“Alun—Talasyn,” Elagbi corrected himself, seeing her hackles rise as he started to call her by the name that was not hers, “please allow me to explain. Let’s sit down. Rapat, take those blasted restraints off her. It is exceedingly bad form to treat the Lachis’ka like a criminal.”
Lachis’ka? Had she just been insulted in the Nenavarene tongue? Talasyn glared at Elagbi as Rapat cautiously approached, sidling around her to unfasten the restraints. She shook feeling back into her wrists and stretched arms that had been locked in one position for too long, but she stayed where she was, on her feet. She might need to make a break for it should things go downhill.
No, she needed to make a break for it anyway. If the Sardovian Allfold was about to come under some brutal assault, as Alaric had insinuated, then she needed to go.
If he was bothered by her refusal of his invitation to sit down, Elagbi didn’t show it. Instead, he remained on his feet as well, casting an imperious look at Rapat and inclining his head in the direction of the door. The beleaguered kaptan opened his mouth as if to argue, but then he appeared to think better of it, shooting one last searching glance at Talasyn over his shoulder as he left the room.
“Yanme Rapat is a good man,” Elagbi remarked once he and Talasyn were alone. “A fine soldier, if still smarting a bit from his demotion nineteen years ago.”
Talasyn couldn’t figure out why she was supposed to care about Rapat and his erstwhile career in the regiments. Was Elagbi attempting to make small talk? Now, of all times?
He sighed. “I want to tell you everything, Talasyn, and I very much wish for you to let me, someday. However, given your current mood and the circumstances, I think that it would be best to skip ahead and address the issue of why you were sent away. Believe me, if there had been any other option . . .”
The prince trailed off, staring into the distance at some harrowing event in the past that only he could see, before speaking again. “When you were a year old, a civil war broke out here in Nenavar. My older brother, Sintan, led a rebellion. He amassed many followers, and they believed in their cause strongly enough to kill anyone who got in the way. They attacked the capital and routed our forces, and you and Her Starlit Majesty were evacuated in separate airships. I would have given anything for us to stay together, but I had to defend our homeland and our people.”
Elagbi’s voice grew low and tense. “You were in so much danger. You were the Lachis’ka, the heir. Only women may ascend to the Dragon Throne and Sintan would never have spared your life, no matter how young you were, no matter that you were his niece. His ideology had twisted him, rotted him from the inside. I killed him myself a sennight later on the Roof of Heaven and, with his death, the tide of war changed and the Huktera managed to retake the capital and crush the rebel forces. Queen Urduja returned, but you did not. We couldn’t find you. Your airship had gone dark over the aetherwave.”
“Who else was on board?” Talasyn asked in little more than a whisper.
“Accompanying you were your nursemaid and two members of the Lachis-dalo—the Royal Guard,” said Elagbi. “They were supposed to bring you to the Dawn Isles, your mother’s homeland, but you never made it there. It’s halfway across the world from Sardovia. I don’t know how you ended up in the latter.”
“My . . . my mother”—how strange those words felt on her tongue—“she’s not Nenavarene?” Elagbi shook his head, and Talasyn continued, “Where is—”
She stopped. She already knew, didn’t she? She’d heard Elagbi talk to Rapat about his late wife. Perhaps that was one of the reasons she hadn’t wanted to believe him in the first place. If he truly was her father, that meant that her mother was dead.
“Hanan passed away shortly before you were spirited out of the capital,” Elagbi replied, his sorrow shining through the span of years in such a manner that one could clearly imagine how it must have blazed when the wound was still fresh. “It was an illness. A swift fever. She succumbed before the healers even knew what to make of it.”
Talasyn couldn’t react to that. She couldn’t pick apart the tangled thread of her mixed emotions and attempt to understand what she felt—grief? nothing?—for a woman she didn’t know. Not now, on top of everything else. She didn’t have the space.
So, instead, she asked, “How did the civil war start? Why did Sintan rebel against Urduja?”
It had happened around the same time as the Cataclysm between Kesath and Sunstead. Were the two events connected? Did the Nenavarene civil war have something to do with the airships that the Zahiya-lachis hadn’t wanted to send to the Sunstead Lightweavers’ aid?
Elagbi opened his mouth to respond, but it was at precisely that moment all hell broke loose.
Five women thundered into the interrogation chamber. Talasyn assumed that they were the Lachis-dalo that Elagbi had mentioned: statuesque and clad in heavy armor plate. They surrounded the Dominion prince in a well-practiced, protective circle, speaking to him in that lyrical language rendered fast-paced and urgent.
“Alaric Ossinast has escaped,” Elagbi translated for Talasyn. “He is no longer contained by the sariman cages. We have to get to safety—”
Talasyn grabbed her map and her compass off the table and shot out of the room like a crossbow bolt, stuffing the items into her pockets as she ran. She had to subdue Alaric or, failing that, she had to get back to the Continent as soon as possible. Sardovia was in danger because of the unknown traitor and whatever the Night Empire had planned. There would be time to process everything else later. She shoved past the guards, ignoring the cries that trailed in her wake, running as fast as her feet could carry her down the bamboo corridors where the air rang with warning gongs, running along with soldiers carrying muskets that she already knew wouldn’t do any good, not when Alaric had recovered the Shadowgate.