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Moonlight glinted off the ocean waves. Tasia leaned against the railing of the galleon. Not for the first time, she wished she could enjoy the beauty of the Adessian Sea the way Akella and her sailors did instead of always getting so sick. She wiped the corner of her mouth with the back of her wrist, grimacing at the foul taste her seasickness had left.
“How are you feeling?” Joslyn asked, coming up behind her.
Tasia turned, unsurprised to find Joslyn standing a respectful few feet away, and she wondered how long Joslyn had been watching. Probably the whole time, from the time Tasia left her conversation with Linna, hastily passed the sailors’ dice game, and made her way here, to this relatively private section of railing where she’d just lost her dinner.
Joslyn was like that these days, always hovering nearby. Protective but unobtrusive. It reminded Tasia of when they’d first met, when Joslyn kept that same respectful distance between them, because she was just a bodyguard, and the princess was her charge, not her lover.
Tasia found that she liked being reminded of those early days between them, each battling an impossible attraction to the other, each knowing nothing could happen between them and yet harboring those forbidden feelings anyway. She liked being reminded of those days and yet she didn’t, because the way Joslyn treated her now also reminded her of the seemingly insurmountable distance that had grown between them, the distance formed by the ten years Joslyn had left her in the city of the small men while she tried to hold off the deathless king.
She didn’tleave you, Tasia reminded herself. She always intended to come back.
And yet knowing that didn’t change the fact that she had felt left behind. Emotions, Tasia had found, often resisted reason.
“I’ve felt better,” Tasia said at last, leaning back against the railing. “How about you?”
Joslyn didn’t answer at first, just gazed at Tasia as she so often did these days, like she wasn’t sure if Tasia was still Tasia, or some Order of Targhan assassin.
At last Joslyn sighed and gave a one-shouldered shrug. She stepped closer, putting one hand on the railing Tasia leaned on while still keeping a few feet of distance between them. Tasia found herself wishing Joslyn would close that distance, wrap Tasia up in her arms and squeeze her to her chest. They shared a bed in the ship’s captain’s quarters, but even at night, with no one else to see, Joslyn was careful not to touch her, as if Tasia was something hot that might burn Joslyn in her sleep.
“I feel…” Joslyn began, then stopped. She shifted her gaze to the night sky, clear but for a few thin clouds drifting across the moon. She looked back at Tasia. “I feel like I can’t help looking over my shoulder, waiting for a horde of shadows to drag me down –” she pointed with her chin to the waves beyond them “– there.” She drew in a breath. “I know we aren’t in the Shadowlands. Most of the time. But sometimes…”
Tasia waited, motionless. This was the most Joslyn had said to her in the entire week and a half that they’d been at sea. She didn’t want Joslyn to stop talking, and feared the slightest movement on her part might shutter her back into silence.
“Sometimes, especially at night, I worry it’s all a trick, and I half convince myself I’ve never left and will never leave.” She let out a strangled laugh that had no humor to it. “You?”
“I miss Xochitcyan sometimes,” Tasia said. “I miss Grastinga. I guess I’ll never see either one ever again. Which is strange. It was home for so long.”
Joslyn nodded, then turned her face skyward again.
And I miss the feeling of being united with a force more powerful than anything that exists within the mortal realm, even though I only experienced it for a few minutes,she thought, but of course she would not say that aloud. Such a statement would definitely drive Joslyn back into retreat.
“Joslyn?”
Joslyn glanced down. “Yes?”
“I miss you. I miss … us.”
“We’re still us.”
“Are we? You don’t even touch me anymore.” Tasia could hear the slight whine in her voice – it made her sound childish, she knew, but she couldn’t help it. “Half the time, you act like you’re scared of me.”
“I’m not scared of you,” Joslyn said, but there was something strident in the way she said it, something that told Tasia Joslyn was trying to convince herself of her own words.
“Aren’t you?” Tasia said, voice small.
Joslyn opened her mouth, closed it again. Shook her head.
Tasia itched to reach for her but held back. This, too, was like the early days when they had first met. Joslyn had been so closed down, so emotionally distant, never revealing any part of herself to Tasia, as if doing so would provide Tasia with a weapon she would use to attack.
So Tasia did now what she had trained herself to do then: She kept her expression neutral, avoided eye contact, and waited.
“You spent ten years in a tower, nurtured by Grastinga,” Joslyn said at last. “I spent ten years running for my life. Fighting for my life.”
