Page 55 of The Hurricane Wars

“Well?” Talasyn demanded as Alaric chewed thoughtfully.

He was a proper little lord, she would give him that. He waited until he’d swallowed to respond. “It’s interesting.”

Offended on behalf of her beloved pudding, she turned her nose up at him before moving away so that everyone else could get to the merchant. Alaric followed her and they finished their cups in silence, facing each other beside the docked dugout ship. In spite of his bland assessment of the pudding’s qualities, Alaric ate every last bit of soybean curd and drank the remaining syrup.

Talasyn found it surreal that the Master of the Shadowforged Legion had a sweet tooth. Then again, it must have been a novelty to him, as it had been to her when she reclaimed her birthright. Back on the Northwest Continent, sugar and soybeans had been strictly rationed due to the war effort.

They returned their spoons and empty cups to the pudding merchant. The high sun of early afternoon beat down on the limestone cliffs, alleviated by a fresh, brisk breeze blowing in from the distant Eversea. And it was some impulse—some abrupt yearning to not spend the afternoon cooped up inside the palace walls—that made Talasyn ask Alaric, “Do you want to aethermance out here today?”

He shrugged. The plush swell of his bottom lip glistened with a hint of syrup, and her gaze lingered for far too long. “Wherever you like, Lachis’ka.”

Alaric could still taste brown sugar on his tongue as Talasyn led him to a grove of plumeria trees that carpeted the space between the southernmost wall of the palace and the edge of the limestone cliffs. There were plumerias in Kesath, too, buttheir flowers were typically fuchsia in color. The blooms speckling the green leaves of the Nenavarene variety were as pristine white as the Roof of Heaven’s facade, with star-shaped splashes of yellow at their center.

Sevraim and the Lachis-dalo remained at the edge of the grove while Alaric and Talasyn wandered further in. The trees grew closely together, enough that their rounded crowns would shield the two aethermancers from view of the windows or the patrolling guards.

Alaric was glad to be free of curious stares from nosy Nenavarene, but something had been weighing on his mind all day thus far. Once he and Talasyn assumed meditation poses on the grass, beneath the plumerias, he could no longer stop himself.

“Is there something troubling you?” he asked, which marked the second instance in as many days wherein he regretted asking someone a question as soon as it left his lips.

From where she sat, framed against bark and leaves and white flowers, Talasyn blinked at him as though he’d lost his mind.

Perhaps he had, at that.

“I don’t think we heard a peep out of you all morning, during the negotiations,” he explained. “And you usually have quite alotto say when you’re around me.”

Talasyn sneered and opened her mouth, then stilled as though remembering something. Finally, she said, “Let’s focus on training.”

Her manner was that of someone who had been told to stand down—or perhaps toldherself, as the way she treated everyone on the Nenavarene panel these days made it clear that she wasn’t on speaking terms with them. In any case, she was being cooperative, and Alaric wasn’t about to scorn a miracle when it was right in front of him.

“Very well,” he said. “We’re going back to the basics today. I’ll teach you some Shadowforged breathing meditations. Theprinciple should be roughly the same.” He had no wish to admit to anything in common with Lightweavers, but there were some truths that couldn’t be denied. “Aethermancy comes from the center, the place in one’s soul that is similar to a nexus point, where the wall between the material realm and aetherspace is thin. The hidden, more stubborn aspects of one’s magic can be coaxed forth by mastering how to let it flow through your body in the correct way.”

For the next hour, Alaric took Talasyn through the seated meditations. He taught her how to hold air in her lungs and expel it slowly, rhythmically. How to gather it behind the navel, push it out through the nose, and tuck it into the tongue. How to let the Lightweave build up and swell on the crests of it, seeping into the spaces between blood and the soul.

She was a quick study in terms of mimicking his postures and the expansions and contractions of chest, abdomen, and spine—but it was as plain as day that she had trouble clearing her mind long enough for the practice to take full effect. She was a restless thing, her coltish frame thrumming with nervous energy, and he had half a mind to leave her alone for a bit, because maybe she would be able to focus better without him.

But he didn’t leave her alone. He stayed where he was. For once the blue-skied afternoon wasn’t beastly hot due to a pleasant breeze that stirred the plumeria blossoms. The gaps between the trees offered glimpses of the sweeping city of Eskaya miles below, with its golden towers and its bronze weathervanes. He could almost call itrelaxing, sitting here in this place of leaves and earth, secluded from the rest of the palace at such a great height. There was no political maneuvering to worry about, no specter of wars past or future. It was just them, and breath and magic.

Could I have lived like this?Alaric found himself idly wondering. Without a throne to someday inherit, with the stormships remaining his grandfather’s impossible dream,would he have been content with this kind of life, his days passing slow and easy in some mundane pastoral setting?

Would he have been all right with never meetingher?

A strange thought, that. It stood to all reason that his life, whatever iteration of it, would be so much simpler without her in it. Talasyn—in all her prickliness, with that face that his gaze somehow always lingered on—was a ceramic shell hurled into his carefully laid plans.

She was currently squeezing her eyes shut, her freckled nose all scrunched up. Sunshine illuminated the golden undertones of her olive skin and her unkempt chestnut braid spilled over one shoulder. She lookedfetching, and Alaric grimaced. What was it about her that reduced him to such nonsensical adjectives?

And then, because the gods had a twisted sense of humor, he was suddenly falling into the depths of Talasyn’s honeyed eyes as they flew open, too quickly for him to abolish the grimace on his face.

“What?” she muttered with deepest suspicion. “Am I doing it wrong?”

“No.” Alaric seized the first excuse that he could come up with. “I was just thinking.”

“About?”

Well, he certainly wasn’t going to reveal that he’d beenoglingher. He grasped around wildly for a suitable evasion, and stumbled upon something that he had in fact been ruminating on earlier in the day. Something that had been revealed during the talks. “Your mother was from the Dawn.”

Talasyn blew out a measured breath that had nothing to do with the meditations he’d taught her. “Her name was Hanan Ivralis. My father met her on his travels and brought her with him when he went back to the Dominion. She died during the civil war.”

Alaric’s brow creased. “The people of the Dawn Isles arepowerful warriors, by all accounts. What could kill a Lightweaver hailing from there?”

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