Page 8 of A Monsoon Rising

Alaric exited the lounge without another word, leaving Talasyn staring at the empty space where he’d been. In all her stress-filled imaginings of what their reunion would be like, she hadn’t expected it to be this … anticlimactic. She wasbothered. And annoyed with him.

She stomped over to a table laden with wine and an assortment of small plates, where Jie and Elagbi were helping themselves.

Jie bit into skewered cubes of grilled duck’s blood and chewed tentatively, then made a face. “It’s bland!” she exclaimed, aghast.

Elagbi squinted mournfully at the remnants of the vegetable roll between his fingers. “The bean sprouts are soggy, and the dressing is most uninspired.”

“It will be up to Her Grace to introduce the finer points of Dominion cuisine to the Night Emperor’s court,” Jie declared.

Talasyn blinked at them, her cheeks bulging around a piece of egg-dipped sticky rice cake. They stared at her and she shrugged as she swallowed, then reached for the plate of vinegar-cured prawns and sea-grapes without the slightest hint of remorse. Food was food, after all.

She eventually had to stop eating because Queen Urduja beckoned her over to the lounge’s sole window. Talasyn went reluctantly; they had more or less been ignoring each other since the fight that had earned her some measure of freedom within Nenavar’s borders, but she should have known that such a state of affairs was too good to last.

“I have never before left the Nenavar Dominion,” the Zahiya-lachis said, as though it were a point of pride—which it probably was for her. She was speaking in Sailor’s Common. “So far, I am not impressed by what I find. A most shabby domain.”

Talasyn wanted to tell her grandmother that there was beauty only hours away. That it would become clear the moment one saw them why the snow-laden Highlands were called the Spine of the World. She longed to say that it was spring and the canyons of the Heartland would be teemingwith silver-blue rivers, its gorges bedecked in greenery and its meadows covered in flowers.

But all of this belonged to a Sardovia that no longer existed, and so instead she pointed out, “You only have to endure it until the day after tomorrow, Harlikaan.”

“Indeed.” Urduja extended a slim arm dripping with silk and gemstones to indicate several spots with one stiletto-coned finger. “You will need some fountains there, there, and there. A promenade connecting the various buildings would not go amiss—perhaps with some flowering trees.”

“I don’t think beauty ranks very high on the Night Empire’s list of priorities,” Talasyn remarked.

“It should. The masses appreciate a bit of flair. This city is the heart of your empire, yes? You need to keep its inhabitants happy, and to dothat, you need to make it livable.”

“It’s not reallymyempire—” Talasyn started to protest, but Urduja cut her off with an impatient shake of her head.

“There’s no use thinking like that anymore, Alunsina. The chips have fallen into place. No one knows what the future holds, but for now”—the Zahiya-lachis gestured to the skyline once more, this time sweeping her hand as if to encompass it in its entirety—“the Night Emperor is yours, his lands are yours, hispoweris yours. It’s time for you to rule.”

“You’re sounding awfully enthusiastic about this.” Talasyn narrowed her eyes at her grandmother. “Youlikethe idea of having a granddaughter on the Kesathese throne.”

“And why shouldn’t I?” countered Urduja. “What matriarch would object to her house gaining more influence, more prestige? ‘We will become a major player on the world stage’—you told me so yourself, the day after your wedding.”

This won’t last forever. The Night Empirewillfall,Talasyn wanted to argue, but at that moment Urduja folded her handstogether, her right forefinger tapping on the curve of her left hand’s knuckles with painstaking deliberation.

Talasyn froze, recognizing the warning gesture for what it was. She glanced around the lounge, bringing her awareness of every inch of it to the forefront.

Every inch of itsarchitecture, to be exact.

The curved walls. The elliptically arched roof. Certain rooms in the Roof of Heaven were also built like this, engineered to deliver sound to a focal point …

Urduja’s finger ceased its tapping and stretched out to languidly indicate an enormous ebony-wood mantelpiece that occupied a portion of the wall from floor to ceiling.

It was large enough to conceal the entrance to another chamber, where someone could listen to the conversations in the lounge.

How had Urduja known …?

“I account for everything,” the Zahiya-lachis reminded her, lowering her voice as she switched to the Nenavarene tongue just in case, echoing words that she had said a fortnight ago, “and so I am caught unprepared by nothing.”

It dawned on Talasyn that Urduja had sought to lull whoever was listening into a false sense of complacency by making them think that the Dominion was content to revel in their newfound position and to occupy themselves with superficial matters such as redecorating—rather than hiding the last bastion of the Sardovian Allfold within their borders.

“It also does not escape me,” added Urduja, “that your husband has put us up in this dingy corner wing, isolated from the rest of the Citadel.” She kept her tone light. To make any potential eavesdroppers believe the topic was still frivolous, even if they couldn’t understand the words. “Which implies he wants to limit his people’s exposure to you, andthat, in turn,means there’s either something he doesn’t want you to know, or he has no true interest in a lasting alliance, or both.”

Talasyn’s stomach hurt. Was it the questionable vegetable roll? No—this was a different kind of pain. It spread to her extremities, leaving her numb.

What Urduja was saying made perfect sense, but it shouldn’t matter to Talasyn that Alaric had hidden motives. So did she.

Combined with the chilly reception he’d just given her, though, the realization stung.

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