Page 75 of The Hurricane Wars

“That doesn’t mean that Alunsina isn’t ours!” gasped the voice of reason. “She is Elagbi’s daughter. She is She Who Will Come After.”

“Maybe itisfor the best that Her Grace will marry the Night Emperor,” slurred the drunkest of the lot. “Outsiders deserve each other.”

Talasyn pushed her mostly empty bowl away. She no longer felt like laughing and she no longer wished to overhear another word of the men’s conversation. She grabbed Alaric by the arm and dragged him out of the alley. “Time to be heading back,” she said, in response to his quizzical look.

But they didn’t head back right away. Instead, once they left the marketplace, Talasyn took a circuitous route for reasons that weren’t entirely clear even to herself. She and Alaric wound up in the side street of a quiet residential neighborhood, where the festive drumbeats rolled only like distant thunder.

Unfortunately, Alaric’s sarcastic tones were not as far away. “Is this the part where you stick a knife into my ribs and dispose of my body?”

“You’re so paranoid.”And you should be,she fervently, if silently, conceded.

She realized that she was still holding on to his arm, her fingers digging into an unfathomablysolidbicep, and she let go at once and widened the distance between them. He’d latched on to her like this earlier and she’d allowed it, not keen on explaining losing him to her grandmother. It had been a matter of practicality. But now she wondered if her touch burned into his skin like his did hers—if he, too, was befuddled by any form of physical contact between them that didn’t end in grievous bodily harm.

The memories of the plumeria grove and up against hiswardrobe surged through her in a flash of white heat and phantom sensations. His soft lips all that she could see, his large hands all over her form.

Talasyn fled. That was the simplest way to describe what she did next—aiming her grappling hook at an upper railing on the nearest structure, embarking on the climb once it caught. Below her she heard metal clacking against brickwork and the stretch of rope as Alaric gave chase, but she didn’t look back, she didn’t stop until she’d scaled all six levels and hauled herself onto the rooftop.

She sat down, balancing precariously on one of the inclines, her legs dangling off the edge. From this vantage point the city was a tangled net of red and yellow lantern-light, glimmering against the dark, beneath the seven moons.

I don’t belong here.The thought pierced her in all its bleakness.I don’t belong anywhere.

Back in Sardovia, she’d grown up waiting for her family to come back. Now that shehadfound her family, it consisted of a grandmother who thought nothing of using her as a bargaining chip and a father who would never side with her over his queen, in a homeland where she was an outsider.

And, as a final insult to injury, she was getting married to someone who hated her—someone whom she would one day betray, for the sake of everyone else.

It was too much.Everythingwas too much. It all weighed down on her like a stone.

Talasyn furiously blinked away the tears that were threatening to spill. Not a moment too soon, as it turned out, because a shadow fell over her and she looked up to see Alaric’s sullen features, stark and pale in the moonlight. For such a tall, wide bulwark of a man, he stood on the precarious rooftop ledge with minimal effort, studying her quietly.

When he spoke, it was in a tone that carried a trace of unease. “Is something the matter?”

She wanted to laugh. Where should she start?

“Why didn’t you kill me when we first met?” Talasyn burst out, because it was what she’d always wondered, because there was no better time to ask it than here and now, when the moonlight could hold secrets and it was just the two of them above the city, amidst the rooftops, in a sea of weathervanes. “That night on the frozen lake outside Frostplum, before we knew I was the Nenavarene Lachis’ka, before we knew we could merge our magic. I’ve replayed that battle over and over. You could have easily killed me then. Why didn’t you? You even parted the Shadowgate barriers so that I wouldn’t run into them. And you shielded me from the falling column and you let me go the day the Heartland fell. Why did you do all of that?”

“Why areyoubringing it up now?” he countered, looking defensive.

Her temper spiked. She didn’t know, either. She had no idea what she’d been hoping to find.

Several flares of light shot up from the streets to the north of the rooftop. They exploded at their zenith in whorls of green and violet and pink and copper, exhaling wisps of potassium smoke as they blossomed against the starry sky. Talasyn stared numbly at the conflagration that was meant to celebrate her betrothal, and she thought about how much she longed to scream. To let all of her fears and frustrations be swept into the light and noise.

She gave a start when Alaric spoke into the stillness that ensued after the fireworks had died down. “I think that I was curious, the night we met,” he admitted. His voice cut through the gloom behind her in a low rasp. “I’d never encountered a Lightweaver before. I wanted to see what you were made of.”

“And at Lasthaven?”

“I rather felt that it would have been—unceremonious. If you’d died like that.”

Strangely enough, she understood. Nothing less than a well-earned ending, by his blade or hers, would suffice. It wasn’t as disconcerting a realization as it should have been. At the very least, it was something to belong to, something that was just theirs. Even if there was no other way for it to end but in blood and a fallen empire.

She gazed out over joyous, gilded Eskaya. With their fireworks and their feasting, it was so different from what she’d known back then.

“All the cities on the Continent will look like this one day,” Alaric said quietly, as though reading her thoughts. He, too, was studying the scene below them, and she thought about the pudding, how he’d finished every last drop, something as simple as soybeans and sugar a revelation. “I will see it done.”

“The cities of the Allfold could be well on their way to looking like this, if Kesath hadn’t invaded,” Talasyn muttered.

He regarded her with disbelief. “You speak so highly of Sardovia.”

“It was my home.”

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