Chapter 29
The way Taran moved with a blade in his hand had been beautiful in the courtyard.
When it was for show, he turned like a dancer.
Here, in the hot, dripping seconds after the dead turned on their handlers, the arcs of his blade were ugly and effective.
Short, rough motions that caught the Fallen at the joints of their arms and necks.
Faster movements than my eye could follow, but I could see the clench of his jaw from the distance of the altar, because he might have known he could do this, but he didn’t remember it, and he had to blindly trust that he knew how to block the grasping claws of Fallen whose lives depended on taking his first.
They might have succeeded, teeth and talons against one man with a sword, but for the assistance of the dusk-souls, who were inexpert with their spears but screaming with fury at their captors.
Several had thrown down their weapons and fled, but most stayed, and they threw themselves at the Fallen.
The Fallen had lost all control of the dead, and the dead were just as invulnerable to immortal struggle as mortal blows.
Every half-immortal abomination went down in a pincushion of thrusts, spears carving through red robes.
Gold and crimson blood splashed the bare stone of the Underworld, thick enough to run into puddles, long after the Fallen quit moving.
Every ounce of fight had fled my body. I clung to the altar I’d nearly died on for balance, breath whistling raggedly through my teeth as I tracked Taran’s blade.
The carnage didn’t end even after the last Fallen had dropped to the cavern floor; Taran strode among the bodies and methodically decapitated each one, his shoulders straining from the effort until he was splattered up to the waist with gore.
It took a long time. Multiple blows. The violence of it pulled my mind to the breaking point.
I didn’t react when Taran viciously kicked the head of the Fallen who had nearly slit my throat to the side, or even when he climbed the stairs to the altar to stand in front of me, face incandescent with rage and chest still heaving with exhaustion.
He looked like he’d spent the time it had taken him to run here composing a few really devastating observations about my folly, but when I didn’t move or lift my eyes above the level of his blood-spattered hands, his first question was almost gentle.
“Are you hurt?” he asked again.
If he’d yelled at me instead, I might have slipped deeper into shock, but his question was like permission for something I’d often longed to do and never indulged in.
I threw my arms around his waist and fell apart.
I gave up all self-control and sobbed into his neck, letting myself go completely limp against him.
Nobody was depending on me now. It didn’t matter if anyone saw through me to the bottomless fear inside.
I cried out all the tears and terror I’d stifled for years, clinging to the safety of Taran’s strength.
He was as surprised as I was by my reaction, but after one stiff second with my messy face pressed into his throat, he groaned and wrapped his arms around me until my bones creaked, anger warring with relief in his touch.
His bloody hands caught in my hair and pulled as they tightened, and the small pain did more to reassure me that I was still alive than any words would have.
He kissed my temple, the part of my hair, whatever he could reach, and I cried harder.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I panted through sobs, eyes scrunched shut against perceiving any reality that wasn’t Taran, impossibly here.
He pushed me back far enough to grip my shoulders in his hands, but I hung my head, unable to face him.
“You’re not sorry! Isn’t this what you wanted? If you’re sorry, why do you keep doing this to me?”
“They didn’t have anyone else,” I said, weakly defending myself.
“I don’t have anyone else! Was the idea of a life with me so terrifying that you couldn’t wait a single hour before throwing yours away?”
“I would have done the same thing for you—”
“I don’t want you to do the same thing for me,” he said, really yelling now. “Do more for me. Live for me. I would let the entire fucking City and everyone in it fall into the sea before I risked losing you. Do you understand?”
“I know,” I sobbed.
“Do you? What did you think would happen if you died down here? Did you think I’d take over your war against Death? Did you think I’d stop the other Stoneborn from subduing the entire mortal world? I wouldn’t. I don’t care if anyone survives, if you don’t.”
I tried to rub thick tears off my face enough to see him, but the entire world was distorted. “You don’t mean that,” I said, voice shaking.
Taran leaned back in, fingers tense on my arms.
“Act like I do,” he said, precise words as sharp as a vow and eyes as hard as emeralds.
When I reeled back from that, he took some pity on me and kissed my wet cheeks again before looking over my body for missed injuries.
Once satisfied that I was only wounded in spirit, he turned to the huddle of chained, weeping priests and the souls of the dead, who were beginning to drift away into the Underworld.
