The Lightweave returned to her, too, about seven meters away from the sariman cages. It crashed through her in waves, bringing with it the burning. Some of the soldiers pouring out of the barracks tried to stop her—they probably thought that she was the reason for the alert—but she swept them aside with raw, shapeless blasts of blazing magic, their bodies slamming against the walls, their weapons clattering to the floor. Eventually she outpaced them all, darting from the garrison’s main building and into the warm night, where the overgrown landing grid was littered with the collapsed forms of badly wounded men, where a scythe made of shadow and aether shrieked beneath a net of silver constellations as it slashed at the last soldier standing.
The man fell to the dew-damp grass, chest shadow-scarred but still alive, like the rest of his injured comrades. Alaric was showing a restraint that Talasyn had never imagined the Legion capable of; then again, he probably didn’t want to put the Night Empire in hotter water with the Nenavar Dominion than it already was. Across the distance between them, she met his silver eyes, their corners crinkled with the smirk that she could tell hid behind the obsidian half-mask that he’d donned once more. She spun two daggers and ran at him while he stood and waited for her, his war scythe at the ready, crackling with deadly challenge.
He was so close, he was within striking distance, when she heard a multitude of footsteps clattering to a stop behind her. Followed by the low roar of the Voidfell and a searing flash of amethyst and a cry from Prince Elagbi.
Both Alaric and Talasyn turned to the stream of violet magic hurtling in their direction. Just the one, the other Nenavarene soldiers lowering their muskets as they heeded what appeared to be orders to stand down from both Elagbi and Rapat, but it was wide and unstoppable, nonetheless.
There was no time to dodge, no time to think. There was no time to do anything but act on instinct alone. Alaric transmuted his scythe into a shield and held it in front of him, while Talasyn—who had yet to master crafting shields or anything that couldn’t be used to stab or club someone—flung one dagger at the oncoming violet haze, hoping to intercept it.
Her plan didn’t work.
At least, not in any manner that she’d expected it to.
The instant that her light-woven dagger grazed the edge of Alaric’s shadow-smithed shield, they . . . merged. That was the only way that Talasyn could think to explain what happened. Shield and dagger blurred into each other and, at the point of contact, whorls of aether blossomed like the surface of a moonlit pond disturbed by a stone. The ripples grew in size as swiftly as lightning strikes, encasing Alaric and Talasyn in a translucent sphere that shimmered black and gold with a combination of Shadowgate and Lightweave. The current of void magic collided with the sphere and harmlessly washed over it, trailing to the ground in wisps of violet smoke.
And every blade of grass that the Voidfell touched turned brown and shriveled, forming withered patches amidst a carpet of green.
Necrotic, Talasyn remembered Rapat describing this new dimension, and that was as far as she got with regard to processing what had just occurred when the protective sphere surrounding her and Alaric vanished. He wasted no time in making a break for the nearest coracle on the grid and climbing into its well.
“Oh no you don’t!” she shouted, even though he wouldn’t be able to hear her over the roar of Squallfast-infused aether hearts whirring to life. She scrambled to commandeer a coracle of her own, and none of the Nenavarene tried to stop her. Indeed, when she glanced over at the soldiers, and at Elagbi and at Rapat, they were all frozen in what seemed like shock, looking as though they had just borne witness to something impossible.
But Talasyn barely spared a thought for any of the Nenavarene. The world of Lir had narrowed to encompass only Alaric’s stolen airship as he coasted over the treetops. It wasn’t long before she followed, her knuckles clenched white around the wheel, the ground falling away, the aether hearts shrieking, the jungle opening up into air and sky.
Chapter Nine
The girl was so mad at him.
Alaric found it amusing at first, but soon enough he had to admit that he was quite possibly in trouble.
The ivory-hued hull of the Dominion coracle was constructed from an opalescent, lightweight material that made it a dream to maneuver. It was roughly cylindrical and tapered at both ends, with blue-and-gold sails that flared out from port and starboard like wings and another set of sails that extended from the vessel’s stern in the shape of a fan. After a few seconds of fiddling with the controls, Alaric discovered the levers that operated the airship’s weaponry—only, instead of ribaults or repeating crossbows, what opened fire was an array of slender, swiveling bronze cannons. And instead of iron projectiles, they shot those strange bolts of shivering violet magic that lit up the night, their glow more intense than that which the soldiers’ tube-shaped devices had fired.
This coracle was a marvel of engineering. An elegant yet deadly weapon.
The problem lay in the fact that the Lightweaver was currently manning one as well.
She chased him over the woods. Aetherspace surged through her vessel’s cannons, pelting him with wave upon wave of amethyst that took all of his skill and cunning to dodge. She was out for blood and he couldn’t resist goading her, and another round of fiddling granted him access to the aetherwave. “This hardly seems like the time and place to have it out,” he remarked into the transceiver.
“Shut the fuck up.” Talasyn’s voice echoed through the well, a growl of static-tinted rage. She set her cannons to stutter-fire and clipped at Alaric’s sails. For him she existed as a silhouette against the moons in their different phases, sliding along the crescent of the Second, vanishing briefly into the eclipse of the Sixth, coming at him from the shadows of the Third’s waxing gibbous.
“Aren’t you in the least bit curious about that barrier that we created?” he asked.
“I am,” she said silkily. “Retract your cannons and stop moving around so we can talk about it.”
A chuckle rose in his throat, unbidden, but he hastily swallowed it back down. “Nice try.”
He let her have her fun firing at him for a while before he pulled into a sharp ascent, spiraling in the air and then dropping back down behind her. He’d hoped to have the element of surprise on his side but, unfortunately, Talasyn’s reflexes were razor-sharp, bringing her coracle into an abrupt about-face that he was mildly surprised didn’t snap her pretty little neck. They hurtled toward each other, the strange magic spouting from the cannons meeting in violent conflagrations that trailed sparks down onto the jungle canopy, withering every leaf and branch that they came into contact with.
They were on a collision course. His brow knitted as he realized that she wasn’t going to give way any time soon. Sardovia’s lone Lightweaver had no sense of self-preservation. It was a miracle that she’d survived this long into the war.