Chapter 18 #4
She slapped Taran full across the face, hard enough to stagger him backwards and split his lip open.
Before he could recover and wipe the spot of red-gold blood away, she lunged up to suck his mouth clean with a hungry noise, her narrow features curving wide with satisfaction when Taran didn’t resist.
Death slowly smiled to see it, the expression more disgusting on his face than a rictus of fury would have been.
“Well, then. Look how quickly we can all agree to peace when we decide to be reasonable in our requests. I’ve also heard about your apologies, Taran ab Genna. How skilled you are at giving them.”
“After three hundred years, I ought to be,” Taran said, but I couldn’t understand why I was the person he turned to look at when he said it, anger carving deep into every line that love had ever softened.
The tension was too much for Marit; he collapsed to the floor and sobbed until my shoes were soaked with seawater.
Taran begged a moment to see me off Smenos’s lands, then dragged me roughly into the hall.
My hope that it was a show for the other gods was flagging, but it was the only scrap of protection I had left.
I clung hard to it, and as soon as we were alone, I bunched the muscles in my calves to run while Taran planted his feet and glared at me like I’d been the one to insult his sister instead of the one who’d saved him from being turned into a pile of charcoal.
“Are you so tired of eternal life that you want it to end this quickly?” His voice was a low hiss.
“He was going to kill you,” I said, my shock at Taran’s reaction finally shifting to my own anger. “He almost did! If I hadn’t stopped him—”
“He can’t kill me! I just showed you—he’s no stronger than I am! I broke his damn nose! I beat him in front of an audience, and if you hadn’t tried to take our hostess hostage, we could be on our way home right now.”
“You have no idea what you’re dealing with,” I snapped. “You remember six months of sipping wine in the City. You don’t know what Death can do!”
“And why do you know? Because Wesha sold you out for a fancy home and the power of a Stoneborn. Stop thinking like a maiden-priest—nothing would have happened to you if you’d let me handle this.” He clenched his hands in front of my face instead of yelling, which he obviously longed to do.
“It’s not that. Forget Wesha. Something is terribly wrong here,” I said, trying to get myself under control and be persuasive, when what I really wanted to do was shake him.
“Death’s not like you or Marit, he’s not powerless.
He’s hiding it somehow, but I could feel it, only for a moment…
and something is wrong with the Shipwright too.
Why is he alone? Where are his priests—the living ones? ”
“His priests left him because his death released them from their vows. And because mortals are fickle. And ungrateful,” Taran said, eyes still bright with what I was beginning to recognize as fear.
He was afraid of what the other gods wanted from him as an apology, and he was going to go anyway.
Don’t accept it. Don’t accept that they have the right to demand it. He would have agreed with me once.
“Then let’s go right now, before they notice,” I begged Taran, splaying my hands against his chest imploringly. “We’ll figure it out later.”
“Go? Where would we go? Really. Tell me. Where would we go, that this wouldn’t follow us. Four people just saw my priestess put a stone blade to Wirrea’s throat. Any of them could go to the Allmother, and any of the Stoneborn would hand me over to her justice.”
As he spoke, my eyes landed on the serving station at the entrance to the dining hall: the unserved courses, the vegetables and roasts that had been sliced for the coals in the center of the table.
The white bones that had been stripped clean for the meat course were too slender to be beef and too long to be pork.
Their shapes were familiar to me from my first lessons in surgery.
No wonder the dead crafter-priest had wept.
I gagged and covered my mouth as my stomach convulsed.
“Do you see—” I squeaked, pointing to the butchered remains of the crafter-priest.
Taran had known. It was why he’d told me not to eat anything. Tears sprang to my eyes as a wave of dizziness swept through me.
“Yes,” Taran gritted out without a trace of sympathy. “Wirrea has some disgusting habits, which is why I didn’t want to come in the first place.”
I should have shoved that blade home in Wirrea’s throat, but that regret didn’t help us now. We needed to get as far away as possible.
“It’s a straight line down that hall to the courtyard, and the stables are in the south wing. We could be gone before they notice,” I urged him.
White lines of anger framed his mouth. “And then? What next.”
“We—we could go east, up the Mountain. To the Painted Tower. And then we’ll take one of the boats on the shore back to the mortal world—”
“Back!” Taran pressed a palm against his forehead, bending at the waist as though looking to the Heavens for assistance.
When he wheeled on me, it was the angriest I’d ever seen him.
“We are never going back. We live here.” Each word was hurled at me like a weapon, punctuated by a jab of his finger at the floor, and I inhaled sharply at the viciousness of the tone.
With visible effort to regain his composure, he swallowed hard.
