s mother had played an instrumental role in sending Nenavarene warships to the Continent nineteen years ago, to help the same aethermancers who had killed his grandfather—and once the Sardovian remnant made their move and he learned that Nenavar had been sheltering them in the Storm God’s Eye—that would be the death blow to any budding intimacy that Talasyn forged with him.
Here she was, letting her guard down with Alaric, panting after him, while her Sardovian comrades hunkered down on Sigwad. While the Continent suffered under his empire’s cruelty.
Wasn’t that what the Lightweave had been telling her, when it showed her that image from Lasthaven? He was the enemy. And he might have lost his mother and his grandfather, but she had lost people, too.
Because of Kesath. Because of him.
Enough now. The inside of her chest grew tight. No more.
You can’t have impossible things.
“In the regiments, I made one friend. Her name was Khaede. She was the one who told me that the Voidfell could be seen from the Sardovian Coast,” said Talasyn. “She didn’t connect it to the sevenfold eclipse, and I doubt she believed that the amethyst light on the horizon was anything more than an old wives’ tale until I came back from Nenavar with news of void magic. But we did make plans, years ago, for the Moonless Dark. If there was no battle, if we were stationed in the same place, we’d camp outdoors, in the woods or on a hill somewhere, and we’d stay up until the moons shone again.”
Talasyn spoke with the clarity of memory that the Sever had granted her. That day had long been buried by the endless horror and violence of the Hurricane Wars, but it was now solid and vibrant in her recollections—the crowded and noisy mess hall, Khaede speaking with her mouth full, alight with rare excitement as she talked about the night no moons would rise after the going down of the sun. About how she and Talasyn would experience this once-in-several-generations occurrence together. That plan had later changed to include Sol, months after he and Khaede had shot down a wolf coracle and he sailed past a jessamine tree, plucking one of the blossoms and handing it to her as their ships passed each other while their fallen enemy spiraled toward the waiting valley below.
“We won’t be able to do that now, of course,” Talasyn continued in what was barely above a whisper. “After the battle of Lasthaven, I never saw Khaede again. She was the only friend I ever made, and now I don’t even know if she’s alive, if the baby she was carrying is all right. Probably not.” The words hitched in her throat. It was the first time that she’d ever given voice to this fear. “Your soldiers killed so many of us, after all.”
A heavy silence fell. It dragged on for a long time, the charged stillness following a peal of thunder frozen into eternity. A sharp ache sank its hooked barbs into Talasyn’s being as she realized that, the night Surakwel smuggled her out of the palace and into the Storm God’s eye, she hadn’t even thought to ask Vela if the aetherwave had picked up any sign of Khaede.
At some point, without her even being fully aware of it, she had already given up her friend for lost.
That was what the war had done. It had turned people into statistics. It had taken away hope and turned it into something to be buried until there were only bones.
“Talasyn.” Her name was low and stricken on Alaric’s tongue. “I—”
Time moved again.
“No.” A rush of unshed tears pricked at her eyes, but she refused to let them spill. She would never cry before him; she owed Khaede and everyone who had died that much. How could she have forgotten, even just for brief moments over the last few days, that Alaric was the face of Sardovia’s downfall? How did the memories of Khaede and Sol and Blademaster Kasdar not burn with her every breath? “Let’s just not talk at all.”
He sat up, narrowing his eyes at her. They weren’t filled with the cold, quiet kind of anger that she’d come to associate with him and only him. There was a wild glint in them, a recklessness. “What about what happened in the amphitheater? Don’t you think we should talk about that?”
“There’s no need to discuss it,” Talasyn said stiffly. “It was an aberration.”
“An aberration that you enjoyed, if I recall.”
“I rather think that you were enjoying it more!” Incensed, she rolled over onto her other side so that she wouldn’t have to be plagued by the sight of him. Still, his piercing scrutiny raked pinpricks along the back of her neck. “Daya Langsoune once told me that hate is another kind of passion. I was carried away by the duel. I got my wires crossed. That’s all.”