Four Years Ago
Taran
The broad silhouette of a bearded vulture’s wings lingered above the horizon during my slow descent down the Mountain, circling ominously while I sweated under the weight of the small boat I’d balanced over my shoulders.
In the wet air that rose off the Sea of Dreams, the Maiden would have flown more comfortably in an albatross’s feathers than a vulture’s, but I’d never say the Maiden lacked a sense of humor.
Wesha was funny, and everyone forgot that.
That she watched me for hours rather than help me haul the little boat down the rocky cliffs to the shore—
Everyone who’d ever known her would have expected that.
If she’d known me at all, Wesha should have expected spite would have me launch from the farthest point on the pebbled beach from her Painted Tower, beyond the wreckage of funeral boats that crowded the path to the Underworld, but by the time I’d finished raising the mast and rigging the sail, I could nearly feel her anxious attention on me as she wondered whether I’d really go past without saying anything to her.
I left it till the last, making a big show of securing my provisions, but I turned and trudged down the beach when I was ready to go. I was fairly certain I could get past the Gates of Dawn without her permission, but I’d look ridiculous if I was wrong about that. Better to pay any toll now.
Wesha had changed from beak and feathers to her tattered wedding dress and stood in the darkened doorway of her tower as I approached.
It was all theater—she could have walked out onto the beach, could have worn a different dress, could have flown down and spoken to me as a bird at any time in the past three hundred years—but that didn’t mean it was ineffective.
It made the sharp edges of my soul prickle beneath my lips and fingertips to see her look exactly the same as the last time I saw her, rattled me enough to leave me silent for long minutes while she recovered from seeing me in the shape of a grown man instead of a terrified child.
Sometimes Genna, the Peace-Queen, would have a maudlin mood and list all the ways I resembled Wesha, though really she’d be thinking of Carantos ab Lixnea, Genna’s last mortal lover and Wesha’s unfortunate sire.
It used to annoy me to hear Genna credit a mortal foolish enough to cuckold the storm god as the source of the straight dark eyebrows and attractive singing voices that Wesha and I had both inherited, but I had to admit that it was convenient to my current venture to look almost human.
I looked more human than Wesha did now, despite being less.
Wesha had bargained for the power that had turned her eyes into a starry expanse of sky and her long hair to a slash of dawn, but despite the bleak expression of regret painted across her delicate features, I’d never heard her wish she could give that part of her bargain up.
“Hello, Mother,” I told Wesha as soon as I thought I could manage the appropriate tone of pleasant nonchalance.
She used to wince every time I called her that.
It was strange, how often I’d been thinking of my long-ago childhood recently.
That decade somehow felt more accessible than the three centuries since.
I could remember my last trip to this tower with perfect clarity—the stolen daggers weighing down my pack, my stupid confidence that Wesha and I would soon live together like pirates on the Sea of Dreams, feared and respected by all the other Stoneborn—while the things I’d done more recently were shadowed like half-forgotten dreams, albeit ones that sometimes had me waking up sweaty and nauseous.
Today Wesha didn’t scold me for wanting her attention. Perhaps the past three centuries had toughened her up too.
“Hello, Taran. I wondered whether Genna would send you.”
Of course that was what she wondered. Not how her only child was feeling this morning.
Not why the mortal world was in such disrepair that most of the dusk-souls farther down the beach were arriving not in lovingly tended funeral boats but on piles of brush, or why thousands of mortal priests had recently fled up the Mountain to the Summerlands—no, Wesha had wondered only whether her blockade here at the Gates had finally caused sufficient trouble to end her imprisonment, one way or another.
“Genna didn’t send me,” I said, which wasn’t quite true.
The point was, she didn’t make me come. She’d rather richly bribed me to sail past the Gates of Dawn and clean up the mess my parents had made of the world.
I was here on the beach with my little boat because the reward was worth the trouble, not because Genna still had the power to compel my every breath and action.
Wesha’s starry eyes widened. “You mean…she released you?”
“Two weeks ago.”
Her response was grimly amusing for everything it wasn’t: Oh, Taran, I’m so glad you’re free! I never thought she’d punish you so long! If I forgot to say so before, I’m sorry I got you caught up in this, how can I make it up to you?
