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Chapter Thirty

Red-gold sunset was pouring over the ancient ruins in a molten haze by the time Alaric and Talasyn made it to the mountaintop. The Lightweaver shrine had been a vast, ethereal thing when she’d first seen it, silvered in moonlight; in the fiery glow of a dying day its weathered sandstone facade contrasted starkly against the rolling dark green jungle within which it reclined, solemn and immense, like a forgotten god on a long-lost throne, the faces of its multitude of carved dancing figures peering out from vines and bramble with enigmatic half-smiles wherein lurked the secrets of the past.

Alaric regarded the dancers on the entrance arch with interest. “These are?”

“Tuani.” Talasyn summoned the term from one of an endless array of history lessons. “Nature spirits. You’ll find reliefs like these in a lot of millennia-old structures. They were worshipped by the ancient Nenavarene.”

“And now the Nenavarene worship your grandmother.” Alaric’s gray eyes were fixed on the carvings, their flowing manes forever wild in the wind, their sleek limbs forever raised to some long-ago melody. “And, eventually, you.”

Talasyn offered a halfhearted shrug. She didn’t like thinkingabout this—about what would comeafter. She was run ragged enough worrying about the present as it was.

“There’s not much worshipping involved,” she muttered. “Here in Nenavar the Zahiya-lachis is sovereign because she is the vessel of the ancestors who watch over the land from the spirit world. There are no... prayers or rituals, or anything. People just have to do whatever she says.”

“As the would-be consort of a future Zahiya-lachis, I’ll already be expected to do just that, won’t I?” He sounded faintly amused. “Husbands defer to their wives here, from what I’ve gathered.”

There was a fluttering in the pit of her stomach. There was a skip to her pulse, a shortness of breath. The way he spoke so casually of their impending marriage, when he looked like he did now—

Logically, Talasyn had always known that Alaric had a body hiding somewhere under all the black fabric and leather armor. She had even been taken aback by the sheer size of it on numerous occasions. It shouldn’t have come assucha shock.

But he had emerged from behind the tall reeds in an undershirt that bared his sharp collarbones and broad shoulders, that clung to his defined chest. Paired with trousers that were hung low on his lean hips and emphasized the considerable length of his legs, and black armguards hinting at the solid muscle beneath them... the effect had been quite dizzying. It still was.

At least his hair had long since dried and he wasn’t raking his fingers through it with a casual, smarmy elegance, and she’d stopped feeling as if she was on the brink of combusting. Sort of. Maybe.

“There you go again, talking about being married to me,” she scoffed with a bravado that she hoped he wouldn’t see through. “Youareexcited.”

“Given your proclivity for pointing it out,” Alaric countered, “I’d hazard a guess thatyou’reexcited that I’m excited.”

“You,” she hissed, “are the most ornery man that I’ve ever—”

“Been betrothed to?” he suggested helpfully.

“Will you stop talking about that!”

“No. Annoying you is in my ornery nature, Lachis’ka.” His tone was even. Perfectly calculated, she thought, to rile her.

And it worked.

Glowering, she made her way into the complex. So did he, this time keeping pace with her instead of trailing behind. They both knew the way to the Light Sever, after all.

Talasyn was no stranger to handsome men with excellent physiques. There had been plenty in Sardovia and there were plenty here in the Dominion. But she had never before experienced this...pullin the company of anyone else. Her eyes kept flickering to Alaric, mapping him out. Her every nerve ending sparked at his nearness.

In truth, it was the same set of reactions she’d had to him ever since they met, butamplified, somehow. As though in the peeling off of his layers, some of hers had been removed as well.

It scared her, this epiphany that he wasn’t unattractive. Or perhapsepiphanywasn’t the right term. Perhaps it had been something that she’d always known, deep down, and it had been lying in wait for the right moment to surface and wallop her over the head.

The right moment being Alaric wet from the stream, all tousled sable mane and sun-flushed skin stretched over sculpted muscle, drops of water tangled in his long lashes.

Talasyn’s face grew hot, and she was exceedingly grateful for the gloom that shrouded the dusty, crumbled corridors they were traversing. Gods, there seemed to be nothing more humiliating than being attracted to someone who didn’t feel the same. Alaric had told her, in such a cruel and biting manner, that she cleaned up well. There was no mistaking his implication; theonly times he ever found her tolerable to look at was when her face was painted and she was draped in silk and precious gems. Without these trappings, he obviously had no impetus to view a former wartime enemy as anything other than a cave troll.

Ashrewishcave troll, at that.

She felt nauseated. Wasthiswhat attraction normally entailed—suddenly caring if the other person found one pleasing to the eye?

The Dominion court was influencing her in the worst of ways, Talasyn decided. The emphasis that the Nenavarene placed on fashion and cosmetics had cultivated in her a vanity that had been absent for twenty years. She resolved to work on that, on quashing this new and highly frivolous aspect of herself.

The reliefs that lined the shrine’s interior walls almost appeared to move in the half-light, their stone eyes following the intruders. Through it all Talasyn’s veins hummed with the golden strings of the Lightweave, beckoning to her as it strained against the veils of aetherspace. However, when they reached the courtyard, all was still, the Light Sever dormant.

The tree that Alaric’s magic had felled a little over four months ago was still there, gnarled trunk cracked like an egg over the stonework. Alaric and Talasyn stared at it, and then at each other.