A few minutes passed before the man who was obviously Elagbi swept into the room. Despite his slender build, the Nenavarene prince’s regal bearing still managed to ensure that he cut an intimidating figure in his pale blue tunic and flowing cape of gold silk. His graying hair was pushed back from his high forehead by a gilded circlet crafted in the likeness of two serpentine forms intertwined, and the face beneath the intricate arrangement of precious metal was immaculately proportioned and fine-boned despite the lines of age.
That wasn’t the only reason Talasyn was gawking, however. The Dominion prince was also familiar, in a way that she couldn’t place but nagged at her like a dull toothache. It was almost as though she’d seen him before, but that was impossible.
Wasn’t it?
Elagbi’s jet-black eyes had been trained on Rapat from the moment he padded into the interrogation chamber. He spoke to the other man in Nenavarene, which Talasyn felt was a bit rude—and also dangerous, if she didn’t know what they were planning to do with her.
“Excuse me,” she loudly interrupted. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
Without missing a beat, Elagbi switched to Sailor’s Common. “I was telling the esteemed kaptan that he had better have a good reason for summoning me from the capital in the midst of the succession debate—”
Elagbi broke off abruptly as his gaze darted to Talasyn. And stayed there.
She was no stranger to haunted expressions. She’d seen it on her comrades’ faces when they spoke of all that they had lost in the Hurricane Wars. This was different, though: more potent on a soul-searing level. The prince of the Nenavar Dominion was looking at her as if she were a ghost.
“Hanan,” he whispered.
That name again. Before Talasyn could open her mouth to demand who that was and what was going on, Rapat spoke up. “My men and I were on a routine patrol when we found her and another intruder fighting at the temple, Your Highness. They are both from the Northwest Continent. The other intruder is Alaric Ossinast, the Night Emperor’s heir. She says that she was abandoned as an infant and she has no memory of her parents. However, she is currently twenty years of age and she is a Lightweaver—”
“Of course she is,” Elagbi murmured. He ignored the news of Alaric’s presence in the holding cell entirely, never taking his eyes off Talasyn, who was simply sitting there and weathering the scene with blank confusion. “It’s passed down via the bloodline, isn’t it?”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Rapat hastened to tell him. “I recommend—”
“Have you gone blind?” Elagbi snapped. “Do you not see what is in front of you, that she is the spitting image of my late wife? And she can spin the Lightweave, just like Hanan. There is no doubt about it, Rapat.”
He then said the words that brought the world to a halt.
“She is my daughter.”
Chapter Eight
Talasyn had dreamed about this moment for nineteen long years. As she plodded through the long grass and the bitter wind of the Great Steppe and stole and sold what she could to scrape out a meager existence in the Hornbill’s Head slums, as she curled up in whatever corner of the orphanage and then of the fetid streets she had claimed for the night, as she mixed seeds into water just for something to fill her stomach—and, much later, as she huddled in deep trenches with comrades that were now long dead, as she closed her eyes while stormships screamed through the land—her imagination had been her refuge, conjuring a different set of circumstances every time. She’d often wondered what her family would say when they found her, if they would hold her in their arms, if the only tears shed would be happy ones at last.
In none of even the most dramatic, far-fetched scenarios had she been in restraints, and she’d never imagined that her first words to the man who was purportedly her father would be: “I’m your what?”
“My daughter,” Elagbi repeated, his aristocratic, copper-skinned features softening as he took a step toward her. “Alunsina—”
She sprang to her feet, some latent sense of panic spurring her to retreat further into the room, shaking her head. “My name is Talasyn.”
For a moment, Elagbi looked as if he was about to argue. But Talasyn could feel the blood draining from her face and her eyes growing wider and wider with each second that passed, and such a ghastly picture must have convinced him that a more delicate touch was required.
“Yes, you are Talasyn,” he said slowly. “Talasyn of Sardovia, who walks between this world and the aether. But you are also Alunsina Ivralis, only child of Elagbi of the Dominion and Hanan of the Dawn. You are Alunsina Ivralis, granddaughter of Urduja, She Who Hung the Earth Upon the Waters, and you are the rightful heir to the Dragon Throne.”
“Your Highness, I must counsel against such premature declarations.” Rapat looked aggrieved. “Despite the striking resemblance to Lady Hanan, Her Starlit Majesty would never accept—”
Elagbi waved a dismissive hand. “Of course there will be a thorough investigation for formality’s sake. However, it will only confirm what I already know to be true.” His full attention swung back to Talasyn, who noticed, much to her discomfiture, that his eyes were wet with tears. “I know you, you see. You were such a mischievous, tiny thing, always trying to yank this”—he motioned to the circlet that he wore—“off of my head every time I carried you. But I could never stay mad for long because you’d blink up at me with your mother’s eyes and smile her smile . . . I would know you anywhere. Another nineteen years could have passed before we found each other again and my heart would still tell me that you were mine. Do you not remember your amya at all, even if only a little bit?”
No, Talasyn thought, I don’t.
Things were finally clicking into place, however. The connec tion to Nenavar that she’d always felt. The dreams and visions that it dawned on her now had been memories all along.
She had gone to the Dominion searching for answers and here they were. But it had never occurred to her that she wouldn’t feel an instant connection to her family once she was reunited with them. The Nenavarene prince was familiar, yes, but she was bewildered by the odd situation, helpless with her hands bound and the Lightweave blocked off. This was such a far cry from the joyous meeting of her childhood fantasies that she felt cheated—and furious.
“You can’t be my family,” she snarled at Elagbi as a horrible aching sensation burned through her chest. “Because that means—look, people dump their children all the time because they can’t provide for them or keep them safe. You’re—you’re royalty.” She practically spat out the word. “So, either you left me behind in Sardovia or you sent me there because—because you didn’t want me.”
It was a possibility that she’d always secretly feared but couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge. She’d had to live on hope as she fought over scraps in the dirt with the other bottom-dwellers. The hope that her family loved her, that surely there was someone out there who loved her.
“You can’t be my family,” she repeated. “I won’t believe it.”