Page 82 of A Monsoon Rising

In bed afterwards, propped up against a mountain of pillows that Iantas’s chambermaids had meticulously fluffed, Talasyn studied the scars on her right palm and inner forearm.

The pain was gone, but the discoloration hadn’t faded in the slightest. Every vein in this region of her arm, from the tips of her fingers to the inside of her elbow, was outlined in bright red, as though cut open. Revealing the scarlet branches of a barren tree.

Her forearm looked grotesque. That was the only word for it. Talasyn had never set much store by her physical appearance, but the Nenavarene greatly valued beauty, and she had liked to think that her looks were tolerable enough for their standards.

Now, however …

The castle healer had given her a tin of salve that, if applied every night, might lighten the marks, but Talasyn wasn’t optimistic, and neither was the healer. These were aethermanced scars, inflicted by a type of magic that the world had never seen before—not until Alaric and Talasyn spun it into existence. There was nothing else that the healer could do, because it didn’t hurt.

Talasyn would just have to live with it.

It was stupid to be so bothered. She wouldn’t have cared back when she was in the Sardovian regiments; everyone there had battle scars. But in the Dominion court everyone was smooth-skinned and beautiful, and she’d been here long enough now that something had shifted in her mind.

Alaric emerged from his dressing room. Talasyn stuck her arm under the covers, so self-conscious that it was almost painful.

He didn’t approach right away. The fire lamps had been switched off, and only half of his face was starkly visible, palely etched in the moonlight streaming in through the balcony’s glass panels. The other half remained cast in darkness.

The scarred half.

In the furor of the imperial couple’s return to Iantas—on an Ahimsan airship provided by Daya Vaikar, because Bakun had apparently dashed the empty yacht against the crater’s sides—Alaric had refused to have the healer see to him. He had vanished into his dressing room in full armor, his mask still on, and he had stayed there for a long while.

Talasyn thought about how he’d tried to flinch away from her back on the deck, after the Voidfell’s initial wave had ceased. She imagined him looking at his reflection in the dressing room mirror, studying his scars the way she’d studied hers.

The Moonless Dark had irrevocably changed them both, but they didn’t have to deal with it alone.

“Come lie down,” Talasyn said. “You must be tired.”

Alaric stayed where he was. “I can sleep in my study, if you—”

“I want you to sleephere.”

Her tone brooked no argument. He walked over to her stiffly, like a man on his way to the gallows. He ducked his head as he clambered onto the bed frame, and he kept the leftside of his face turned away from her as the mattress dipped beneath his weight.

Her heart caught in the crush of some uncaring fist, Talasyn took Alaric’s face in both hands, forgetting all about her own marks. He resisted, but she managed to turn him toward her fully. And she saw, at last, the entirety of what had sprouted beneath his mask when that sliver of void magic hit him.

Whorls as black as midnight radiated from the base of his ear and all the way across his cheek, a few strands spilling over the bridge of his nose and up the outer corner of his eye. The overall shape was reminiscent of an oak leaf blowing in the wind; each inky line curled like a plume of smoke over the moon-kissed skin of his aristocratic features.

At first his gaze was determinedly trained on the sheets, but after a while his gray eyes met hers with sullen defiance.

“Does it hurt?” she asked hoarsely.

“No.” His fingers curved around her right arm, barely touching the red marks there. “Does this?”

Talasyn shook her head. She smoothed Alaric’s black hair away from his brow, then pressed a slow kiss to the scar at the corner of his eye. A shudder went through his powerful frame, his lashes fluttering against the edge of her cheekbone. She leaned into him, tracing the path of death magic with her lips.

“On second thought,” he mumbled, “it does twinge a bit. You should—you should keep doing that.”

The quip was so unexpected that she laughed. No, shegiggled, a sound that she was making in his presence with worrying frequency these days. She kissed her way down his scarred face and then their lips caught somehow, and her mirth tapered off into a sigh.

The relief that he’d made it through the Moonless Dark surged within her like a volley from a stormship cannon. She’d kept it at bay the last few hours, distracted by practicalconcerns in the aftermath of a catastrophe averted, but now she seized on every sound he made, each rise and fall of his chest, and held them up to the hand of death, which retreated like a shadow dwindling as the sun reached its zenith.

Alaric had never kissed her like this before, so gentle and searching. It frightened Talasyn in a way she couldn’t name, but she let it happen, too caught up in the feeling of his heart beating at her fingertips as she slid her palms down his warm, solid chest. They’d clawed their way out of one danger and many more lurked ahead, but tonight, beneath these silken tapestries, they were alive and that wasallthat mattered.

She helped him yank his shirt over his head. It was tossed to the floor, soon joined by her own, which he peeled from her shoulders, kissing every inch of skin as soon as it was bared. By the time the rest of their clothes were on the pile, she was shivering all over, her toes curling. What was it about this slowness that made it so unbearable and delicious all at once? She fell back against the pillows and he followed her down, their lips connected, his lean hips settling between her thighs. He was already hard, brushing against her in hot glides that made her clench with sheer need, but he acted as though they had an eternity of hours to draw from, mouthing at her throat, her collarbone, her breasts until she was squirming beneath him, flushed all over.

Talasyn’s right arm collapsed against the pillow, over her head. Alaric glanced at it while he kissed the freckles on her chest, and that one glance was all it took for her selfconsciousness to resurface, a cold and ugly thing cutting through the haze of desire.

He’d found her attractive. That had been the one thing stronger than their enmity, stronger than his hatred for Lightweavers. That had been the one hold she’d had over him.

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