Chapter 9 #2
“Maybe dying and returning to the Summerlands was always his plan,” was all I could come up with. Though that was not very flattering either, that someone would rather die than marry me.
“That’s stupid. He probably planned for you to die instead.”
“Oh. Probably,” I agreed, shoulders slumping before I thought harder about it and stiffened.
He hadn’t wanted me dead. Not by the end, at least. Even setting aside three years of care—little things that made my throat hurt to think of, times he’d slid his dinner into my bowl or warmed my hands in his—all he’d needed to do on that last day on the beach was nothing, and I’d be dead instead of him.
“Maybe that’s what he planned at the beginning, but he changed his mind.” My breath caught with the pain of a hopeful thought to interrupt my very satisfying wallow in anger.
Maybe Taran had changed his mind. Maybe he’d started off with the idea that he’d put the rebellion down, turn us back toward the temples, even asked me to marry him to cement his control over the people propelling the uprising, but at some point he…stopped.
“Stoneborn don’t change their minds,” Awi said, unimpressed.
“You said he has mortal blood. And he was a disappointment to Genna,” I reminded her, speaking more quickly.
“Maybe he realized it wasn’t our fault when he got there.
We didn’t turn against the gods. They abandoned us, and then Death took everything we had.
It was Death’s fault. Maybe he realized that. ”
The hope, of course, was that if Taran had changed his mind before, he might do it again. I told myself I was a silly girl who couldn’t accept that I’d been in love with an evil beast, but I couldn’t let go of the possibility. I liked it more than all the alternative explanations.
“That’s the kind of talk that’ll get your limbs displayed at different crossroads for blasphemy,” Awi said.
I made a face at her, then lifted the bottom of the chest. It was full of stone knives—the same rainbow obsidian as my surgical blades, but much more substantial. The bird goddess whistled in slow appreciation at the jumble.
“Enough stone blades to do in the entire pantheon.”
Who are you planning on killing, Taran?
I heard bathwater begin to drain next door and hurriedly packed the chest back up before fleeing Taran’s bedroom—minus the smallest of his hidden knives, which I tucked away for safekeeping.
I grabbed the clothes he’d brought me off the divan and made it to the solar before he returned to the front room.
“Are you ready to go, darling?” he called. “If you want to live till evening, I suggest you change out of Wesha’s regalia.”
I snarled as I flipped through the options.
All were cut for someone taller and much more fond of jeweled embellishments than I was; the pearls on the bodice of a single dress would have paid for the house he’d promised to build me.
I picked the one with the highest neckline, deciding that I didn’t need to wonder why he owned so much spare women’s clothing.
Taran, himself resplendent in a sleeveless tunic that showed off the wide golden armbands around his biceps, was all but tapping his foot when I returned, but he stilled to look me up and down.
“What?” I asked. He couldn’t be impressed—the dress was made of fine, sleek ramie, but it covered me from wrists to ankles, and coral pink clashed with my hair and made me look jaundiced. Still, he studied me as though just now realizing that I had physical form.
“If someone asks, say I let you dress yourself today. I don’t think Wesha’s clothes suit you,” he said.
I blinked, looking around the room with some outrage as I realized this dawn-pink-and-gold palace must have been Wesha’s before she married Death.
He’d threatened to throw me out? I should throw him out!
Didn’t the Maiden’s last priest have a better claim on all this than her estranged younger brother?
Heedless of my frown, Taran opened the door and gestured for me to follow him.
“Time to start earning your keep, little priestess,” he announced. “We’re late for services.”
“What services?”
He favored me with a sunny smile. “Worship services, of course. I’d be very pleased to receive your prayers of gratitude. And I’m particularly fond of hymns, if you can manage those. Feel free to compose on the way there.”
I nodded slowly. I already knew the sacred names I’d call him, and I’d compose in the key of B major, for bastard.
Taran’s long legs propelled him faster than I could ever keep up with, and my foot ached from the effort.
I followed him through the same tiled halls as the night before, teeth gritted and limp increasing until he finally slowed his pace to one I could match.
When I stumbled at the first set of steps we came to, Taran wordlessly wrapped my arm around his for balance.
