Chapter 7
Taran wore the gaudiest golden cloak I’d ever seen, draped over a floral-patterned silk tunic and equally lurid trousers, but I knew every breath of him.
Still kneeling, I lurched to press my hand over his heart, right where his body had been most torn by Death’s last attack, but there wasn’t even the texture of a scar beneath the fabric.
I couldn’t see through his shape, and his skin didn’t glow with foxfire.
He was as solid as the last time I’d touched him.
I’d often thought the Allmother had her most inspired moment when she made him.
His sharp cheekbones and the straight blade of his nose might have made his face ascetic if they weren’t softened by a full mouth and thick, dark hair that brushed his jaw.
His square chin and determined jaw might have suggested arrogance, but few people noticed when disarmed by the dimples in his smile and the dark eyelashes that framed his bright eyes.
All of him was as perfect as the day I met him, and all of him was whole.
“Taran?” I whispered his name, fingertips burning from the heat of his body. The chains that had bound my chest since he died loosened, allowing a single gasp of joy to fill my lungs as my hands curled into his tunic. “You’re alive?”
After a blink of surprise, his smile widened to match mine—
Until his gaze dipped to the knife buckled over my white dress.
At once the open, friendly expression on his face vanished, replaced by three heartbeats of wariness.
He shot his eyes at the drunken godling, and I watched the playful mask drop back onto his features before the other man noticed the change.
“What have you got there?” the godling said, wiping his mouth on his shoulder and staggering to his feet.
Taran sat up just as slowly, offering me his palm to pull us both up. I clutched his hand. Warm. Alive. I didn’t understand.
“A little lost priestess,” Taran said, eyes roaming over my clothing again.
“Yes, but whose? I don’t recognize—oh! Is she a maiden-priest?” The immortal’s bloodshot gray eyes widened. There was a disorienting, swirling movement to his irises that made my gut shrink. “I didn’t think there were any left.”
“Why don’t you go back to the party?” Taran asked his companion in a disinterested tone, though his gaze didn’t leave me. “I’ll handle this.”
Both his words and tone stiffened my shoulders. Handle? There was intensity in his face, but as he examined me, I realized there was not a shred of recognition in it. My blood froze into shards.
He didn’t know who I was.
“No, let me see,” his companion slurred. He grabbed my chin, turning my face to the side and back. “Wesha doesn’t pick them for looks, does she? Hard to tell under the grime.”
“Singers,” Taran said, casually knocking the immortal’s hand away from my face. “Wesha picks singers. Marit, why don’t I meet you in a moment by the game boards?”
Marit. I knew that name. Waverider. The god of the open ocean, the unreliable patron of sailors, potters, and drunks. His priests fled the war in the first month.
“Singers! How lovely,” Marit told Taran, ignoring Taran’s request to depart and shoving him playfully. “Why are you here, little maiden-priest?”
“Wesha sent me here,” I said, voice grating in my throat. Taran’s expression hardened.
“Really. What does she want from me now?” he asked cautiously.
I didn’t have a moment to unpack that, because there was a clatter of clawed feet on the tiles behind me.
I spun to see the two Fallen from the storeroom, who’d caught up to me at last. They’d shed their bronze lion masks, but their unnatural meld of immortal and animal was worse than Death’s sigil.
They slowed as they entered the courtyard to take in the three of us, but they’d picked up sacrificial knives, and rage twisted their bestial features.
I reached for the knife at my own waist, but Taran neatly grabbed me and hauled me back against the hard length of his body. He pinned my arms to my sides by wrapping me in a mock embrace, chin digging painfully into my scalp. I struggled like a dove in a snare, but I couldn’t move his grip at all.
Marit belatedly recognized the arrival of the two Fallen and frowned.
“You were not invited to this party,” he chided them, leaning back to his full, considerable height in affront, the effect slightly undercut by his wobbling intoxication. “No Fallen outside of Death’s sector! We don’t want to see you, let alone smell you.”
They did smell terrible, but this would be their least offense. The two Fallen looked at each other, regrouped.
“We just want the priestess,” the reptilian one lisped. “Give us the priestess. Maiden-priests belong to our father.”
“Let me go,” I began to insist again, but Taran slid his hand up to grip my neck in a gesture that was equal parts threatening and protective. I shut up.
“Now, first off, that’s no way to speak to Stoneborn,” Taran drawled.
Marit snorted agreement.
