Chapter 13 #2
I wouldn’t have broken my heart expecting a god to love me back.
Priests moved the tables and chairs, rearranging the furniture to face the stage.
When the plates were all cleared, musicians gathered at one end of the room and began to play popular dances.
Despite my efforts to covertly swap his wine for juice during dinner, Marit was by now happily drunk, and he lifted his head at the change in music.
Lixnea stood and clapped her hands in a shower of silver sparks to mark the next stage of the evening, but as she passed Marit, she ran tender fingers across his forehead and his eyes half closed in response. He put his head back down on his forearms, looking abruptly sleepy.
Taran and I watched Lixnea withdraw from the main hall toward a balcony over the water.
“Did she say anything to you about the other Stoneborn?” I asked.
“No. She keeps her secrets close, that one. But if you want to ask her about Death, now’s your chance. Her chariot flies over the mortal world and the Summerlands both—she’d know if anyone does.”
“You want me to ask her? What about you?”
“Oh, I promised several people I’d dance. I don’t remember their names, but that didn’t seem to matter,” he said, straightening his tunic and smiling at a group of moon-priests who’d raised graceful arms into the air when the drummers began to hit a quick three-count.
Taran looked at me as though waiting for an objection, but when I didn’t voice one, he backed away until his arms were seized by members of the growing crowd of revelers, and he was pulled away into the lines of the dance.
My stomach ached, because I remembered dancing with Taran on more than one night. Hiwa playing reed pipes, Drutalos slapping his lap desk like a drum. Stepping on Taran’s feet before he wrapped my legs around his waist and spun me till I was dizzy. Kissing him until he was breathless too.
For three years I had thought that Death would probably kill me someday. But that didn’t mean that there hadn’t been moments full of complete and pristine joy.
“Do you want to dance?” Marit asked, startling me out of my memories. “I’ll dance with you.”
He was surprisingly coherent for his flushed cheeks and glassy eyes.
“Thank you, but I can’t dance anymore,” I said, touched by the offer despite my caution. “I hurt my foot.”
“You can’t dance ever again?” When his eyes widened in dismay and began to well up with dangerous tears, I hurried to reassure him before the floods could begin.
“But I could play some music later if you want to dance.”
“I’d like that,” he mumbled, face softening. He put his head down on his arms. “I think I like music. I’d like to hear you play sometime.”
I patted him on the shoulder, then followed the Moon outside.
So close to the Mountain, the air was a cool touch on my skin and sweet from the lake below us.
Lixnea stood by the rail, looking into the water.
Her white face was reflected back like the heavenly body we saw in the mortal world, and I had a sudden pang of homesickness for my own sky, of all things.
I’d picked up a discarded kithara as I went, thinking that I could pretend to be offering that performance if she was offended at my approach, but she turned around when she heard the door.
“What, Taran is going to fob off Genna’s dirty work on his priestess?” she said by way of greeting, face creasing in wry amusement. “Not very much like one of the Stoneborn, after all.”
“I’m not here for Genna,” I said cautiously, hearing several things in that statement I wanted to know more about.
Lixnea smiled without teeth, like she’d expected that response.
“No, I didn’t think you were, Iona ter Wesha. The Maiden and the Peace-Queen never did get on well.”
I froze, only just realizing what the Moon might have seen during her flights over the mortal world in the last three years.
She beckoned me closer.
“Don’t fear, child. I never speak of what I see during my voyages across the night sea, and I dearly miss my lost little dawn star. We might have a few words later about the state of my temples, but I’m not about to harm Wesha’s last priest.”
“Thank you,” I breathed. “Though I’m not one, not really.”
“Aren’t you?” the Moon said gently. “You remind me a bit of her—though not her priests, who were very stuffy. The little Fallen girl I raised.”
“You raised Wesha? Not Genna?”
Lixnea flicked her eyes toward the ballroom.
“Wesha’s father was a moon-priest. That was no secret, even if it was a shame.
Do you not tell this story?” When I shook my head, she ducked hers in fond remembrance.
“Her father was Carantos ab Lixnea. He was so handsome, and so talented, that I brought him across the sea before he took his vows. Ah, that boy! When he sang, even the birds gathered to listen, and the Stoneborn too. I lost him to Genna—the personal attention of the Peace-Queen must have turned his head. Poor child had more in the way of looks than common sense. Of course, Skyfather then scattered his body across the width of the Summerlands when he found out Genna had strayed, which made me rather cross, but Wesha’s arrival a few months later made for some small recompense.
” Lixnea sighed at the memory, looking up into the sky at those luminous, too-near stars.
One seemed to wave at her. “I love my children, but I had them when the world was young, and they’ve been out of my arms for a long time.
I was glad to have another baby to hold when Genna dropped Wesha here.
I should have raised Taran too. I would have done a better job of it than Genna. ”
I swallowed hard. Part of me wanted to know the entire story, and part of me hated everything I’d never known about Taran. But ignoring the truth didn’t change it, and if I was ever going to escape this tangle between Taran and the Maiden, I wanted to know where it began.
“Is there more?” I asked Lixnea. “I only know the Maiden’s story from the moment she walked down the Mountain to marry Death.”
“Ah,” Lixnea said with growing interest. “Perhaps you’d like to see her garden?”
I nodded, and the Moon goddess waved me away from the railing and led me around the side of her palace.
She moved slowly, either due to her age or because she noticed my limp, and I had time to gather myself before we reached a damp, green garden that flanked the waterfall feeding the lake.
