Chapter 23
The Mountain was still on fire the next morning.
Orange flames were occasionally visible through the black smoke, and the wind brought cinders that clung to the inside of my nose and throat.
Taran said all the Stoneborn were vanished beneath the rock, but he could hear Death’s cries below the surface.
We had until the Allmother was satisfied with his contrition to prepare for his return.
“It could be a thousand years. It could be a week. The Allmother loves her evil stoat of a baby boy,” Awi mused.
“Ah, maternal devotion,” Taran said sourly. “I’ve heard stories about that.”
Little immortals had been disappearing for months, Awi eventually told us, the forgotten gods of dried-up springs and abandoned hilltops. The Stoneborn had taken no notice, fully absorbed by their own dwindling storerooms and the silence where mortal prayers had once been.
No wonder Awi had been so desperate to escape when I met her.
I found a little sympathy for the bird at last, although her presence in the knot of my hair prevented any continuation of my conversation with Taran, clothed or otherwise.
His stormy face said he’d come to no conclusions anyway.
It only took three days to get to the City even at the pace of one lame horse and two riders, the weird logic of the Summerlands prevailing over my understanding of its geography.
Taran went into the baths as soon as we arrived, stripping without a word of warning—or bothering to close the door.
I yelped and scuttled off to the little room he used as a kitchen when he bared the dimples at the base of his spine, mumbling flimsy excuses about finding us something to eat.
He quickly reappeared with his wet hair combed back from his forehead and his skin scrubbed raw and pink. As soon as he was dressed, he headed for the door again.
“Bird,” he addressed Awi. “Do you want to come tell Genna what you saw?”
“Better not mention that I was there at all. Genna doesn’t like me,” she said, shrinking back to her old hiding spot on top of the wardrobe.
“I don’t like you either,” he said pitilessly, then scrubbed his face with a palm. “Not that you’ve committed half the capital crimes I apparently did.”
“What are you going to tell Genna?” I asked.
“I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear this, but not everything.”
“Should I come?” I asked, though I was still filthy, since I was not exactly up to joint bathing with Taran.
“No. I don’t want you anywhere nearby when the Peace-Queen starts thinking of what she can throw at Death to pacify him this time. Stay here and don’t unlock the door for anyone until I return. Even Marit. Especially Marit, if the Allmother has already brought him back.”
“But—” I began to argue, not liking the idea of Taran going out unarmed and exhausted when we knew that Death had been snatching immortals off the street to sacrifice.
“Do I need to lock you up again, or can you stay out of trouble for one hour while I find out if we’re the first ones back with a story about what happened?” Taran thundered, eyes beginning to crackle with anger.
“I’ll just go clean up, then,” I said, looking down at my feet with what I hoped was an appropriately contrite expression on my face.
I kept my posture demure until Taran had slammed the door shut and locked it behind him. Then I did exactly what he should have expected I’d do.
I bathed and washed all the ash and soot out of my hair. I put on the least revealing of the green dresses Taran had stolen for me before we left the City. I took two stone knives out of Taran’s hidden stash and fastened them to my belt.
And then I sang the door open and headed toward Genna’s palace.
Taran’s vague references to cooking and cleaning for him had led me to believe there were domestic facilities underlying the visible buildings in the City, but I wasn’t prepared for the maze I found beneath Genna’s dormitories.
For as empty as the surface of the City seemed, the less-decorated rooms underground were packed and busy with saffron-garbed mortals hard at work.
Nobody challenged my right to walk through the rooms where priests labored for their goddess, silently taking a census of the number of mortals who might be residents in the City. Perhaps a few thousand if the other Stoneborn were supported by as many priests as Genna.
A tiny number, compared to those at risk in the mortal world if Death could force his way through the Gates, but vulnerable sooner.
“Excuse me,” I finally asked an elderly peace-priest with peppercorn hair in one of the kitchens. “Do you know where I might find the high priestess?”
He did not release the raw duck whose backbone he was laboriously extracting with a cleaver, but he spared me a kindly glance.
“You must be new. Several of us were high priest before we were called here,” he said, with a trace of wry irony.
“I see,” I murmured. This dignified man, whose face had the sweet appeal of all of Genna’s chosen, had once advised our kings and queens before crossing the sea to spend eternity doing kitchen chores.
