Page 23 of A Monsoon Rising

A horrific possibility occurred to Alaric. What if this message wasn’t even from Talasyn? What if something had happened to her on the journey southeast? Another rebel attack—

He walked faster, heart pounding.

The Citadel’s rookery was a tower attached to the High Command building. This domed edifice was honeycombed with holes that let in air and sunlight and through which the skuas of the Kesathese regiments and the ravens of House Ossinast could come and go as they pleased or as communiqués demanded. Inside, the high walls were dotted with craggy ledges tufted with dozens of nests, and most of the space fromfloor to ceiling was crisscrossed by wooden beams where the birds could perch.

It was a rare commotion that greeted Alaric when he strode in. Over the course of the tower’s long history, the ravens and the skuas had arrived at a begrudging coexistence, but today feathers were flying. A Nenavarene eagle had landed in their midst, and now its wickedly curved talons were wrapped around one of the lowermost perches, a roll of parchment tied to one leg. Several ravens and skuas surrounded it in a whirl of glossy black and dusky brown plumage, cawing and screeching, beating their wings in warning.

The lone eagle was ready for a fight. It was almost the size of a small canoe, easily dwarfing its opponents. The white feathers cresting its head flared out as it moved its neck in snakelike motions. Snakelike, too, were the hisses that it emitted, adding to the deafening cacophony that echoed off stone and wood. Its blue-gray eyes surveyed the other birds with a raptor’s deadly intent.

Nordaye rushed forward, making shooing noises and waving his arms. The ravens and the skuas scattered, gliding all the way up to the ledges, but the eagle—with the murderous rage typical of Nenavarene beasts, from the dragons to the damn cows—lunged.

Nordaye recoiled with a shrill scream, narrowly managing to avoid being disemboweled by the large, powerful beak. The eagle flapped its enormous wings as though about to fly at the aide and peck him to death, but Alaric wisely chose that moment to draw near. The bird went still, cocking its maned head, staring at him. Threads of silver aether flashed within its black pupils, like lightning in the night.

Then it held out its leg and waited with an air of general impatience while Alaric retrieved the message it had carried across the Eversea.

My lord,Talasyn had scrawled on the parchment, in the clumsy Sailor’s Common of one unused to corresponding in that alphabet. Her upbringing would have offered her precious little opportunity to write, perhaps just enough to get by.I am writing because there will be three eclipses next month, in quick succession, and it will be a good time for His Majesty to come to Nenavar for an extended stay as we prepare for the Moonless Dark. I have taken up residence at the castle at Iantas, and it is well equipped to receive you and your household.Some ink stains followed, as though she’d held the stylus over the parchment for a beat too long, torn about what to scribble next, and then:I hope you are feeling better.

She’d signed it with her birth name.Alunsina Ivralis.Alaric frowned as he studied the unfamiliar shape of it, a screen slid between them to obscure her from his sight, just like when he’d met her as the Lachis’ka in the Roof of Heaven’s throne hall after the Hurricane Wars.

The letter was stilted. Formal. Had her grandmother told her what to write? Had she told her family what Gaheris had done to him? Prince Elagbi seemed harmless enough, but it was a given that Queen Urduja would file it away as ammunition.

Talasyn wouldn’t have been inclined to keep it a secret from her grandmother and her father had Alaric asked her to, anyway. Their marriage was purely a strategic maneuver, one in which both their courts would happily seize any opportunity to gain the upper hand, and that was simply the way of it. He didn’t need their alliance to be anything more than that.

He only wished that he felt a little less vulnerable. A little less bereft.

“Write back to the Night Empress,” he instructed Nordaye. “Tell her that I will join her at Iantas in a month’s time.” He noticed that the eagle had now fixed its keen gaze on the skua nests above, where plump, fuzzy, straw-colored chicks wereblithely chirping away, and he added, “You’d better feed her messenger first, though.”

Nordaye gulped, turning as white as a sheet.

From a ramshackle assortment of nipah-palm huts, time had turned the Sardovian encampment in the Storm God’s Eye into a suggestion of a city. There were pastured animals and a communal longhouse at the very center, and most of the buildings now sported upper levels. But the hulking shell of theNautilusstill reigned supreme, casting a shadow over everything in the moonlight.

Talasyn had been too impatient to arrange for a clandestine meeting such as the one that took place in Lidagat. She’d sailed to the Storm God’s Eye on Surakwel’s yacht almost as soon as she returned to Nenavar and contacted him. Then she’d ordered the young lord to wait on the beach while she trekked through the mangroves alone. She needed to talk to Vela, just the two of them.

She’d sent one of the castle eagles ahead of the yacht; Vela was waiting for her at the edge of the settlement. The Amirante gave a brisk nod as Talasyn approached.

Talasyn proceeded to discuss her sighting of Gaheris—leaving the exact details vague—as well as her encounter with Darius and the presence of a resistance movement. Vela bore the news of Darius with her usual stoicism, but it was no easy task to describe the look that came over her face at the mention of the resistance. It was the exhaustion of someone who had been hiding in the mangrove swamps of the Storm God’s Eye for the last several months. It was the relief of someone learning that she and her cause hadn’t been forgotten by the people left behind.

Talasyn was loath to watch that softness vanish, but she had no choice. She couldn’t put it off anymore. “There’s somethingelse that you should know, Amirante. The resistance attacked during my coronation.” Vela’s features froze, and Talasyn had to duck her head as she relayed the whole sorry tale, fear and shame eating away at her with every word. One of the three remaining Sardovian stormships gone. Dozens of rebels dead, five by her own hand, and Hiras and the rest captured. The losses were too harrowing to encompass in simple words.

“But we can break the prisoners out,” Talasyn hurriedly continued when Vela said nothing. “I learned that they’re being kept in the eastern wing. It’s heavily guarded, but there are no Shadowforged patrolling within, and it’s beside a mess hall, so I was thinking that we could sneak in through the kitchen cellars—”

“Talasyn.” The Amirante held up a hand. “It wasn’t your fault. There was nothing that you could have done, and you had to save yourself. And if you’d let Alaric Ossinast die that day,wewould all be dead, come the Moonless Dark.”

“I can make up for it,” Talasyn said desperately. “I’ll join the rescue attempt—”

“There will be no rescue attempt,” said Vela. “Not on my end. We need to conserve all of our resources, and Kesath cannot know that I am alive and well in Nenavar until we make our move.”

Talasyn couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “But Hiras and the others, they’re being tortured even as we speak,” she protested. “We can’t just let ithappen.”

“It’s unfortunate, but our hands are tied. Surely you must understand that, deep down.” It was jarring how much Vela reminded Talasyn of Urduja in this moment. Cold and resolute. Unyielding. “Their suffering won’t be in vain, and neither will the deaths at the plaza, because each fallen rebel helped you gain the Night Empire’s trust. They will all be avenged when we reclaim the Continent.”

We were chess pieces in her war,Talasyn remembered Darius saying.Purely expendable.

But shedidunderstand Vela’s point of view, didn’t she? Pulling off a prison breakout would be a logistical and strategic nightmare. She’d only been pushing for it to make herself feel better. She hadn’t considered how much she would be asking of Vela, how grave the risk would be to Sardovia’s survival.

So she swallowed her retorts and her pleas to save Hiras and the other captives. And she knew full well that her silence damned them all, a burden that she would carry for the rest of her days.

There was something else she had to talk to Vela about.

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