It was the stark difference that had always defined them. Tasia had grown up privileged and protected; Joslyn’s entire life had been a fight for survival. And even in the Shadowlands, the pattern had held.
“Are you…” Tasia swallowed. “Are you saying you’re jealous of me?”
“No,” Joslyn said. “I’m saying… I’m saying I haven’t been able to turn it off, not yet. I’m not – I’m not used to not running, not fighting. I keep waiting for… for…”
“For us to wake up in the palace gardens with a half-empty bottle of wine, realizing we never left,” Tasia finished quietly.
Joslyn nodded.
“Me, too.”
Tasia remembered the first time Joslyn had been trapped in the Shadowlands. Joslyn experienced it as months, even though only minutes had passed, and during those “months,” the undatai had manifested as Tasia, and Joslyn had been forced to kill her over and over again.
If that was what the undatai had done to her the first time, when Joslyn had been out of the mortal realm only for minutes, what had it done to her this time, when instead of experiencing the passage of months, she’d experienced the passage of a decade?
Tasia stared Joslyn’s hand, the one resting lightly on the ship’s railing a few feet away. She thought of reaching out, covering it with her own hand, but she hesitated. If Joslyn pulled away, rejecting that touch, it might break Tasia’s heart. And she wasn’t sure she was strong enough to have her heart broken right now. Not when the oily desire to feel the undatai united with her still floated in the back of her mind, always an arm’s reach away.
She felt Joslyn’s eyes on her and looked up. Something smoldered in those dark eyes, and for the first time in what felt like a very, very long time, Tasia felt a different kind of desire. Not just a desire to be comforted, either.
She bit her lip and reached out despite her fears, dropping her hand onto Joslyn’s.
Joslyn didn’t flinch, didn’t pull away.Instead, she stayed still – as still as Tasia had been earlier when she’d worried movement might push Joslyn away.
Perhaps they’d both been trying too hard not to scare the other away.
The thought amused Tasia, and she chuckled lightly.
“What?” Joslyn asked.
“Nothing,” Tasia said. Then she added, “This. Us.” She nodded to their two hands, touching so cautiously. “Didn’t it used to be easier?”
Joslyn’s gaze followed Tasia’s to their hands. She turned the hand beneath Tasia’s, and at first fear spiked through Tasia’s chest, because she thought Joslyn really was pulling away. But instead, Joslyn laced her fingers with Tasia’s. “Maybe it can be easy again.”
Tasia took a tentative step forward. For the first time since the false palace, she rested her head against Joslyn’s body – but lightly, as though Joslyn was injured. She was injured, in a way. They both were.
“Grastinga said we will heal,” Tasia said softly. “She said we both will.”
Joslyn was warm, radiating heat like a fireplace. She turned her face so that her cheek rested against the top of Tasia’s head.
“She’s right. We will.”
#
“Land ho!”Fayzo cried from the crow’s nest.
He called it out in common tongue, probably because he knew the ship’s Imperial guests, not to mention the daughters rescued from the Kingdom of Persopos, wouldn’t understand him in Adessian. Tasia watched as the pack of little half-Adessian girls, who ranged in age from about six down to infants, pitter-pattered in bare feet across the deck to catch the first glimpse of Negusto rising in the distance. They stood at the railing together, the biggest ones cradling the babies in their arms, and marveled in little murmurs of awe.
Tasia and Joslyn sat together on the main deck under an umbrella Akella had fashioned for them, playing Castles and Knights with a dusty travel set they’d found in the captain’s quarters.
Negusto, Linna had explained to them, stood at the Empire’s easternmost edge now. The wall Emperor Mace had been constructing for the past five years ended at the Terintan city – or began there, depending on one’s perspective. From there, the wall followed the bank of the West Snake River all the way up to its other end in the Zaris Mountains. It wasn’t quite finished yet, but when it was, it would be a feat of engineering that would surely define the Emperor’s legacy. It was a line which both kept the mountain men out of Imperial territory and reminded the Empire to never again overreach.
Linna’s brow had clouded when she told them about the wall; she seemed to believe the Emperor really had no choice about building it after the failed campaign to take back the East, but she also recognized that the wall was a monument to the Empire’s greatest failure. Her friend Megs, whom Tasia learned had once been a First Sergeant in the Imperial Army, grew sullen and moody each time the name Emperor Mace was uttered. It was clear to Tasia that this Megs viewed the wall as a symbol of the Empire’s abandonment of its own people.