Chapter 7 #2
I didn’t hear what Marit said next to him over the rush of blood in my ears, or Taran’s reply, but he began towing me back the way he’d come in, arms stiffened to keep me upright when my legs would have given out.
How did I never see it? How did nobody notice?
Taran wasn’t mortal. I began to shiver like I’d fallen through the ice over a winter pool as we passed through a luxuriously appointed apartment with potted fruit trees and thick rugs.
Taran pointed me toward an upholstered divan, but before I could fall on it, Marit cleared his throat.
“You’re letting them go after they trespassed in your house and threatened your priestess?” the god asked, hooking a thumb toward the direction in which the Fallen had departed.
Taran paused, effortlessly holding me up with one hand. “I thought I’d be merciful?”
Marit laughed hard, not in a nice way, and there was a matching blink of something dark on Taran’s face before he returned the sea god’s smile.
“Of course I’m not going to let them go. Just give me a minute.” He cast a brief glance down my body before plucking the last stone knife from my belt and tucking it into his waistband. He lifted me again and none-too-gently pushed me through a door in the rear of the large living area.
“Wait here,” he said.
I unthinkingly complied for two steps, but turned around to find Taran shutting the door in my face.
The lock clicked, and I heard the sound of something heavy being dragged across the floor.
Only then realizing that he’d trapped me somewhere, I banged my fists against the wood in protest, but heard footsteps recede in pursuit of the two Fallen, heedless of my shouts.
The latch wouldn’t move, and even after I sang the lock open, I couldn’t shove the door past whatever Taran had put in front of it.
With his immortal strength. Immortal.
All options to flee exhausted, I slid down to the floor, shaking.
Everything that had happened since I stole the damn boat crawled up my limbs and congealed into an icy-hot, shivering lump in my throat.
Just in time, I grabbed a gold-chased urn from the floor next to me and retched into it, though there was little in my stomach and all I could do was dig my fingernails into the glaze while my gut uselessly convulsed, throbbing in time with my head.
How could I not realize what he was? He’d been too strong. He’d known too much. He’d been too perfect—especially to me.
He’d done this to me on purpose, and my broken heart fell to dust as I realized it.
I never expected to fall in love. It wasn’t forbidden to Wesha’s acolytes, just impossible for her sworn priests and unlikely during my training, which consisted chiefly of care for pregnant women, infants, and the elderly.
Acolytes sometimes left the cult to serve other gods or marry, but those of us who remained considered that a personal failing, and I was always determined not to fail.
When I met Taran, the feeling took me entirely by surprise.
I barely knew what to call it. I felt like the first person in the history of the world to ever discover effortless joy in another person, to look for his coming and going like the movement of the Sun and Moon.
I treasured the emotion, cradled it to myself, and never thought to say anything to him about it.
We should get married, Taran had announced one morning as we swept up the farm kitchen where a dozen of us had slept in a huddle for warmth the night before.
Apropos of nothing. We’d been fighting Death’s forces for months, and the main variation in our days was the degree of desperation.
At the moment of his unexpected proposal, I’d felt something of the same shock I felt right now, the sense that I’d failed to notice something important when it had been obvious to everyone else.
I had also wondered if he might be teasing me.
Embarrassment nearly made me run out the door.
Why would we get married? I’d asked him instead.
I tried even then to conceal what I felt, though I instantly decided I would never speak to him again if he dared mock the beautiful secret thing I’d carried through a year of war and destruction.
I still recalled the exact look on his face, because it colored my every view of the world after.
The way he tried to smile at me, heartbreakingly vulnerable when he was so rarely straightforward about anything.
That’s what people do when they’re in love, isn’t it?
I loved a man who didn’t exist. I didn’t know why the gods had done many of their great and cruel works, and I doubted they felt love the way I understood the meaning of the word, but at a minimum, every moment I had known Taran had been based on a lie.
I wished I could cry, but I just shook. I noted in a distant, clinical way that I was experiencing symptoms of shock and someone should wrap me in a blanket.
It would have been a relief to pass out or stop breathing or feel my heart seize in my chest, but time continued to pass, the way it had stubbornly continued after Taran’s death, when I had wanted it to end.
After half an hour or so, the unfamiliar ache of inaction prodded me to lift my head.
There was only me. Maybe there had only ever been me. But, as I had noted when I landed in the Summerlands, I could still decide what to do. I would get free if I could.
I was in a room with ornate black-and-white tiles covering the floor and walls and three fountains running from invisible pipes into hip-deep pools for bathing.
Carved cedar clothes chests and a stand mirror made up the furniture.
The only door was behind me. There were open windows high in the walls, probably too narrow to fit myself through.
I jumped for one anyway, pulling myself up with all the strength remaining in my exhausted limbs to look out, and came nose to beak with a startled little owl. Awi.
She fluttered to a perch on the sill as I fell on my rear out of surprise. My reaction time was better than she’d expected when I sprang up to catch her in my trembling hands, and I evaded beak and talons to pull an immediate target for my anger into the room.
“Come here, bird, you’re going to answer some questions,” I hissed, digging my fingers into dappled brown feathers.
