Chapter 12
The first gift Taran ever gave me was a single perfect snowflake in a tin cup. Winter had come early that year, and he’d been monitoring the clouds with growing excitement for days, like he’d never seen snow before. He shook the frame of my tent just after dawn.
Look, nightingale, it’s snowing!
When I blearily stuck my head out, he presented the cup to me with a flourish, only to find that the snowflake had melted in the transferred heat of his hands. He ran off shouting that he’d catch me another one, returned ten minutes later with a selection.
I’d only known him for four months then, and I’d already fallen in love with him.
When Taran finally came back to Wesha’s palace, he brought me more gifts.
As promised, he found me a set of bedroom furniture and arranged it in the solar for my use.
A bed—better than the cot where he slept—and a trunk for my clothes, plus a small desk with a polished bronze mirror.
He brought me new clothes. Two silver combs and a glass bottle of rosewater.
A kithara with ten strings and a lyre with ivory inlay.
Small and beautiful objects he readily admitted to pilfering from the other Stoneborn.
I wasn’t familiar with how Taran might go about courting someone, as every gesture I’d recognized as romantic had come after we were already betrothed, but it felt as though he was not so much wooing me as attempting to tame me, the way a small boy might try to lure a wild creature inside his house with patience and a handful of grain.
“I’m your prisoner, not your priestess. I don’t need any of this,” I told him, dumping the latest pile of expensive baubles on his bedroom floor.
“Prisoners hate presents,” he agreed with syrupy sarcasm before flouncing off to another of Genna’s endless calendar of ceremonial parties.
When he reappeared to ply me with plates of prepared food and other obvious bribes, he was unforthcoming about the intentions of the Stoneborn.
While Genna’s plan for a cold peace was prevailing by default, he admitted that every immortal could feel the silence that had replaced the words of devotion formerly lofted across the divide from the mortal world.
Sacrifices no longer arrived in the storerooms, and the residents of the City were growing anxious as the gods’ power slowly dwindled.
Not Taran though—I would think, if I hadn’t seen him with my knife in his hand only a few nights ago, that he was perfectly content.
I thought often about leaving tacks in his bed.
Weeks into our standoff, I woke a couple of hours after dawn to Taran shouting my name and banging a silver serving platter against my door.
I glared at him over my thick feather coverlet; he’d never previously disturbed my privacy, although he made no secret of his scorn for the hours I was keeping.
“Finally. You’d think I had you making bricks all day, the amount you sleep,” Taran said.
“I know a blessing that will stop the blood flow to every extremity below your heart. You know the ones,” I mumbled at him.
“Brilliant. Would love to learn it. But right now you need to get up and pack. We’re leaving.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.” I rolled back over.
Undeterred, Taran threw open the shutters to let the sourceless morning light in, then snatched the coverlet off of me. I balled up around a pillow, but he grabbed one ankle and dragged me to the edge of the mattress while I groaned in protest.
“I know you’re very busy feeling sorry for yourself,” he said, still cheerful, “but I didn’t actually ask. We’re going, and you can walk wearing clothes you picked out for yourself, or you can go in a nightgown, thrown over my shoulder.”
I begrudgingly got up and shoved some clothes into a pack as he hovered, nearly bouncing on the balls of his feet.
I’d cut up the terrible carnelian-encrusted frock to make a hood, and when I was dressed, Awi hopped into the space between the fabric and my hair, uninvited but apparently determined to keep an eye on me.
Taran shot me an unaffected look of glee when we reached a wide stable yard on the City’s outskirts, and I saw the reason for his good mood.
There was a chariot constructed of half an enormous, iridescent clam shell yoked to a team of four silver-dappled horses, and not even Marit’s position as driver could entirely dampen my awed reaction to the gorgeous creatures.
Marit’s horses were famous—enormous and unearthly, with hooves that did not quite touch the ground they pawed.
Legend said they could run across the crests of the ocean waves, though it would have been centuries since Wesha let anyone test that myth.
As Taran was watching me closely out of the corner of his eye to see if I was impressed, I kept my face blank.
“Where are we going?”
“To the estate of Lixnea, the Moon. Marit is going to renew his bonds of friendship with the other Stoneborn on a grand tour of the Summerlands,” Taran said in a voice that carried.
When I frowned at that, he said in a lower voice, “And Genna would like to know where the other Stoneborn stand now on the question of what to do about our delinquent mortal worshippers.”
He looked at me like he was waiting for something, which I realized was a thank you, Taran, for bringing me along.
“Has anyone seen Death?” I asked instead.
Taran gave an airy wave of his hand, like this was of no importance. “Perhaps we’ll hear news somewhere.”
Marit was attended by two nervous immortal horse-masters and delighted with himself when he got his team to trot a neat circle.
As he pulled to a halt in front of us and hopped down, Awi shot out of my hood, fluttering to the roof of the stables to put some distance between herself and the mercurial god of the ocean.
“Oh dear,” said Marit, watching her go. He looked between the bird and me, face creased with uncertainty. He seemed more cogent than the other evening, but I knew that could change, so I was braced to flee.
