She rolled onto her side so that she could glare at him, only to jolt when she found him already facing her. His gray eyes gleamed starkly against his pale face in the moonlight.
Another memory washed over her, far more recent. The amphitheater. His teeth nipping at her bottom lip. Each caress of his hands.
The smart thing to do now was to stop looking at him, because looking at him and the way he was too big for his bedroll did nothing to ease her racing thoughts. Instead, Talasyn continued staring into Alaric’s eyes, over stone and night, until he asked, “What is it?”
He sounded defensive, as though he already knew what was on her mind.
Willing herself not to blush, she blurted out the first safe topic that she could conceive of. “Do you really think that we can stop the Voidfell?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “You know how to weave a shield and we have a few months to prepare. It will be all right. Otherwise, we’re all dead.”
“How inspirational, truly,” she sniped.
“I try.”
A fraught quiet seeped in once more, and she turned back onto her side, peering up into the silver-black night. The minutes stretched on, and just when Talasyn thought that sleep had claimed him, Alaric spoke again. “I remember being lonely.”
She went still. “What?”
“You asked me, back when we began aethermancing at the royal palace, what I remember from my childhood. That is what I remember. Loneliness.” She craned her neck toward him again and he flashed her a rueful half-smile. “I am my father’s only child, and he demanded that I apply myself to my studies and my training. I was the Night Emperor’s heir, and so my companions could not truly be friends. Even Sevraim knows where the lines are drawn.” He paused, weighing his next words. And when they finally came, they sounded as though they were being drawn up from the deep well of an old heartache. “My mother was kind but unhappy. I think that she found it difficult to look at me and see what was tying her to her marriage.”
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.”