Chapter 33 #2
“So you let your son suffer all the consequences alone? You know what Genna did to him.” I leaned in, accusing the goddess whose name was chanted by women in labor. She’d been alone all this time, but her choices were her own, and Taran didn’t even get that dignity.
“What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t keep him in this tower with me forever. He wouldn’t escape to the mortal world.”
“I was ten!” Taran finally raised his voice. “You did nothing to protect me—after I handed you the means to kill my own father.”
Wesha’s face grew soft and troubled, and she didn’t deny it. “I didn’t want him dead. I wanted him to let me go.”
“Which is also the only reason you’ve spent the day roasting goose and decanting wine for me,” Taran said, and Wesha didn’t contradict him.
Three hundred years later, Wesha was still asking Taran to get her out of the trap she’d walked into willingly. To break her vows to the Stoneborn, the ones that had her sealing Death’s power over the Underworld, and set her free.
The legs of Taran’s chair made a piercing screech on the flagstones as he shoved it back from the table.
“Well, there you have it,” he told me, gesturing at the goddess.
“The entire sordid story. Three generations of lies and cruelty. I’m sure you can see all the worst traits I’ve inherited from them—I’m hard-hearted enough to kill my father and spiteful enough to keep my mother locked up for three centuries, with enough of the Peace-Queen’s guile to keep you from knowing about any of it while you were dying in the fires we all lit.
If I were you, I’d do my best to forget it all on the boat home. ”
“Taran,” I began, then closed my mouth. I didn’t want to comfort him in front of Wesha, whose beautiful dawn-sky eyes were focused imploringly on her son.
“Don’t say that I’ve never tried to do anything for you.
When you washed up dead on my shore, I was the one who gathered the mortal pieces of your soul and gave you your life back.
Yes, that was me. Did you think it was the Allmother?
Did you think you were really one of the Stoneborn?
My father was mortal, and there’s red blood in your veins too.
I cried when I saw you burned almost beyond recognition, and I was the one who spent the power to heal you.
And even though you swore at me and left as soon as I asked you for help, when your bride came looking for you, I sent her right to you! ”
“Only because you want out of here,” he said.
Wesha’s mouth tightened. “I do.”
The lines around Taran’s mouth were white from anger and grief as he glared at his mother.
“Do you know that I’ve never once broken one of my own vows?
I could have. I would have been strong enough by the end of my first decade of service to Genna, but I didn’t.
I can live with my promises. I don’t know why nobody else can.
” He said this last part directly to me as his shoulders sank.
Without another word, he turned on his heel and stalked back down the stairs.
The room was darker when he was gone, empty despite all the lamps burning in their niches.
Wesha made as though to stand and follow him, but I shook my head.
“Give him some time,” I advised her.
“He’s going straight to the stables and leaving,” she worried, long black hair falling around her face as she folded in on herself.
“He’s not. He wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye.”
The goddess gave me an ironic look. “You think you know him better than me?”
I did think that, but it wasn’t polite to say that to someone’s mother, so I just looked down at my dinner.
The food was tasteless in my mouth, but I forced myself to eat a few bites, since it was the last hot meal I might expect for the next week.
Wesha began to look at me speculatively, so I folded my napkin in my lap and got ahead of any ideas she might have developed about how to deploy me against Taran.
“What would you do if you were free?” I asked.
“Whatever I want, just like anyone else,” she said haughtily.
Points for honesty, but not much else, I thought, rolling my eyes. “You’re not making a great case for yourself.”
She snorted delicately. “Would you like me to try?”
Wesha had been born into a world determined to treat her unfairly, but she’d done nothing to make it better, despite considerable opportunity. When I shrugged, she gripped that dawn-streaked hair in her hands and pleaded with me.
“Would you believe me if I told you I’ve been alone with my regrets all these years, and I wish I could make amends?
How could I even begin? There was peace and plenty when I was born, and now all the Stoneborn blame me for the smoking ruins I see from my window.
Would Taran believe me if I told him I wished that I knew him now, despite all the love I denied him as a child?
Would even Napeth believe me if I told him I wanted to find a way for us both to live in this world? ”
“Well,” I said skeptically, “do you believe any of that?”
She didn’t answer my question. “The story you heard,” she said after a moment. “The one my priests sang. I wish it was true that I sacrificed myself for peace. That three hundred years of loneliness meant something.”
“It’s not too late to make the story true,” I said, leaning forward with interest. “Do you want to make it up to Taran? Death would make the same bargain he did before. It would end the next war before it started. Stop the Stoneborn from reconquering the mortal world. And I could stay with Taran and give him the love and peace he’s never had in his entire life. That’s what he wants.”
Her face fell. “So you’re going to tell Taran to leave me here?”
I shook my head. Even if I was callous enough to demand that Wesha bind herself to the horrific lord of the Underworld for eternity, I couldn’t ask Taran to be the one who imprisoned her.
“I think you should choose. If you want to be the goddess of mercy, you should choose that. Stay here. Hold the Gates closed. Tell Death yourself that he can still decide to stop. But it’s not a sacrifice if we make you do it.”
For most of my life, I woke up and lay down praying to Wesha, goddess of mercy.
There was no meaning in her true story—just wickedness and tragedy and the echoes they had spread across the entire world.
That didn’t make mercy meaningless though.
If it was up to me, I’d show it to her even if she had none for us.
I excused myself from the table and left the Maiden with the dishes and her regrets.
Taran had stored my packs in the vacant priests’ barracks, a pointed message that I pointedly ignored, and I tried doors on each floor until I found him.
As in every other room but the top chamber, the window had long ago been crudely bricked up, but Taran had pushed a few blocks out to create a small porthole with a view of the night and sea, and he sat on the simple cot below it.
