Page 35 of A Monsoon Rising

“Talasyn, you’re not focusing,” he snapped, thoroughly shattering the illusion of dreaminess.

She scowled, irritated with him all over again, but she dutifully shut out all distractions. The magic that poured from her fingertips took on more solid shape and soared through theveil on the crests of the amplifiers. Sand whirled around her feet, stirred by an unnatural wind.

The last time Talasyn had cast the barrier with Alaric within the amplifying configuration had been in the Roof of Heaven’s atrium, when it had felt like her magic was taking wing, becoming greater than the sum of its parts. Here and now on Iantas’s beach, with the aether cores modified to project the barrier over a greater distance, it was the same but also—different. The longer Talasyn aethermanced, the more something seemed to open up inside her, beneath her heart, along her spine.

She couldn’t let anyone down; she had no choice but to ride it out, this sensation that was like dread but not quite, this feeling of something being awakened. Sweat beaded at her temple, and a quick glance at Alaric—his complexion sallow, his jaw clenched—revealed that he was doing no better.

And soon some critical point was reached and the jars burst. One after the other, their wires shorting out, the world blurring into glass shards and rain and lightning. Startled, Talasyn’s concentration broke and the light-and-shadow barrier collapsed in on itself, dissolving into wisps and then nothingness as the Enchanters redirected the mass of burst aether cores into the ocean before anyone could get hurt.

“Not as stable as I thought,” Ishan grumbled. “But it held for half an hour, so we are getting somewhere. Only a few more minor adjustments …” She trailed off in a renewed surge of alarm. “Your Grace? You’re shaking—”

Talasyn was burning up. Had it really been just thirty minutes? It had felt much longer. Her throat was parched and every inch of her body was on fire.Heatstroke,she thought groggily. Like the relentless summers on the Great Steppe. Too much light, too much warmth. She took a step toward the waterline with some hazy thought of drowning herself in theEversea. She would do anything for even a moment’s relief, but the treacherous sand shifted under her feet and she couldn’t correct, she was falling—

And Alaric was catching her. Strong arms wrapped around her, hauling her up against a broad, hard frame. The relief was instantaneous everywhere his skin touched hers, her fevered brow to the hollow of his throat, his bare hands on her shoulder and the small of her back. It spread, this cooling, the roar of light receding.

And Alaric was shaking, too. No, he wasshivering. His teeth were chattering and he was ice-cold. Talasyn burrowed deeper against his chest, tightening her own grip on him, no thought left to her but to offer him some measure of comfort. Her left hand slipped underneath the hem of his shirt, palm flat on the heaving muscles of his abdomen. His tremors abated and his breathing evened out at the same time as hers.

Talasyn blinked up at the eclipse over Alaric’s shoulder, at a loss as to how to rationalize what had transpired. The world came rushing back in all its chaos—people crowding around them and voicing concern … Ahimsan Enchanters yelling at everyone to steer clear of the broken glass that littered the sand and reflected the starlight in their jagged edges … the waves crashing against the shore.

Elagbi shoved his way to the front of the throng and grabbed Talasyn by the arm, gently pulling her out of Alaric’s grasp. “My dear, what happened?” He held her by the shoulders, scrutinizing her from head to toe. “Are you ill?”

“Hot,” Talasyn croaked. “I felt too hot.”

She looked at Alaric. “Cold, for me,” he said. “Like—like winter in the mountains.”

If it had been as intense a sensation as she’d felt, and yet he’d somehow found the strength to steady her …

But the Shadowforged were used to pain. Vela had told herthat. Talasyn was seized by the urge to throw her arms around Alaric again, and for a horrible moment she resented her father for tugging her away.

Ishan was outright scratching her head. Talasyn felt a familiar twinge of guilt at being the source of all the daya’s problems for as long as they’d known each other.

“Eclipse magic, amplifiers—this is all new terrain in Enchantment. There is no existing literature,” Ishan said at last. “It’s possible that the configuration we devised has affected Their Majesties’ aethermancy on an internal level.”

“And no one saw fit to inform me of such a risk?” Alaric’s tone was sheer, quiet fury. It made Talasyn think of the seawater bubbling around the dragon’s snout earlier that day. The surface rippling that was a paltry hint of the inferno from which it sprang. “In all this time that I have been submitting to these experiments, no one deemed it advisable towarnme that my magic would be altered?”

Ishan seemed rather taken aback at being chastised by a man, but she recovered and drew herself up straighter. “I cannot preemptively inform you of risks that I was not aware of, Emperor Alaric. As I said, this is still very new to us as well.”

“And yet you had the temerity to act as though you knew what you were doing,” he hissed. “Shadow magic is what stands between my people and the threats at our door. If my aethermancy is compromised in any way, I can’t protect them. If the Lachis’ka and I are killed by these contraptions of yours, all of our plans will have been for nothing. We have foolishly placed it all in the hands of a—”

“My lord.” Talasyn clutched at his sleeve before he could call one of the most powerful nobles in the Dominion a charlatan, or worse. When Alaric transferred his glare to her, she could see the fear that lurked behind its virulence, and she could understand where it came from. But the situation needed to bedefused, and she tried to think of something to say, tried to paste an expression on her face that wasn’t alarm.

Before she could manage either, he shrugged off her grip and stalked away.

Alaric stormed up the sweeping granite stairs. The Shadowgate crackled from his fingertips, chipping the marble banister. At least he could still dothat.

He had no idea what the plan was. He knew only that he never wanted to feel anything like that ever again.

Not the cold that had made him believe he was dying, and not the way Talasyn’s touch had channeled warmth into his veins like salvation.

Because she wasnothis salvation, she was the wielder of a dangerous age-old magic that had nearly destroyed his country, and what had he beenthinking, letting her and her cohorts manipulate the very fabric of his aethermancy, as unintentional as it purportedly was?

He had been too complacent. He had let her get too close. She would be his undoing. Light and shadow couldn’t exist together without one destroying the other.

“Alaric!”

Talasyn was chasing him up the stairs, taking them two at a time. He stopped begrudgingly and waited as she caught her breath a step below him.

“Look.” She swallowed. He watched the butterfly-wing pulse of her throat and thought about how alone they were in the stairwell. “What the amplifying configuration did to our aethermancy, I know it bothers you—”

---