Talasyn had one hand on the doorknob when a question occurred to her. One that she’d wanted to ask for years but hadn’t had the guts to until today, when it had never before seemed so stark that there might not be a tomorrow to ask it.
“Amirante? Before you defected—when you were still with the Kesathese army, I mean—why didn’t you join the Shadowforged Legion?”
The older woman didn’t respond for so long that Talasyn thought she never would.
“I was very young when I enlisted as a helmsman,” Vela finally said, still looking out the window. “My abilities manifested much later. But I made the decision to hide them because—well, I didn’t have a clear idea of what was right and what was wrong back then. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be the person that the Legion would have required me to become. Had I given in to that darkness, the Night Empire would have swallowed me whole.” Her gaze met Talasyn’s in the glass, in the vague shards of their star-etched reflections. “You have a chance to end this, Talasyn. To become the light that guides us out of the shadows, and to freedom.”
Talasyn leaned against the wall outside Vela’s office, attempting to center her emotions. The weight of the Amirante’s words hung heavily on her heart, but that wasn’t what preoccupied her. In a little over twenty-four hours from now, she would be in Nenavar. At last, she would learn what was pulling her there.
Come off it, she chided herself. Here you go again, looking for connections where there aren’t any.
As she had so many times before, she recited a mantra of cold logic to herself. Her parents were most likely descendants of the Sunstead Lightweavers, which explained her magic. They had, for whatever reason, left her on the doorstep of the Hornbill’s Head orphanage. And she would never know why, so it was better to make her peace with that instead of live on wishful thinking, nurturing the part of her that believed she would still be able to find them again one day. It was better to go to Nenavar focused solely on the mission that she’d been entrusted with, and nothing else. Everyone was counting on her.
Slow, shuffling footsteps resounded through the quiet hallway. Coxswain Darius was approaching Vela’s office, with the ponderous steps of one who carried the world on his shoulders. He stopped when he reached Talasyn.
“You’re off, then?”
She gave a cautious nod, unable to speak. The coxswain looked—defeated. As if he’d been running on fumes for months and now there was nothing left.
“Not sure how much good it will do now,” Darius mumbled, almost to himself. He shook his head, as though belatedly remembering that there was someone in the hallway with him. “Word has just come in from the Highlands,” he told Talasyn. “It’s over. The King on the Mountain bowed to the Night Empire. And the Shadowforged Legion cut off his head.”
Dread swept through Talasyn’s veins in an icy wash.
Following the Cataclysm between Kesath and Sunstead, the Sardovian Allfold had been composed of the Great Steppe, the Hinterland, the Highlands, the Coast, and the Heartland. Now, after a decade of ground warfare and stormship battles, Sardovia was down to those last two states. Surrounded on all sides except seaward.
“It’s not over,” Talasyn insisted to Darius, trying to convince him as well as herself. “We’ll fortify our defenses. I’ll commune with the Nenavarene Light Sever and then I’ll come back and I’ll be there on the front lines—”
“What is the use?” Darius burst out. His words echoed off the stone walls, and Talasyn paled, remembering the Hornbill’s Head orphanage, a time when a caretaker’s raised voice heralded his palm ringing against her cheek.
Darius didn’t strike her, of course. Instead, he continued in a quieter tone that was raw at the edges with despair, “What good will one trained Lightweaver be against the entire Legion? And that’s assuming you’ll even be able to access the Dominion’s Light Sever. The Amirante is grasping at straws, Talasyn. We’re—” He swallowed. His next words quavered on his tongue. “We’re all going to die. The Shadow will fall across the Continent and Gaheris will show us no mercy. Why would he? We’ve been a thorn in his side for so long.”
Talasyn stared at him. She had never witnessed a Sardovian officer crack like this—least of all Coxswain Darius, who had been as steady as a rock since the day they met. Across the span of years, a child in rags screamed as a Kesathese soldier who’d spotted her through the dust and the rubble pulled his crossbow trigger, the light inside her growing until he was burned to dust. She remembered Darius calmly leading her through the wreckage of Hornbill’s Head, away from the Kesathese soldier’s light-ravaged bones, assuring her that everything would be all right as she trembled, afraid of what had just happened, not understanding what she had done and how she’d been able to do it. He had saved her that day.
How difficult it was to reconcile that memory with the broken man before her now.
“I have to report the Highlands’ surrender to Ideth,” Darius choked out before Talasyn could respond, which was just as well because she didn’t have the slightest idea how to respond. “Safe travels, helmsman. May Vatara’s breath grant you a fair wind and carry you back to us.”
He pushed open the door of Vela’s office and shut it behind him, leaving Talasyn alone in the hallway to wrangle with the fact that the success of her mission was now so much more critical than ever before.
Before the sun had risen the next morning, her wasp coracle glided out of its dock and shot over the deep gash of the Wildermarch, cloaked in the gloom of nautical twilight.
No one had seen her off; she’d said her goodbyes the night before. A faint tinge of guilt mixed with worry waged within her at leaving Khaede, but if she didn’t, there would be nothing left for any of them.
Forty-five minutes flew by before she lowered the sails—plain ones, replacing the striped cloth with the phoenix crest that would have easily marked her vessel as Sardovian—and gradually brought down the lever that controlled the Squallfast-infused aether hearts, reducing speed as she slipped into the zigzagging ravine that was aptly called the Shipsbane.
She needed to concentrate here. Navigating the sharp and rocky turns in daytime was already a challenge for even the most veteran of helmsmen, and as this was a covert mission, the Firewarren-powered lamps affixed to her tiny airship’s bow were dimmed. However, despite her concerns, the wasp wove through the treacherous ravine with minimal trouble.