Taran held a kithara and pick, and he was trying to play a ballad, unsuccessfully. When he closed his eyes he could follow the melody a bit, but every time he opened them to look at his hands, he fumbled the notes. He’d forgotten how to play.
When he saw me, he tossed the instrument to the foot of the bed and flopped over to face the wall. He was already stripped to his waist, so I put out all the lamps except the one on the nightstand and crawled in with him. The linens were clean and crisp and new. Nobody had ever visited Wesha.
His body was stiff and unwelcoming until I wormed my arm under his elbow and pressed my cheek into the gap between his shoulder blades, and then I felt him unwind by fractions until he covered my hand with his own, right over his heart’s reassuring thud.
He ran a few degrees hotter than other people, and I didn’t know if that was a trait all immortals shared or something he’d inherited from his father. I’d thought of it as unique to Taran.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
He pulled my arm more closely around him. “What do you want me to do?”
Even though I was fairly certain he knew how I’d answer, I responded anyway. “Let her go. Let me go.” I paused, spoke with my lips directly against his skin. “Come with me.”
He craned his head back, made a counteroffer. “Stay.”
I didn’t voice my refusal, just tightened my arms and closed my eyes, summoning every memory that told me who Taran really was, because he was mine more than he’d ever been anyone else’s.
“Wesha is selfish, and that selfishness turned Napeth from a caretaker to a tyrant,” he warned me. “She’s only thinking of herself, no matter what she told you. She’ll disappoint you.”
“All children are selfish, and she never got a chance to be anything else. And you—you’re not giving yourself a chance either.”
At every turn, he’d sacrificed himself for others. Wesha. Marit. Me. If he was capable of it, so was Wesha. And even if she wasn’t, it wasn’t right to found Genna’s peace on her daughter’s unwilling sacrifice.
What the two of us had given up had been given freely. I had to believe that mattered.
Taran rubbed fingertips along the crest of my knuckles almost to the point of pain, his muscles still tense.
“Can you promise me that this is the last one? Say we convince your mortal queen not to throw her people against the ships of the Stoneborn when they arrive. Will that be enough? Can we go home then, if the other gods forgive me? Would you stay with me longer than the length of one mortal life, if I do this for you?”
“I don’t have a single secret from you now. Do I have all of yours?” I murmured against his back.
“Yes,” he said after a moment, and he sounded honest.
“I don’t remember my father’s name. My mother left me with the maiden-priests when I was six, and I never looked for her again.
You’re not your parents, Taran, and neither am I.
We’re our choices. I can’t say what will happen tomorrow or when we reach the mortal shore, but I’ll probably want to do exactly what you imagine I will.
I will love you with every single heartbeat.
I will never want to be apart from you for a single minute of my life.
I will still have made every mistake I ever made—and I’ll probably make a lot more. I can’t promise more than that.”
He exhaled, a long, painful sound in the near darkness. I could feel his power swirling through the room, clinging to my skin and battering the stone walls around us as he struggled with what I’d asked him to do.
“I don’t want to go. This good person you thought I was, who was trying to help—I don’t think I ever was that. I think I knew better than to join your rebellion, and I did it anyway. For you, Iona. And so if I go with you—that’ll be the only reason.”
He rolled over to face me, nearly nose to nose. There was a shine to his irises that hadn’t been there before—a glow clinging to him even in this quiet moment—but I brushed my lips against the solemn line of his mouth until the tense set of his jaw dissolved.
“What do your reasons matter now? All that’s left is what you did and what I remember. Why don’t you just let that be the whole truth?”
Taran lifted his hands to my face, thumbs pressing against my cheekbones.
“Because I know you think I became a better person, but I wonder if I got worse. The list of things I wouldn’t do to keep you gets shorter and shorter. That ought to scare you. It scares me, sometimes.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” I whispered.
“I know,” he said gently. “Which is why I wonder whether I ought to tell you to go alone and not come back until you’re sure you’ll stay forever.
Because I thought about not letting you.
I thought about locking you up until you changed your mind.
I think about how…happy I would feel, if I knew nobody would ever take you from me. Even if you hated me for it.”
I swallowed hard. “You’re not your father, Taran.”
“Not yet. But you haven’t ever left me.”
Most people never had the opportunity to be very good or very evil, but that was just luck.
Taran hadn’t always chosen to heal the wounded and free the suffering out of a sheer lack of opportunity to harm and control.
What was a good person except someone who’d always chosen to do good when he had the chance?
“Well, if the only thing keeping you from committing atrocities is me, then it sounds like it’s very, very important that we stay together,” I said.
He huffed out a pained laugh. “That is the point you would take away.”
I kissed the corners of his mouth to make them tilt in the other direction, and when he captured the whole of my mouth with his own, I opened my lips and deepened the kiss. I lifted my arms to help him get my clothes off and parted my thighs to help him settle between them.
He wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye. I barely knew this language, the one spoken with his mouth against the fragile skin of my neck and his fingers pressing bruises into my shoulders, but I didn’t think he was saying goodbye. That wasn’t what I was saying, anyway.
Come home with me, I said. And I’ll wear that green scarf at our wedding. And If all we get is a little stone house and one mortal lifetime, we’ll be happy in it. I said it with every swallowed breath and pull of my hands in his hair, as devoutly as I’d ever prayed for mercy.
I’ll love you till the stars fall out of the sky, he whispered with his mouth against my skin.
It wasn’t until he was asleep with his head pillowed on my stomach that I realized that he must have answered my question about what he was going to do at some point, because he’d promised to answer all my questions, but I hadn’t recognized his answer when he gave it.