Chapter 31
Taran took my hands in one of his and walked me backwards toward my room, shaking off my attempts at clarification. Fine, he’d break my vows? Fine, he’d come with me?
When I was seated on the edge of my bed, he knelt in front of me with my feet resting on his thighs. He didn’t even have to sing to ease the swelling in my bad foot now, just stroke his thumb along the arch. A careless show of inherited power.
He frowned at my tense, worried expression and leaned forward until his chest was pressed up against my knees.
“If you think you’re in a cage, you’ll just batter yourself to death against the bars,” he said, more to himself than to me.
“So, fine. If you want to go, you can go. I’ll break your vows if you ask.
” His eyes lifted to mine, and with his jaw clenched tight, he pulled his other hand from behind his back to offer me two different treasures, both stolen: my green scarf, tattered but clean and neatly folded, and my silver betrothal ring.
The look in his eyes was urgent enough to still my next breath.
“But you were right. I do want to know if you would have said yes. I do want to know if you’d choose me.
So, here’s my last offer. I’ll go to the Painted Tower to fulfill your vows to Wesha and the bird.
I’ll retrieve your poor dead betrothed from the Underworld and send him back across the sea.
Wesha has to allow it if she promised it to you. ”
My hand lifted as if of its own accord and pressed over my wildly beating heart.
“He can go tend to your hapless rebels. Wreak havoc in the mortal world,” Taran said with heated determination. “And you can choose me this time.”
“You’d really go to the Painted Tower? Help me stop the next war?” I asked, even as my vow to him punished me for entertaining what I knew was an impossible idea. There was no third person who could do this for us—only the image of Taran I still held in my heart.
“I’ve tried offering you everything else I have. What else is there?”
He’d be so close if we went to the Painted Tower together. Just one small sea between us and the mortal world. If he’d go that far for me, surely he’d go a little farther.
“Because you want me to be your priestess?” I asked gently.
Taran looked up at me with soft eyes, searching my face.
“I know you said no more vows. And marriage vows are stronger than anything I’d have asked you to swear as my priestess.
But that’s what you wanted before, isn’t it, someone to love you till the stars fall out of the sky?
I actually can, Iona. If I marry you, it is for forever.
Isn’t that what we should do?” He didn’t know we’d done this before—him on his knees, my heart trembling in my chest. “Aren’t we in love? Isn’t that what this is?”
It was an echo of the first time he asked me.
Isn’t that what people do when they’re in love?
Say yes, nightingale.
“Yes. Yes, Taran, we’re in love,” I said, gasping for breath after I said it, and oh, it felt like the shard of obsidian that had been lodged in my own heart since he died loosened and let it fully beat again.
The light in the entire room brightened with his smile.
“I was looking for you,” Taran said, putting scarf and ring aside and wrapping his arms tightly around my calves, chin resting on my knee.
“When I woke up, I couldn’t remember anything, but I knew something was missing.
Someone. I looked through all of the Summerlands, and I felt nothing.
I went down to the Underworld and walked through Death’s citadel, but it was empty, and nothing there called to me either.
Smenos’s price for a boat was too high, so I went to Marit.
The night I found you, I was planning to ask him to take me across the sea in his chariot.
And then I found you and it was like—finally I could breathe.
I could rest. I could sleep. I had you again. ”
“You tried to make me do your laundry!” I objected, laughing when Taran stood up and pushed me down on the bed.
“I thought I needed a priest. Everyone else had them, and I had those plans set aside for my big villa that was supposed to be full of people. I thought that was what I’d been missing—but it was just you.”
His big hands cupped my waist through my loose gown, gripping me with restrained need.
“Tell me you missed me too. Even if you didn’t choose me the first time.”
That was the moment I should have told him.
There was no reason not to now, except for how much it would hurt him to know I’d held the full truth back.
But I wished so much that what he imagined could be the truth.
I wished there was someone else who would go and fight and die so that for once I could just live.
If mortal dreams could build the Summerlands, if mortal devotion gave the gods their power, why couldn’t I want so much to be with Taran that the world would reshape itself to permit it?
“I loved you,” I said, wrapping my arms around his neck. “How could I not have?”