“Have we met?” he asked me yet again.
“Yes, this is Iona, my priestess,” Taran patiently answered for me.
“Do I owe her an apology?”
“I’m sure she thinks so.”
“I’m always apologizing, and I can never remember why,” Marit said unhappily. But then he brightened and smiled beneath soft gray eyes. “I do think I’m getting very good at it though! I’m sorry, Iona, for whatever I did—I’ll probably do it again, but I’ll be sorry then too. Do you like my horses?”
It was probably unsafe to reject this sincere expression of feeling, and I did like his horses, so I extended my hand and he smacked a kiss to the back of it, grinning.
There was no guarantee he wouldn’t try to kill me again, but as I still didn’t know whether that had been Taran’s plan when he asked me to marry him, I was less inclined to hold it against Marit.
At the urging of Taran’s hand on my lower back, I approached one of the horses and held out my palm for the animal to sniff. His huff at my mortal scent was somewhat skeptical, but so was I, with one daring hand on the velvet of a perfect equine nose.
“We’re supposed to ride in that chariot?” I whispered to Taran.
He looked down at my bad foot. “Can you stand in one? I’ve been meaning to have a peace-priest come look at your foot.”
I shook my head. Hiwa had looked at my foot, but there was nothing a peace-priest could do once the bones had begun to knit in the wrong places. It needed surgery, and the last maiden-priest could hardly operate on herself.
“I guess I can’t go,” I said sweetly.
Taran smiled even more beautifully.
“Don’t worry, I asked them to bring my horse.”
What was brought, after a short wait in which Marit made me nervous by driving his team in bored circles around the yard, was an enormous white mare whose eyes glowed like heat lightning and whose hooves had the insubstantial outlines of cloud banks. She wore a bridle and reins, but no saddle.
“I’m not riding that,” I said, but Taran just patted the creature’s neck with loving affection.
“Isn’t that your father’s horse?” Marit asked, slowing down to look at her.
“Diopater would wash your mouth out if he heard you accuse him of my paternity,” Taran said, catching me around the waist when I tried to run. “And he doesn’t ride her enough.”
“Who was your father, then?” Marit asked, confused.
“Oh, who even knows. My mother hates that question,” Taran replied, not really answering his friend.
Despite my flailing, he effortlessly deposited me on the horse’s back, where there was only a small blanket for padding.
Kicking him in the ribs hurt my foot and made him laugh before he used one hand to vault up behind me, muscular thighs framing mine.
The mare turned her head to look at us, sharing my outrage about the situation.
“I’m not a good rider,” I said in a panic—that I’d fall, that I wouldn’t, wrapped in Taran’s embrace like a lover, with Taran’s arm curled around my waist and his palm splayed over my hip.
My blood raced up in my veins to match his heartbeat at my back, traitorous body nothing but exultant to be in his arms again.
Taran chuckled, warm breath tickling my ear.
“I am though.”
He tightened his legs and the horse leapt forward as though shot by a bow.
Her dark gray mane evaporated in my fingers like fog, so I had nothing at all to hold on to, not even the reins, which Taran kept in his free hand.
I would have fallen off within seconds, but Taran held me tightly as the mare gained speed.
I yelled when we approached the stone wall around the stable yard, and Taran must have considered that to be encouragement, because he gave a loud whoop and leaned us over the horse’s neck to make an impossible leap over the wall.
Part of me thought I was still dreaming, one of those dreams where I could fly. I even didn’t feel the mare land.
“Open your eyes,” Taran said breathlessly.
As soon as I did, I laughed, the sound reedy and unfamiliar to my own ears. I instinctively clapped a hand over my mouth to stop it, but Taran took his own off the reins to pry my fingers away and scold me. “My priests are allowed to laugh.”
Wesha’s priests had been discouraged from the practice, trained against it from childhood in deference to our imprisoned goddess’s sorrow.
But why shouldn’t I laugh? Who did I owe my grief or humility or even dignity to? Not to Wesha, who hadn’t even wanted them.
I’d come here hoping for joy instead, and I was starving for it.
The world whipped by at fantastic speed, an exhilarating green-and-blue blur that resolved into forests where bluebells and lilacs and daylilies all bloomed at the same time under a perfect canopy of trees in summer foliage.
Marit called out encouragement as he was forced to detour to the road while Taran dove straight ahead, trusting the horse to leap over every obstacle as the buildings fell away.
The sea god gained on us with his team of four, but he had to keep to the path while we flew on as though the white mare had actual wings.
I was glad that I was allowed to laugh now.
I was on a fast horse with Taran’s body warm and solid behind me, and in this moment I was alive and unafraid.
I got this moment of joy when it had felt like there would never be another one, off-balance and uncertain and breathless too as Taran and Marit competed for the lead, wind stealing the words from their lips.
I lifted my hands from the mare’s neck, marveled at how the air spun around my fingers, and tilted my head back against Taran’s shoulder to look up at the sunless blue of the sky.
Anything else Taran offered me, I’d take it, I decided. Because I did want this moment, and a hundred more like it.