I’d steeled myself to see the corona of power that had haloed Taran ever since the attack on the City, but I was still startled to find him in Death’s gold-embossed armor. It fit him perfectly where it curved around the visible musculature of his arms and legs, suggesting that it had been made to fit him. He held the plumed helmet under his arm, and I was glad I didn’t have to meet his green eyes through the snarling mouth of the lion-maw faceplate, at least.
He was impossibly beautiful and terrifyingly inhuman in it. I understood why someone might worship him, and I felt like a villain for wishing nobody would. I wanted to strip the armor off him and drag him out of here with me. Knock him out and pray that when he woke up, he forgot the past year too.
“Was there more fighting?” I asked through a dry mouth.
Taran glanced down at his spotless breastplate. “No, just thought I ought to look the part today.”
“What part?”
He smiled at me. Only his lowered eyelashes suggested anyfatigue—the rest of his face was taut and strong. “If we’re to re-form the armies of Heaven, the Stoneborn agreed we’d need a general. Of course it took them two weeks to agree on who.”
My stomach lurched. “You?”
Taran nodded and raked a hand through his hair with the segmented gauntlet still on, leaving furrows in the dark waves. “Today they gave me their vows. On the battlefield, I can command any priest in the Summerlands. Speak with their patron’s authority.”
No wonder I could taste it on my tongue, the charge in the room. He held out his arm as though observing the way the light clung to his skin now.
He used to pick the onions out of his food. He once brought me a snowflake in a tin cup.
Look, nightingale, it’s snowing.
When he spotted my expression, his smile faltered. “I thought you’d be pleased.”
I bought myself time to respond by standing and putting his kithara away.
“What are you going to do with an army?” I asked cautiously.
“Whatever we did last time. I assumed you’ll remind me—I should have brought you along, but I thought I wouldn’t be able to pry you away from Genna’s people before they were all healed.”
“We didn’t have an army. The queen had the army. We had a few dozen half-trained acolytes who hadn’t been ordained yet.”
That made him laugh. “Then I like our odds even better this time, darling, if we don’t have to fight Death with a bunch of children.”
He tracked my plummeting mood, began pulling off bits of his armor with a puzzled frown. The gauntlets, the bracers. I moved to help him with the buckles on his breastplate.
“I thought you’d want me to take control of the defense,” he said in a quieter voice. “Death attacked the City itself, which hedidn’t even do in the Great War. It won’t end now until he’s sworn to peace again or Wesha takes him back. And of the two of them, believe it or not, he’s the one who cares more about the interests of the other Stoneborn.”
“No, I know,” I said, avoiding his gaze until I could pull the breastplate off him. “I just don’t like the idea of you leading an army of priests into battle.”
“I’m not very keen on it either, but who else would you like to do it? Diopater and Marit both volunteered.”
I cringed at the disaster either of those would be for the mortals still living here. Or worse, the mortals across the sea.
“Marit said he was going across the ocean,” I tentatively said.
“You saw Marit? I told you not to go near him unless I was there.”
“It was in the street, and he had a couple of his priests with him. He said he was planning to return to the mortal world, and the other Stoneborn, too.”
“Not immediately,” Taran said with a frown. “But Death’s power grows with every priest he can kidnap and sacrifice, and ours diminishes. Can’t you feel the earthquakes?”
“So you’ll get more worshippers from the mortal world? Taran, if an army of priests and immortals arrives on the shore, it’ll be a bloodbath.”
“If an army arrives on the mortal shores, I’ll be leading it. You really think I’d butcher the peasants just because they won’t swear vows?”
“I think you’d defend yourself if you were attacked,” I said, hands twisting against each other.
Taran exhaled, his frustration palpable. “And of course you’d be sympathetic to mortals who attacked the gods whose blessings they need to survive without any provocation.”
