Chapter 24
“You couldn’t wait until after dinner before engaging in some light sedition?
” Taran asked once the wet evening air was between us and Genna’s priests.
He didn’t sound too angry at me, so rather than answer directly—if you think that was light sedition, wait until I really get going—I ignored the second part of the sentence and asked, more hopefully, “There’s dinner? ”
He hadn’t taken his arm off my shoulders, though it was as much companionable as punitive as he steered us back toward Wesha’s old quarters.
“Yes, I have acquired our dinner, at great risk to myself, because my priestess doesn’t cook.”
It was hard to parse his mood. A little punch-drunk, maybe, like I’d been the night before. He was often the least serious when he felt most under threat.
“Both of us could cook, actually, and I’d be happy to remind you how. So that you won’t have to steal every dinner.”
“Where’s the fun in that? Skyfather’s priests know how to cook but not how to secure their kitchens, and that’s good enough for me. Besides, of all your hidden talents, I don’t think cooking is the most relevant one, hm? Didn’t I ask you once which blessings you knew?”
“And I did offer to set you on fire,” I replied, realizing that I felt comfortable strolling toward Taran’s rooms with his arm around me. “You used to know more than I did. Certainly Death’s first blessing.”
“Not anymore. Though I’m certain I was more circumspect about calling other gods’ blessings than you just were.”
“You taught me that one. It wasn’t like we had a death-priest handy.”
His stride barely slowed. “But you had at least one acolyte of Genna, to teach you her blessing of healing? I suppose your betrothed wasn’t as devoted to nonviolence as those priests back there were.”
“Not very, no,” I said with a snort. “Did you know that if you sing a rest instead of a triplet in every fourth measure of the blessing that repairs a leaky mitral valve, you’ll stop the heart instead of healing it?”
“I still think you’d have more luck with Skyfather’s priests. The ones who know how to call lightning.”
I absently rubbed my hands together. “Lightning takes at least five minutes of chanting, and the clouds have to be there already or it takes even longer. Genna’s blessings are faster, but I’d forgotten the vow of nonviolence. I’ll have to think about that.”
Taran quietly laughed.
“What?” I asked.
“You. Thinking about your next war.” It was dark, but his face was rueful and almost tender, his eyes crinkling at the corners when he looked at me.
“Aren’t you thinking about it?” Was not thinking about it an option?
“I told Genna and Diopater what happened. Most of what happened. I tried to keep you out of it, though one of the priests back there will probably inform on you forthwith.”
I didn’t stop walking.
“And?” I asked. I didn’t have high expectations, but I did hope they’d look out for their own priests, if nothing else. They had to remember that they hadn’t defeated Death in the Great War, only bought the Summerlands a ceasefire with Wesha’s hand in marriage.
Taran stroked his neck with his palm. “And nothing. I don’t think they believed me.”
I closed my eyes and kept walking, borrowing a little of his gallows humor for a moment that needed it.
“Why? Are you considered an untrustworthy person?” I asked sweetly.
“By the Allmother, you’re such a brat. No wonder Wesha foisted you off on me,” Taran said in his most loving voice, squeezing my shoulders until I squeaked.
“No, we didn’t actually see Napeth sacrifice any immortals on that altar.
If he did, the Allmother will handle it herself.
And I could just be making up wild stories to cover for Wesha or Marit’s deranged attacks on the more respectable Stoneborn, which are things I have done before.
I wouldn’t take a vow that I was telling the truth. ”
“No?” I said, struggling a little to keep up the light tone of the conversation with the accusations that had been flung at Taran.
“As you are the primary beneficiary of my ability to lie to Skyfather, my darling little rebel, let’s not second-guess that one,” he said.
“So they’re not going to do anything?” I asked, discovering that I was still able to be disappointed by my gods after everything.
“Well, Skyfather reargued his plan to invade the mortal world and demand sufficient sacrifices to restore order in the Summerlands, which he thought might appease Death as well. Genna wants to wait and confer with the Allmother, once she’s calmed down and let loose the children she just dragged into the Mountain. Perhaps one more party will do it.”
“You told them one of the Stoneborn was murdered, and a second one wants to launch a war to conquer the world, and there’s not a single thing they’ll change about what they’ve been doing?” I repeated, appalled.
