Due to the fact that she was navigating a series of slippery steps, Talasyn held on to Alaric tighter than she would have liked. He seemed to instinctively understand what she needed, slowing his pace and keeping his arm steady to support her. She glanced at him, and his sharp profile contained a trace of haughty amusement.
“Oh, you try climbing the stairs in these infernal shoes and this kind of skirt,” she snapped under her breath.
“I’d rather take my chances with the shoes,” he murmured. “Your dress is so loaded down with diamonds that I’m surprised that the floor hasn’t cracked yet.”
“Shut up.”
Once they reached the top of the platform and stood before the altar and the officiant, they signed the two contracts that the initiates brought forward. They were beautifully embossed documents stating that, on this day, Alunsina Ivralis of the Nenavar Dominion was marrying Alaric Ossinast of Kesath.
After raising the parchments to the light to ascertain that the ink had dried, the officiant carefully rolled each one up. She gave one to an initiate and placed the second one inside the censer hanging from the dragon’s crystalline jaws. Smoke spewed forth, the acrid smell of burning parchment soon engulfed by the perfume of incense as news of the union was carried to the great warships of the ancestors that sailed paradise, the Sky Above the Sky—or so the Nenavarene believed. Talasyn was absolutely certain that, if the afterlife did exist, the ancestors of House Silim would be rolling over in their graves right about now.
She and Alaric turned to face each other, their hands reaching out across the space between them to, with some hesitation, clasp their fingers together. He wasn’t wearing his usual gauntlets and her eyes widened at the brush of skin on skin. It was as though a static charge rushed into her veins at every point of contact. Her pulse began to race.
And yet there was also something about his touch that was soothing. Like a cool drop of water sliding down her parched tongue. Talasyn had been running on anger her whole life, be it the inferno or the fumes. The burning was what her magic was built around, was at times all she knew.
But this was . . . anchoring. The Lightweave that often surged so restlessly through her veins was now crooning, reaching for its opposite, its dark mirror that lurked beneath Alaric’s own skin. The cradle of his hands hinted at somewhere quiet and safe beneath the storm of her hammering heartbeat. It offered a dream of peace.
It—
It wasn’t real.
Alaric’s lips were pressed into a sullen line. He was entirely unaffected, and this went a long way toward spurring Talasyn to gain control over her odd reaction to the feeling of his bare fingers laced through hers.
The officiant produced a red silk cord and looped it around the couple’s wrists, to signify that fate had bound them together. The music came to a stop and the scarlet-robed woman lifted her arms to the stained-glass ceiling, intoning in a solemn voice that echoed through the room, “We are gathered here today to celebrate the union between two realms, which in itself signifies the dawn of a glorious new age for the Nenavar Dominion. With the blessing of Her Starlit Majesty Urduja Silim, She Who Hung the Earth Upon the Waters, these two souls now pledge their troth . . .”
Perhaps Talasyn would have been more interested in the officiant’s words if she’d actually wanted to get married. Perhaps then this farce of a ceremony would hold some meaning. As it was, though, her attention drifted during the speech, distracted by the weight of hundreds of gazes and Alaric’s hands holding hers—so strangely gentle, for some reason, as though she were some fragile thing. She had never expected gentleness from this dour, hulking specter of a man. She had never expected to deem him not unattractive.
And she definitely had never expected to find herself concentrating solely on him as the officiant droned on. He made her forget the crowd. He centered her, in this beautiful, treacherous place, where he was the only one who had known her in the time before, where he was the only thing she could honestly say that she knew. They might have been thrust into new roles, but there was still a war’s worth of memories between them.
Talasyn remembered the clash of blades in the moonlight, in the ruins, under burning skies. She remembered moving with pure instinct, light against shadow, and how alive she had felt every time she and Alaric fought, the aether singing between them. His fingers tightened reflexively around hers, and for a moment she thought that she could see those memories in his eyes, flashing silver in the setting sun.
The officiant gestured over their joined hands. “These are the hands that will love you for all the years to come and comfort you in times of sorrow,” she told them. “These are the hands that will work alongside yours to build an empire. These are the hands that will hold your children and help you carry the world. These are the hands that will always reach for yours.”
The blessing shook Alaric to the core. These hands of his could never do any of the things that the officiant had mentioned, not when they were so irrevocably stained in blood. He would never be able to fulfill any of the promises that he was making to Talasyn, because his parents’ relationship was his only blueprint for what made a marriage, and it had ended in betrayal, in flight.
It was ridiculous—it defied all logic—that the ceremony was affecting him in this manner. It was all for show. But there was a part of him that wished . . .
He should never have eschewed formal gloves. His father had drilled into his head that they were his armor, that they insulated him from the distractions of the physical realm. But Daya Rasmey had sternly advised him that wearing them would be disrespectful to the significance of the wrist-binding rite, and so he’d gone without. As a consequence, he couldn’t marshal his defenses when Talasyn’s fingers were intertwined with his. A warmth like sunlight flooded into him at every point of contact, seeping into all the icy places where the Shadowgate had taken root. It sated the buried hunger for touch that he thought he had overcome long ago.
He couldn’t get enough. He never wanted to let go.
It was all going so, so wrong.
Alaric sped through his vows while trying not to make it too obvious that he was in a rush to finish saying them. He told himself not to meet Talasyn’s eyes, but it was impossible to look away. He was trapped within sunset and stained glass, holding the hands of his bride and gazing upon her face as he recited words that he wished he could mean. If only it had been any other life.
And then it was her turn.
“I t-take . . .” Talasyn faltered, trailing off, and closed her eyes briefly before trying again. “I bring you the whole of my heart at the rising of the moon and the setting of the stars.”
Alaric wished that she’d kept her eyes closed. Her gaze crackled with intense energy, and it made the words that emerged from her lips all the fiercer, somehow, all the more poignant, even if she was merely echoing what he’d said to her scant moments ago.
“Fire of my blood, sun of my soul, I would raise my armies in your defense and I would stand by your side though the Eversea itself be against us.”
A dull pain stabbed through his chest. They were just words, and not even original words at that, but no one had ever before told him that he didn’t have to fight alone.