Gods.
Talasyn wanted nothing more than the ground to open up and swallow her whole. But she truly could not call to mind what he’d asked—all logic, all situational awareness had disappeared.
No one had ever stood this close to her before. Even in battle, no one else had ever gotten this close. It had always only been him. His lips were a breath away from hers, as they’d been in the plumeria grove. Would they be as soft as they looked? She longed to find out, so badly. To learn what it was like to touch, to feel.
Alaric blinked at her. A disbelieving look came over his face, slow to be replaced by the inscrutable mask he usually wore. He wrenched himself from her and sat down heavily on the edge of his mattress, all the while studying her the way a wolf studied a hunter’s trap.
“What,” he finally repeated in quieter but more guarded tones, “possessed you to throw yourself in the Shadowgate’s path? How could you have done something so utterly asinine?”
Now that they were apart, Talasyn could breathe easily again. Could summon the answer from the strange inertia that her brain had been trapped in scant seconds ago. “I was preventing a diplomatic incident. I don’t know what possessed you, continuing to advance on Surakwel after he lost his sword.”
“Surakwel,” Alaric jeered softly. “I’m glad that you and his seditious young lordship appear to have become such fast friends.”
Talasyn flushed with a renewed burst of temper. Over the months she’d improved at referring to people by their courtly address, but it wasn’t ingrained in her just yet. She tended to slip up when she was flustered. “Now is not the time to lecture me on etiquette.”
“I wasn’t—” Alaric broke off with an exasperated sigh. He looked away, his sharp jaw clenching, and Talasyn had the unsettling sensation that she’d missed something. That she’d misinterpreted what he’d been trying to imply.
“Anyway,” she hastened to continue, belatedly recalling why she’d come here in the first place, “as I said, I want to apologize on behalf of the Dominion for what happened tonight. I know that the court hasn’t exactly been welcoming, but that changes now. I’m reaffirming Nenavar’s willingness to cooperate—”
“I’m familiar with how all of this goes, Lachis’ka,” Alaric interrupted, his gaze snapping back to meet hers. Somehow, he seemed more incensed than ever before. “If they sent you here to do nothing but parrot your grandmother’s words at me, then I believe that we can skip that part. Feel free to remove yourself from my disagreeable presence at any time.” He inclined his head toward the door. “The sooner the better for both of us, I think.”
Talasyn stayed rooted to the spot, hopelessly confused. She wanted to tell him that he’d gotten it wrong, that she was here of her own accord, that she’d slipped out of the banquet hall before Urduja had the chance to talk to her. But it was likely that he would never believe that, and her insistence would only make the situation worse.
Something nagged at her, forcing her to retrace the events leading up to this moment. The way that Alaric’s eyes had widened through the shadowy haze in the banquet hall, the way that he’d insisted she summon a healer.
Were you worried about me? Talasyn nearly asked Alaric point-blank, but she stopped herself in the nick of time. Any concern that he might have for her welfare hinged solely on the political alliance pushing through.
She was grasping at straws as usual, thinking she deserved better than she actually did.
Perhaps it was her pride that balked at scurrying from his room like a frightened mouse. Whatever the case, her mind was frantically casting around for a reason to stay, and it wasn’t long before her gaze fell to the slash in the fabric at his thigh.
“I thought that I’d help you with your wound,” she said. “If you need it bandaged, I can call for a healer.”
“It’s taken care of,” Alaric replied. “I patched myself up. Are you quite done playing the part of concerned nursemaid? You have my assurance that the Night Empire’s displeasure with how this evening turned out will not interfere with tomorrow’s negotiations, as long as they are concluded within the allotted time. That is why you came to my chambers, is it not?”
Talasyn bit down on the dozens of choice retorts that threatened to burst from her lips. Instead, she floundered, searching for something, anything, that could let her stay in this room. And in the process of letting her thoughts run rampant, she stumbled upon a realization that cut her to the quick.
It went beyond the imperative to mollify him. It went beyond her mission to ensure the continued safety of the Nenavarene and the Sardovians.
She didn’t want to leave.
She had no desire to go back to her chambers and spend what she already knew would be a sleepless night agonizing over everything in deafening and lonesome silence. She wanted to remain here, with Alaric—to let him annoy her and distract her from the complicated tangle that her life had become, even if he himself was the knot at the center of it. She wanted to bicker with him in a language she’d grown up speaking, free to use turns of phrase that only the people of the Northwest Continent would understand. She wanted to check the wound on his thigh that the old metal blade had wrought, to make sure that it didn’t fester. She wanted to tease another vague almost-smile out of him.
She wanted him to not be angry at her anymore.
Talasyn surveyed the imperious figure on the bed, with his messy black hair and his clenched jaw and the hunch of his shoulders, with his narrowed charcoal eyes and all his injured pride and simmering restraint, with that habit he had of drowning out the rest of her world. And she thought, I want so many things.
Impossible things.
Things that she couldn’t even begin to understand.
“And what, pray tell, are you still doing here?” Alaric inquired, like the complete and utter twat that he was.
Inspiration struck, and she countered his question with one of her own. “When are we going to Belian?”
“We’ll discuss that in council tomorrow. Get out.” When she continued to hesitate, he added, in the frayed tone of someone on the verge of losing all patience, “Now, Your Grace. If you please.”
While it would rankle that he’d gotten the last word, she really had to cut her losses. She couldn’t antagonize him any further.
She marched out of his quarters with her head held high, taking refuge in a dignity that no one else needed to know rang false within her. She forced herself not to look back even as she felt his eyes following her before she slammed his bedroom door between them, and she was halfway across the orchid garden when she realized something else. Something that had been lost in the heat of the moment but now made her stop in her tracks as she replayed their encounter.
Alaric Ossinast had called her beautiful.