“I suppose I could probably convince Diopater’s daughters, the Winds, to go to the Mountain and investigate. They were alarmed at my story, and they despise me a bit less than everyone else in his court,” Taran said.
There was something in the way he said convince that made me look at him sharply.
“Convince them how?” I asked.
Taran pursed his lips and looked away as though I’d asked an indelicate question.
I elbowed him in the stomach.
“How about you come up with a strategy where you keep your clothes on this time,” I said, fighting a burst of jealousy.
“I’d be happy to, if you come up with a strategy where you don’t set anything on fire,” he retorted, grabbing my arm and wrapping his securely around it.
“No deal,” I said. We walked on. The night was beautiful and silent and empty, but all this empty loveliness was fragile, ready to crack.
I didn’t know whether it was true that the Allmother had built the Summerlands out of mortal dreams, but those mortals had limited foresight. This was all too flammable.
“And you?”
“What about me?”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
Taran spared me a curious look. “Well, I bowed and headed out through Skyfather’s kitchens, as I mentioned, to get our dinner. And when I realized that my single, solitary priestess had wandered off to preach insurrection, I went to collect her…what do you want me to do next?”
“We need to get ready. Evacuate all the people who can’t fight across the Sea of Dreams, organize the ones who can to fight back.
If there are any of his Fallen or death-priests still in the City, we need to eliminate them so that Death doesn’t have the power to sacrifice even one more person on his altar,” I said, not abandoning my joking tone, even though it wasn’t a joke.
Taran halted, which forced me to stop too. Half my mind had already moved to what he’d brought for dinner. He looked down with a long-suffering expression, even though he wouldn’t remember suffering more than a few weeks of my direct approach to difficult questions.
“Is that all?” he asked faintly.
“I have some more concrete ideas, but let’s eat before we do anything else,” I said, craning my neck toward Wesha’s former palace.
“I mean…Iona. My darling. That is not a fair request.”
My heart squeezed at the real concern behind his tight smile. I’d seen that look before, and I’d always thought it was because he loved me and was afraid where the war would take us.
“I didn’t think it had to be fair. You asked what I wanted you to do.”
He laughed, another pained noise. “Mortals are fickle. Can’t you want something else? Ask me again to dump you at Wesha’s doorstep. Better yet, ask me for something I can give you. Jewelry? The head of someone who’s offended you?”
“You can do this. We did it before,” I pointed out.
“Which is something I am finding…difficult to believe.”
I gestured at myself in the dark. “Why is it hard for you to believe?”
“You are a single mortal girl, and I’m the youngest of the Stoneborn, one with the unknown and unheralded ability to open locks.”
“We also had a couple dozen teenage acolytes and some of the queen’s guard.” What we didn’t have, that I really missed, was Taran’s three hundred-odd years of painful survival in this place and the quiet empathy it had sparked in him for other people who had suffered.
“And your betrothed, who caused heart attacks instead of healing them.”
“I can do that, if it’s necessary,” I reassured him, trying to guide the conversation away from any pointed questions about the third person between us, who didn’t exist.
“I’m working on one right now,” Taran muttered. “What I’m trying to ask is why we, of all people, are the ones who ought to deal with what I’ll admit is the rather daunting problem that Death presents. Genna did eventually end the Great War, after all.”
I didn’t like Genna’s solution. I didn’t like any of the gods’ plans, the ones that always asked for someone else to make the sacrifices.
“I never thought I was the best person to lead the mortal rebellion.” I limped faster toward Wesha’s palace.
My stomach was making audible noises and felt ready to bite out the knobs of my spine if I didn’t feed it soon.
“I was only eighteen. All I’d ever wanted was to be a priestess of Wesha—to sing at children’s ceremonies and treat patients. I didn’t want to be in charge.”
“Why were you, then?”
“I didn’t think that nobody else could lead the fight against Death.
I thought that nobody else would if I didn’t,” I said, voicing a thought that I’d wrestled with many times, whenever I’d felt scared and stuck.
It wasn’t like I was totally selfless. I’d wondered more than once what would happen if Taran and I just…
left. Fled abroad, like most of the nobles.
But I had also thought that Death might not stop at the border when there was nothing left to burn.