“I am going to stay here and pay for your little outburst, on my fucking back if I’m lucky, and hope it doesn’t take three hundred years this time to get free.
You are going to wait until Marit is sober, and then he will take you to my rooms in the City, where you will stay and speak to not a single other immortal until I return, whether that is next week or next year.
And then, we are going to have a lengthy, lengthy discussion of how I expect my priestess to behave. ”
“I’m not your priestess,” I snarled, fists at my sides.
It was an even more bitter laugh that rasped out of his throat, and he loomed over me, close enough that I shrank a half step away.
“Careful, darling,” he said in a dangerous undertone. “You keep saying that like you want me to believe it. And yet the only reason your pretty hide isn’t forming a part of Wirrea’s next decorating project is that you are mine. Think about that on your way home.”
I went rigid in fury, but Taran must have taken my silence as acquiescence, because he raked his hands through his hair, trying to put himself back into order.
He squared his cloak and made an effort to smooth his features.
He used to be better at hiding how he felt.
He still looked like he was headed for a battlefield, not a bedchamber.
“I’ll see you when I return to the City,” he snapped and turned on his heel, stalking off to the dining hall without a backwards glance.
My vision was smeared with red as I limped to our rooms. Marit wasn’t there yet, which gave me the opportunity to pick up an ornamental vase and hurl it at a wall without the fear that I’d spark a tsunami by acting out in front of the sea god.
The pottery fragments vibrated on the floor like they longed to rearrange themselves but didn’t quite have the power to do it. I kicked them, just for good measure.
I shouldn’t have listened to him. I shouldn’t have obeyed.
What was I doing? Who was I with my breasts exposed in a gaudy dress and my face painted, perched on Taran’s knee like a docile pet?
Before I met him, they were calling me Iona Night-Singer.
Before I met him, I had survived the disaster at Ereban.
Before I met him, I had started a war against Death himself.
I was angry, but most of all at myself. If he’d lived, Taran wouldn’t even have recognized me.
Quickly, I stripped the dress off, tearing the fabric in the process, and wadded it in a corner. I put on my warmest clothes; I wasn’t waiting for Marit, the damned coward. I was leaving tonight.
Perhaps by the time I made it back to the City, I’d no longer regret leaving Wirrea’s circulatory system in one piece. Perhaps I’d think of a plan I liked more than rendering Taran unconscious by the most expedient means possible and dragging his limp body feet-first up the Mountain to Wesha.
If I wrapped my ankle well, I could walk for a couple of hours straight, then make my own camp. It was going to be days before I could bear to look at Taran again, and I could use the time and space to remember Iona Night-Singer instead of whatever I’d become.
Nobody stopped me as I stomped out the unattended front gate, and I even made it to the edge of the courtyard before my vows caught me. Just as it had the night I tried to run from Taran, the pain grabbed my throat and held me in place. The leash had no slack to give.
“That’s not fair!” I cried as though Wesha might hear me over the Mountain and take pity on me. “He told me to go.”
But when I tried to take another step out of Smenos’s domain, the breath squeezed out of my chest and my vow lit my nerves to agony in warning.
“What are you afraid of—he’ll smother between Wirrea’s blessed thighs? Marit’ll drown the lot of them out of shame? Let me go!”
I shouted defiance at the Maiden, but some part of me didn’t really believe that Taran was safe.
I didn’t believe he’d survive to take me to the Painted Tower if I didn’t turn around.
I knew Death was dangerous, I knew something had happened to Smenos’s priests, and I knew Marit wouldn’t protect him if the situation turned again.
I fought the pain down, wishing I’d never made any vows at all.
Part of me had realized it, that day at Ereban.
That I could never be any god’s priestess.
It wasn’t just Death—they were all complicit, from the Allmother down to Wesha.
None of them could be trusted with our freedom.
The Taran I’d loved must have realized that at some point.
If I ever wanted him to remember that, I needed to be the rebel he met three years ago, not this half-broken girl with the fully broken heart, crying by myself instead of avenging every life Death ever stole.
I turned around and stared up at the dark shape of the Mountain, the broken facade of the palace, considering what I could do. What would I have done back when I was Iona Night-Singer, not his protected darling?
I would have brought him home with me, and left everything else to burn.
I considered Smenos’s vacant workshops, where his hundreds of priests should have been after crossing an ocean, trusting their god to give them life eternal. I thought of the dead crafter-priest whose fire-cursed feet had scorched the carpets he walked on.
I’d always fought Death’s fire best with fire.
The Shipwright should have known better than to build everything out of stucco and timber—I sang Death’s blessing in each of the corners of the valley, using the empty buildings as kindling, and soon pillars of flame stretched up so high I hoped Wesha could see them from her tower.