Chapter 25 #2
“Not yet. I suppose the Allmother’s busy,” Taran said, glancing at the smoking Mountain with a little chill. He shook himself. “What did you really want, or should I keep guessing?”
I almost didn’t want to ask him now. I wanted to have that dinner with him and flirt and pretend that nothing would change here, except perhaps what he felt about me.
“Would you take someone—someone who wasn’t me—to the Painted Tower?” I asked instead of doing what I wanted.
Taran took a step back, letting my hand slide off his chest. He paused, not because he was considering it, but just to indicate politeness.
“No,” he said, without asking who.
I firmed my jaw. I hadn’t really expected otherwise, but it had been worth checking. I changed my request.
“Then I want to talk to Genna.”
“Also no, but out of morbid curiosity, why?”
“I need to get as many of Genna’s priests away from here as possible before Death returns. I can’t make them take the threat seriously.”
Taran scoffed. “I don’t even steal food from the Peace-Queen, and you want me to steal her priests?”
“She doesn’t need all those priests. They only came when the war started—she can send them home.”
“Somehow I managed without you around for all these years, but perhaps Genna’s grown attached to her priests too.”
“Taran!” I kept trying, even though he was impossible when he was in a mood like this. “Genna has the heir to the mortal throne serving her.”
He looked unimpressed. “You’ll recall that until recently, she had me serving her. It’s survivable.”
“But Genna forced her to take vows after she was sacrificed. You, of all people, ought to sympathize.”
“What does my sympathy do for her?” Taran asked stiffly.
“Let me ask Genna to let her go. If Genna wants mortal worship restored, returning the queen’s daughter would go a long way toward convincing the queen to lift the ban.”
More importantly, it would get more priests out of harm’s way, once Death and his allies were free again. They were defenseless here.
“And how am I supposed to explain why you know that?” Taran said, rolling his eyes.
I nearly said, you figure that out, you’re good at lying, but he really hadn’t done much of that recently, so I sighed and waited. I just had to push him. I had to remind him. He wasn’t the person Genna had tried to make him into.
“You think you can gaze up at me with big brown eyes and I’ll do whatever you want again?” he asked scornfully. “My memory is short but it isn’t that short.”
“No,” I said. “I think you’ll do it because you’re a good man, and you do care what happens to people, and you always did.”
The noise he made wasn’t an agreement, but he didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand either. It wasn’t until he’d stalked away, all ideas of dinner and a beautiful evening put to the side, that I realized with a little glow of excitement he hadn’t tried to ask for something in exchange for any of it.
I nearly raised the question of Elantia and the other peace-priests again, because Taran didn’t say anything for days, but one evening he handed me a pile of white fabric and told me to dress myself like a maiden-priest. We were both expected at Genna’s court.
“I know that as my priestess, you think of nothing but how to best secure my comfort,” he said, worry making him flippant.
“So as you consider what you want to say to Genna, please remember that I would find it very unpleasant to watch her liquify your bones because you shared your positive opinion of the mortal rebellion.”
Even though I’d asked him to set up the audience, I took a cue from his edginess and stiffened in instant apprehension about speaking with the Peace-Queen.
“What have you told her about me?” I asked as I put on the wool dress and bleached linen apron for the first time in months. It felt strange to dress as a maiden-priest now; I’d never felt the Maiden’s presence in my life less.
“Don’t worry about that. If she asks you a question, don’t lie to her.
I told her you served Wesha until Death destroyed your temple, and then you came here for me.
She has no reason to object to that. But also remember that Genna will liquefy my favorite body parts if she thinks I was complicit in any of your more unfortunate life choices,” he called from the other room.
Wonderful. Cowbirds were better parents. They at least didn’t attack their own young.
“So what do you want me to say?” I asked, coiling my hair up tightly, the way I had every day that I’d worn these clothes. I barely recognized myself in the mirror as the acolyte who’d walked into the temple at Ereban years ago.
“I don’t want you to say anything! But if you could support the idea that I have been diligently attempting to keep both the mortal world and this one from tumbling into chaos”—with this he came into my room, scowled at my bound hair, and began pulling the pins out—“perhaps we might both make it home tonight in one piece?”
“So she knows…” My voice trailed off as his hands brushed out the waves of my hair, his heat palpable against my back.
We were framed in the mirror, me in the plain white dress, him behind me with a jeweled pin on his horrible golden cloak.
One of us was still in disguise, but which one had changed?
The maiden-priest and the Peace-Queen’s son. He looked more the part than I did.
“What?” he asked when he saw me watching his reflection in the mirror.
I looked away. “Just thinking that you must have stolen some poor farmer’s clothes and then rolled in the dirt before I met you.”
“Was I really convincing as a mortal?”
“Well, you convinced me.”
“Did I have an exciting backstory?” His fingers rested on my hair as he appeared interested in the idea for the first time. I was reluctant to say more, but I couldn’t think of a good reason to refuse.
“No, you didn’t ever say where you’d come from.”
“You must have thought something.”
I sighed, wishing I hadn’t brought it up at all. “You knew all the blessings of Genna, but you were too old not to be ordained. I thought you might have left her temple because you wanted a home and family.”
