She cocked her head, as though considering. Then she repeated the words from the Belian ruins. “Hate is another kind of passion.”
“Two sides of the same coin,” Alaric confirmed, even as his heart twinged in a manner that he was in absolutely no hurry to examine. “We were fighting and we got carried away. No further discussion is required. I realize, like you must also, that we can’t allow it to happen again.”
Talasyn’s gaze dropped to her feet. An awkward silence ensued.
Finally, she nodded.
Alaric decided that it was well past time to cut this encounter short. “Your coronation as the Night Empress is in a fortnight. I will see you in Kesath then, my lady.” He couldn’t resist needling her with the reminder that she was now his lady, that they were bound by law.
Talasyn glowered at him. “I shall wait on tenterhooks for our happy reunion, my lord,” she all but snapped, her voice dripping with sarcasm, and she once again looked so much like a disgruntled kitten that he nearly smiled.
He turned to go, but then stopped. There was something about the way Talasyn looked, prickly and endearing all at once. He wouldn’t see her for a while. He couldn’t bear to leave things like this.
“Talasyn.” Alaric whirled back to face her. “I will inquire regarding your friend Khaede’s whereabouts at the Citadel.” Her eyes widened in panic and he almost flinched, hastening to add, “If she is being—detained there, I will arrange for the two of you to meet when you come to Kesath.”
It was clumsy, it was fumbling, it was a reminder that her former comrades were being held in his prisons. It was, in short, the worst possible thing he could have said in this moment, and Alaric wholeheartedly prepared for Talasyn to punch him, knowing full well that he deserved it.
But she didn’t punch him. Instead, she exhaled as though she were letting something go. “Thank you,” she said—a bit stiffly, but there was a wrenchingly sincere note to it. Her expression was wary but tinged with hope. “If she is there, I’d like . . .” She faltered. He watched her hope turn into hesitation, then harden into resolve. “I should like to bring her back with me to Nenavar.”
The very blood in Alaric’s veins went still. He couldn’t permit that. He couldn’t free a Sardovian soldier, a prisoner of war. He—
His mind was already racing with ways to accomplish it. He could pass it off as an act of conciliation. A grand gesture to herald the new age of peace. A wedding gift.
He swallowed. “I’ll see what I can do.”
It was a simple enough statement, but it tinged the air with a hint of treason. It looped them both into the barest bones of some kind of furtive plan. As if they were conspirators now.
Still, when Talasyn’s features lit up with a small but genuine smile, dimples peeking out at the corners, Alaric felt that it was somehow worth it.
A flickering burst of amethyst to the far south drew their attention. The Voidfell had activated, causing a conflagration of the shivering magic to sear across the horizon in whorls of violet smoke. It looked—angry, and Alaric found himself thinking of a frieze of carvings that he’d studied at the Lightweaver shrine on Belian. Warriors in bark-woven breechcloths with feathered bands around their heads, winding along one of the walls leading to the campsite, riding elephants and swamp buffaloes, brandishing swords and spears as they charged at a serpentine leviathan with a crater-pocked moon in its jaws.
An eternal battle fought in the spirit world of the Nenavarene ancestors, to stop Bakun before he could destroy all life.
A battle that Alaric and Talasyn would have to fight themselves a little over four months from now.
As he watched the Voidfell now, noting how intensely it flared even from across such a distance, it seemed impossible that the odds would be in their favor. But they had to try—and, if Alaric knew anything about the scrappy soldier girl who was now his wife, she would try.
She was pale and tense, her shoulders squared as she warily regarded the amethyst glow. Her lovely smile had faded and he was all of a sudden incensed by what had caused it to vanish from her face.
Right. He had to leave now, before he promised to fight the Voidfell with his bare fists for her.
Alaric turned on his heel and strode swiftly up his airship’s ramp. He didn’t look back. It took everything in him to not look back. The flare of the Void Sever screeched one last time and then it was gone, with no sign to mark that it had ever been there at all, save for the echoes of sound that lingered in the air like a dragon’s roar.
Talasyn returned to Jie and her guards as the shallop prepared to sail, Alaric a solemn, black-clad figure on the deck. Aether hearts glowed a rich emerald and the vessel was lifted into the air on the crackling currents of wind magic, peeling away from the Roof of Heaven, away from the limestone bluffs.
Like the guards, Jie seemed somewhat apprehensive at the Void Sever’s fleeting discharge. Not apprehensive enough, however, to refrain from teasing; whatever she saw on Talasyn’s face made her ask, with an impudent twinkle in her eyes, “Are you missing His Majesty already, Lachis’ka?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Talasyn scoffed. Over the next several days she had to resume aethermancy training all by herself, navigate what was certain to be a treacherous new order of things now that she had worked up the guts to challenge Urduja, and mentally brace for her return to the Northwest Continent. There were so many things that she needed to do, and missing Alaric Ossinast was not on the agenda.
But he had promised to try to find Khaede for her. If he was successful, if Khaede was in Kesath, then Talasyn would move heaven and earth to bring her to Nenavar. If Alaric went back on his word or was unable to keep it, she’d break Khaede out and smuggle her away from the Citadel herself—right under Gaheris’s nose, if need be.
Talasyn stood on the front steps of the palace longer than she ought to have. Her mind was afire with schemes and plans, that was true, but as she watched Alaric sail away, her lips were also burning with the memory of his feverish kisses.
We can’t allow it to happen again, he’d said.
But what if I want it to happen again?
The thought broke past her defenses, rising to the surface with a mutinous ease. She forced it back down, burying it, her heart heavy in her chest, her eyes fixed on his airship as it became a mere speck on the still horizon, until it disappeared into the deep blue of a cloudless sky.
Chapter Forty
Alaric was summoned to his father’s private hall at the Citadel within an hour of the Deliverance making landfall in Kesath.