Chapter 33
Wesha had gone to some pains with dinner.
There was nobody else in the tower but her, but when we reached the top of the stairs, we found her at the head of a banquet table dressed in rose linen, groaning under the weight of dishes sufficient for an extended family.
A whole roast goose with crisped brown skin.
A fleet of crayfish swimming in cream sauce.
Five types of soft cheese on a sideboard, decorated with out-of-season raspberries. Three chairs.
“I didn’t know you could cook,” Taran said, tossing himself into the chair farthest from her and reaching for a jug of undiluted wine.
Wesha pointedly handed him a goblet, which he ignored in favor of sticking out his legs and leaning back to uncork the jug with his teeth.
His throat moved as he gulped down more than a full cup before glancing back for me.
I was stuck on the landing, breath coming too quickly. The floor wasn’t moving here, but it felt uneven beneath my feet.
“Sit,” the Maiden said, pointing toward the free chair with a graceful arm.
I had a moment of vertigo, looking between them.
They looked alike. Of course they did, even though Wesha chose to appear a few years younger than Taran.
They had the same dark hair and thick straight eyebrows, the same full mouths and long, tapered fingers.
Taran had inherited those from his mother.
Which meant Taran got his bright eyes and sharp-edged beauty from his other parent.
Got that power to break bonds, even his hold over the dead—
That was from his father, Death.
“If I didn’t cook, how did you think I ate? There’s nobody else here,” Wesha asked tartly as I stumbled to the chair, my mind reeling wildly between the faces of Taran and the god of the Underworld.
“I supposed you might be gnawing your offerings raw so that you’d have more opportunities each day to feel sorry for yourself,” Taran said.
I took a cue from him and reached for the wine, mostly for the opportunity to hold something solid between my hands.
“I tried being sorry for you too, but you didn’t believe me the last time I said it,” Wesha said, taking a delicate sip from her own cup.
I wondered if I ought to give them a moment to catch up while I perhaps stuck my head under the ocean surface and yelled, but Taran hooked a thumb in my direction to bring me into the conversation.
“Your last surviving priest might also want some apologies. For the pack of lies she organized her entire life around. The story of the pure and beautiful Maiden who so loved humanity, the innocents, little children, that she sacrificed herself to keep Death from destroying the world. Iona here is very attached to that story, but we’ve been in a mode of rigorous honesty recently, and I think she’d appreciate the real one. ”
Wesha’s expression toward me was dismissive, but I rallied enough to curl forward in my chair to face her, though my heart hammered.
She’d had a child with Death—not the monster she fought from the beginning, but the sweetheart she snuck into the City—and that child was Taran. Three hundred years later, he waded into the wreckage that affair had made of the world and helped kill his own father.
No wonder he’d looked so sad.
“Was any of it true?” I asked through a cracked throat.
“Some of it,” Wesha said while Taran gave a harsh laugh.
She frowned at her son. “Yes, some of it was, and I’d know better than you, since it started before you were born.
My father was Carantos ab Lixnea, the mortal fool Diopater killed for cuckolding him, and my mother handed me off to Lixnea without a second thought. ”
“Yes, poor you, left to be raised by the gentlest of the gods amid a court of poets and dreamers,” Taran said mockingly.
“I was a Fallen in a world the Allmother made for gods and their priests. And as soon as I was no longer a sweet baby to hold in her arms, even Lixnea had no patience with me. I grew up lonely.” Taran fell begrudgingly silent, and Wesha turned to me, her young face proud and wounded.
“When I was seventeen, Genna finally invited me to the City. Gave me that palace you’ve been staying in, took me into her court—and let it slip that she’d promised me to her own husband as a concubine. As an apology for my birth.”
There had to be more to it, if Taran expected me to be unsympathetic. This part sounded perfectly like Genna, who always spent other people to buy her peace. His face was expectant.
“Needless to say, I wasn’t willing. I decided I’d flee across the ocean, find my father’s family and live as a mortal. But when I reached this shore and tried to cross the Sea of Dreams—I met Napeth instead. Right where this tower was built,” Wesha said.
“And he wasn’t a monster yet,” I said, remembering what Lixnea had told me.
Wesha sighed. “He was beautiful and powerful and kind to me. When I told him what I was running from, he said he wasn’t afraid of Skyfather, and that the Summerlands would be emptier if I left. I thought…then I thought I could stay.”
