Alaric nearly smiled. “Certainly not me.”
“Sorry you missed out on your better options on my account.”
She had meant it in jest. Truly, she had. But the act of bringing up the snide remark that he’d made on his stormship somehow excavated the same wound to her pride—to her feelings?—that she thought she’d moved past, and her tone was more bitter than good-natured.
He went tense. She was seized by the urge to burrow into her bedroll, absolutely mortified.
But she couldn’t look away from him. And it wasn’t long before he spoke.
“I was angry when I said that. There were no better options; there weren’t any options at all. I had no plans to marry anyone. Until you.” Alaric’s pale brow knitted as he measured out his words with care. “And even though ours will be a marriage in name alone, there will still be no other options for me after we pledge our troth. You will have no cause to feel dishonored. I swear it by your gods and mine.”
Talasyn hadn’t known that Kesath used the same oath as Sardovia, and that Alaric could sound so wrenchingly sincere that it sent an odd thrill down her spine. She opened her mouth to tell him that there was no need to make such a promise, but then the image of him turning his vague almost-smiles on some other woman flashed through her mind and something in her chest cracked open.
“Yes,” she said instead. “We must behave ourselves. Keep up appearances, I mean. It’s not like the Dominion nobles need any more reason to run you through.”
“How unfair, considering that the Kesathese High Command is ecstatic that I’m marrying you,” he drawled.
Talasyn laughed. Alaric’s features softened. And, as they lay there in their separate bedrolls underneath a crown of stars, she found herself wondering what it would be like to close the distance between them once more. She wondered this with a curious yearning that, for a moonlit moment, went as deep as the Eversea.
In the middle of the night, Alaric was jolted out of slumber by a tugging at the edges of his mind. The stars overhead began to blur as the Shadowgate cast its inky nets around him, hauling him into aetherspace.
Gaheris was calling.
In hindsight, it should have been expected, but Alaric had been so focused on his betrothed—on her training—that this felt almost like an intrusion. As though some bubble had been pierced by a dose of cold reality.
Alaric looked over at Talasyn. She was an unmoving, curled-up lump on her bedroll, snoring lightly. He couldn’t walk the In-Between now. What if she woke up and he was gone or, worse, she caught him vanishing and reappearing like one of her blades?
It was a security concern. Gaheris would understand. Perhaps.
Alaric skirted out of his father’s grasp. He blocked him off and fell back into an uneasy sleep, suspecting that he would pay for this a thousand times over.
The second morning of aethermancing at the Lightweaver shrine saw Talasyn produce three more vaguely shield-shaped blobs of light, in addition to two accidental blast-marks on a very old, very historically significant wall. The exhilaration that she had felt yesterday had completely dissipated. What if blobs were all that she would ever be capable of?
At around noon, with the temperature and humidity soaring as the sun approached its zenith, she conducted her meditation exercises beneath the shade of a grandfather tree while Alaric went off to do some exploring.
At least one of us is having fun, she grumbled to herself. He’d been all but glued to the carvings on the entrance arch and he was always studying the ones in the courtyard. She was beginning to suspect that her betrothed was possessed of a rather bookish nature.
But she really shouldn’t be thinking about him when she was supposed to be working on her aethermancy.
Talasyn created several more pallid incarnations of a shield, each one petering out after mere seconds without ever solidifying. She was missing a final piece of the puzzle, the piece that would give her magic shape.
Alaric returned just as her latest attempt vanished. “Still no luck?” he asked, looming over her.
“What do you think?” She scowled at him, the effect quite ruined when the breeze sent a strand of hair tumbling down her forehead and past her jaw, and she scrunched up her nose and blew it out of her face.
He smirked, leaning down and chucking her under the chin. It happened so fast that she would have believed it to be a figment of her imagination, if not for the way that her skin burned where his bare fingers had brushed against in a fleeting ghost of a touch.
“Cheer up,” he said, unfolding himself to his full height once more. “I have an idea.”
He held a hand out to her. She stared at it, confused. A faint pink flush seeped onto the tops of his cheeks and his hand dropped back to his side. It was only then that she realized he’d been aiming to help her up.
Talasyn felt her own face growing warm as she scrambled to her feet. “Where are we going?”
“I found an amphitheater.” Alaric didn’t look at her as he went over to his pack and rummaged through it for his gauntlets. “Let’s spar.”
The amphitheater was a perfect circle sunk into a stretch of overgrown wild grass, its sloping walls composed of sandstone steps and hundreds of carved seats. The floor at the bottom was covered in deep gouges, the remnants of Lightweaver duels past.
Amidst the marks of old battles, they faced each other from across a distance. Talasyn seemed a little tentative, a little uncertain, fidgeting with the brown leather gloves and arm wraps that she’d donned for this session.
“I haven’t sparred in months,” she went on to explain. “Not since—that day.”
The day Sardovia fell.
She didn’t say it out loud. She didn’t need to. The unspoken weight of it darkened the air, another dose of reality piercing Alaric’s sun-drenched bubble just as much as his father’s summons had.
“Then it is all the more imperative that we do this,” he said, before the atmosphere could get too tense and accusing. “Sharpening old skills might allow you to tap into new ones. We’ve already tried everything else.”
Talasyn blew out a breath. She rolled her graceful neck and stretched her slender arms, a spark of that old familiar annoyance with him lurking behind freckled features that were making a valiant attempt to remain neutral.
It’s for the best, Alaric thought. She could channel those emotions into their duel, maybe even successfully shield because of it. This was all working out according to plan.
What Alaric hadn’t planned on was Talasyn shucking off her tunic, revealing her breastband and the upper half of those infernal tight breeches. His gaze flickered over the hard plane of her bare midriff and the slight flare of her hips and all that lustrous olive skin, slicked with the beginnings of sweat in the merciless sunlight.
He was well aware that she only meant to move more freely in the tropical heat.