Page 26 of A Monsoon Rising

“What did you tell them?” Alaric asked out of the corner of his mouth.

“I said thatwe”—Talasyn’s grip tightened on his arm—“insist that they reside with us at Iantas, where they shall want for nothing, until their fields are arable again. And I also promised that you and I will do everything in our power to stop the Voidfell on the night of reckoning.”

Talasyn put her soldiers to work. The Lachis-dalo and the coracle helmsmen and the crew of Iantas’s lone warship were all dispatched to help the villagers pack up their personal effects and bury their dead. The animal corpses could be taken care of later by the battalion that would be sent to clean up, but over twenty people had died and Talasyn wasn’t about to force their bereaved families to evacuate without the proper rites being observed.

They had to move fast, though. There was no telling when the Voidfell would flare up again.

Kaptan Gao had more than a few reservations about the survivors transferring to Iantas. “Your Grace, shouldn’t the Zahiya-lachis be consulted first?” she asked as Talasyn bustled past her with a shovel.

“What for?” Talasyn shot back, hardly breaking stride. “The castle was ceded to my husband as my dowry, so it’s ours to do with as we please.”

Besides, she’d already sent an aetherwave transmission to the Roof of Heaven, and no one had come out here to join her from there. The silence probably meant that she had her grandmother’s blessing to deal with this situation by herself.

Alaric and Sevraim had retreated to the northern edge of the village. Talasyn approached to find the two of them wordlessly studying the brown-black expanse of sugarcane fields spread out before them, gone to rot. On the horizon, wreathed in clouds, was the imposing, roughly cone-shaped silhouette of Aktamasok—the Dragon’s Fang, the ancient volcano that spewed out void magic instead of ash and lava. Its rugged slopes were a deep coal-tar hue, with no sign of the rich foliage that carpeted other Nenavarene peaks.

And now that lifelessness had spread, decimating the land that was the village’s main source of income and wiping out their livestock.

“Here.” Talasyn thrust the shovel at Sevraim. “They’re digging graves. Go and help.”

For once, the legionnaire had no witty remarks. He took the shovel from her and left to do as she instructed, and she replaced him at Alaric’s side.

“Are you angry?” Talasyn ventured. “That I’m bringing the villagers to the castle?” It was technicallyhiscastle, after all.

Alaric’s gaze flickered to her, irises flashing silver in the places where they caught the sunlight. “I’m not angry.”

“Annoyed, then.”

“No. You’re doing the right thing. The fair thing.” He nodded toward the ruined fields to emphasize his point. “Compared to what they’ve suffered, us being a little crowded at the castle is of no consequence.”

She hadn’t realized until then how badly she’d been hoping that he would agree with her decision.There’s a heart there, somewhere,she mused as her own twinged with a poignant ache.Maybe the Amirante is wrong. Maybe he can still—

“How can I be of assistance?” There was a piercing note of earnestness in Alaric’s tone. “What do you need me to do?”

Be on my side at the very end.

Talasyn swallowed. She forced herself into the present, into the sea of death, into the shadow of the Dragon’s Fang.

“Come on.” She turned away from him, away from things she could never say, and back to the task at hand. “We need to help load the ship.”

Although the hundred surviving villagers could theoretically squeeze into the Iantas warship, there were their rattan baskets and bulging cloth packs to consider, as well as the livestock that had managed to outrun the Voidfell’s wrath.

Talasyn solved the problem by decreeing that half of the luggage and a few of the animals would be stored on the Night Emperor’s shallop for the duration of the journey.

“We’ll tip over,” Sevraim opined as he stood on the landing grid and watched with an air of unbridled skepticism while a Kesathese crewman timidly led a sun buffalo up the ramp. “I’m not sure if we’ll even be able to launch.”

“It’ll be fine.” Alaric wasn’t all that convinced either, butwith a rattan basket filled with damp laundry clutched in one arm and a disgruntled chicken tucked under the other, he had no patience for trying to allay Sevraim’s fears. “Stop complaining and help me with … this.”

Sevraim took the orange-and-white chicken. He glanced up at Talasyn on the deck of the Nenavarene warship; she was hauling packs into the cargo hold and barking orders at her men in the same breath. “Our new empress is rather bossy for someone so short.”

The color drained from Alaric’s face as the memory of his wedding night blazed to the forefront of his mind with all the force of a punch to the gut. He knew justhowbossy Talasyn could be; he had firsthand experience—

“And now I’ve just been shat on,” Sevraim grumbled. The chicken nestled in his sleeves issued a satisfied little cluck.

Alaric followed Sevraim up the ramp and onto the shallop’s deck, where he navigated a careful path through the maze of luggage and farm animals until he found a place to sit—on a pile of rattan baskets, beside the tethered sun buffalo. Talasyn joined him a few minutes later, plopping down beside him with an exhausted huff.

“My ship’s full,” she said in response to his questioning look. At the sound of her voice, the sun buffalo lowed softly, and Talasyn laughed. “Well,thisis familiar.”

The sun buffalo was half the size of the swamp buffalo, its wild, semi-aquatic cousin that had chased Alaric and Talasyn through the Belian jungle in a murderous rage. Instead of the colossal and sickle-shaped horns of that beast, the sun buffalo’s horns were slanted daggers pulled back flat against its broad skull. The swamp buffalo’s red eyes would lock onto its target with eerie menace, but this tame relative regarded its surroundings with an affable mien, happily chewing on its cud as the shallop lifted into the air.

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