“Before you speak to us, you bow,” Taran added.
The first Fallen, whose ancestry seemed to have involved more fur than scales, snarled and took a step forward. “We do not bow to you, Taran ab Genna.”
Taran didn’t respond, but the arm around my waist slipped until his hand covered the one on my knife.
“I assure you, you do,” he said, voice dangerously lazy.
“I could go for some bowing,” Marit said, scratching his chin. He burped, then giggled, the noise unsettling. “Do it.”
The Fallen looked at him sullenly, but after a moment, they both halfheartedly bobbed their heads.
“That’s a shit bow,” said Taran.
The reptilian one hissed and took another half step forward, and Taran pulled me back by the same distance. But its sibling made a curt gesture, seeming to think the better of it. They bowed more deeply, animal spines curving like bows, then straightened to fix golden eyes on me again.
“I’ve had enough. You heard Taran ab Genna. Kneel or be knelt,” Marit said, but this time there was an echo like thunder, and the chamber filled with the scent of brine, fogging the air and dropping the temperature in seconds. Water out of nowhere rose around my feet, enough to soak my boots.
My breath caught in fear of this casual display of power, but Marit’s threat made an impression on the two Fallen. They flopped to the floor, prostrating themselves in the new puddles with performative, splashing obeisance.
Marit watched them grovel for a moment, his expression darkly amused. His power thickened the air, soaking my lungs until they felt overfull. And then just as quickly as his mood had dipped, he was done, smile shifting back to hectic cheer. “Well, alright. Say what you want. Politely.”
The reptilian Fallen struggled up to two legs again, brushing his soaking robe with scaled hands. His mouth curled into a yellow-fanged snarl as he formed human speech with obvious difficulty. “She’s a priestess of Wesha. See her dress? Wesha’s priests are ours, she vowed it. All Stoneborn agreed.”
“Hmm,” Marit said, appearing to consider this argument. “What do you say, Taran?”
“I’m afraid they’re confused,” Taran replied. “She’s my priestess.” He turned his cheek so it was pressed against the top of my head. “Easy mistake to make.”
“Yours? But—” The furred Fallen stuttered, dumbfounded. “You don’t have priests.”
“Of course I do,” Taran said, voice betraying nothing but amusement. “They’re so popular these days, and for good reason. What, do you think I wash my own back?”
The Fallen wrestled with this argument, clearly afraid of Marit but no more able to entertain the idea that I was Taran’s priestess than I was.
“She is dressed like a maiden-priest,” the furry one argued.
“It’s a costume party,” Taran said sweetly.
Marit snickered with a sound like raindrops. “Well, there you have it! Glad we could clear that up for you. She’s Taran’s, and you’ll have to go gnaw your own arm for dinner. It seems you owe us an apology for wasting our time and spoiling the rugs.”
His words were light, but there was a taste in my mouth that lingered, a nearly primeval scent of fear.
Instinctive fear of one of the Stoneborn—the greater gods.
The Fallen seemed to feel it too. They wrestled with dueling urges to leap upon us and to collapse back down to the ground, but in the end, they retreated, eyes narrowed on Marit.
“Very sorry, Stoneborn. We did not mean to bother,” the furry one said, an apology that very evidently did not include Taran. After a moment, he scraped another deep bow.
“Wonderfully done,” Marit warbled, happy with how this had played out. “You can teach a dog new tricks, it seems. Now, to the kennels with you. Out. Out, out!”
The Fallen slunk out of the room with their eyes still on us, wet dog scent lingering a few moments more, and then diminishing howls of anger pierced the night to vent their fury at being denied me.
When there was no further sign of their presence, Marit groaned and put a dramatic hand to his forehead. “I wish Napeth would develop better taste in women. For the sake of your pretty décor, if nothing else.” Then he giggled at his own joke, still very drunk despite the interlude.
I tried to worm free of Taran’s arms, but all he did was spin me around, his attention finally refocusing on my grubby and trembling self. Marit approached too, just as interested.
It was only when I looked at the two of them together that I saw it.
I’d never seen it before. It was nothing simple that I could point to like the silky texture of his dark hair or the bright color of his eyes, and it wasn’t in the sculpted lines of his face or the strength of his shoulders.
It was his presence, a reaction he drew from me.
The atavistic recognition of something other, something closer to Marit than to me.
Taran’s features weren’t just inhumanly perfect, they were inhuman.
Immortal.