Chapter 21 #2
The reality was worse. The lion’s mane was fire, and his mouth was grotesquely wide, big enough to swallow horses whole. Big enough to eat the sun, in the oldest story. More than large enough to swoop from the sky and bite a crafter-priest in two.
The Allmother was trying to defend her children, but she couldn’t see her targets, and when she reached toward the Stoneborn who’d broken her laws, she just as often swatted down the little gods who were attempting to flee.
Bodies were strewn everywhere, death-priests and crafter-priests alike, and gold blood spread on the stone where immortals fell too.
“Why are they fighting her? She’s our mother,” said Marit, voice puzzled and sad.
I was dimly aware of Taran behind me, trying to coax Marit’s reluctant horses out of their stalls and toward the inferno before the stables were struck from above, but Marit drifted into the doorway where I was still sprawled on the ground.
His reaction to the great violence of the scene was unexpectedly muted. I would have worried he’d respond with one of his fits, but his pearly pink lips were pursed with nothing more than sadness as he took in the nearly impassable road out of the valley between the fires and the rubble.
“Smenos let Napeth sacrifice his priests and retainers to rebuild his power,” I said, trying to at least roll to my knees. “They tried to hide it from the Allmother.”
Marit’s face brimmed with grief. “They shouldn’t have done that. Our mother warned us not to hurt each other. That was the first thing she told me.”
He turned and saw Taran bridling Skyfather’s horse. I lifted my arms for Taran to put me on the creature’s back, but Marit shook his head.
“Take one of mine,” he told Taran. “I’ll go behind you.”
A wordless understanding seemed to pass between the two men, and Taran nodded. As soon as we were both seated on the bare back of one of Marit’s gray chariot horses, Marit swatted its hindquarters, then lifted his arms in the gesture I now recognized as a Stoneborn gathering power.
From the rear of the stable, from nowhere, seawater rushed in.
Marit’s horses did not startle, even though I did, especially once the water lifted their feet off the floor as though the surface was glass instead of brine.
Marit also rose with the tide, feet planted in the cresting wave that swept us forward into the courtyard.
More water flooded into the valley, extinguishing flames even as it slowed the fleeing crafter-priests. It rose faster than any storm could have filled the space, and within seconds I could no longer see the earth under the whitecaps.
With another casual toss of Marit’s hand, a wave knocked the Huntress and her archers off their feet, and Taran leaned us forward, urging the horse into a canter in the direction of the winding canyon that fed into this valley.
We sped past Wirrea’s position and now had only ruins between us and the road back to the City.
Marit had cleared a corridor for us to escape, though we were the only ones who could use it.
“Marit, the priests!” I yelled, twisting around despite the clamp of Taran’s arms to point at the mortals who’d fallen beneath the waves.
This was all for nothing if they drowned within sight of safety.
Marit was only a few feet behind us, keeping pace with his horse despite planting his feet in the surging floodwaters. He blinked his swirling eyes at me with mild affront, then made a cupping gesture with both hands.
“I know, I know. I won’t let them drown. I wouldn’t!”
Like leaves in a stream, the crafter-priests quickly began to bob to the surface, faces terrified but alive as the sea god’s power lifted them up and carried them in his waters. All of us were borne forward, past the ruins of Smenos’s workshop and away from the battle.
I started to laugh when the surge flowed high enough to bring us to the top of the canyon and the hooves of Marit’s horse struck stone instead of water.
Not today, Death! Not by fire or by water!
Death had been punched in the face by his upstart brother-in-law and then reprimanded by his own mother, yet somehow we’d lived to thwart him again.
Taran pulled up the horse to watch as Marit floated the mass of crafter-priests past a concealing bend of the canyon, then allowed the waves to recede.
I beamed at the sea god, ready to chant every prayer of thanks I’d ever heard. Sing sea shanties all the way back to the City. Pour his wine myself, even if I ended up swimming home.
Marit nodded with satisfaction when the last crafter-priest was back on dry land, then turned toward the inferno, face alert to his mother’s angry cries.
Taran realized what Marit was about to do a moment before I did. He lunged fast enough to topple himself off the back of the horse, and he managed to seize a handful of Marit’s tunic but not to quite land on his feet.
They struggled awkwardly, Marit trying to shrug off Taran’s grip without letting him fall and Taran attempting to drag the sea god back from the lip of the canyon. A wave already hung suspended in midair, poised to carry Marit to the Allmother and her battle with the other Stoneborn.
“Don’t do it, you idiot! They don’t care about the Allmother’s laws, and she doesn’t even know you’re here.”
“Let go,” Marit yelled.
Taran grunted in pain when Marit landed an elbow in his gut, and the scuffle ended with Taran staggering back, dazed.
“Marit, no,” I gasped. Napeth was as fat as a tick with the power gained from all those sacrifices, and Marit had no priests left. Even the waves had to have taxed his strength. The other Stoneborn would kill him.
But Marit drew himself up to his full height and glared down at Taran. His soft, childish features shifted, turning hard and inhuman.
“You can’t talk to me like that,” he thundered in a voice whose echoes lifted the hair on the back of my neck. “I am the god of the sea, and my mother made my bones centuries before Genna even knew the word for peace. I keep the laws, even if no one else will.”
At Taran’s stricken expression, Marit sighed and turned his back on us. His voice still carried. “You’re my friend, Taran, but really, you’re just a Fallen, aren’t you? You wouldn’t understand.”
I couldn’t recognize the emotion in Marit’s voice, though I knew the grief in Taran’s when he called again for Marit to come back. But Marit didn’t flinch—he stepped onto the crest of the wave and let it carry him away from the canyon, past the flooded valley and to the chaos on the Mountain.