Wesha only sighed and turned her face toward the sea, knuckles brushing over her very mortal heart.
Without Genna’s will wrapped around my soul, forcing me to obey, I felt almost…hollow. Like my body had grown larger than my thoughts or feelings could fill, now that I was no longer the Peace-Queen’s puppet. Empty.
Right now though, it was easy enough to feel disappointed that my mother couldn’t pretend to be happy I could make my own choices for the first time since I was ten years old, at least not when it was obvious I wasn’t going to use my newfound freedom to deliver hers.
“I’ve gathered the mortals are in open revolt, your priests are dead, and Napeth’s are dropping like flies. Genna asked if I might consider going over to sort things out,” I prompted Wesha, thumbs hooked on my belt.
“It’s worse than that,” she said quickly. “Your father’s become such a greedy monster. The sacrifices he’s demanded! The waste of it all. At this rate, there won’t be anyone left to light an altar soon.”
“And this surprised you? I got an inkling he’d cracked up when I started to meet my half siblings with fur and claws.
But who could have guessed he’d act out after you drove him across the sea, besides absolutely everyone?
” My cheerful mask was beginning to fall apart in the face of Wesha’s complaints about my father, the god of death.
Death and the Maiden—long ago, he went to war to marry her. But neither half his power nor my birth could convince her to stay with him, and the world had been torn in two ever since, with Death trapped in the mortal world, and all the other Stoneborn here in the Summerlands.
Wesha’s lips pursed as she chose her words carefully. She probably sensed my patience was limited.
“All he had to do was let me go, and I would have let him come home. All anyone else had to do was let me go, and I would have let them pass. It shouldn’t have to be you.”
“No, it shouldn’t.” On that, my mother and I were in complete agreement. Whether she meant I shouldn’t be the one to put down the rebellion caused by my father’s misrule or that I shouldn’t get her out of her bargain—or her marriage—I agreed.
“You could tell him that,” she offered, face troubled.
I laughed. “You think he’s going to take advice from Genna’s bastard, who he knows only for trying to get him killed for no apparent reason?”
Wesha was not the only one with regrets—just the only one who’d never tried to pay for them.
“He’d believe you if you told him who you are. You…you do look a bit like him. And if you showed him you could break oaths, could set me free—”
“So am I appealing to his fatherly pride or threatening him? Both? The Moon was right about you. You do have a mortal’s heart.
Still! Even with all your power and after all this time.
You want what you shouldn’t have and not what you were made to be.
Napeth is never going to just stop because you’ve made the cost too high.
He was born to be the god of death and rule from the Underworld, and you made him your husband.
He can’t stop wanting to be that any more than a fire can stop itself from burning. ”
I’d spent the last several days telling myself I was not going to lose my temper with her, was not going to engage with her, was going to cheerfully think about how lovely the new villa Genna had promised me would be once it was finished.
Think about fountains, Taran. Grand colonnades. Decorative gardens surrounded by very high fences.
The Maiden put her hands on her hips and growled right back at me.
“Is that how Genna justifies herself? She says they don’t have a choice but to be greedy bullies? The Allmother made the Stoneborn to answer mortal prayers, and I hear the mortals praying day and night for mercy. Napeth is fighting his nature by brutalizing his people, not living up to it.”
My careful smile finally turned into a snarl.
If Wesha thought she’d impress me with a lesson on divine compassion, she was forgetting that the Allmother still wanted me dead for my childhood attempt to free my mother from the trap she’d walked into, and only Genna’s self-interest had saved me when Wesha would have let my bones be scattered across the Summerlands.
“If the mortals are still praying to you for mercy, I would think that tends to disprove your point,” I snapped. “At least the other Stoneborn do what they say they will.”
Wesha shook her head sorrowfully, which only wound me up even more.
“You’ll see when you get there. The gap between what we’re supposed to be and what we’ve become.”
When she waved her arm and the block of ever-present fog that surrounded this beach parted in front of my boat, I took that as leave to depart.
Fine. Thank you for opening the Gates. Maybe I’ll bring you something nice on my way home, like a couple of new priests to replace the ones you got murdered.
I’d turned on my heel and made it fifteen paces away before she called out to me again.