Chapter 27 #4
He must have had his reasons before. There had been good reasons to wait.
I was young and still wearing Wesha’s white, and he was just off centuries of serving as Genna’s pawn—but now I could barely close my teeth against the truth of oh, I wanted you so much, please give me everything, I want everything with you.
So I tossed my arms around his neck and kissed him hard enough to make him stagger back instead, uncoordinated and giddy. Peppered his chin and jaw with kisses, everything I could reach.
And he looked so happy for it.
Unlike all the times he’d pulled away to smile at me from a respectful distance, Taran held on tight to me now. He gripped loose handfuls of my hair and opened his smiling lips to taste mine. Whatever we’d started, it wasn’t over, even if I didn’t know what happened next.
I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with Taran’s body, or even the hard shape pressed against my stomach through our clothes, but I was resolved to learn it much better before this moment passed.
“I don’t care if I get sunburned,” I said breathlessly, because it was hard to speak with my heart squeezing out all the air in my chest.
Taran chuckled and, in lieu of agreement, just reached down to grip me under my thighs and hoist me into the air. I squealed, trying to lock my legs around his waist.
“That tent is very comfortable, I promise,” he swore.
He walked quickly despite my weight, his lips catching the corners of my mouth as I laughed and clung to his shoulders, and I was so adrift in joy that I almost didn’t see it before he ducked inside. The sky.
The smoke from the Mountain hadn’t stopped since we fled Smenos’s palace, and it was familiar by now. But this was different. A different color of smoke. From a different direction. I wasn’t so disoriented that I couldn’t reason out where it came from: the City.
“Taran, wait,” I gasped. “Something’s wrong.”
I unlocked my legs and tried to turn when my feet touched the ground, but Taran stopped me before I could step away from him, wrapping his arms tightly around my waist.
I looked over my shoulder, confused by his reaction, and then even more by the lack of surprise on his face. Instead, there was faint guilt.
“You knew?”
Of course he’d known: he’d heard something, or smelled the smoke on the wind, immortal senses warning him long before my mortal ones.
His eyelids fell as he looked away from my accusation, but his grip on me didn’t soften.
“The Mountain fell silent this morning. I can’t hear the Allmother at all—something’s happened, and Death is free. If he murdered his own mother, I do hope she had time to reconsider who was her favorite before she died.”
“Then, in the City—”
“Death, I suppose. Perhaps the Shipwright and the Huntress too. Stealing a march before the other Stoneborn can find out what they did.”
I took in a sharp breath, betrayal coursing through my gut in a sickening wave.
“That’s why you brought me here,” I said numbly. His arms had been a shelter, but now they caged me against him. “You weren’t going to do anything to help?”
“I did do something to help. So did you. We both warned them. We told everyone.”
“Weeks ago! And Genna and Skyfather are hours away—”
“Because they have been content to see our home slowly fall apart ever since you started your little insurrection. Since Wesha shut the Gates! Why would I save them from their own neglect?”
“Taran, please, there are hundreds of mortals left in the City, and Genna’s priests can’t even defend themselves.”
“You can barely defend yourself, and I am defending you,” Taran said with grim determination. I wasn’t swaying him at all. He’d planned this. He’d thought this through—probably from the moment we returned to the City.
“You’re just going to sit here while Death massacres them? Or worse, sacrifices them and becomes even more powerful?”
“We are going to stay here until the other Stoneborn who are responsible for this world go back and defend their own priests. Until Wesha confronts the monster she created!”
“You wouldn’t,” I insisted, tears welling as I jerked at the hands that held me in place. “You’re not going to keep me here.”
“When the fight is over, we’ll go find out what happened,” Taran said, slow and deliberate. “The Mountain knows I’d stand against Death himself to keep you safe, but you and I are living through this. Neither of us deserves to die for Wesha’s pride.”
“They can’t even go outside if Genna’s given them something else to do,” I whispered, thinking of Teuta in the basement workroom. Elantia, who ought to be home with her mother.
If I’d been a little prettier, a little sweeter, it could have been me. Genna’s priests didn’t train as long as Wesha’s. I was more like them than I was like the unknowable immortal who held me captive.
My knees sagged, and Taran must have thought I was admitting defeat, so he let me take a couple of wobbly steps away.
I covered my face with my hands, both to get myself under control and to muffle my next words. A song.
Taran was slow to act when he didn’t recognize the tune. He’d recognize Wesha’s gift of sleep, but that one took a little longer. This one was only six measures, key of E, three-quarter time.
Every muscle in Taran’s body locked up when I finished singing the blessing to test a patient’s nervous system.
Taran’s worked.
The effect lasted only half a second, but he didn’t expect it. He crashed to the ground, hard enough that I winced at the sound of his head cracking against the earth.
I got a few more paces toward the chariot, already singing a second blessing. The look of betrayal on his face would have been laughable if it hadn’t pierced me to the very core. He’d lured me here under false pretenses, did his best to distract me while innocents died, and he was surprised?
He’d just gotten to his hands and knees when the second blessing caught him. He gasped as the lower half of his body went numb and useless, unresponsive to his commands. It was the same blessing I’d sung before running down the beach on my broken foot, trying to save his life.
“Stop,” he called, panic making his voice tight. “Iona, don’t. You don’t have an army behind you this time, and Wesha’s power has to be failing. Just stop and think.”
“You didn’t give me a choice,” I snarled in the face of his rush of entreaties.
“I don’t know what I would have said if you’d ever given me one, but you didn’t.
” I meant more than today—I meant this entire place, this idea he had of the two of us in the Summerlands, endless years far from the land of my birth.
I didn’t know if I could have loved the person he was, instead of the one he’d pretended to be.
I couldn’t know. He’d robbed me of that chance.
“And now you’ll never know if I would have said yes,” I told him, voice shaking.
Taran had nobody but himself to blame, and I saw in his face that he knew that. He never made it back to his feet before I chanted every note of the Maiden’s blessing of sleep, and he collapsed in the sunlit field as I turned away.