Alaric stood up, motioning for Talasyn to follow suit. He demonstrated the simplest of the moving meditations—feet apart, inhaling deeply as one palm was placed in front of the stomach and the other over the head, exhaling as the right knee was bent as far as it could go without the body toppling over. Slow and gradual movements, like a gentle ocean wave.
At first, Talasyn gave the exercise her utmost attention, with the furrowed brow and the wrinkled nose that he was starting to find so alarmingly endearing, but it soon became obvious that she was preoccupied, a distant look in her eyes. Her expression flitted to uncertainty, and then to solemn determination, and Alaric could only marvel at how unguarded she was, at how she let various emotions play across her face without thinking, the way that clouds shifted through the heavens, at turns hiding and revealing the sun. She was so different from everyone else he’d ever met in both the Night Empire and the Dominion courts.
“What happened to your mother?” she blurted out in the middle of another attempt at the pose.
Alaric would normally never have any desire to talk about it but, to his own surprise, he found he wanted to with her. Parting with each word more willingly than he ought to have, because fair was fair and Talasyn had shared such a dark shard of her past with him, too.
“My mother abandoned Kesath when I was thirteen.” Abandoned me was what some part of him longed to say. She abandoned me. “I haven’t heard from her since. I assume that she sought refuge in Valisa, where her ancestors originated.” He ran a critical eye over Talasyn’s stance. “Don’t put all your weight on one knee. Balance it out and keep your back straight.”
“Valisa,” she mused. “That’s all the way west, on the edge of the world.” She aligned herself to Alaric’s specifications and he walked around her, saying nothing, searching her form for what needed improvement.
“Do you miss her?” Talasyn asked, in a much quieter tone.
Alaric was caught off-guard. He stopped in his tracks behind her, glad that she couldn’t see his features as he struggled to compose them. “No. She was weak. She faltered in the face of what it meant to be the Night Empress. I am better off without her.”
Come with me.
My son. My baby.
Please.
“Sometimes I wonder . . .”
Alaric trailed off, embarrassed. He had been so cautious all his life, always weighing his words before he spoke them. Why could he never seem to do the same around Talasyn?
“If she ever thinks of you,” she finished for him in a soft voice. “I wondered that every day, back in Sardovia, before I knew who I was, before I knew that my mother was dead. I wondered if she ever regretted leaving me.”
There was a tightness in his throat, a certain rising lightness in his chest. Someone finally understood. Someone could give voice to all the things that he could never put into words. Talasyn was still in meditation stance, still facing away from him, and he was seized by the urge to sweep her into his arms. To embrace her in reassurance, in solidarity.
To no longer be alone.
“Keep your back straight,” he said instead. “And your elbows out.”
“I am!” she protested. Her shoulders visibly bunched underneath her thin white smock, as they always did when she was about to pick a fight.
“No—” Alaric stepped forward, impatient all of a sudden, eager to shake free of the chains of memory, to distract himself with something that wasn’t the terrible night Sancia Ossinast left Kesath. “Like this—”
He reached out to correct Talasyn’s posture at the same time that she straightened up with an exasperated huff, moving backward as she brought her feet together. His gauntleted hands closed on the tops of her shoulders and her spine pressed flush against his chest.
The world went still.
Mangoes was Alaric’s first coherent thought. That slick, succulent, golden fruit that graced every meal he had here in the Dominion, with its lush perfume of summer-warmed nectar. Talasyn smelled as if she’d been eating them, dusted in flaky sea salt. And that wasn’t all. Orange blossoms and the creamy floral note of promise jasmines wafted from her hair, tempered by cool green attar of lotus and the barest hint of cinnamon bark.
Alaric’s mouth watered. He wanted to bite down.
It didn’t help matters that Talasyn fit perfectly against him, that he could tuck her head under his chin, that her bottom was slotted between his hips and shapely enough to make the pit of his stomach clench. In a daze, he watched his leather-clad fingers spread over her shoulders. Watched his thumbs graze the sides of her neck.
He had never despised his gauntlets more. He longed to peel them off, to touch her sun-kissed skin. His thumbs moved in circular strokes, caressing the elegant slopes they rested against. She shivered, every tremor passing through him, touching off inner chords within him, and what was he hoping to achieve, why wasn’t he moving away, how had he never known that holding someone could feel like this?
The breeze picked up, shaking a rain of white petals loose from the plumeria trees. Amidst all those swirling snow-drop pieces of flowers that drifted on currents of faint perfume, she turned her head to look at him.
Her brown eyes were so wide in the sunlight, her breathing shallow, her pink lips slightly parted.
It overwhelmed him, then—a dark curiosity, a yearning to find out if those lips would taste like the pudding they’d just eaten.
Alaric leaned in. He lifted his fingers from Talasyn’s neck and curled them along the line of her jaw, gently nudging upward. She went willingly, relaxing against his chest, tilting her chin so that her mouth was suddenly so much closer to his than ever before. Petals whirling all around them, his heartbeat tremulous, he bowed his head further to bridge the scant distance. Her eyes slid to half-mast. She waited.
“Excuse me.”
Alaric and Talasyn sprang apart. Neither of them had even noticed Sevraim’s approach.
“What do you want?” Alaric growled at his legionnaire.
“I hate to interrupt—” And, the thing was, Sevraim really did seem abashed, conscientiously looking everywhere but at the two royals. “—but the Lachis’ka’s lady-in-waiting has just come to inform me that it’s time for His Majesty and Her Grace to prepare for the banquet.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
The mirror in Talasyn’s dressing room was a polished glass oval framed by carved hummingbirds and squash vines, inlaid with lustrous chips of mother-of-pearl. She sat in front of it, once again laced into a spectacle of a garment, this one sewn from banana-stem fiber that gave it a multichromatic sheen, her neck stiff from bearing the weight of yet another gaudy crown. Jie pored over her with a plethora of long-handled willow brushes, dipped into small golden pots of various powders in order to paint on a face that would befit the Nenavarene Lachis’ka at a formal event.