“Because they have been content to see our home slowly fall apart ever since you started your little insurrection. Since Wesha shut the Gates! Why would I save them from their own neglect?”
“Taran, please, there are hundreds of mortals left in the City, and Genna’s priests can’t even defend themselves.”
“You can barely defend yourself, and I am defendingyou,” Taran said with grim determination. I wasn’t swaying him at all. He’d planned this. He’d thought this through—probably from the moment we returned to the City.
“You’re just going to sit here while Death massacres them? Or worse, sacrifices them and becomes even more powerful?”
“Weare going to stay here until the other Stoneborn who are responsible for this world go back and defend their own priests. Until Wesha confronts the monster she created!”
“You wouldn’t,” I insisted, tears welling as I jerked at the hands that held me in place. “You’re not going to keep me here.”
“When the fight is over, we’ll go find out what happened,” Taran said, slow and deliberate. “The Mountain knows I’d stand against Death himself to keep you safe, but you and I areliving through this.Neither of us deserves to die for Wesha’s pride.”
“They can’t even go outside if Genna’s given them something else to do,” I whispered, thinking of Teuta in the basement workroom. Elantia, who ought to be home with her mother.
If I’d been a little prettier, a little sweeter, it could have been me. Genna’s priests didn’t train as long as Wesha’s. I was more like them than I was like the unknowable immortal who held me captive.
My knees sagged, and Taran must have thought I was admitting defeat, so he let me take a couple of wobbly steps away.
I covered my face with my hands, both to get myself under control and to muffle my next words. A song.
Taran was slow to act when he didn’t recognize the tune. He’d recognize Wesha’s gift of sleep, but that one took a little longer. This one was only six measures, key of E, three-quarter time.
Every muscle in Taran’s body locked up when I finished singing the blessing to test a patient’s nervous system.
Taran’s worked.
The effect lasted only half a second, but he didn’t expect it. He crashed to the ground, hard enough that I winced at the sound of his head cracking against the earth.
I got a few more paces toward the chariot, already singing a second blessing. The look of betrayal on his face would have been laughable if it hadn’t pierced me to the very core. He’d lured me here under false pretenses, did his best to distract me while innocents died, and he was surprised?
He’d just gotten to his hands and knees when the second blessing caught him. He gasped as the lower half of his body went numb and useless, unresponsive to his commands. It was the same blessing I’d sung before running down the beach on my broken foot, trying to save his life.
“Stop,” he called, panic making his voice tight. “Iona, don’t. You don’t have an army behind you this time, and Wesha’s power has to be failing. Juststop and think.”
“You didn’t give me a choice,” I snarled in the face of his rush of entreaties. “I don’t know what I would have said if you’d ever given me one, but you didn’t.” I meant more than today—I meant this entire place, this idea he had of the two of us in the Summerlands, endless years far from the land of my birth. I didn’t know if I could have loved the person he was, instead of the one he’d pretended to be. I couldn’t know. He’d robbed me of that chance.
“And now you’ll never know if I would have said yes,” I told him, voice shaking.
Taran had nobody but himself to blame, and I saw in his face that he knew that. He never made it back to his feet before I chanted every note of the Maiden’s blessing of sleep, and he collapsed in the sunlit field as I turned away.
28
Taran probably wishedhe’d never taught me to ride a horse, because I took both of them. I unhitched the chariot and rode one while the other trailed behind us, unhappy to be racing toward smoke and noise instead of away from it, but too well trained to buck or stray. I didn’t dare leave a horse for Taran. I didn’t know how long Wesha’s blessing would incapacitate him, and if he caught me before I made it to the City, I was certain he’d drag me off even if I fought back. I wasn’t certain I had the heart to injure him, but if I did, I knew I wouldn’t be able to forgive either of us. As it was, I was so angry at him that I could barely breathe.
It wasn’t a battle, when I reached the City. It was a reaping. The buildings were aflame, and death-priests were methodically stalking through the City, calling their lord’s fire on every other living being, mortal and immortal alike. The war Death had calmly predicted—the one the other Stoneborn refused to consider—had begun.
I’d spent the ride considering what I would do when I reached the battle, but I discarded all my plans. I’d thought that perhaps I would rally defenders at some wall where we might hold off long enough for Skyfather or the Peace-Queen to rescue their people, but there was no defense possible against an assault that had already spread in every direction. This had begun hours ago.
Still, I had to savesomeone, or I might as well have sat with Taran in the meadow and pretended not to see the smoke. I slapped the reins of the horse to propel me into the City as ringing filled my ears and metal flooded my mouth.
For the second time in my life, I ran straight at Death.
In the far distance, in Skyfather’s sector, the winged lion was leaping from roof to roof, his maw belching fire as his claws scored through slate and tile to expose the interiors of palaces that held priests at their tasks. If the Allmother was dead, her last work had been to re-create her murderer in golden perfection. Where were the other Stoneborn? Genna? Diopater? Even Marit? The only one I saw was Death.
He was smaller than he’d been at Smenos’s palace and less bright, nearly shrunken to the size of a mortal beast, but still deadly to any creature he encountered. He dug priests out of their homes like the roots of an unwanted vine, sapping the divine power of the other Stoneborn with each screaming mortal death. I sucked in a breath to prepare for singing vengeance.
When I reached the first blazing structures, a pair of red-robed death-priests turned their heads at my approach, raising their hands almost languidly to call flame. Gracefully, ceremonially. I sang faster. These two must have spent generations here in the City, counting the sacrifices that arrived in Death’s storerooms and mingling with the other mortals they’d just turned on. Today their lord had commanded them to set the City on fire, and they’d obeyed.
