Chapter 14
I snagged a glass of sweet wine the color of the harvest moon from a black-robed priest with kind eyes and drained it immediately.
He smiled and offered me a refill, and I took that too.
I thought getting as drunk as Marit sounded like a good idea—and unlike him, I was less dangerous when emotional and intoxicated.
How old are you? I asked Taran when I’d known him for a month.
He was cagey about his background, and I had come to suspect he didn’t have an honest claim to his name.
A runaway acolyte couldn’t profess to be the “son of Genna,” the way all priests were called sons and daughters of their patrons, and anyone with his talent should have been ordained before his apparent age, which I estimated at a little older than my eighteen.
Guess, he replied, grinning broadly. I had not yet noticed that his smiles warmed me like sun on bare skin, but I smiled back. This was the only fun I had, most days. A few moments with Taran while everyone else was asleep.
Twenty.
Taran had smirked and pointed one finger toward the ceiling of the abandoned cowshed we were sheltering in for the night. Older than twenty.
Twenty-two.
Someone older than twenty-two would have been married and a father already, especially someone handsome and strong like Taran. Even with no family or trade, some farmer’s daughter would have caught him and brought him home.
Taran laughed and pointed up again. Older than twenty-two. I gulped.
Twenty-five?
Taran laughed harder. He didn’t look twenty-five. He didn’t have sun damage around his eyes or scars on his hands. But he laughed at my wide-eyed dismay, finger still pointed at the ceiling.
I opened my mouth to guess thirty, but I closed it again. For reasons I didn’t care to examine, I did not want to know that Taran was thirty, when I was only eighteen.
Twenty-seven, I decided but didn’t guess out loud.
I’d lost count of the days, but I was fairly certain I was twenty-two as I made my way across the dance floor on the buoying float of the wine.
Several of the revelers tried to pull me into the whirling, ever-changing knots of dancers, but one moon-priest with long black braids put an arm around my waist and warm lips to mine before spinning me on my good foot and pointing me toward the performers.
My head spun too, but I welcomed the opportunity to join the other musicians and feel like I knew what I was doing.
The moon-priests cleared a space at the front of the stage and passed me a lute.
I was prepared for a challenge—an obscure hymn of Lixnea’s, or a composition that would tax my rusty skill with the instrument—but instead the flutist trilled the opening notes to a simple ballad, a hundred years old but perfectly suited to my range.
I smiled with gratitude and prepared to send my voice to the rafters.
How healing, to find myself the right tool for a task. So much easier to sing than to lead an army—or love someone complicated.
I wore one of the dresses Taran had stolen for me.
The soft fabric clung to my body in a green so dark it was nearly black, with sleeves that fitted down to my fingers and a fluted hem that swished around my ankles.
I felt almost pretty in it: not overwhelmed by the symbolism of Wesha’s thick white wool or overshadowed by the gems on her castoffs.
From the corner of my eye, I caught the gleam of Taran’s gaze where he watched me from a knot of his admirers.
Locked on me like the point of a compass needle.
Were there hollows in his soul where our vows once tied us together? Was there something in the shape of him that remembered me, the way the Moon claimed that Death yearned for his bride?
At the end of the set, when the flutist yielded his spot to a piper, I excused myself and wove back to a padded bench at a table in the corner of the room, planning to sit and enjoy the music for the rest of the evening.
Still, I wasn’t surprised when Taran peeled away from the crowd a few moments later and claimed the seat at my side.
“I overheard at least two brewing plots among Lixnea’s people to steal you away from me,” he announced, pride on my behalf only outweighed by his self-satisfaction.
“You still don’t have me,” I said, smiling anyway.
“A distressing thought.” He gave me a melting look through his dark eyelashes, an expression no less effective for being practiced. “I didn’t know you played the lute too. I’ll get you one.”
Three hundred years of punishment did not seem to have made any impact on Taran’s respect for the property of others, because he was obviously planning another theft soon. I hoped he didn’t steal from our hostess.
“What about you? Just the kithara?”
“I don’t know. Nobody’s mentioned it,” he said, expression dimming a little.