He didn’t say goodbye, but what reasons were there for goodbyes between immortals?
The smoke made it hard to see Marit’s change, but it wasn’t so much a matter of a man’s shape growing into a monster’s as a shift in what my mortal eyes were allowed to see.
There had always been a jeweled serpent as well as the odd, wounded man I’d met that first night in the Summerlands—I just hadn’t noticed.
Now the great sea wyrm of legend that sometimes wrecked ships and sometimes led sailors to shore spread delicate fins and waded into the melee.
His scales were all the colors that his eyes could shift between, chalcedony to onyx, and his long, strange shape was familiar.
He’d carved it from driftwood last week at Lixnea’s palace—beautiful and deadly in the water but vulnerable to the fire and rubble flying through the air.
As more priests and immortals crawled out from beneath Smenos’s palace and reached the safety of the water, little waves carried them away from the Huntress’s arrows and the Shipwright’s boulders.
Marit was saving who he could, all the stragglers who’d fallen behind after weeks underground, but Marit wasn’t safe himself.
The Allmother’s grasping arms had not yet pinned Death, and the winged lion was leaping closer and closer to Marit, whose long, trailing tail and stubby legs made him ill-suited for battle on land.
Taran ran to the edge and teetered at the precipice like he wanted to leap after the sea god, but the sheer rock drop wouldn’t even let him climb down.
“Can you do anything like that?” I demanded, pointing at Marit’s scaled form. Anything to even the odds, anything that would save Marit from what I knew was coming.
Taran’s fists bunched helplessly at his sides. “If I could, don’t you think I would?”
His angry stare made the question real, and I was instantly sorry that I’d asked. He would have saved his friend if he could have.
And I then knew, just as strongly, that he hadn’t held back before. He would have lived through his own battle with Death if he could have, but it had been him or me, and he’d chosen me.
“Come on,” he said, voice still dripping with fury as he climbed up behind me on Marit’s horse and reached for the reins.
“No, wait,” I begged, striving to keep Marit’s jewel-like scales in view as Taran turned the horse to follow the thin lip of the canyon. There had to be something I could do. Sing Wesha’s blessings or Skyfather’s. Take my tiny stone knife back from Taran—
“Will it help him to watch?”
Again, Taran’s question was real, and I knew the answer from bitter experience. Marit wouldn’t want us to stay and watch, any more than Taran had wanted me to run after him on my broken foot.
But I couldn’t help but look back through eyes blurred with tears. I looked over Taran’s shoulder as he urged the horse to run in the opposite direction of its master.
I saw the moment the winged lion pounced on the sea dragon and began to tear golden rents in his sides, but that was my choice, and I wished I could spare Taran the sound of Marit’s strangled roar when Death bit viciously into the side of his neck.
The delicate fins were shredded in moments, and his vestigial legs could find no purchase.
Marit’s coils looped uselessly around the body of the larger god as his waves began to recede, but teeth and claws alone were not enough to kill an immortal.
All the time, he continued to scream as he struggled in Death’s grasp.
The Allmother had commanded the Stoneborn not to fight, but Taran had worked out how they could kill each other—their mother’s stone.
So it was the Allmother who ended it; she heard her son’s anguish and shrieked in answer.
The Mountain erupted, turning the sky black and the smoky air to dust. Her stone arms had become pillars of lava, bright enough to leave flowing afterimages on my retinas when I blinked tears away.
It was Marit’s cries that finally let the Allmother locate her disobedient youngest son, teeth still caught in his brother’s neck as water turned to steam and earth to flame.
The Allmother’s fire-flowing hands grasped for her children, seized them, and, in a final flash of light, dragged them all down beneath the stone.
Taran rode on long after the cliffs turned to forest. It was almost dawn before he stopped, at a shabby stone structure by a small pond, as humble as any building I’d seen in the Summerlands.
Little curricles were stacked outside. Some immortals enjoyed fishing, I supposed.
I couldn’t be sure, but I thought we’d made it out of Smenos’s lands.
The night smelled like wet grass and fresh dew, though smoke still clung to our clothes.
Taran didn’t speak a word as he lifted me off of Marit’s horse, though when my foot still couldn’t bear my weight, he scooped me back up to carry me inside.
There were no beds in the single room, but there was a thickly woven rush mat in front of a cooking hearth, and I gratefully slumped to the floor there.
My breath emerged in shaky spurts as I tried to calm muscles that were releasing days’ worth of fear.
Instincts from three years of war compelled me to rest at the first moment of safety, because safety never lasted long.
Innocent of that experience, Taran puttered around the room first, opening drawers and rattling window shutters before his feet dragged closer to me. He lay down on his side, facing me, studying my silent collapse.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
I shook my head, and Taran scooted closer on the mat.
After picking a few loose strands of hair away from my face, he rolled on top of me.
He’d never done that before, but the heaviness of all that muscle felt wonderful, and after a second of surprise, I welcomed his weight and wrapped my arms tight around his waist. I’d thought he was still angry at me, but he’d just had what was surely the worst day of his new life—of course he wanted comfort.
So did I. I tucked my face against his shoulder, the warm scent of his skin registering beyond the smoke and blood.
We lived today. He’d saved me, then saved every person who made it out of the underground prison. I felt more than in any moment since I reached the Summerlands that I had him back, the same person I’d lost. Maybe I’d never have to let him go again.
Taran shifted his weight after a lengthy inhale, gathering my hands into one of his and tangling my legs with his own. Even then, I didn’t recognize that he wasn’t holding me but pinning me down until I felt the edge of my own knife prickle against my neck.
“Alright, darling,” he said softly. “I’m ready to collect on that debt you owe me. Let’s start with some answers.”