Taran must have seen my thoughts on my face, because his mouth tightened before I could speak. “Don’t ask me today, Iona. Not today. Let’s just find a way out.”
I nodded and batted at my tears with my dusty knuckles. I sniffed the rest back, trying to get myself under control.
It was still him, underneath this glowing shell. Because this must have always been there too.
I put a hand on his chest—for balance, and to reassure myself that he still had a beating heart—then pushed myself up on my good foot to kiss his unsmiling mouth. There was a fine, well-hidden tremble to his lips when they met mine, and realizing how scared he was at once broke my heart and made me feel a tiny bit better, becauseme too, Taran, me too.
He exhaled and wrapped me in his embrace, a slow sway until the scent of lightning had faded and the Underworld fell back into darkness. I heard the priests begin to depart, seizing their lives back from the Stoneborn.
Taran didn’t have to do that. I would never have known to ask. He was better than he was trying to teach himself to be.
“What else?” he asked when I didn’t make a move to find the tunnel to the surface. “Is there a lost kitten down here? You want to besiege Death’s citadel? Find your betrothed and kiss him hello while I watch?”
“I don’t think I can walk back up. Can you carry me?”
Taran nodded in relief to hear a request he could grant, then dipped to gather my legs over one arm while I put mine around his neck. I turned my face into his chest, wishing I could return to the moment when he was carrying me down the cliffs ahead of the fires, the last moment when I’d been able to feel only one thing about him.
30
The City wasn’tfixed two weeks later. Whatever power had kept its columns erect and gilded murals bright had failed, along with Genna’s long peace. The Allmother’s design was falling apart. The flower bushes still bloomed in the endless summer, but there were charred brown tracks through the lawn and trash in the City streets. The ground trembled from time to time, like a wrong step might open a crack in the earth and send us crashing into the sea below. Every moment felt as fragile as the skin of an overripe fruit, ready to split.
I was the only one walking alone down the street from Genna’s sector to Wesha’s; mortal priests hurried together in groups, and even immortals went armed. The Stoneborn were frightened as their world had proven breakable and their eternity limited.
Death, the coward, had retreated as soon as Genna and Diopater reached the City, but with so many of their priests dead, the Stoneborn knew they were diminished and vulnerable to another attack. They could hear the distant sounds of digging—it was only a matter of time before Death reached the Underworld and captive dusk-souls marched through the Summerlands again.
I had my wish fulfilled: the gods now prepared for war against Death.
My eyes were always scanning the horizon for smoke or the rose-streaked sky for wings, so I nearly careened into Marit for the second time. He moved aside to avoid my path, but surprise made me turn to stare at him, and he halted.
Marit had wandered back to the City the day after Death’s attack, newly reborn and confused by all the commotion, but this was the first time I’d seen him myself.
My surprise also took in the two sea-priests who flanked him, middle-aged men with lines around their wary eyes and the baggy blue-striped trousers of their god’s old vestments. Swearing vows anew to the latest incarnation of the mercurial sea god must have been a difficult choice, but I couldn’t blame them for making it. This wasn’t a mortal place, and we were all at the mercy of the gods’ protection while we were here.
Marit himself appeared a little different from what I remembered. Younger, maybe. Even younger than me, with more fullness to his pink cheeks and his seaweed-like hair a mess around his shoulders. It made him look almost sweet.
His storm-gray eyes were calm when they took me in, but he couldn’t place me in my nondescript linen gown.
“Pardon me if I’ve forgotten, but have we met?”
Taran had warned me off the sea god, but we were in the middle of a public street, so I didn’t think I was in much danger.
“Not recently,” I said, and I took his hands loosely in my own. “Hello, Marit. I’m Iona. I’m glad to see you again.”
I decided to remember only that he’d once asked me to dance and that he’d died just as unfairly as all the sacrifices on the bone altar, rather than his life before that. If his priests could forgive him, so could I.
His face brightened when I told him my name. “Iona! I thought that’s who you might be, with your pretty hair.” He turned to his priests and hooked a thumb at me. “This is Taran’s high priestess.”
They immediately ducked their heads in respect, and I took a small step back.
“Oh, I’m…not. Please don’t bow,” I stammered.
Marit laughed. “He said that’s what you’d say.”
“Yes,” I uneasily agreed. “Is Taran here too?”
I had barely seen him since we reached the surface again. He’d been at Lixnea’s palace, against the empty, silent Mountain, conferring with the other Stoneborn. Of course I was glad that he’d convinced them to take Death’s threats seriously, but part of me wondered if he was avoiding the opportunity for me to ask him about which vows he could dissolve.
“We rode back together,” Marit said cheerfully. “He’s lovely, isn’t he? It was very confusing when I woke up on the Mountain alone, but Taran explained everything to me.”