I was too busy minimizing contact between my body and his to notice that we’d stepped outside until the light hit my eyes, and I halted as I got my first look at the City of the Gods.
Wesha’s palace stood at the outskirts of a gentle, sloping bowl that contained the hundreds of temples and villas where the immortals dwelled.
Our epics described the City as a walled garden, and the flowers were the first thing I saw.
Espaliered cherry trees bearing both rosy blossoms and lush fruit separated mounds of hydrangeas and lilacs, without a single brown leaf or wilted petal, flowers of every season perfect together at once.
Amidst the emerald lawns, chestnut and oak trees stretched their arms hundreds of feet into the sky.
The buildings were constructed in a single style, with the same tall-columned verandas and grand arched entryways as our oldest mortal temples, but no single one was made out of the same stone as another.
Here was one in red granite, here another in golden sandstone, a third in blue-veined marble, as though every quarry in the entire world had given tribute.
The infinite dots of color across the landscape were harmonized by the green slate tiles each used on their roofs, and the profusion of columns underneath added to the suggestion that the buildings bloomed out of the soil like the other growing things in this celestial garden.
It was just morning by the color of the sky and the golden glow above the mountains, which came from everywhere and no direction in particular, but I couldn’t get my bearings.
There was the Mountain in the distance, beyond many other snow-capped peaks.
But wasn’t that the same shape to my left as well, beyond the parapets of the City?
There was barely any shadow, even under my foot when I lifted it from the glinting stone of the path.
“Where is the sun?” I whispered.
“Flying over the mortal world, at this hour,” said Taran.
I took a deep breath, trying to steady myself against the overwhelming disorientation of the Heavens.
“You’ll get used to it,” he added, not unkindly. “All the other priests did.”
If I didn’t focus on any particular landmark, I might cry from the beauty of it all. If I tried to look more closely at any one tree or palace, I got the dizzying impression that I was seeing a slightly different scene through each eye.
I forgot myself and clutched Taran’s arm as he led me toward the center of the City, battered by the overwhelming perfume of the out-of-season flowers and hundreds of colors around me.
The paved paths turned into boulevards, and the buildings grew closer together, more than my mind could absorb.
Our destination seemed to be the very center of the bowl, a vast arena painted with enormous murals depicting the feats of the Stoneborn, all painted in a single artist’s style.
The arena was set down into the earth like the navel of the entire world, only one story high at the level of the street but dipping down hundreds of feet to accommodate a crowd of the full thousand little gods and their worshippers.
I saw them in the streets with us: gleaming immortals trailed by priests carrying the trains of their elaborate robes or carrying their gods aloft on ornate palanquins with silk cushions and gilded carry-bars.
“The service is for all the gods?” I asked, eyeing an immortal with the hindquarters of a ram and a long, yellow sash carried by a pair of priests wearing garlands of fragrant hops. There might be thousands of mortals here too, in that case.
Taran nodded. “Genna, with her boundless love of peace—and elaborate dinner parties—has invited the younger gods to come together and renew our vows of friendship.”
“The younger gods?”
“I am not the only one to experience some recent…challenges with immortality.”
I stopped, ignoring Taran’s impatience.
“Will Death be there?” I asked.
He stopped too, going very still.
“Why do you ask?”
Because you killed him. Because he killed everyone else.
“Because he died. He died six months ago, in the mortal world. Wesha said he’d been reborn. Here? Is he here?”
Taran’s expression relaxed. “He’s invited, but nobody’s seen him. Possibly he’s still crawling down the Mountain, since he hasn’t more than a few dozen priests and a handful of Fallen left.”
“But he’s in the Summerlands? The Stoneborn haven’t done anything to contain him? They let the Fallen roam the City and eat people?” My voice grew tighter as I imagined it.
“Technically, it is Wesha who lets the Fallen eat you, my precious almost-maiden-priest. Because she promised everything she owned to her husband.”
I hadn’t been anywhere near Death at Ereban. I’d been all the way in the rear with the other acolytes, shouting and pushing through the crowd as his priests led the young princess to the altar. I’d lived because I didn’t make it to the front in time.
Like every time I sent my mind there, I began to feel hot and confined. My throat remembered smoke. My arms remembered the press of other bodies. Too hot, too tight, the ceiling will—