Her circular eyes went even wider with betrayal before she shifted, and then I had my hands wrapped around the long, naked neck of an angry, feathered creature the size of an ox, standing on long legs capped with deadly, finger-sized talons.
She immediately kicked me in the stomach, and I let go.
I staggered back, trying to get control of myself. Awi might be the least of the immortals in this world, but she could probably throw me through a wall if she put her mind to it.
“Glad to see you’re alive!” she snapped.
“Am I?” I asked her. I hadn’t been certain. I remembered Wesha cutting my throat and feeding me to the altar.
She only rolled her beady eyes at me.
I touched my throat again, where there was still a clot of dried blood.
I was tired and so, so lost. My last surge of energy expiring, I sank to the floor, then to my back.
Even the ceiling was tiled. Beautiful abstract shapes in black and white and rose, to match the single wall mural of dawn rising over the Mountain.
I’d never seen anything so grand as this bathing chamber, and I’d been to the royal palace and the high temple at Ereban.
“Who is he?” I asked the ceiling.
“Who?”
“Taran.”
“You found him already?” Awi asked, sounding pleased.
“Obviously. Who is he?” I demanded again. “You knew his name.”
“Taran ab Genna?”
“Yes!” I almost shouted. “Who is he?”
Awi ducked into my field of vision, her strange, shovel-beaked face somehow judgmental. “Everyone knows him. ‘Taran, son of Genna.’ The bouncing baby bastard Genna foisted on her husband. Her infrequent pride and occasional joy.”
“Genna, the Queen of Heaven,” I managed.
“Did you not know this?”
“No, I did not know this. Of course I did not know this.”
“You came all the way here, and you thought he was just some mortal?” This was delivered with even more judgment.
I bared my teeth at her in a useless snarl as my stomach throbbed with another lurch of distress.
“He’s…he’s a god? Or one of the Fallen?”
Awi gave a short laugh. “He’s an arrogant little pain in the ass, is what he is. He’s got a good streak of mortal blood in his veins, but since he came back to the Summerlands, he’s been saying he’s one of the Stoneborn.”
“Back to the Summerlands?” For three hundred years, Wesha had held the Gates closed to immortals. How had he come to the mortal world? Why?
Awi paused as though trying to put her next words delicately. “He got through the Gates three years ago because Wesha’s…sentimental about him. But Genna’s the one that sent him on the errand. Putting the mortal rebellion down.”
“Putting it down?”
An errand for Genna, who was his mother.
Taran had been in the mortal world on an errand for his mother, Genna, the Queen of Heaven, the Peace-Queen.
The soot-covered runaway acolyte I’d planned to marry had been on a secret mission for his mother, one of the most powerful Stoneborn—and she wanted my righteous, desperate rebellion against Death, the villain of every single tale of the gods, put down?
Awi had to be wrong. I rejected with my entire soul the idea that Taran had been sent to stop us.
If he’d wanted to put the rebellion down, he could have slipped a knife between my ribs in the first week he knew me.
We would never have succeeded without his help—he’d taught me half the blessings I knew how to sing, fought with us against Death’s priests, the loyalist houses—
“Of course,” Awi said, unimpressed. “Of course, put it down! You ungrateful brats stopped sacrificing to the gods who’d blessed you. Turned against the rule of their priests—even killed one of the Stoneborn. What did you think would happen?”
“We stopped sacrificing when Death massacred Wesha’s priests and destroyed the high temple at Ereban. What were we supposed to do?”
“Well, Diopater wanted to send a big wave and wipe you off the map,” Awi said, swinging one enormous foot in a semicircle.
“Start fresh. You’re lucky Genna won that argument, sent Taran to bring you in line instead.
Didn’t do much for his popularity around here that he made an utter hash of the job. ”
My head sloshed with anguished confusion.
I’d spent my childhood on my knees, singing praises to the Stoneborn.
The last three years falling into a very different kind of devotion.
I still wanted to believe that this was Taran being clever, tricking the gods themselves, and at any moment he’d come back and let me in on it. Putting the rebellion down?
“Why doesn’t he know who I am?” I asked, voice faint.
Awi shook her head dismissively. “He died, and all his power and all his memories died with him. That’s how the Stoneborn are reborn.
Made anew by the Allmother from the stone of the Mountain.
Brought back to be the god of…well, hard to say what he’s the patron of. Disappointing his mother, probably.”
None of this sounded like Taran. Not the man who knit together the bodies of mortal soldiers, the man who fought and sweated and died with us. Not the man I loved.
I closed my eyes for a moment. Distant music streamed through the windows, but in this room it was quiet. My body clung to the floor like a sack of iron bars. It simply couldn’t sustain this level of distress for long. Human hearts gave way under this kind of pain.
This reprieve of lying on the floor and trying not to think about anything didn’t last, because soon I heard the scrape of furniture being moved outside the door.
Awi dove into the form of a tiny bird and took the shelter in the neck of my dress that she’d previously disdained, and I laboriously pulled myself to a seated position for Taran’s return.