Page 12 of A Monsoon Rising

Talasyn couldn’t even check on Alaric, because a wasp coracle swooped down low before the dust could settle, reeling off a volley of crossbow bolts in her direction.

What the—

The helmsman nestled in the vessel’s well was slightly familiar to Talasyn, but he clearly didn’t recognize her. She wove a shield and held it in front of her, hoping that the display of light magic would jog his memory. But he kept on coming, and she ran to find more cover. The iron bolts bounced harmlessly off her aethermanced defense, catching one of the Shadow-forged legionnaires barricading a doorway unaware.

He collapsed, one bolt through his chest and another through his abdomen. The hem of Talasyn’s slashed skirts brushed against his corpse as she sped past to crouch behind a pile of debris. His fellow legionnaires unleashed their magic with a vengeance, crafting javelins of shadow energy that flew through the air and tore the wasp coracle and its helmsman to pieces.

Talasyn fought back a wave of nausea. The sane thing to do was to stay put, stay with the Legion. But she couldn’t just hunker down and let more Sardovians die. She had bargained and begged, trained in politics and in aethermancy, shut herself off from everything she’d ever known, and pledged her troth to her sworn foe so that no one else would have to die.

And she couldn’t let her husband get himself killed, either. She scanned the plaza until she saw him, fighting in seamless formation with Sevraim, Ileis, and Nisene. Alaric was disheveled, his fine clothes soot-stained, but he was in one piece and that was what mattered, in a way that went beyond the treaty and the need to stop the Voidfell. A way that was too dangerous to acknowledge, and Talasyn certainly wasn’t going to dwell on itnow, because she saw Hiras a little further away.

Hiras. The young cadet whom Talasyn had saved from the Legion at the battle of Lasthaven. She hadn’t even realized that he’d gotten left behind in the mass retreat. He’d grown like a weed since then. The gangly and pockmarked young man had currently taken up a defensive position with four other rebels between two pillars, a wall behind them.

TheChitonsent another barrage of lightning into the plaza, and Talasyn seized the opportunity to run to Hiras while the Kesathese were distracted. White-hot currents zapped at her heels as she wove between broken stone and broken bodies, and finally she made it to the wall that ran along behind the little group of rebels and she was calling Hiras’s name …

He whirled around, along with the four other Sardovians. Beneath a shock of russet hair, his brown eyes widened in recognition. She opened her mouth to tell them to escape while they still could, or to ask about Khaede, she couldn’t decide—

—and in that split-second of hesitation Hiras’s boyish features twisted in fury.

“There she is!”

He raised his crossbow, aiming it at Talasyn’s head while his companions charged at her, brandishing pickaxes and hunting knives.

“There’s the traitor!Kill her!”

CHAPTERFIVE

Time slowed to a crawl, the click of the crossbow’s trigger reverberating through the space between Talasyn’s heartbeats. A curved, spike-tipped sword materialized in her hand, and she swung it in a wide arc, slicing the iron bolt Hiras shot at her in half. Epiphany sank in, like the chill of a fever from which no relief can ever be found.

The helmsman steering the wasp coracle from earlierhadrecognized her. The Sardovians who’d been left behind on the Continent had learned of her marriage to Alaric, but they didn’t know about the deal that Ideth Vela made with the Nenavar Dominion. They assumed that Talasyn had betrayed them.

They wanted her dead.

“Wait!” Talasyn cried out as Hiras’s comrades converged on her. She summoned a shield to block the hunting knives, and her light-spun blade loped the head off one pickaxe. Her maneuvers were purely defensive, her aethermancy muted. She couldn’t hurt any of her assailants. Their names eluded her, but up close they were all familiar. She had fought at their side and shared barracks and meals in mess halls with them, united by a common cause. “Wait,” she tried again, when they’d backedher against the wall and the man with the remaining functional pickaxe was digging its point into her shield, looking for an opening in the already weak magic, “please, you don’t understand—”

“What Iunderstand”—spittle flew from the man’s lips—“is that you were our Lightweaver, but now you’re the Night Emperor’s whore. And the two of you will be dead soon enough.”

His fist slammed into her cheek, over the blazing edge of her shield. He had a farmworker’s brawny build, and as Talasyn’s neck twisted to the side with the force of the blow, her vision blurred from the agonizing pain. Sword and shield flickered out of existence as she sagged against the wall, sinking to the ground, ears ringing, her mind a fog, no defenses left. The rebels lunged with their weapons from all sides all at once, and there was no way out, except—

To be most useful, the Lightweave needed to be honed into tools reflecting the wielder’s intent. The mind had to be sharp so that the magic could be sharper still, whether the intent was to spare or to destroy. But sometimes the mind knew only desperation, knew only to save the body.

An eruption of golden radiance seared the battle-torn air, washing over the four rebels as swiftly as day washed into a room the moment the curtains were drawn back. Four silhouettes, freezing where they stood. Devoured by flashes of sun and aether, their blackened forms illuminated from within.

It’s coming from me,Talasyn realized in a daze. Her magic was blazing forth from her veins, gathering around her at the same time that it engulfed those it had marked as her foes. It whirled and raged, outlining with each actinic pulse the contours of bones, the skeletons of grimaces. The rebels’ screaming split the air, and her eyes filled with tears. Foursilhouettes, crumbling to the ground, burned into her memory. Adding to all her other sins.

The Lightweave left dark spots in her vision after it had ebbed. The ringing in her skull subsided, but the world remained vaguely blurred through her wet gaze. Hiras was trembling at the sight of his fallen comrades, at how their blistered skin had peeled all the way to ashen bone. Eaten away by light.

“Why?” The plaintive note in his scratchy voice made him sound less like a soldier and Talasyn’s would-be killer and more like the child he had never been, the boy growing up in the shadow of the hurricanes. “You were supposed to—tosaveus …”

He raised the crossbow again, sobbing, and Talasyn could only stare up at him through her own tears, her back to the wall, the plaza filled with smoke and the last currents of lightning fizzling out as theChitonexhausted the Tempestroad in its cannons. It was the end of the line, for the stormship and for her, because shecouldn’tkill Hiras, there was no way …

Then a snarl of fury, issued from between bared teeth, a shriek of aether as the Shadowgate was opened, the swirl of a tattered formal cape, as Alaric leapt in front of her, swinging his war scythe at the crossbow in Hiras’s hands.

Hiras let out a panicked cry as his weapon was cut in half. He dodged Alaric’s next strike, moving to the side, but his fear eventually rooted him to the spot. Talasyn saw them both in profile. Hiras shook like a leaf in the wind, and there was nothing but icy rage in the Night Emperor’s silver eyes as he brought the scythe down on the rebel’s head.

“Alaric, don’t!” Talasyn screamed.

Alaric froze. The scythe vanished, a mere hair’s breadth from making contact with its target. He turned to look at her fully.

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