“But you changed your mind,” I said softly.
“No, not immediately. He gave me everything I asked for. When I told him I was afraid of Diopater, he promised to keep me safe. When I told him I’d been lonely, he promised to love me forever.
And when I told him I felt powerless, he gave me half of his.
Those blessings you sing—for sleep, for surgery, to end pain—those were his. ”
“Which somehow wasn’t enough for you,” Taran said into the wineglass.
“We were happy for a few months while I did my best to push off Diopater’s interest. But then Napeth took me to his citadel in the Underworld, where he’d built me a walled garden full of crystal trees and a wedding bower of night-blooming flowers inside a locked castle.
Which was when I discovered that he’d promised me his love and my safety, but not my freedom.
He wanted me to be his little songbird, singing in the dark forever while he tended to the dead on their journey.
And I realized that my soul was still as mortal as it had ever been.
” She looked out the window at the dark sea.
“So I ran. I went back to the Moon’s domain.
I thought she’d protect me, let me be a child again, not a bride, not someone’s concubine. But then—”
Taran finally met my eyes, expression shadowed as he finished her sentence. “—then, inconveniently, there was me.”
Their tones made Taran’s very existence sound like a tragedy, and my heart ached for how easily he seemed to accept that conclusion.
“You gave him to Genna? The person who tried to sell you to her own husband?” I guessed, my hands curling into fists.
How many childbirths had I attended in Wesha’s service?
How many feverish babies had I sung back to health?
It made a mockery of her entire cult. Wesha hadn’t even cared for her own child, let alone mortal ones.
“Napeth and Diopater had started fighting over me,” Wesha said, eyes downcast. “Lixnea was outraged at Genna’s bargain, so Genna agreed to claim Taran as her own to make it up to her. I thought she might take a little more care with Taran, since he was nearly one of the Stoneborn.”
“And yet you didn’t think to offer me to my father,” Taran said, face rigid with anger. “Who might have actually wanted me.”
Wesha frowned. “The Stoneborn don’t love the way people do. You would have been a hostage to use against me, the way he tried to use the entire world against me.”
“The Great War,” I said. “He started it over you.”
“His priests hounded me wherever I went. And he became—horrible. Did things no Stoneborn had ever done before. Murdered and stole. Scorched the world. Genna asked me what I’d take to return to Napeth and make him stop.”
“What was it?” I asked, because Taran’s stony face suggested that there had been no real sacrifice on Wesha’s part. No noble choice to spare the world the consequences of Death’s wrath, like I’d always believed.
“Nothing,” Wesha said bitterly. “I never agreed. I was tricked. She tricked me.”
“You did agree,” Taran said, eyes slitted. “You gave your vows to a dozen of the Stoneborn. That’s why you’re here in this tower, holding the Gates shut.”
Wesha tilted her chin in a challenge. “Genna told me Diopater and Napeth would never give up while they could still win me. So I said I’d marry if she promised me a handsome husband to cherish me, a beautiful home that no one could enter against my will, and the full power of a Stoneborn.
This tower was supposed to be a home, not a prison, and that power was supposed to be my freedom, not a chain to the Gates. ”
“But Death was the bridegroom, not some handsome mortal stranger,” I guessed, feeling begrudging compassion for her.
“I’d given my vows, so I had to go through with it,” Wesha said, looking at Taran.
“You immediately tried to get out of it.” Taran’s voice was dropping, angrier. “You asked me to get you out of it.”
“But you were just a child, and you weren’t strong enough,” the goddess said sadly. “So you stole the stone knives from the Allmother and told me to free myself.”
I bunched my shoulders, thinking of a frightened boy caught by the enormous living Mountain who’d snatched up the gods with her stone hands.
Taran had obviously loved Wesha the way children always loved their parents, no matter how bad at the job they were, and he obviously still loved her to be as hurt as he was now, centuries later.
Wesha saw herself as the victim in this story, and to a point, so did I. She’d been betrayed by her mother and treated like a war spoil by the other Stoneborn, had seen her former lover turn hateful and cruel. If she’d made mistakes, they were the same mistakes mortals frequently made in love.
I could forgive her for all of them, except for what she’d done to Taran.