Chapter 25
Three weeks later, the Mountain still belched smoke and flame into the sky. Death’s palaces in the City were quiet and apparently empty, but Taran would not let me go in to check.
Or to make them empty, if they weren’t.
“Did I really let you just murder people?” he asked, though the answer should have been obvious by now.
“Oh, Taran, some of our very best times together were killing death-priests,” I said, concealed below the hedge that marked the border between Wesha’s lawn and Death’s.
“Then explain why your boundless sympathy for mortals who made poor choices in their vows runs out with Death’s people,” Taran whispered with a cautioning grip on the back of my neck, like he expected me to make a berserker run across the lawn to the palace where I’d first landed in the Summerlands.
I turned my head to smile at him. I’d treasured Taran’s gentleness, the way it tempered my anger, even if I didn’t always agree. “You do care.”
“No, I just think this will be a more pleasant place to live if nobody’s priests are indiscriminately slaughtered.”
Did he still think, after what we’d seen, that there was any living with Death? There hadn’t been peace in three hundred years; Death’s campaign to destroy the world had just been slower and farther away from the Summerlands before now.
“Death’s Fallen, then. There were more in the temple besides the two you buried alive.” They would be even more of a threat than death-priests once Death was released by the Mountain. Even more adept with their father’s blessings than death-priests, and harder to kill.
“As a former priestess of Wesha, you might be expected to believe that the children of the Stoneborn shouldn’t suffer for the sins of their parents. Let’s not murder any immortals just for the misfortune of having Death as a father.”
I slapped the dirt, frustrated. “Well, what are you going to let me do? You know what he plans to do as soon as he gets free.”
“I let you do quite a bit, darling,” Taran said smoothly.
It irked me because it was true, but it wasn’t enough. I was trying to build a firebreak by myself, with one garden trowel.
Once Smenos’s people began to stagger into the City, half-broken in mind and body, Genna’s priests had been happy to care for them. There were healers who’d gone decades without patients, and when I told them to set up field hospitals, they did what I asked.
When I requested things—maps to plan an evacuation, buckets and sand to fight the fires, food, bandages—they were brought to where I wanted them put, with at most a questioning glance toward Taran, who lurked a step behind me as I limped through the City.
Either they were familiar with him from his time as the Peace-Queen’s envoy and thought this was all Genna’s will, or they were so used to obedience that they’d follow anyone’s orders.
What nobody would do was plan with me for a war that would soon return.
The Summerlands were eternal and inflexible.
If I dragged a wheelbarrow through a lawn, the rut was gone by the next morning.
If I cut back branches hanging too close to flammable roofs, the trees were just as verdant within a few days.
The food didn’t rot, the dishes were never dirty, and the City rejected barricades the way it did potholes and broken floor tiles.
It did something to the people who lived here too. Gave mortals immortal life, but made them a part of the fixed idea of the place—the Allmother’s plan, I supposed. No one could imagine that anything could change; no one tried to change anything.
A doe-eyed ghost in Genna’s golden vestments convinced me that it was no use pressing Genna’s priests to act.
“Elantia?” I gasped when she shyly presented herself one evening at the laundry.
I’d last seen the queen’s daughter bent backwards over Death’s altar, that terrible day at Ereban. Her body burnt like an offering, then vanished.
“Teuta said you were here,” she said, head bent and hands clasped. “I had to come see for myself.”
She had been four years younger than me when she died, but she looked even younger now, her heart-shaped face soft and childish.
I’d only known her a little: a vocate in Wesha’s temple not because of her abilities or inclinations but because the daughters of the nobility got a reputation for chastity by sheer proximity to maiden-priests.
“How are you alive?” I asked, grabbing her by the shoulders to feel her solidity.
The girl gave me a forced smile. “I don’t really know. I remember being called to the front of the temple at midsummer, the fire—not much else, really.”
“Is anyone else—the others who died at Ereban, Wesha’s priests? Are they here too?” My heart began to pound.
Elantia gently shook her head. “No, just me. I didn’t even know what happened until the other priests came from over the sea. I just woke up here, in Death’s temple.”
Hope died hard for being only a few moments old. Of course not. She had been sacrificed, like Wesha sacrificed me, while all the others at Ereban had simply died. I’d overseen their funerals, sent their bodies out to sea.
