C HAPTER T HIRTY -F IVE
As their cohorts fanned out across the rest of the ballroom, the ten assassins searched the sitting area in tight formation, muskets at the ready.
A panicked figure emerged from behind one of the overturned tables and made a mad dash for the exit. One assassin reflexively pulled the trigger, and the ensuing bolt of void magic outlined the figure’s horned goat’s mask in violet light before he crumpled to the floor.
Behind the table where she and Alaric were hiding, Talasyn clapped a hand over her mouth, biting a scream into the mound of her palm.
“Moron!” someone snarled. “You just killed Rajan Wempuq!”
The words were in the Dominion language. Talasyn had known, of course, that the assassins had to be Nenavarene, given their void muskets and sariman cages, given that the dragons hadn’t risen from the sea, but the confirmation made her insides shrivel. And now Wempuq was dead, and there was no time to grieve. The people who had killed him were moving closer to the hideout where she and Alaric lurked.
Someone was screaming, though. From all the way across the ballroom, through the din of everything else. Broken wails of No and Amya , interspersed with wordless sobs.
Oryal. She had seen her father die.
“ Now ,” Alaric said.
The rounded table was small enough to carry, with some effort, and big enough to provide some cover. Alaric picked it up and held the tabletop in front of them as he and Talasyn ran at their foes while she reeled off one void bolt after another. The table served as both shield and battering ram right through the middle of the enemy formation, throwing the assassin ranks into disarray.
Alaric and Talasyn managed to overwhelm several of the attackers, but the rest rallied and soon the table had splintered into pieces under the onslaught of crossbow bolts, leaving the two of them no choice but to separate. She knew that they had no chance of winning; their aethermancy was gone and they were vastly outnumbered. But Alaric was as fierce and defiant as a caged tiger, and that inspired her to new heights. She ducked for cover behind pillars and slid under fallen chandeliers, and when the musket’s aether cores ran out, she didn’t shy away from using her fists, her elbows, her teeth . She left a trail of bodies in her wake, but soon two of the assassins managed to outflank her. She dropped to the floor the moment they opened fire, and one fell victim to his comrade’s void bolt. She wasted no time in tackling the other by the legs. They wrestled over the marble tiles, but he scrambled upright before she could and took aim—
Then he spasmed and went still, the musket slipping from his limp grasp, the tip of a sword protruding from his stomach. As the blade was retracted, the dead man fell away to reveal the kaptan of Talasyn’s royal guard.
“ Where is my father? ” Talasyn asked as Nalam Gao helped her to her feet. The rest of the assassins closing in from all corners of the ballroom had been intercepted by the rest of the Lachis-dalo, and the sounds of furious combat churned the air.
“Prince Elagbi was safely extracted by his own guards,” said Gao. “He is on his way to Eskaya, along with the Zahiyalachis. The castle’s soldiers have been poisoned, Your Grace. The attackers have surrounded the ballroom. We need to get you out of here—we’ll fight our way out.”
“Easier said than done,” Talasyn muttered. There were only ten Lachis-dalo and countless assassins. Most of the party guests were flooding through the exit, but several remained, cowering behind furniture or frozen in fear, in plain sight.
She came to a decision. “Jie and some others are hiding by the windows,” she told Gao. “Take them and the rest of the civilians somewhere safe.”
Gao blanched. “Lachis’ka, my duty is to you—”
“That’s an order , kaptan.”
Talasyn sprang away from Gao before she could argue. She ran to Alaric, to fight by his side.
After the duel with Surakwel Mantes, Alaric hadn’t exactly been anxious to wield a Nenavarene sword again. But one of Talasyn’s guards had tossed him hers, and it was worlds more efficient than his bare hands.
A sword was also, in theory, more efficient than what Talasyn was currently using, but somehow that didn’t appear to be the case. She’d picked up a broken-off table leg and was now using it as a makeshift club, which would have given Alaric pause had he not been fighting for his life. She cracked skulls with it, swung it at stomachs and kneecaps, put enemies into strangleholds with it.
Without the benefit of aethermancy, his wife brawled .
Alaric slammed his forehead into an assassin’s, breaking the death grip the other man had on him as they both recoiled from each other in pain. When the dark spots stopped swimming before his eyes, the first thing he saw was the amused look on Talasyn’s face.
“Where did you learn that , I wonder?” she quipped.
He bared his teeth at her. “Only from the best.”
Alaric was facing the broken windows. Over Talasyn’s head, he spotted one of Iantas’s smaller fighting craft, a crossbowladen sloop, gliding along the length of the castle, its square sails gleaming blue and gold against the black velvet sky.
