Page 27 of A Monsoon Rising

Alaric spent the next half-hour staring at his booted feet. The silence between him and Talasyn had become suffocating, punctuated only by the hum of wind magic, the footsteps and brisk communication of the crew, the steady clucking of myriad chickens, and the occasional goatish bray. He yearned to talk to her, but whatcouldhe say to his wife of political convenience, a wife he had already inconveniently orgasmed with? A wife he had let tend his injuries and to whom he had revealed his deepest secrets when he should have been keeping her at arm’s length?

He couldn’t even take any cues from Sevraim; the infinitely more socially adept legionnaire was all the way across the deck, sunk into a state of complete and utter despondency as chickens and ducks pecked at him.

“I’m glad it didn’t scar,” Talasyn blurted out.

Her fists had been curled in her lap, and when Alaric turned to her, she brought one hand up to her forehead, indicating the spot where his father’s magic had cut him.

It stung, the reminder that she’d seen him at his lowest, his most humiliated. He thought about all the other scars on his body, all the times that his failures had left a permanent mark. Had she been disgusted by them, that night in his chambers? Who wouldn’t be?

“Yes, a husband grizzled with battle scars might be a point of pride on the Continent, but it’s not quite all the rage here in the Dominion,” he remarked in caustic words dredged up from the dark within him that had no place here in these sundrenched heavens, next to a girl lit from within.

Talasyn blinked, her pink lips parting in confusion. It couldn’t have been clearer that such a sentiment had never crossed her mind, and Alaric fought back a stab of regret. He braced himself for her ire, for yet another heated quarrel.

She crossed her arms and—lookedat him. “Those weren’t battle wounds.”

He grimaced. She wasn’t allowing him to sink into self-pity, but neither was she letting him off the hook for thinking so poorly of her. He could appreciate that, and even be grateful for it, but it was still hard to force out the “I apologize” that eventually emerged, half choked.

“Thank you,” Talasyn said stiffly.

“Thankyou,” he countered in a rush, desperate to make her forget his surliness of moments prior, “for what you did at the Citadel. I hope that I wasn’t too difficult a patient. If I said or did anything foolish—”

“You don’tremember?”

“Not much after the valerian,” he admitted. Her nose scrunched up and he continued, with some alarm, “Was I untoward in any way?”

She lookedincensed, and he started to panic, thinking he’d somehow made things worse, but it must have only been a trick of the light, for her expression was quick to smoothen and she shook her head.

“No,” Talasyn mumbled. “You were no more cantankerous than usual.”

Alaric’s lips gave a reluctant twitch. “What you did,” he repeated, overcome by the sense of vague affection that he only ever felt around her, “that was more than anyone else ever …”

She bit her lip, her features crumpling with a pained sorrow that went far too deep for what she knew of his situation. Then she placed her hand over his, where it lay on the strips of woven rattan between them. He was struck dumb by the gentleness of the gesture, by how each touch of her slim fingers burned right through the leather of his gauntlets.

“Alaric,” she began, and his heart soared at the sound of his name in her voice.Yes, what is it?every drop of blood in his body seemed to ask, one finger lifting as though of its own accord to curl around hers,What is it, anything—

A crewman beat the gong mounted on the quarterdeck by the ship’s wheel, releasing a metallic bellow that thoroughly shattered the moment while signaling the beginning of the descent.

Talasyn stood up and, after wrestling his whirling mind into some semblance of order, so did Alaric. They clutched the railing for balance as the shallop pulled into a slow dive ahead of the warship, approaching a small island just off the Vasiyas coastline. Iantas’s shores of quartz and coral sand gleamed snow-white against the azure waters of the Eversea. At its center, surrounded by stately coconut palms, was the eponymous castle of pink-veined granite, bristling with spires and pointed arches and flying buttresses. The riotous facade resembled an ocean’s worth of spiny murex shells clumped together, laden with carvings of dancing nature spirits and opalescent mother-of-pearl windowpanes.

Talasyn flashed Alaric a small, hopeful smile. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

Strands of chestnut hair had spilled loose from her braid and were blowing in the wind. The sun brought out the gold in her eyes and danced atop the freckles on her softly rounded cheeks. He was looking at her when he said, “Yes.”

CHAPTERELEVEN

The halls of Iantas were narrow, their stained-glass windows shedding jeweled light on the sparkling mineral veins running through the granite walls. The tapestries were woven mostly in shades of gold, plum, and cobalt, while the oil paintings depicted storm-tossed seascapes and the dragons that lurked beneath the currents.

Talasyn vastly preferred it to the Roof of Heaven’s overstated grandeur, but she couldn’t deny that it had been rather lonely with just Jie and the Lachis-dalo and the comparatively small number of servants for company. That was no longer the case. With the arrival of the refugees, the castle resounded with footsteps and voices. Even the vegetable gardens outside rang with the commotion of attendants trying to place dozens of farm animals all at once.

She busied herself with getting the villagers settled in while the Kesathese contingent was shown to their rooms. Running her own household was not as difficult as she’d previously feared; she simply had to think of it in terms of the army, with everyone having their role.

The sun had begun to inch toward the horizon when Talasynfinally retreated to her quarters—or, to be more accurate, the quarters that she shared with her husband. A husband who didn’t even remember kissing her a month ago. Her hand shook a little against the bronze-wrought bedroom door, but she determinedly pushed it open.

Alaric turned to face her at the sound of her entrance. He was standing by the sliding glass panels that led out to the balcony, and he had changed out of his armor. The gauntlets were gone, too, and the light of the late afternoon sun bounced off the vulana stone on his ring finger, the one that matched hers.

“Sorry about this,” she said, a touch too loudly. “Things are different here in Nenavar. People will talk if we have separate chambers. But if you’re truly uncomfortable—”

“Areyou?” he asked, in that low and solemn rumble of his that always had the peculiar effect of making her want to crawl out of her skin, for reasons that weren’t entirely too terrible.

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