But my mind still raced at the possibilities.
“Nobody knows what happened to you. I mean, they all know what happened at Ereban. But nobody came back—oh, Maiden. We have to get word to your mother somehow. We need to get you home.”
She was the heir to the throne and the reason the queen’s anger at the gods had never been quenched. If she came back…
Elantia fitfully smoothed her dress, face still lowered. “I’m a priestess of Genna now.”
I made a noise of startled dismay. A royal daughter might take Skyfather’s vows, or even Death’s, but not the Peace-Queen’s. Genna’s priests could marry, but mostly wed other peace-priests—the demands of Genna’s service left little of a life to spare for other causes.
“Nobody knew what to do with me. A mortal sacrifice. It hadn’t happened in hundreds of years. Some death-priests said I ought to belong to them, like I was a goat someone had brought as an offering.” Her mouth twisted. “Genna said I could choose whose vows I’d take, but I had to take someone’s.”
Genna’s kindness looked a lot like greed to me. My hands curled into fists.
“You know that your mother…that the queen—” It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her how the queen had pulled down all the temple walls and destroyed the sacrificial altars to every god in vengeance for her slaughtered child.
It was becoming harder and harder for me to say she’d been wrong to do it.
The princess squirmed. “Is my mother well?”
“Yes,” I said, trying to be gentle. “Though she still grieves for you. I last saw her a few weeks before I came here. She’s rebuilding the port at Lubridium as the new capital.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Elantia whispered. She gave me another forced smile. “I’d be happy to help with whatever you’re doing here, even though I’m not a very good singer. I never could get any of Wesha’s blessings, and I’m not much better with Genna’s.”
I put my hands on my cheeks. It shouldn’t be up to this girl to defend the City from Death. Where was Skyfather with a quiver full of lightning bolts? Where was Lixnea in her silver chariot?
Genna couldn’t buy an end to every war with one of her children.
“If anything happens, you just run. In the opposite direction of any danger,” I told Elantia.
She nodded weakly, and I directed her to one of the groups that was packing supplies into smaller bundles.
Taran had decided that I could be trusted to go to Genna’s laundry on my own, or more likely decided that Genna’s priests could be trusted not to report my attempts to foment insurrection, so I had to stomp back across the City to find him.
He was out on the lawn in front of Wesha’s palace, stripped to the waist and skin faintly glistening in the fading light of sunset, practicing with a jeweled dagger.
He’d spent hours a day at this since our return, the rest of them practicing the blessings of the other Stoneborn as fast as I could teach them.
Taran was getting ready for war, at least. He moved with more grace, more power than any mortal could, and there was joy in the lines of his body as he discovered it again.
Two steps to the side, turning faster than my eye could track to meet one imaginary blow, ducking and spinning again to catch a second.
His beauty still caught me by surprise sometimes, even after years of it, still took the breath from my lungs and made me freeze to capture the image in my mind.
There was a solid chance he was showing off, but I was a performer too, and I did like a show.
When he stopped the exercise and stuck the dagger in the earth, I clapped like I would for a brilliant aria. He swaggered over with a self-assured grin.
“I know that face. You want something,” he said, rubbing his sweaty forehead against my cheek to make me squeak and laugh as I pushed him away.
“I do,” I admitted, keeping him at arm’s length with a palm on his chest…and fighting the urge to sweep that hand down his stomach and explore how the rest of it felt against my palm.
“Let me guess. You want to go sit with me on the northern terrace, where the first stars of the evening will appear over the tops of the cypress trees at dusk,” he said in a grandiose voice.
I tipped my head back and smiled at his good mood.
“Now that you mention it, sure, yes.”
“And you want to play something beautiful on the kithara for me, because it’s been days since I heard you sing and I’ve already stolen dinner for us.”
“That too,” I agreed.
“But that’s not all. You want to pull back your lovely hair with a new rope of pearls to match your blue linen gown, because Marit will never miss them,” he said, casting a disparaging eye over the nondescript wool smock I had on.
“No sign of Marit, then?” I asked, imagining that was the real reason Taran had gone looting in the sea god’s vacant palace.