I didn’t know what Genna’s priests were told before their ordination, but the service I’d anticipated prior to taking my vows was service to my people—and it hadn’t involved spatchcocking any poultry.
“Who are you, then? Oh—Taran’s girl,” the priest said, thinking back only a few weeks.
“Yes,” I agreed after a moment, because if I wasn’t going to lie, I couldn’t come up with a much better descriptor for what I was doing in the Summerlands. “Do you know where I’d find Teuta ter Genna?”
I was directed farther downstairs, to the laundry facilities. It was humid and warmer the deeper I went, the stone on the walls a little damp and smelling strongly of lavender and cleaning solvents. I’d seen a few immortals near the kitchens, coming in for food, but down below, it was all mortals.
Teuta was in a small room with piles of mending.
We’d met the day I started my surgical training—I was fourteen, years younger than typical, and very anxious about it.
Teuta had come to assist our temple with removing the diseased half of a teenage girl’s colon.
She’d healed the incisions so neatly there wasn’t even a scar, and the patient had woken up well enough to walk home with her parents.
Afterwards, I’d bowed to Teuta and smiled nervously as my accomplishments were recited by my mentor, and Teuta had promised to assist on my first surgery, after I was ordained. That hadn’t happened, since I didn’t take my vows and she fled with the other priests.
Instead, my first surgery had been a month after Ereban, when I tried to fix a shoddy battlefield amputation.
There had been no older maiden-priests to advise me, and I’d muttered apologies to Wesha and my patient for my incompetence while thirteen-year-old Hiwa ter Genna assisted, doing her best just to stop the bleeding.
After a terrible hour, Taran had strolled in and corrected Hiwa when she stumbled with her blessing, and that was how the rest of my life began.
Today, Teuta’s strong, clever fingers were engaged in repairing a line of feathered trim on a decorative cushion, and I felt another sullen burn in my stomach at the use the gods had put us to.
“Iona!” When she noticed me, she did look pleased, at least, though she didn’t stop working. “I wondered how you were adjusting. Well, I hope?”
That was a complicated question, and I’d let her draw her own conclusions.
“Teuta, would it be possible to get all of Genna’s priests together somewhere? Quickly? The ones who don’t know about…Ereban. And what’s happening now. I need to tell them.”
The former high priestess looked down at her mending, smile fading. “Even if I was certain that was a good idea, I’m working right now, and so is everyone else in the building.”
“When are you free?” I asked impatiently.
“Next week.”
“What about—dinnertime, then,” I said, confused. The priests didn’t seem ill-kept, just busy.
“We have meals in the dormitory upstairs,” Teuta said. “Genna bid us stick to a schedule.”
“This is important though. I’m sure she’d understand. Taran’s talking to her right now.”
“Have him get permission from Genna and come back,” Teuta said. When my face said that I still didn’t understand, Teuta sighed and put the pillow aside. “He hasn’t asked you for any vows, then? That’s good.”
I paused until I finally understood. Genna’s priests had been told to do this work, and their vows of obedience wouldn’t permit them to deviate from the schedule even for a good reason.
I hadn’t ever thought of myself in rebellion against the gods, plural, no matter what the mortal queen had said.
The other gods were known to us chiefly by what they’d left behind.
The Shipwright’s architectural marvels, the secrets of agriculture and weaving and music that we called gifts from our departed deities.
And their blessings, of course, the power we saw wielded by mortal priests who gave as much as they took for the gods in offerings.
I’d agreed with Taran that we ought to rebuild the temples at the end of the war, pray for the priests to return and finish training our lost generation of surviving acolytes.
It skittered across the surface of my mind though, as Teuta patiently took her mending back up, that perhaps the queen had been right, and we were better off without the gods.
Wesha had given me the blessings I used to win the war and save countless lives, but had she ever deserved the whole of mine in exchange?
It wasn’t a fair bargain, and I hadn’t even understood that I’d been about to make it.
“Is there somewhere down here that’s big enough to gather in?”
“The laundry?” Teuta said reluctantly when she saw that I wouldn’t abandon the idea. “I could try to convince people to eat their dinner in there.”