Chapter 30 #2
He was impossibly beautiful and terrifyingly inhuman in it. I understood why someone might worship him, and I felt like a villain for wishing nobody would. I wanted to strip the armor off him and drag him out of here with me. Knock him out and pray that when he woke up, he forgot the past year too.
“Was there more fighting?” I asked through a dry mouth.
Taran glanced down at his spotless breastplate. “No, just thought I ought to look the part today.”
“What part?”
He smiled at me. Only his lowered eyelashes suggested any fatigue—the rest of his face was taut and strong. “If we’re to re-form the armies of Heaven, the Stoneborn agreed we’d need a general. Of course it took them two weeks to agree on who.”
My stomach lurched. “You?”
Taran nodded and raked a hand through his hair with the segmented gauntlet still on, leaving furrows in the dark waves. “Today they gave me their vows. On the battlefield, I can command any priest in the Summerlands. Speak with their patron’s authority.”
No wonder I could taste it on my tongue, the charge in the room. He held out his arm as though observing the way the light clung to his skin now.
He used to pick the onions out of his food. He once brought me a snowflake in a tin cup.
Look, nightingale, it’s snowing.
When he spotted my expression, his smile faltered. “I thought you’d be pleased.”
I bought myself time to respond by standing and putting his kithara away.
“What are you going to do with an army?” I asked cautiously.
“Whatever we did last time. I assumed you’ll remind me—I should have brought you along, but I thought I wouldn’t be able to pry you away from Genna’s people before they were all healed.”
“We didn’t have an army. The queen had the army. We had a few dozen half-trained acolytes who hadn’t been ordained yet.”
That made him laugh. “Then I like our odds even better this time, darling, if we don’t have to fight Death with a bunch of children.”
He tracked my plummeting mood, began pulling off bits of his armor with a puzzled frown. The gauntlets, the bracers. I moved to help him with the buckles on his breastplate.
“I thought you’d want me to take control of the defense,” he said in a quieter voice.
“Death attacked the City itself, which he didn’t even do in the Great War.
It won’t end now until he’s sworn to peace again or Wesha takes him back.
And of the two of them, believe it or not, he’s the one who cares more about the interests of the other Stoneborn. ”
“No, I know,” I said, avoiding his gaze until I could pull the breastplate off him. “I just don’t like the idea of you leading an army of priests into battle.”
“I’m not very keen on it either, but who else would you like to do it? Diopater and Marit both volunteered.”
I cringed at the disaster either of those would be for the mortals still living here. Or worse, the mortals across the sea.
“Marit said he was going across the ocean,” I tentatively said.
“You saw Marit? I told you not to go near him unless I was there.”
“It was in the street, and he had a couple of his priests with him. He said he was planning to return to the mortal world, and the other Stoneborn, too.”
“Not immediately,” Taran said with a frown. “But Death’s power grows with every priest he can kidnap and sacrifice, and ours diminishes. Can’t you feel the earthquakes?”
“So you’ll get more worshippers from the mortal world? Taran, if an army of priests and immortals arrives on the shore, it’ll be a bloodbath.”
“If an army arrives on the mortal shores, I’ll be leading it. You really think I’d butcher the peasants just because they won’t swear vows?”
“I think you’d defend yourself if you were attacked,” I said, hands twisting against each other.
Taran exhaled, his frustration palpable. “And of course you’d be sympathetic to mortals who attacked the gods whose blessings they need to survive without any provocation.”
“Someone should go warn people about Death and the other gods returning soon. Contact the other acolytes and the loyalist nobles. Tell the queen that we need some kind of accord with the Stoneborn or we’ll all starve or burn.”
He laughed again, but this time there was no mirth in it. He pulled off the last piece of the gold-chased armor and kicked it into the corner.
“And let me guess who you have in mind for this assignment. No. You’re not going. I can’t believe you’re even going to ask me.”
“You don’t have to go to Wesha, and neither do I. You can break my vows. The same way you broke the priests’ vows,” I said.
“I could, except that I don’t want to. I imagine it was a daily challenge, keeping you alive during your last war, and you wouldn’t last the week if I let you go now.
Your body’ll decorate a gibbet right next to your little friend, and the next time I see you, you’ll be pointing a glowing spear in my face. ”
I felt as though I were standing in a deep hole, looking up at a surface that was so far away that it would be easier to dig through the center of the Earth to escape.
I couldn’t stay here and watch Taran become something I didn’t recognize in a war he didn’t want to fight, and my soul shuddered at the idea of how many people would die because I’d helped turn them against the gods when the Stoneborn returned to demand their due.