The grimace on his face said that he blamed them for getting caught only a little less than he blamed the Fallen for catching them.
“What did you do?” I asked, thinking of the flash of light that cut through Death’s control over the dead.
Taran’s jaw tensed, and he answered reluctantly.
“Napeth’s power over them is like a lock. I opened it.”
“Did you know you could do that?”
He shrugged like that was unimportant, uncomfortable with the question.
I would have pressed more, but one of the dusk-souls broke away from the cluster of glowing figures and slowly approached us.
It was the same one who had driven her spear into the first Fallen, but it still took a long moment of looking through the green flame to recognize a short, slender girl with her dark hair cut into a sleek cap.
“I wondered if I might see you here,” said Hiwa, oddly serene. “Though I didn’t think it would be like this.”
“Maiden’s mercy,” I whispered in horror. I reached out a tentative hand, but my fingers were singed when I tried to touch her. This day had been an avalanche of heartbreaks, but this one threatened to collapse the rest of my soul.
Taran took a step to put his body between us, crowding me back.
“Who’s this?”
“Don’t you know me?” Hiwa asked in her soft voice. “It’s me. I’m still me.” She appeared to concentrate, and the green blur of her form momentarily solidified into that of an acolyte in Genna’s saffron.
“It’s our friend. Hiwa ter Genna,” I said, voice cracking into fresh tears. I was unsteady on my feet, and Taran put an arm around my waist to pull me protectively against his side even as his face creased in dismay at this dead stranger who knew him.
Hiwa didn’t seem to notice his distance or my grief. “And you’re alive again! Oh, Taran, I’m so glad.”
“I’m sorry,” Taran said after a moment, at a loss for words. “We were in the rebellion together?”
“Of course,” Hiwa said, brown eyes beaming up at him through a haze of flame. “I had such a crush on you. I think you knew. You were always very patient with me.”
I hadn’t known, but Taran had always been much more sensitive to that sort of thing than me. He made a soft noise of concern, because he couldn’t remember now.
Hiwa flicked her eyes to me, almost playful. “I’m glad I never did anything silly about it, but it was terribly unfair that he didn’t fall in love with me. I saw him first, after all.”
“You did,” I agreed softly.
“Iona was going to ask me to officiate at the wedding, which would have been a wonderfully tragic and romantic moment for the two of us,” Hiwa confided in Taran, her voice still soft and sweet.
“I was already working on my speech when you died. It would have made you cry. I’m sorry I won’t be there now. ”
“Hiwa, how—” I tried to turn her to a different subject, but Taran held up one hand to quiet me, a line appearing between his eyebrows.
“I would have cried?” Taran asked.
“Yes,” Hiwa said, rocking back on her heels.
“Because you thought I was in love with the bride,” he guessed with half-lidded eyes.
Hiwa looked at me in muted confusion, then at Taran. “I knew before Iona did. Every morning when you woke up you’d look around for her, and you didn’t smile until you found her.”
Taran made a derisive noise in his throat, releasing me to stalk a few feet away as though embarrassed.
I took his distance as a reprieve and reached for Hiwa’s hand, even though it felt like clutching a pot straight from the oven.
This might be my last chance to see her, and the fire didn’t really burn here in the Underworld.
“What happened to you?”
I’d thought she’d be safe when I stole the boat to follow the dawn. She still had some family, and she should have returned to her hometown on the western coast when I left.
She smiled brightly. “I heard about a bad outbreak of the spotted sickness at Lubridium two weeks ago and went back to help.”
That simple sentence told me so much. The spotted sickness usually struck during winter, when people were in close quarters, not spring, when farmers were out in their fields. When the spring rains didn’t come, people must have gone to the new capital to beg for help.
“Why did you go?” I asked through the ache in my throat. Only Wesha’s blessings could cleanse an infection. The most Hiwa would have been able to do was lend a little strength during a patient’s recovery.
“I thought it was what you would have done,” Hiwa said with a little half shrug, smile not dimming. “I did cure a couple of cases of pneumonia. Remember that I followed a very talented priestess of Wesha for several years? I learned a few things.”
Taran returned to my side, now listening intently.