He grinned in amazement, then kissed me hard enough that I gasped for air when he broke away.
“Tell me it always should have been me,” he said.
“It always should have been you.” I grabbed the fabric of his shirt and pulled it free, struggling with it until he tossed it aside. I sighed in satisfaction when I got my palms splayed against the hot, bare skin of his chest. “It always should have been like this.”
“You thought about it?” Taran asked, fingers stroking my jaw as I explored the swells and hollows of his body.
“From about ten minutes after I met you. Not that I ever said anything.”
His smile was triumphant. “Even after you were betrothed?”
“Especially after I was betrothed. But I was trying to be the perfect priestess of Wesha, even as we were burning down the temples.”
“What idiots we were,” he said with a laugh. “You must have felt guilty.”
“Very guilty.” So needlessly. Too afraid of disappointing him to ever ask honestly for what I wanted—what he must have wanted too.
He wasn’t afraid of asking now, dipping his head and kissing me more deeply. He caught one of my bare legs between his thighs and pulled me against him, close enough that I could feel his racing heartbeat.
“We wasted so much time,” I said, desire beginning to make me dizzy. “I used to stare at you across the fire at night and imagine—it felt impossible, but I’d imagine you suddenly looking at me and saying that you’d die if you couldn’t touch me that night. And I’d say I felt the same.”
His hands slipped up farther, until his thumbs brushed the undersides of my breasts through the fabric of my nightgown. It was thin enough to carry the warmth of his hands to my skin, which blazed up under his touch, heated even when his hands moved on.
“What did you imagine? Let’s do all of it. Tonight. I would have done anything you asked.”
“Oh, I—” I blushed at the idea I was going to have to say anything out loud. “I imagined everything.”
Taran chuckled softly and rubbed his lips along my earlobe.
“I doubt the perfect priestess of Wesha imagined everything. Though I would be delighted if you did.” His hands trailed back down to my waist, then farther, and this time he slipped his hands under the hem of the dress and repeated the same broad caress with his palms against my skin.
“So, when I was sixteen, I was seconded to the high temple of Genna to assist in the burn ward,” I confessed, daring enough to drop my own hands to his stomach and trace the hard lines of his hipbones where they disappeared into the drawstring waist of his trousers.
“And it turned out that there were some very, ah, educational scrolls in their library.”
Taran’s breath was hot on my neck as his hands continued their gentle exploration of my body. “Something inappropriate for acolytes of Wesha, I take it?”
“Very inappropriate. And mostly…diagrams,” I said, cheeks heating when he caught the tip of one breast between a thumb and a knuckle and rolled it in his fingers. “About twenty of them.”
Taran laughed harder at my confession. “Maybe you’ll teach me something, then. I’m not sure I know twenty different things off the top of my head. Maybe ten or so that I’ve been thinking about.”
When he put his hands on the bottom hem of my dress and prepared to pull it over my head though, I kept my arms down, not quite struggling.
“This part probably looked better in your imagination,” I warned him. I looked better with my clothes on, where tailoring could suggest curves. Maybe I should keep them on.
Taran snorted and slid my fingers from my hem to ease it up, inch by inch.
“I have a very accurate imagination.” I closed my eyes when he pulled it off and settled back down next to me with a couple of fingertips trailing between my breasts and across my stomach.
“And there is not a single inch of you that I didn’t imagine touching. ”
His fingers hooked in the waistband of my underwear and pulled my last scrap of clothing down over my hips.
Completely bared to him for the first time, I held my breath as he silently looked me over.
I waited for him to touch me, cover my body with his, break the moment.
People liked the idea of me best, followed by the sound of me, and I hoped very much that Taran would like the feel of me too, but the sight of me didn’t have much to recommend it beyond my hair.
But Taran’s knuckles traced tenderly along the lines of my breasts, my stomach, the dips of my hips. “If I thought the Allmother cared for me at all, I’d think she made every part of you just to please me,” he said, voice dropping and roughening.
“I want to,” I said, my voice shivering when his hand briefly slid across my thigh, a tingling line of heat that burned even when he lifted it to my waist again. “I’ll try.”
“Darling, you already do,” he whispered. “You’re perfect for me. Your mouth fits against mine like it was made for me.”