Before he could get lost in that thought, I took his left hand and wrapped it around my wrist at the approximate position he’d press the strings on a lute.
“Listen. Everyone knows this song. See if your hands know the music.”
Lixnea’s priests were playing one of my favorites.
It wasn’t some great epic, just a sweet and silly song about an actor who prayed to the Moon for the ability to change his appearance onstage but forgot his own face afterwards.
He came home with his landlord’s eyebrows, his baker’s nose, and his neighbor’s beard, but his wife knew him anyway.
I waited for Taran to press the shapes of the chords onto my skin, but after a moment, his fingers slipped down to my hand. I gave him a startled glance when he gently traced the scar a ragged plectrum had left with the tip of his thumb, but he was intent on his study.
I had a maiden-priest’s hands. Slender and strong, but scrubbed ruthlessly clean and flecked all over from encounters with snapped strings, stray cinders, and broken mortal bones. Taran held the one with his ring on it—I knew I should take it off, but I couldn’t quite make myself do it.
“Do you remember anything? Anything at all?” I asked softly. Several times he’d already said he didn’t, but I still hoped that wasn’t true.
“Before I died? No.” He didn’t look up as the warm pad of his thumb dipped up and down across my knuckles. He let his fingers rest in the hollows between my own, marking their size against my smaller hand. The weight of his hand resting in mine made my stomach tighten with yearning.
“But there are a few things I just…know,” he added after a moment.
I didn’t want to put as much hope into that statement as my heart urged me to, but if Marit could still feel the well water around him, why couldn’t Taran feel his hand in mine? He didn’t elaborate, leaving me to dream that some part of him found this familiar.
He pulled his fingers from mine to rest on my wrist, thumb brushing the fragile skin over my pulse, which quickened at the tiny intimacy.
When I didn’t squirm away, he lifted my palm to rest against his upper arm, and we sat back like that.
As delicately as I’d replace a baby bird in the nest, he shifted so that my head fell onto his shoulder.
I let the wine and the music slide through me, and my eyelids grew heavy as the night stretched on.
Nobody sought us out, though Taran drew some speculative glances from the dancers who passed by.
Moments of peace had not been so common in my past few years that I needed anything more than the comfort of Taran’s warm, solid form next to me and the beauty of the music to feel content, but his energy was more restless.
He let go of my hand to sit up and refill both our glasses from one of the open carafes on the table. I took mine but didn’t drink—I was feeling a little fuzzy already.
“If you’re not going to sing again, do you want to go back to my room?” Taran asked with his voice nearly obscured in his cup.
“Why?” I asked with complete innocence.
I didn’t catch his meaning until he gave me a wide, slow smile, eyes brightening with delight at my naive response.
“I need your help reaching something on a low shelf,” he drawled, trying to pull my hand onto his arm when I turned my shoulders to frown at him. I did know what people left parties to do in bedrooms, at least in theory; I just hadn’t expected him to ask when he never had before.
I would have been very easy to seduce—from the beginning, even.
It had been my first time out of the strictures of Wesha’s temples, I was terrified and alone with the burden of leadership, and Taran had been everything I could have wanted.
I used to lie awake cataloging the times he’d smiled at me that day.
And once we were betrothed—well, he could have had me by crooking the least little finger.
I loved him to distraction. It wouldn’t have taken words.
It could have been a look, a hand pulling me toward his bed.
I would have gone. I had been waiting for our wedding night not to keep Wesha’s favor but because he’d seemed to expect I would prefer to wait, and I didn’t want to disappoint his idea of me.
Well, there was nobody but me to care what I did now.
What had felt like respect for the vows I nearly made to Wesha now felt like another mistake.
Why had I never pulled him away from the firelight and asked him to demonstrate some of that eternal devotion he was always professing?
Was he actually indifferent to me, or would it have felt too dishonest to cross that line?
I didn’t think I’d feel any more betrayed than I did now if I’d left the three years I loved him with a better idea of what two people did when they left a party hand in hand.
There was a little power in having these particular regrets in this situation though. I crossed my arms, let my glass sit loosely in my hand, and considered him with lowered eyelids.
“Why?” I asked again. “No, really—tell me.”