Elagbi was at the wheel.
Talasyn followed Alaric’s line of sight. Her jaw dropped. “He’s supposed to be with his guards!”
Still wearing his crocodile costume from the masquerade, the Dominion prince fired the airship’s crossbows at something on the terrace. Several somethings. The resulting explosion was identical to what Alaric had seen when the amplifying configuration destabilized during the tests, and once more on the Night of the World-Eater. A plethora of fiery suns, flaring to life, and with them—
— the return of the Shadowgate.
Her husband’s eyes abruptly turning bright silver was all the warning Talasyn needed to cast a shield. The Lightweave poured out of her, hot and rich, and the golden shield that materialized in her hand trembled and sparked as waves of raw shadow magic crashed against it, flowing around her to engulf their nearest assailants. The screams of the dying mingled with the guttural shriek from aetherspace, a grating parody of an orchestra.
More assassins converged on Alaric and Talasyn’s location.
Neither light nor shadow magic could stop the Voidfell if there was no eclipse. But the attackers wielding the muskets were flesh and bone, and as such easily cut down with radiant javelins and inky throwing knives, easily hauled every which way by searing chains. As Talasyn exulted in the return of her aethermancy, she tried not to feel too much vindictive satisfaction, but as she thought about her frightened guests and how close her family had come to getting killed, and about poor old Ito Wempuq, the burning rose within her. Her rage fed the Lightweave, fashioning it into a sword in her hands as she and Alaric broke through the enemy ranks.
Talasyn was too caught up in the maelstrom of slashing and stabbing to notice that the last attacker flanking her position had succumbed. When she detected a dart of movement and a whirl of aether to her left, she automatically swung around to meet it. Caught up in her fury, she didn’t even realize it was Alaric until she was staring at him through the haze of their locked blades.
Perhaps the snarl on her lips should have faded away. Perhaps his fierce eyes should have softened in recognition at the sight of her.
But this, too, was memory. They were surrounded by the fallen, the floor a mess of bloodstains and broken glass, their clothes torn and their chests heaving, adrenaline pumping through their veins. Her instincts marked him as dangerous. Her body knew his from the Hurricane Wars.
In the mood they were both in, they could have easily slit each other’s throat.
But he leaned in, over the intersection of their blades, and pressed a hard and bruising kiss to her lips instead. Then another stream of void bolts flared out from the darkness and they separated.
As Talasyn scrambled from out in the open to take a more defensible position, she spotted Oryal on her knees, hunched over Wempuq’s corpse. Oryal had broken away from the throng of nobles fleeing to safety, and she’d crossed an ocean of combat to reach her dead father’s side.
Something in Talasyn’s mind snapped, pulled to breaking point by the horror of the last several minutes. Of the last several years. Suddenly she was looking not at Oryal and Wempuq but at the past. At Khaede on the deck of the Summerwind , Sol’s head in her lap. Oryal’s praying mantis mask, discarded over the marble tiles, became the crossbow bolt, slick with Sol’s blood, rolling over teak boards and iron nails.
Everything ended, even pain, even empires. Everything but this.
War was the unchanging season, the eternal state. No matter what Talasyn did, no matter what crown she donned, no matter who she loved or didn’t love, someone was always going to die.
Oryal raised her head. Her eyes locked with Talasyn’s. And there was something—
For the barest split-second, there were white sparks in Oryal’s eyes, flashing through her tears. But Talasyn had to be imagining it, or it had to be a reflection of the moonlight—but in any case she couldn’t dwell on it. Several assassins had swarmed around her, all wielding blades rather than muskets. The void hearts had probably run out. This battle was almost over, even if war would never end. She conjured her golden daggers, slicing them through and across her assailants’ forms. They all fell, one after another, and when Talasyn finally surfaced—
Oryal was gone.
Talasyn looked around wildly, her heart racing. She had to get Oryal out of here. She’d lost sight of Khaede at Lasthaven, leaving her to an unknown fate. But she wouldn’t fail this person, she wouldn’t let go of this one thing that could still be saved.
In the gloom, she spied a skirt of rose-colored wings disappear into the antechamber from which she and Alaric had emerged earlier. Talasyn ran for it, leaving the battle behind. Gao had mentioned that the assassins had surrounded the ballroom; they might be lurking outside the antechamber, too, ready to mow down whoever exited as ruthlessly as they’d mowed down Wempuq.
