Page 31 of A Monsoon Rising

There was a figure looming in the corner. The darkness emanated from him, in rivers, and her gaze traveled up to his face. She expected Gaheris’s wizened features, expected the Regent to have crept into her room under cover of night.

But the gray eyes that looked back at her were Alaric’s. He smiled as his magic devoured her whole.

She screamed again. It came out as a rattle of sound, pushed through a throat gone dry with fear. And suddenly she was bolting upright, freed from the shackles of paralysis, of that waking nightmare. There was no trace of the shadows that she’d seen and felt so vividly, or of the figure that had summoned them.

Through the pounding of her heart, through the horror falling away, she became aware of something else: her bladder clamored to be relieved.

It was a shock, her bare soles thudding against the cold floor. She stumbled to the bathroom on leaden legs. Her mind was all fogged up; that was her only justification, really, for not remembering that she was no longer alone in Iantas’s royal chambers until she walked in on Alaric in her—their—bathroom.

He was hunched over the sink, clad in nothing but a towel wrapped around his lean hips, his black hair damp and his jaw slathered in the creamy white suds of his shaving soap.

“Why didn’t you bolt the door?” Talasyn demanded, suddenly fully awake. For all her bluster, though, she couldn’t quite stop herself from gawking at his bare chest. At the beads of water pooled in the hollow of his collarbones, and the expanse of pale skin and chiseled musculature, riddled with silvery scars. At the smattering of dark hair that dusted a tantalizing path from his navel to what lay hidden under the towel.

“I forgot,” Alaric grunted, lowering the steel-bladed razor from his face. His expression was as cool and haughty as usual, but it carried shades of the ruthlessness from her nightmare, and she nearly shrank back.

Then his gaze flickered over her and darkened to soot, and it hit her that the fabric of her nightshirt was perhaps a little too thin. She crossed her arms over her chest, trying to be casual, but it was too late, of course. Their shared embarrassment suffused the air.

“I—um—nature calls,” she faltered.

“By all means.” He was careful not to let their bodies touch as he skirted around her in the doorway. Some wicked part of her keened in regret.

Talasyn spent the whole morning with her father on a grassy hill that lay to the west of the castle. It overlooked the beach and had the added benefit of being nowhere near Alaric. In the dappled shade of leafy coconut palms, she and Elagbi picnicked and played casongkâ, a game of count-and-capture. It was played with tokens in the form of tiny cowrie shells and an elongated wooden board with two rows of cup-shaped holes calledhouses, bracketed by the larger holes that served as each player’sfield. The objective was to plant more tokens in one’s field than the opponent did in his by scooping up all the cowrie shells in one house and distributing them piece by piece to the other houses in a clockwise direction, each player’s turn ending whenever the last shell landed in an empty hole. The game came to a close once all the houses were empty.

Casongkâ required precise calculation and careful observation—rather like dealing with the Dominion court, Talasyn thought. She was absolute rubbish at the game, and she was fairly certain that Elagbi was cheating on more than one occasion, but she was thankful for the opportunity to focus on something other than her shirtless husband, who didn’t even remember kissing her. Whose magic had devoured her in her nightmare earlier. When it came to him, her fear and her desire were tangled together, a vicious web.

Elagbi had just claimed another victory, Talasyn vehemently protesting all the while, when excited cries in the distance drew their attention. A dragon had broken the wave-tossed surface of the Eversea while several of the villagers’ children frolicked on the beach.

It was an old one, with clouded blue eyes set in a grizzled, horned head. Its fire-orange scales were crusted with barnacles and a multitude of scars, from centuries of battle against sawtoothed sharks and colossal squid and whatever else the ocean hid. As the children cheered and clapped their hands in delight, it waded into the turquoise shallows on clumsy reptilian forelimbs, chiropteran wings tucked against its slithering flanks like a ship’s sails, an eruption of sand and saltwater blossoming with every motion.

Once the dragon reached the shore, it lay down and closed its eyes. Talasyn would have suspected that it had died, if not for its breath stirring nearby ribbons of water, bringing them to a boil. The lower half of its body curled and twitched in rhythm with the tide.

“They spend most of their time in the deeps, but they like to bask when the sun’s out,” said Elagbi. “It will probably sleep there for hours.”

“Even with those ruffians around?” Talasyn gestured to the children who had now swarmed the dragon and were clambering up its many coils and prodding at its folded wings.

Elagbi laughed. “What are mayflies to a leviathan? And the children are Nenavarene, so it will never harm them.”

Indeed, the dragon gave no indication that it was in the least bit bothered by the small humans’ antics. It slumbered on, and Talasyn was about to race down the hill for a closer look when her father gave a sigh.

“They all vanished during the civil war,” he said. “Retreated beneath the waves. In all those long months, not a single dragon was spotted basking on the shore or gliding through the heavens. Their disappearance was an ill omen. We thought they had left us forever, and it was no more than what we deserved for tearing the nation apart.”

In the past, Talasyn had refrained from asking too manyquestions about the Nenavarene civil war, mindful of Elagbi’s pain, careful not to stoke the flames of Urduja’s wrath. But there was freedom to be found here in Iantas, two hours away from the Roof of Heaven and the Zahiya-lachis’s watchful gaze, where brilliant sun on snow-white sand burned away all secrets, where fresh, salt-laced breezes softened the hurt.

Once the rebellion had surrendered after Elagbi killed their leader, his elder brother Sintan, Urduja had ordered all memory of her traitorous firstborn expunged. A sennight ago, however, while exploring Iantas’s library, Talasyn had stumbled upon a portrait miniature hidden in a drawer—Elagbi and Sintan as teenagers, in stiff poses and even stiffer formal attire. In contrast to the dark curls of the youthful Elagbi, Sintan’s hair had been a lighter shade of brown, and his eyes had been Urduja’s, jet-black and calculating.

Talasyn had felt a chilling sense of unease at the sight of this younger version of her uncle, a boy who had grown up to want her dead. And she had the sneaking suspicion that it was Elagbi who had stored the portrait miniature in the drawer, keeping it safe from Urduja’s purge.

“Amya.” Talasyn leaned forward, over the casongkâ board. “Why did Sintan do it?”

Elagbi’s features crumpled, and Talasyn regretted the question immediately. But it was too late to take it back. It hung heavy in the air.

“You must understand, my dear,” Elagbi said in a hoarse whisper, looking off into the distance, “my brother and I were very close when we were children. We had only each other. He was terribly intelligent, and possessed such a strong sense of righteousness—a bit aloof, but he always protected me and told me bedtime stories when we were children.

“He was, however, a completely different person in the end. There was a seed that took root in his mind as he grew older,as he learned about lands across the sea where men could rule. Sintan became convinced thatheshould be the rightful heir to the Dominion throne. He used that burning intellect of his to quietly amass supporters from the more power-hungry noble houses who felt they did not have Queen Urduja’s favor, and he plotted and schemed—”

“And manipulated my mother,” Talasyn said dully.

Tears leaked from the corners of Elagbi’s eyes. “My poor Hanan. What did she know of these kinds of games? Sintan told her about the plight of the Lightweavers on the Continent, and of course she agreed to help. I should—” He scrubbed at his wet cheeks with the back of a shaking hand. “I should never have brought her here. She wasn’t happy. She refused to be named the Lachis’ka because she had no interest in politics, and yet she became a pawn anyway.”

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