Alaric swerved to the right mere seconds before what would have been a devastating impact. His head spun with the dizzying move, but he managed to activate the transceiver again. “See you at home,” he drawled, for no purpose other than to rile her, and then he darted up into the star-strewn heavens.
Talasyn didn’t give chase, which was a rare show of common sense on her part, Alaric thought. After all, they were still deep in what had become enemy territory. Unless he missed his guess, the Nenavarene were not going to take kindly to their historical ruins being vandalized, their soldiers maimed, their airships commandeered, and one of their bird things set loose from its cage.
Remembering the bird made Alaric shake his head at how odd this country was. Shortly after Talasyn had been led away for questioning, he had pounded on the door of the cell, demanding to use the facilities. There had only been one guard stationed outside, young and spotty-faced and far too confident in the fact that the prisoner was cut off from the Shadowgate. It had been easy to take him by surprise, to wrestle his weapon out of his grasp and fire at the cage hung outside the cell. Alaric had feared that aether-based weaponry wouldn’t work, either, but the nullifying device apparently only affected aethermancers, and the cage was blasted off its hinges and sent rolling to the floor by unchecked streams of magic that he didn’t know how to control. He certainly hadn’t been prepared for the twisted golden beak and the blaze of red-and-yellow feathers that had come into view as the cage shattered and the bird glided away with an affronted chirp, but the Shadowgate had reopened for him by then and he’d knocked the guard unconscious and crept through the garrison in search of the exit—until the alarm was raised and he’d had to fight his way through.
Alaric’s mission had turned out to be quite the catastrophe and he didn’t even have a dead Lightweaver to show for it. He would pay dearly upon his return to Kesath.
But, now that he was well away from the garrison and its hostile forces, he had the opportunity to reflect on what the Nenavar Dominion’s unique arsenal meant for the Night Empire. In addition to their lightweight but deadly coracles, their aethermancy was highly advanced; it had to be, seeing as they had tapped into a dimension of death magic that he’d never even heard of. They’d somehow outfitted even their smaller munitions with it when the only weaponry in Kesath built large enough to hold the required number of heartstones were the lightning cannons of the stormships. As if that wasn’t enough, the Nenavarene also had creatures that could block both the Lightweave and the Shadowgate.
Even if the Zahiya-lachis was willing to let bygones be bygones with regard to this incident, Nenavar could still pose a problem in the future.
At least the dragons seemed to be a myth. For what felt like the hundredth time since he’d made landfall on Dominion shores, Alaric furtively scanned the skies and found nothing of interest.
He had docked his wolf in a clearing near the coast. No sooner had he entertained the notion of retrieving it when he began to consider the airship that he was currently steering. How fast it was, how gracefully it moved. How its dizzying array of controls could unleash magical beams a thousand times more powerful than iron projectiles. Beams that shriveled every living thing that they touched.
This was valuable technology. It would be the height of stupidity to let it go to waste.
And he had to hurry to tell his father about how his and the Lightweaver’s magic had combined. He’d never heard of that before, either.
Alaric set course for the Night Empire.
Talasyn landed on a riverbank, thumping the control panel once the stolen Nenavarene airship had powered down. That failed to take the edge off her frustration, so she screamed, the wordless sound ear-splitting in the coracle’s dark and silent well.
Abandoning the vessel, she navigated the moonlit jungle on foot, steadily retracing her steps back to her wasp. Occasionally she would hear the drone of aether hearts overhead and duck beneath the tree cover to avoid being spotted by what were most certainly search patrols. Part of her desperately wanted to return to the garrison and demand more answers from the Dominion prince, but another part was . . .
Afraid. It took a few more minutes of stumbling through the undergrowth for her to figure out that she was afraid. What if there was a thorough investigation and it revealed that she wasn’t of Elagbi’s blood, that her resemblance to that woman—Hanan Ivralis—was pure coincidence? After all, the whole thing was too outlandish to believe. She was a bottom-dweller; she was a soldier; she was no one. She was definitely not a long-lost princess.
Was princess even the right term? Elagbi had called her something else. He had called her the Lachis’ka.
The heir to the throne.
Talasyn shivered in the humid breeze. If she was Alunsina Ivralis, that seemed more ominous, somehow.
If they find out, you will be hunted.
Who had told her that? Was she simply mixing up Vela’s warnings about the Lightweave with this startling new revelation? Or had it been the Nenavarene who brought her to Sardovia? Why had they brought her to Sardovia, to Hornbill’s Head, of all places, instead of her mother’s homeland?
So many questions, and not a single answer in sight.
Talasyn found Alaric’s wolf coracle first, at the edge of the jungle, black and sleek against the moss and the leaves. Aside from giving the hull a petulant kick as she passed by, she left well enough alone. Let there be proof that the Night Empire had trespassed on Dominion territory.
Another hour of hiking brought with it the faint beginnings of sunrise and led her to the cave where she’d stashed her wasp, which was now playing host to a gaggle of alarmingly large fruit bats that darted away shrieking at her approach. Once inside her own airship, Talasyn stared at nothing for a good long while as she went over the events and weighed her options. But there really was no question as to what she was supposed to do, was there?
“I have to go,” she said out loud, testing the words on her tongue. She balked at the prospect of leaving without a resolution to the mystery of her past, but the Sardovian Allfold needed her. She had to tell them that there was a traitor in their midst and that the Night Empire was planning . . . something. There was the family she’d wanted to find and there was the family she’d found along the way, and she knew where she had to be right now. She dreaded having to admit her failure to commune with the Light Sever to Vela, but there was no point in returning to the shrine. The Nenavarene were already on high alert.
As the wasp sailed out of the cave and into the dawning skies, Talasyn thought of Elagbi and the unceremonious way that their reunion, if that was what it was, had ended. She wondered if he could see her at this very moment, if she was a comet trailing emerald fumes away from where he stood on the Belian mountain range.