It was one of those gardens that looked wild until I found the patterns, saw the harmony in the arrangement of night-blooming datura and faintly glowing mosses.
Lixnea arranged her black skirts on a stone bench and gestured for me to take the seat next to her. Wesha was the Dawn goddess, and this garden faced east. I imagined the girl I’d met as a child, seated on this same bench, watching the sunrise.
“Poor Wesha. The changeable heart of a mortal, not to mention her father’s attraction to power. I think that was the root of her tragedy.”
I made a small noise, and Lixnea renewed her focus on me. I would have swallowed it, but the shrewd gaze of the goddess made me speak.
“You disagree,” she said, narrowing her eyes.
“Why do you say it was her mortality that made her heart changeable?”
“We may be deceitful, cruel, stonehearted—but never inconstant,” the goddess told me, but I still shook my head.
“Immortals can forget all they loved. Like Marit forgot the ocean,” I said, even though I was thinking of Taran.
Lixnea shrugged. “We are always what we are. We may be changed, as Marit was changed by his ordeal, but only a mortal could imagine trifling with a god, the way Wesha did with Napeth. For a god, to love something is to grow around the shape of it. She knew he loved her, which meant he had to have her or forever feel the lack. But she didn’t feel the same—she couldn’t. ”
At the mention of Death, I sat up straighter. “Before the Great War? Or after it?”
“That story is no secret either, though I regret to speak of my own part in it. Death loved her from the moment he set eyes on her, with her father’s voice and her mother’s grace.
I didn’t discourage him—I thought she might meet a worse fate than being adored by the youngest of the Stoneborn.
But Wesha was like an infant reaching out for a candle flame, only thinking it was lovely and bright.
She soon learned that fire burns as well as it warms,” Lixnea said, voice dropping into a hypnotic register as she recited a story she had to have told before.
“For a fire, having is consuming, and it scared her. She tried to run away, but he pursued her, and eventually the entire world was aflame. Yes, he went to war for her.”
“And Wesha sacrificed herself to end it,” I murmured. Genna negotiated peace at the price of Wesha’s hand in marriage, with Wesha to remain forever at the Painted Tower, holding the Gates shut against the souls Death would command in the Underworld. “We learned that song first, in Wesha’s temple.”
Lixnea nodded. “It’s lovely, isn’t it? Though Taran couldn’t stand it. He recalled the events rather differently.”
I’d been lulled by the evening and the sound of the waterfall, but when my mind belatedly processed those words, it was like plunging into the cold lake. I had a moment where I lost my bearings.
“What?” I cried ungracefully. The events that founded my temple?
She had been watching me carefully, and she was keen for my reaction. The Moon was the goddess of secrets and dreams, and not all secrets were good secrets, nor all dreams. She might be one of the gentler members of the pantheon, but she was still enjoying my shock.
“He was still a child then, and Wesha rarely gave him a kind word, but he cried and cried when she was imprisoned in the Painted Tower. I thought she might finally take some interest in him then, but alas, it was mostly self-interest.”
“That was three hundred years ago,” I said, my voice soft and fuzzy.
The Moon goddess nodded. “Taran went to his grandmother, the Allmother, and asked her to give him the power to strike down Death and free Wesha. But the Allmother will not abide violence among her children, and she refused him.”
Lixnea grimaced in the direction of the noisy great hall.
“So Taran made himself his typical charming presence in her court until he got what he wanted anyway. He stole stone blades from the Mountain for Wesha, who promptly forced her new husband across the sea at the point of a knife. And that was nearly the end of Taran.”
I held very still as Lixnea concluded her tale.
“The Stoneborn were horrified that their weakness was exposed, and most of them wanted Taran buried at the bottom of a pit where he was unlikely to be found, with one of his new knives through his heart. Genna and I were against it, but I’m hardly a power to contend with, and Genna was angry too.
In the end, Genna made him swear to obey her until she was satisfied that he’d learned to act in a manner befitting one of the Stoneborn. ”
“Three hundred years ago,” I repeated, still reeling at the idea.
I didn’t doubt that it was true. It sounded like Taran, or at least the person he used to be.
“Yes. I would have told him to run instead of making that promise. He has enough red in his blood that he might have made a life for himself in the mortal world, and Wesha surely owed him the passage. But he didn’t think Genna’s service would be so long, or so hard, I suppose.”
“You mean—you mean Genna forced him to put down the mortal rebellion?” I asked, heart leaping in my throat.
With a trace of pity, Lixnea shook her head. “No, he agreed to go. After hundreds of years where Genna spent him like coin for all he could purchase her. It was difficult for me to forgive her for Wesha—I still haven’t forgiven her for Taran.”
Seeing my dismay, the Moon goddess stood up and inclined her head at the party. The music was louder, spilling out over the dark water of the lake.
Now I knew so much more than I had when I stumbled into the Summerlands, but not the few things I’d followed Lixnea outside for. I had a sudden hunch that she’d done this on purpose, distracted me with this sad story from long ago, instead of telling me what the Stoneborn might do next.
“Wait. I was going to ask you about Death. You must have seen what he did to the mortal world after his exile. Do you know where he is now?”
The Moon goddess’s face fell back into shadow as she stepped to the edge of Wesha’s garden.
“I’m afraid I can’t part with any of my secrets about Death—it would be entirely contrary to my nature.
But you might ask Taran, who still knows more about Death and the Maiden than anyone else.
” She gave me another smile, half malice and half compassion.
“Before he asks you what you know, Iona Night-Singer.”