Chapter 34
I woke up when something slashed my cheekbone hard enough to draw blood.
I was up for hours after Taran fell asleep, carding the soft strands of his hair through my fingers and trying to quiet my rising fear that he’d be gone the next day, and I registered the cold hollow where he’d slept next to me even before the sharp pain on my face.
“Stupid, lazy slut,” Awi chirped, launching her raven-self into the air as fast as I could clap a hand over the place her taloned feet had scratched me. There was an ache on that side of my scalp too, like she’d been pulling my hair for a while. “Wake up already! You need to get out.”
It was very dark in the chamber without any of the lamps lit, and the only light came through the gap left by the bricks Taran had pulled from the window, but that was indirect and white, midmorning or later.
“What’s going on?” I mumbled, even as my heart seized to see Taran’s pack missing from its spot next to mine.
“The tower is on fire,” Awi announced, shifting to the form of a sparrow and hopping to the window.
“What? Why?” As soon as she said it, I could smell the oily, musty stink of a house fire, deadly familiar from the war.
Smoke was coming up through the cracks in the floorboards, and I was perhaps five stories off the ground.
I shot to my feet and began to fumble around for my clothes, discarded on the ground.
“Because I set it on fire,” the bird said like I was being very slow.
“What?” I cried again, nearly dropping my shoes. “Why would you do that?”
“So that nobody can live here,” Awi said, edging into the gap in the window, as though that made sense. She looked back at me with one black eye, briefly dipping her beak in an awkward show of reluctance. “Well, goodbye.”
“Wait!” I ran to the window after her, but she launched into the air and spread her wings in the direction of the sea. The tiny sparrow blurred into an albatross and gained height in the morning light, vanishing from my sight within seconds.
The smell of smoke was stronger already. With shaking hands, I pulled my scarf from the front pocket of my pack and wrapped it around my face. I put my ring back on my finger and groped for the door handle. Warm, but there was nowhere else to go.
A wave of darkness enveloped me when I opened the door, but I plunged through, doing my best to recall the layout of the tower.
The first glimpses of orange flame were almost like homecoming.
I’d almost died in flame so many times that fear fell away.
Yes, of course this was how it ended. I dreamed this!
I went farther down the stairs anyway. Step by step, keeping to the stone wall.
I started to choke as the smoke made its way through the flimsy barrier of the silk around my face, but I kept moving, knowing that every second mattered.
I stumbled one floor down, two, how many had there been, exactly?
Awi must have set a fire in each storeroom, not trusting the wooden beams inside the concrete pillars of the tower to carry the blaze all the way to the top.
By the third, I started feeling dizzy and needed all my strength to grip the wall.
The floors were hot enough that the soles of my boots began peeling away from the shafts, enough that the skin of my feet began to blister.
I gagged on ash. Even if I made it out at this point, my lungs were probably too damaged unless a priest of Genna happened upon me in the next few minutes.
I stopped on what I thought was the third level, considering the flames erupting from the open storeroom. More than hot enough to dissolve bone. Hot enough to melt my ring, probably. There would be no trace of me. If I died here, I’d vanish.
What would Taran think, when the armies of Heaven crossed the sea and found nobody waiting for them?
He might think I failed. Worse, he might think there was something he should have done to stop me.
He might think he’d been wrong, and he should have locked me up somewhere safe, no matter what I said.
If he’d left me today, it had been because he saw no other way to give me a choice to go and a choice to come back. I couldn’t let him think I hadn’t chosen him.
I wouldn’t have gone without you, Taran.
I should have told him that.
I was just going to have to live.
“Taran!” I yelled, thinking of all the times he’d heard me when I thought he wouldn’t.
I coughed smoke from my lungs. Marit, I’d sing Marit’s blessing.
We never used it for putting out fires, because the waves it called were just as likely to wash away rescuers as extinguish a blaze, but maybe Taran would look back from the Mountain and see the sea change.
My voice was thin and reedy as I stumbled a few more steps down the grand staircase. Waverider, ocean lord, dancer on the waters—was there a key change in the chorus? I couldn’t think straight.
I slumped against the wall, feeling the hem of my dress begin to smolder.
Nothing had happened. Maybe Marit didn’t have enough priests yet, or maybe I wasn’t singing it right.
I was only trained to be a maiden-priest, after all, and Wesha had abandoned me, just like Taran had said she would.
He’d set us both free, but we would both disappoint him, when he’d never failed anyone he loved in his entire life.
The stones of the tower vibrated under my feet, and it could have been the waves or it could have been the mortar melting. I fell to my knees, and my head swam too much to stand again.
I stopped praying to Marit and thought of Taran instead.
I’m sorry. I really did try to survive this time.