Despite her eagerness, Talasyn slowed down when she passed by one of the lance corporals who had escorted General Bieshimma on his diplomatic mission. The boy was pink-cheeked from the cold outside, snowflakes melting on the upright collar of his uniform as he recounted the adventure to a small circle of raptly attentive wedding guests.
Everyone else was in uniform as well, including Talasyn. Wool breeches, thick boots, and padded coats the color of orange peels. There was no time for pretty dresses or an elaborate ceremony. This wedding was a stolen moment in between skirmishes.
“It went as badly as it did when we last sent an envoy to the Nenavar Dominion,” the lance corporal was saying. “Remember, a couple of years back? Although I’ll grant that this time they let us make landfall instead of turning us away at the harbor again, it was only so we could rest and resupply. Their queen, the Zahiya-lachis, still refused to see us. Bieshimma gave the harbor guards the slip and set out for the capital on horseback, but he wasn’t even allowed into the royal palace, apparently. The concerns of outsiders are not the concerns of the Dominion—that’s what the harbor guards told us when we tried to state our case.”
A bowman leaned forward with a conspiratorial twinkle in his eyes. “See any dragons while you were there, then?”
Talasyn stopped walking altogether and other conversations happening nearby petered out as several soldiers craned their necks in interest.
“No,” said the lance corporal. “But I never left the docks, and the skies were overcast.”
“I don’t even think they’re real,” said an infantryman, sniffing. “All we have to go on are rumors. If you ask me, it’s smart what the Nenavarene are doing, letting the rest of Lir believe that their dragons exist. People won’t bother you if you’ve supposedly got an army of giant fire-breathing worms at your disposal.”
“I’d kill for a giant fire-breathing worm,” the bowman said wistfully. “We’d win the war with even just one.”
The group started bickering over whether a dragon could bring down a stormship. Talasyn left them to it.
A surfeit of vague images rushed through her head as she stepped away: from nowhere, so sudden, in the space of only a moment’s breath. She could barely make sense of them before they darted out of reach. A coil of slick scales undulating in the sunlight, and maybe a crown as sharp as diamond, as clear as ice. Something inside her, awakened by the soldiers’ conversation, tried to fight its way out.
What on earth—
She blinked. And the images were gone.
It was likely an effect of the pine-scented smoke from various firepits suffusing the longhouse, not to mention the sheer heat radiating from so many bodies crammed into one narrow structure. Sol was kind and charming and much loved, and it showed in how nearly a quarter of the regiment had turned up for his wedding.
They were definitely not here for his bride—rude, prickly, caustic Khaede—but Sol adored her enough for a hundred people, anyway.
As she reached the closed door of the side room, Talasyn glanced back at the newlyweds. They were surrounded by effusive well-wishers clutching mugs of hot ale while the regiment’s field band struck up a lively tune on fife, bugle, and goatskin drum. A beaming Sol pressed kisses to the back of Khaede’s hand and she tried to frown in annoyance but failed miserably, the two of them looking as radiant as it was possible to look in helmsmen’s winter uniforms, the garlands of dried flowers around their necks serving as the only nod to their status as bride and groom. Once in a while, Khaede’s free hand would come to rest on her still-flat stomach and Sol’s blue-black eyes would shine like the Eversea on a summer day against his oak-brown skin.
Talasyn had no idea how these two planned on caring for a baby in the midst of a war that had spread throughout the whole Continent, but she was happy for them. And she wasn’t jealous, exactly, but the sight of the newlyweds stirred in her the same old yearning that she’d lived with for twenty years as an orphan. A yearning for somewhere she could belong, and for someone she could belong to.
What would it be like, Talasyn wondered as Sol chuckled at something Khaede said and leaned in to hide his face in the slope of her neck, his arm looped around her waist, to laugh like that with someone? To be touched like that? An ache shivered through her as she let herself imagine it, just a little bit, reaching for a phantom of an embrace.
A nearby drunken soldier stumbled forward, splashing ale all over the floor by Talasyn’s boots. The sour odor assailed her nostrils and she flinched, briefly overcome by childhood memories of caretakers stinking of steeped grains and curdled milk, those men of harsh words and heavy hands.
Years ago, now. Long gone. The orphanage in the slums had been destroyed along with the rest of Hornbill’s Head, and all of its vicious caretakers had probably been crushed underneath the rubble. And she couldn’t discuss a crucial matter with her superiors while in the throes of despair over some spilled ale.
Talasyn straightened her spine and steadied her breathing; then she rapped smartly on the door of the side room.
As though in response, the deep, brassy tones of warning gongs pierced through the limestone facade of the building, cutting across the merriment like knives.
All music and chatter ceased. Talasyn and her comrades looked around as the watchtowers continued their urgent hymn. They were stunned at first, disbelieving, but gradually a tidal wave of movement swept through the firelit longhouse as the wedding guests sprang to action.
The Night Empire was attacking.
Talasyn ran into the silver night, adrenaline coursing through her veins, a numbing layer against the freezing cold air that bit at her exposed face. Lights were winking out all across Frostplum, window-squares of cheerful gold fading into blackness. It was a precaution to avoid becoming an easy target for air raids, but it wouldn’t do much good. All seven of Lir’s moons hung in the sky in their various phases of waxing and waning, shedding a stark brilliance over the snowy mountains.
And, if Kesathese troops had brought in a stormship, the whole city might as well be a dandelion puff in a stiff breeze. Its houses were erected from stone and mortar and covered in wooden roof trusses and multilayered thatch, built strong enough to withstand the harsh elements, but nothing could withstand the Night Empire’s lightning cannons.
Due to its remote location, all the way up in the Sardovian Highlands, Frostplum had always been a peaceful settlement, drowsing in evergreen blankets of longleaf pine. Tonight, however, it was plunged into mayhem, fur-clad cityfolk stampeding to the shelters and shouting frantically for one another amidst a whirlwind of military activity. It was finally happening, what everyone had feared, why Talasyn’s regiment had been sent here in the first place.