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Alaric turned on his heel and strode swiftly up his airship’s ramp. He didn’t look back. It took everything in him to not look back. The flare of the Void Sever screeched one last time and then it was gone, with no sign to mark that it had ever been there at all, save for the echoes of sound that lingered in the air like a dragon’s roar.

Talasyn returned to Jie and her guards as the shallop prepared to sail, Alaric a solemn, black-clad figure on the deck. Aether hearts glowed a rich emerald and the vessel was lifted into the air on the crackling currents of wind magic, peeling away from the Roof of Heaven, away from the limestone bluffs.

Like the guards, Jie seemed somewhat apprehensive at the Void Sever’s fleeting discharge. Not apprehensive enough, however, to refrain from teasing; whatever she saw on Talasyn’s face made her ask, with an impudent twinkle in her eyes, “Are you missing His Majesty already, Lachis’ka?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Talasyn scoffed. Over the next several days she had to resume aethermancy training all by herself,navigate what was certain to be a treacherous new order of things now that she had worked up the guts to challenge Urduja, and mentally brace for her return to the Northwest Continent. There were so many things that she needed to do, and missing Alaric Ossinast wasnoton the agenda.

But he had promised to try to find Khaede for her. If he was successful, if Khaede was in Kesath, then Talasyn would move heaven and earth to bring her to Nenavar. If Alaric went back on his word or was unable to keep it, she’d break Khaede out and smuggle her away from the Citadel herself—right under Gaheris’s nose, if need be.

Talasyn stood on the front steps of the palace longer than she ought to have. Her mind was afire with schemes and plans, that was true, but as she watched Alaric sail away, her lips were also burning with the memory of his feverish kisses.

We can’t allow it to happen again,he’d said.

But what if Iwantit to happen again?

The thought broke past her defenses, rising to the surface with a mutinous ease. She forced it back down, burying it, her heart heavy in her chest, her eyes fixed on his airship as it became a mere speck on the still horizon, until it disappeared into the deep blue of a cloudless sky.

Chapter Forty

Alaric was summoned to his father’s private hall at the Citadel within an hour of theDeliverancemaking landfall in Kesath.

He strode into the vast, high-ceilinged chamber that was cloaked in perpetual darkness and it was jarring to him, this abrupt shift from the bright islands of Nenavar. Talasyn would dislike the Citadel, most probably. This place would drown out her light. He would have to make her comfortable in any way that he could, perhaps determine which chambers got the most sun and assign them to her.

Focus,he admonished himself. He couldn’t think of Talasyn while in an audience with his father. He needed to come up with a passable excuse as to his recent transgression—when he hadn’t answered Gaheris’s call to the In-Between at the Belian campsite.

However, the withered figure on the obsidian throne in the middle of the hall had no interest in taking him to task just yet. “Welcome home, my boy.” Gaheris’s eyes flashed silver in the dark. “Marriage looks good on you. Why, you’re glowing.”

The dryly affectionate humor was a trace of the old Gaheris, the one who had been king and not Night Emperor. Try ashe might, Alaric couldn’t help but cling to it, to these bits and pieces of the father that he remembered.

Alaric belatedly realized that something wasoff. It took a searching gaze cast around the hall for him to figure it out. The raw shadow magic that Gaheris loved to drape his surroundings in was not as solid today, and Alaric traced the dilution to a far corner that remained untouched by the Shadowgate and was instead bathed in natural daylight from a high window.

The corner was occupied by a table on which sat a tall, vaguely rectangular object, covered in midnight-black cloth.

“A gift from Commodore Mathire,” Gaheris said with a pleased little grin. “Go on, take a peek.”

Puzzled, Alaric walked toward the mysterious object, followed by his father’s watchful gaze. After he had taken only a few steps, sounds began to emerge from under the black cloth, one lilting chirp after another, eerily familiar. Alaric frowned and quickened his pace. Several more steps and then—

He felt it.

An absence in his being. A hole where the Shadowgate used to be.

The magic had drained from his veins exactly seven meters away from the object.

Alaric broke into a run while more chirping wafted through the air, increasing in agonized urgency with each second that passed. As soon as he made it to the sunlit corner, he ripped the black cloth away to reveal the table and the ornamental brass birdcage atop it, and the little creature perched inside, with its twisted golden beak and its red-and-yellow tailfeathers. With its unique, awful ability.

The sariman’s jeweled eyes stared mournfully at Alaric through the brass bars of the cage. It flapped its wings, its chirps taking on a tone of pure distress, of lament. It was clearly terrified, and so far away from its verdant jungles.

“Fascinating thing, isn’t it?” said Gaheris. “I knew that I had to acquire a specimen for myself. How fortunate that Mathire’s men were able to capture one during Kesath’s sweep of the archipelago.”

“Why...” Alaric trailed off, unable to look away from the sariman in the cage.

“Because Nenavar shouldn’t get to have all the fun,” Gaheris replied, the smile still evident in his tone even though Alaric was no longer facing him. “Because Kesathese Enchanters need to catch up to the Dominion’s technology and surpass it. And because your wife is a Lightweaver and a former Sardovian, and this is how we will find a way to rid her of her magic, once and for all. We will rule the ContinentandNenavar. We will rule it all.”

Alaric’s fists clenched at his sides. The sariman’s wings scrabbled against the bars of the cage in a futile bid for freedom, its plaintive melody filling the hall as it sang for its lost shores.