“So thoughtful.” Much to her chagrin, the bite that she’d intended to make apparent in her tone was swallowed up by a gusty yawn.
Breakfast consisted of more rice cakes and some alarmingly potent coffee, brewed from grounds that Rapat’s garrison had provided. It smelled faintly like the creamy yellow thornfruit that could clear a room when cut open, but it tasted of smoke and chocolate—and it was so strong that Talasyn’s heart was beating faster in her chest after only a few sips.
Alaric was unimpressed. “This stuff could strip paint from an airship hull.”
Talasyn secretly agreed with him, but principle dictated that she defend Nenavar’s honor. “Does the rustic taste offend your royal sensibilities?” she sniped.
“You’re royalty, too,” he pointed out. “Or has that slipped your mind?”
She blinked. It had slipped her mind, actually. And he was arching one dark brow at her and his sensual lips were curved into a smirk and he was wearing that stupid undershirt—
His smirk widened in amusement as the seconds passed. “You look like you want to kill me.”
“You look like you enjoy it,” she snapped.
His eyes were silver in the sunshine; for a fleeting moment, they held an enigmatic sort of mischief that she would never have believed he had in him, had she not witnessed it before it faded, its glint retreating behind the usual steel and frost.
She leaned forward, some small suspicion taking root. “Do you enjoy it?” she demanded bluntly. “Getting a rise out of me, I mean?”
He ducked his head, suddenly very intent on his coffee, peering into its depths as though it held arcane secrets. “It’s not that I enjoy it, but it’s different. My father’s—my court”— his pale brow furrowed as he painstakingly corrected himself, and he looked so young—“they bow and they scrape. My legionnaires stand on less ceremony, especially Sevraim, as you’ve doubtless noticed. But they are still aware that I am their master. You, on the other hand, don’t fear to truly speak your mind. I find that interesting.”
“I thought you liked me better when I was still afraid of you.” Talasyn couldn’t resist throwing back in his face his declaration from their night as prisoners. Until today, she’d had no idea that she even remembered what he’d said.
“To quote an esteemed philosopher,” Alaric told his coffee, “I say things when I’m mad.”
There it was again, that grin tugging at her lips, unbidden. And, once again, she fought it back. “Well, the next time you wish to be disrespected, you know where to find me.”
The corner of Alaric’s mouth twitched, as though he was suppressing a smile of his own.
After breaking their fast, they took turns washing up in a spring that Rapat had told them was located on the shrine’s grassy grounds, a few twisting corridors away from the campsite. Talasyn went second and, while she cleaned her teeth with a powder of salt and dried iris petals and crushed mint leaves, she reflected on the disturbing camaraderie that she had fallen into with the Night Emperor.
Was it a by-product of the previous morning’s events, an unlikely bond forged by the act of escaping death? Or was it this place, so hauntingly picturesque, so remote that they might as well have been the only two people in the world?
Whatever the case, Talasyn had to admit that it was probably a good thing. She had nearly slipped—nearly lost this long game—when she railed about the Continent rising up and her joining them one day. If she’d already been the Night Empress, her words would have counted as treason. Her temper had endangered both Nenavar and Sardovia, as well as her own life.
She was incredibly fortunate that Alaric didn’t seem to be holding her stormy declaration against her that much.
When she returned to the courtyard, he was sitting, legs crossed, in the shade of a grandfather tree that had sprouted right up against one wall, its branches pushing at the old stonework. Talasyn joined him with some reluctance, dropping down across from him closer than she would have preferred due to the thick, protruding roots taking up most of the space. He smelled like the calam-lime soap from the garrison.
“We’ll focus solely on meditation well into the afternoon,” he announced. “The objective is for your breathing, your magic, and your body to be so in tune with one another that molding the Lightweave into whatever you want—in this case, a shield—will be effortless. Why are you making that face at me?”
“Sounds tedious,” she grumbled.
“When I began aethermancing under my grandfather’s tutelage, I would spend whole sennights doing nothing but meditating,” he snootily informed her.
She should have taken umbrage at his tone, but . . . “I didn’t know that your grandfather was the one who taught you.”
“As I’ve mentioned before, my abilities manifested at an early age.” Alaric traced a circle in the dust of ages with his forefinger, without even seeming to realize that he was doing it. “He was very proud of me. He made the time to oversee my training, until . . .”
He never finished the sentence, but Talasyn could guess. Until his obsession with the stormships grew, or Until the war began. It all amounted to the same thing, didn’t it?
She only knew King Ozalus as the one who’d started it all. Who had been possessed by a dream of lightning and destruction that culminated in the shadows of the stormships falling over the Continent. She had certainly never before pictured him as anyone’s grandfather, tutoring a solemn dark-haired boy in the ways of magic.
How unsettling, that evil could have a human face. She thought back to what had been, by Alaric’s standards, an explosion of rage when they argued over the true instigator of the Cataclysm. She understood it better now. How unsettling, that an evil man could have had people who cared for him so.