“Then come with me.” I put my hands on Taran’s arms, bared by his sleeveless tunic. His skin was as smooth as marble but warm like brass in sunlight. “We’ll both go. We’ll do it together again.”
He looked at my hands and didn’t move. “And what kind of welcome do you think we’d receive upon our return, after abandoning the Summerlands?”
I swallowed hard. “We could stay.”
“So you can age for a few decades, then die of some pointless mortal ailment?”
“I’ve always been mortal. It’s not frightening to me,” I reminded him.
“Well, it’s frightening to me!” Taran said, stripping off his tunic and turning toward the baths.
I glared at his stupidly muscled back.
“I’m only twenty-two. I’ve got a little time before gray hair and wrinkles set in.”
Taran spun around and yanked me against his body. He was bright and close, warm and compelling.
“I am trying to give you all of it,” he said, eyes earnest. “All the time I have, all the power I have. I’d share it all with you.”
I knew he meant it—and maybe he had always meant to give me this.
An endless summer where he could protect me from harm or want, cherish and coddle me.
He’d suffered to gain that power, but his power wasn’t what had led him to confront Death alone, wasn’t what made him patient with Hiwa or gentle with me or the hundreds of other things that had made me love him.
I didn’t need his power, I just needed him to believe in me again.
“Some things are more important than us being safe. You used to know that,” I said, begging now.
From his face, he simply didn’t believe me, even though I couldn’t lie to him. He disentangled himself from my arms and stalked to the baths.
“I’ll tell them tomorrow I won’t lead their army,” he said, swinging the door open. “Maybe Wesha will bestir herself when she can smell the smoke from her tower.” He slammed the door behind him, hard enough to shake the wall.
My eyes were gritty with repressed tears, but I was willing to give him a moment. When I heard the water run to fill a bath, I tried the door, found it locked, and banged on it with an ineffective fist.
“You know you can’t keep me out of it forever,” I shouted through the wood.
“I’m willing to try,” he called.
I began to sing the lock open, but Taran announced that he was already naked, and I was left to fume outside the door.
“Taran?”
He didn’t answer.
There was only one exit from that room, so if I was more stubborn than him, we could still finish this argument.
I sat down on the floor, but long after Taran’s toes must have shriveled to raisins, I heard nothing from within.
Maybe immortal toes were unaffected by a long soak; in retrospect, I really should have noticed he never got so much as a mosquito bite, let alone a pimple or a hangnail.
He could probably sit in the bath until I turned to dust.
My bare foot started to ache from contact with the cold floor, so I crossed my legs and rested my head against the door. I missed him so much. I wanted him back so badly.
“You know, Hiwa wasn’t even the youngest acolyte fighting with us,” I said after a minute.
Even if he didn’t respond, I knew he could hear me.
He couldn’t stop me telling him who he was.
“That was Acco ab Diopater. I bet he was the first child you ever met. He’d only just started his training when the rebellion began, but he couldn’t go home because both his parents had died in Ereban.
Acco barely spoke at first, but when you showed up, he took to you.
You let him sleep in your tent even though he still wet the bed.
” I wiped my eyes, remembering Taran dipping a shrieking Acco into a pond by his armpits in an attempt to wash him off.
There was no sound from the other side of the door, but I continued with my eyes shut.
“Anyway, on the first long march with the queen’s army, neither of you could stand the field rations.
He was from a noble family and you…well, I guess you were too.
So the two of you convinced each other that you could raid this wild beehive with nothing but a smoking branch of green wood, and we’d all have honey in our porridge.
Of course it didn’t work—you didn’t get any honey, but you did both get stung all over.
I pulled out the stingers and you sang away the venom, but you felt so bad about it that you turned around and walked an hour back to the last farmhouse we’d passed.
You traded your winter cloak to get Acco his jar of honey. ”
I laughed and brushed away more tears with my palms.
“Which was when I decided that I’d love you forever.”
I took a deep, shaking breath and pressed my cheek to the wood. I would have sailed across the sea even if I knew it would take years to find him. I’d keep searching as long as it took.
“I know you’re not the person you’re trying to be. I know it better than you do.”
Though I was prepared to sleep against the door if necessary, a few minutes later it cracked open and I scooted out of its way.
We were a ridiculous pair, Taran with his wet hair and me on the floor, but he only sighed and helped me stand on stiff, numb limbs. He was wary and sad and beautiful, and my heart clenched to see all of that on his face. He closed his eyes.
“Fine. I’ll do it,” he said.