Right before she ducked into the little room, Talasyn chanced one last look at Alaric. His back was to her as he fought in formation alongside her guards. He had his aethermancy and he had help, while Oryal was alone. Talasyn had to go.
And yet, as she turned away, the oddest sensation rippled through the pit of her stomach. It was fleeting and illogical, but there all the same, briefly beneath her heart—the feeling that she was never going to see him again.
She’d felt this before, on too many occasions to count. It was a kind of paranoia rooted deep in her psyche. Back when an endless series of battles swept across the Continent, in the shadow of the stormships there was always a chance that you’d be looking at someone for the last time.
But that wasn’t going to happen here. She’d usher Oryal to safety, then return to Alaric’s side.
Talasyn rushed into the antechamber. It was empty, but the door leading to the hallway had been flung wide open. Bodies lay beyond the threshold—two of them, clad in assassin’s armor. She was rather shocked that Oryal had managed that , but then again, even ladies fought when cornered.
As she stepped over the dead men, a vague suspicion gnawed at the back of her neck. The corpses were still holding their weapons. How had Oryal …?
Squinting down the deserted hallway, where all the fire lamps had been shot out of their sconces, Talasyn heard muffled crying from up ahead.
Ito Wempuq’s wife had passed away a long time ago. Now he, too, had set sail with the ancestors. His daughter was an orphan.
I had no one, Talasyn thought. Back on the Great Steppe, there was no one to hold me when I cried, when I missed a family I never knew, when I felt I had nothing.
She headed toward the sound, rounding the corner. Oryal was leaning against the granite wall and weeping, face buried in her hands.
“Lady Oryal,” Talasyn said softly, touching her on the shoulder. “We have to—”
Oryal appeared to crumple at such gentleness. She turned to Talasyn, spreading her arms like a child begging to be carried. The little painted flowers on her cheeks had been melted by her tears and now ran down her face like streaks of blood.
Talasyn hugged her.
“Lachis’ka,” Oryal said, through sobs that rang with desperate grief, “it’s so difficult. You understand how I feel, don’t you?”
Talasyn nodded mutely, rubbing Oryal’s back even as she kept an eye on their surroundings for the approach of any potential threats.
“I don’t know which of us is more unfortunate,” Oryal continued, shaking in Talasyn’s arms. “We both lost our mothers when we were young, and now—at least you still have Prince Elagbi, but—but at least my grandmother didn’t kill my mother.”
What?
There was a tearing of the veil between the material realm and aetherspace, and Talasyn heard a crackling, like oil dribbled into a hot pan magnified a hundred times over—a sound she recognized from whenever the Tempest Severs activated. Oryal’s hand was on her spine, and there was a jolt, as though that hand had pushed her with all the resounding strength of a horse’s kick. Bluish-white lightning filled her vision and shot through her body, the pain immense, like a million burning wires.
Her knees gave way, snapping like twigs as an abrupt, frightening numbness consumed her from head to toe. She dropped to the carpeted floor with a thud, a dark fog crawling along the edges of her sight.
Something sharp was jabbed into her neck. A blade—no, a needle. Talasyn barely felt it, on top of everything else, but soon another layer of pain—a different kind—blossomed underneath the lightning’s shock. Thousands of tiny glass shards forced their way through her veins as— something —ate at her magic.
It was nothing like the abrupt loss of walking into the sarimans’ nullification field. It was a torturously slow erosion. The light inside her faded. She struggled to hold on to it, struggled to stay conscious. Begged it not to go.
A glass-barreled syringe fell to the carpet beside her. It was empty, but a bead of liquid remained on the tip of the hollow steel needle. The droplet shone a bright turquoise, marbled with ribbons of crimson.
Sariman blood and rain magic.
Oryal loomed over her, a wraith in a rose-colored dress. Lightning crackled in her fist. Her eyes flashed white with the Tempestroad.
“You really don’t belong here in Nenavar, Lachis’ka.” Oryal’s voice, coming from much too far away, was the last thing Talasyn heard—and that scarlet-streaked face twisted in contempt was the last thing she saw—before the remaining fragments of the Lightweave vanished from her being and everything went black. “No one in the Dominion court would ever have fallen for that.”
Talasyn plummeted into that black space, as vast and deep as the Mouth of Night. She could almost be within those caverns again, with the wind howling and the water rising, with warm fingers trailing down the inside of her wrist like safe harbor in a storm.
Alaric, she thought.
She tried to hold on to him the way she hadn’t been able to hold on to her magic, but soon even he, too, was gone.
And there was only darkness.