Page 56 of The Hurricane Wars

“It was a mysterious illness. And it was fast. She slipped away in only a sennight, before anyone could figure out what was wrong. I don’t—” Talasyn broke off sharply, her gaze flicking from him to the waterfall. “I don’t really like talking about it.”

“I apologize for bringing it up,” Alaric said, soft and solemn and far too sincere. Dangerously so. The defiant tilt of her chin and the way her fists clenched in her lap elicited a pang of guilt that he’d inadvertently forced her to relive her sorrow. It was a sorrow that had no root, for she would have been too young to have any clear memories of her mother. Communing with the Light Sever might be able to change that, but the Zahiya-lachis had declared Belian off-limits for now.

Talasyn’s pink lips quirked. “Never thought I’d live to see the day you apologized to me.”

“I know when I’ve overstepped,” Alaric stiffly replied. “While I’m at it, I would also like to apologize for losing my temper yesterday. I hope that you weren’t too—perturbed.”

“I wasn’t.” She was still avoiding his eyes, but some of the tension had drained from her form. “I was wrong, too. For yelling and storming off. We have a common goal now. We should be working together. So let’s just... do that.”

For several long moments, Alaric was so stunned that it defied all speech. Could it be that beingnicerto the Lightweaver made her nicer to him as well? Could Sevraim, in fact, be a genius? He could never tell him he was right.

It was only when Talasyn turned to him with a slight frown that Alaric realized he’d been silent for too long. “Yes,” he said quickly. “Focusing on working together. I am amenable.”

Her frown transmuted into another upward twitch at the corner of her mouth. He had the distinct and unsettling impression that she found him amusing.

Alaric stood up, motioning for Talasyn to follow suit. Hedemonstrated the simplest of the moving meditations—feet apart, inhaling deeply as one palm was placed in front of the stomach and the other over the head, exhaling as the right knee was bent as far as it could go without the body toppling over. Slow and gradual movements, like a gentle ocean wave.

At first, Talasyn gave the exercise her utmost attention, with the furrowed brow and the wrinkled nose that he was starting to find so alarmingly endearing, but it soon became obvious that she was preoccupied, a distant look in her eyes. Her expression flitted to uncertainty, and then to solemn determination, and Alaric could only marvel at how unguarded she was, at how she let various emotions play across her face without thinking, the way that clouds shifted through the heavens, at turns hiding and revealing the sun. She was so different from everyone else he’d ever met in both the Night Empire and the Dominion courts.

“What happened toyourmother?” she blurted out in the middle of another attempt at the pose.

Alaric would normally never have any desire to talk about it but, to his own surprise, he found he wanted to with her. Parting with each word more willingly than he ought to have, because fair was fair and Talasyn had shared such a dark shard of her past with him, too.

“My mother abandoned Kesath when I was thirteen.”Abandoned mewas what some part of him longed to say.She abandoned me.“I haven’t heard from her since. I assume that she sought refuge in Valisa, where her ancestors originated.” He ran a critical eye over Talasyn’s stance. “Don’t put all your weight on one knee. Balance it out and keep your back straight.”

“Valisa,” she mused. “That’s all the way west, on the edge of the world.” She aligned herself to Alaric’s specifications and he walked around her, saying nothing, searching her form for what needed improvement.

“Do you miss her?” Talasyn asked, in a much quieter tone.

Alaric was caught off-guard. He stopped in his tracks behind her, glad that she couldn’t see his features as he struggled to compose them. “No. She was weak. She faltered in the face of what it meant to be the Night Empress. I am better off without her.”

Come with me.

My son. My baby.

Please.

“Sometimes I wonder...”

Alaric trailed off, embarrassed. He had been so cautious all his life, always weighing his words before he spoke them. Why could he never seem to do the same around Talasyn?

“If she ever thinks of you,” she finished for him in a soft voice. “I wondered that every day, back in Sardovia, before I knew who I was, before I knew that my mother was dead. I wondered if she ever regretted leaving me.”

There was a tightness in his throat, a certain rising lightness in his chest. Someone finally understood. Someone could give voice to all the things that he could never put into words. Talasyn was still in meditation stance, still facing away from him, and he was seized by the urge to sweep her into his arms. To embrace her in reassurance, in solidarity.

To no longer be alone.

“Keep your back straight,” he said instead. “And your elbows out.”

“I am!” she protested. Her shoulders visibly bunched underneath her thin white smock, as they always did when she was about to pick a fight.

“No—” Alaric stepped forward, impatient all of a sudden, eager to shake free of the chains of memory, to distract himself with something that wasn’t the terrible night Sancia Ossinast left Kesath. “Like this—”

He reached out to correct Talasyn’s posture at the sametime that she straightened up with an exasperated huff, moving backward as she brought her feet together. His gauntleted hands closed on the tops of her shoulders and her spine pressed flush against his chest.

The world went still.

Mangoeswas Alaric’s first coherent thought. That slick, succulent, golden fruit that graced every meal he had here in the Dominion, with its lush perfume of summer-warmed nectar. Talasyn smelled as if she’d been eating them, dusted in flaky sea salt. And that wasn’t all. Orange blossoms and the creamy floral note of promise jasmines wafted from her hair, tempered by cool green attar of lotus and the barest hint of cinnamon bark.

---