This answer seemed to satisfy him, and he got up to return with the silver combs he’d attempted to give me during my first week here.
He toyed with my hair under the guise of putting the combs in, and I closed my eyes at the pleasure of his fingertips on my scalp. Nobody but Taran had ever cared if I looked nice, so long as I was clean and neat, and I’d missed his knuckles stroking along the side of my neck.
Look at this scarf I got you, nightingale.
You found it! The only color in the whole world that goes with my hair.
Do you want a dress to match for our wedding?
“Did you ever want that, or was it strictly ‘justice or death’ from the start?” Taran jarred me from the memory, raising a half-mocking fist in salute.
“Justice or death?”
“Just wondering if you always planned to go out in a blaze of glory to escape your fate. You can’t possibly have wanted to spend your life diagnosing colic in farmers’ screaming infants in the event you lived through the rebellion. I should have offered you a third option.”
“No, you’ve got it wrong,” I heatedly responded, still startled. “I was going to be married. I was going to have my own home. I was—”
“With a plum tree, yes, I do remember. But that was what someone else promised you, not your idea.”
“Doesn’t mean I didn’t want it,” I said, squirming when he held me in place with his hands on my shoulders. His voice had been gentle, but his expression was more dangerous than usual.
I had wanted it; it had been the beautiful dream that sustained me through the worst nights of the campaign. I would lie awake, watching the embers of the campfire dwindle, and think about what I’d plant in our garden and what color I’d paint our front door.
“Do you still though? You’d like to go home with your beloved, have some simple mortal life together?”
There wasn’t an easy answer to that.
“I don’t—it doesn’t matter. Death is going to get free at some point, and that’s more important than what I want.”
Taran’s raised eyebrow said he didn’t believe me.
“It seems to me that the priests of your temple died, your lover died, I died, and then you promptly threw yourself into the sea in the last of a series of very thinly considered ventures with the likely side effect of a heroic death. I can’t imagine that little mortal life was ever big enough for you to want to live for. ”
I pressed my lips together in protest. He was wrong. He didn’t know better—and couldn’t remember. It only sounded horrible to him because he couldn’t remember enough of the mortal world to imagine it.
Maybe Genna’s immortal son was never going to learn stonemasonry and build me a little house by a creek and help me fill it with fat babies.
He was, if I could manage it by sheer force of will, going to end the war like he promised.
He was going to realize that he was, in his real soul, unselfish and loving.
My dreams were not getting any smaller, at least.
Taran ran his hands lightly down my arms, finally linking them loosely around my body when I shivered at the sensation. He propped his chin on top of my head and considered our embrace in the mirror.
“That’s alright, darling. That’s what you have me for. Wanting to live.” He examined my appearance one more time. The concealing white fabric, the tumbling hair. The defiant expression.
“You should take this off,” he said, and I didn’t realize he had a finger and thumb on my ring until he was already sliding it from my hand.
I cried out and tried to put a protective hand over it, but it was too late. He already had the ring in his palm, examining it with the critical eye of a habitual thief.
“That’s mine,” I said loudly, trying to snatch it back.
“I’ll give it back,” he said in a soothing voice. “I don’t want Genna getting sidetracked and wondering who the little priestess I brought here from the mortal world thinks she’s going to marry.”
This explanation didn’t calm me down, barely made sense.
“I’ll wear gloves,” I said, reaching for it again. I’d never taken the ring off from the moment he’d put it on, and my heart was already twisting at its absence.
“In the summer?”
I made another distressed noise and turned around.
“I’ll wear it on a different finger.”
Taran was beginning to look annoyed. “It’s not even very nice. The finish is uneven. Your betrothed should have been embarrassed to propose with that ring.”
“Our friend Drutalos ab Smenos made that ring,” I said, nearly stomping my good foot when Taran held it out of my reach.
“Hiwa gave him her earrings, and Dousonna ter Diopater gave him the silver pin from her cloak. Drutalos stayed up all night working on it so that we could take our vows the very next day.”
This failed to impress. “And where was I, as everyone else covered for your penniless suitor?”
I paused, realizing that I was close to dangerous territory.
“You were there,” I said, cheeks heating. I stopped grabbing for the ring in his hand.
The side of Taran’s mouth quirked in dark humor. “But I didn’t contribute anything? I must have looked incredibly petty. Did I not approve?”
I was not immune to the irony of Taran imagining that he’d been jealous, but bursting into nervous laughter was not going to get me out of his line of questions.
Truthful words wouldn’t help either.
You seemed really happy about it, in fact.
Taran had been proud and beaming for our vows, then uncharacteristically wine-drunk after a few dozen toasts, enough to let his hands roam in a way that younger me had found very thrilling. I’d spun his ring on my finger and smiled until my cheeks hurt.
Taran took my silence as agreement.
“So I didn’t approve,” he decided with some satisfaction. “I’m sure I didn’t think he was good enough for you.”
“And you should have found me someone better?” I curled my lower lip over my teeth to hide a smirk, because if I didn’t get to enjoy this small joke at his expense, I really didn’t have enough to live for.
Taran hummed thoughtfully, then tucked my ring into his belt pouch.
“I should have gotten you a nicer ring, at least,” he said, holding out his arm to escort me from the room.