“Anyway, on the first long march with the queen’s army, neither of you could stand the field rations. He was from a noble family and you…well, I guess you were too. So the two of you convincedeach other that you could raid this wild beehive with nothing but a smoking branch of green wood, and we’d all have honey in our porridge. Of course it didn’t work—you didn’t get any honey, but youdidboth get stung all over. I pulled out the stingers and you sang away the venom, but you felt so bad about it that you turned around and walked an hour back to the last farmhouse we’d passed. You traded your winter cloak to get Acco his jar of honey.”
I laughed and brushed away more tears with my palms.
“Which was when I decided that I’d love you forever.”
I took a deep, shaking breath and pressed my cheek to the wood. I would have sailed across the sea even if I knew it would take years to find him. I’d keep searching as long as it took.
“I know you’re not the person you’re trying to be. I know it better than you do.”
Though I was prepared to sleep against the door if necessary, a few minutes later it cracked open and I scooted out of its way.
We were a ridiculous pair, Taran with his wet hair and me on the floor, but he only sighed and helped me stand on stiff, numb limbs. He was wary and sad and beautiful, and my heart clenched to see all of that on his face. He closed his eyes.
“Fine. I’ll do it,” he said.
31
Taran took myhands in one of his and walked me backwards toward my room, shaking off my attempts at clarification. Fine, he’d break my vows? Fine, he’d come with me?
When I was seated on the edge of my bed, he knelt in front of me with my feet resting on his thighs. He didn’t even have to sing to ease the swelling in my bad foot now, just stroke his thumb along the arch. A careless show of inherited power.
He frowned at my tense, worried expression and leaned forward until his chest was pressed up against my knees.
“If you think you’re in a cage, you’ll just batter yourself to death against the bars,” he said, more to himself than to me. “So, fine. If you want to go, you can go. I’ll break your vows if you ask.” His eyes lifted to mine, and with his jaw clenched tight, he pulled his other hand from behind his back to offer me two different treasures, both stolen: my green scarf, tattered but clean and neatly folded, and my silver betrothal ring. The look in his eyes was urgent enough to still my next breath.
“But you were right. I do want to know if you would have said yes. I do want to know if you’d choose me. So, here’s my last offer. I’ll go to the Painted Tower to fulfill your vows to Wesha and the bird. I’ll retrieve your poor dead betrothed from the Underworldand send him back across the sea. Wesha has to allow it if she promised it to you.”
My hand lifted as if of its own accord and pressed over my wildly beating heart.
“He can go tend to your hapless rebels. Wreak havoc in the mortal world,” Taran said with heated determination. “And you can choose me this time.”
“You’d really go to the Painted Tower? Help me stop the next war?” I asked, even as my vow to him punished me for entertaining what I knew was an impossible idea. There was no third person who could do this for us—only the image of Taran I still held in my heart.
“I’ve tried offering you everything else I have. What else is there?”
He’d be so close if we went to the Painted Tower together. Just one small sea between us and the mortal world. If he’d go that far for me, surely he’d go a little farther.
“Because you want me to be your priestess?” I asked gently.
Taran looked up at me with soft eyes, searching my face. “I know you said no more vows. And marriage vows are stronger than anything I’d have asked you to swear as my priestess. But that’s what you wanted before, isn’t it, someone to love you till the stars fall out of the sky? I actually can, Iona. If I marry you, it is for forever. Isn’t that what we should do?” He didn’t know we’d done this before—him on his knees, my heart trembling in my chest. “Aren’t we in love? Isn’t that what this is?”
It was an echo of the first time he asked me.
Isn’t that what people do when they’re in love?
Say yes, nightingale.
“Yes. Yes, Taran, we’re in love,” I said, gasping for breath after I said it, and oh, it felt like the shard of obsidian that had been lodged in my own heart since he died loosened and let it fully beat again.
The light in the entire room brightened with his smile. “I was looking for you,” Taran said, putting scarf and ring aside and wrapping his arms tightly around my calves, chin resting on my knee. “When I woke up, I couldn’t remember anything, but I knew something was missing. Someone. I looked through all of the Summerlands, and I felt nothing. I went down to the Underworld and walked through Death’s citadel, but it was empty, and nothing there called to me either. Smenos’s price for a boat was too high, so I went to Marit. The night I found you, I was planning to ask him to take me across the sea in his chariot. And then I found you and it was like—finally I could breathe. I could rest. I could sleep. I had you again.”
“You tried to make me do your laundry!” I objected, laughing when Taran stood up and pushed me down on the bed.
“I thought I needed a priest. Everyone else had them, and I had those plans set aside for my big villa that was supposed to be full of people. I thought that was what I’d been missing—but it was just you.”
His big hands cupped my waist through my loose gown, gripping me with restrained need.
“Tell me you missed me too. Even if you didn’t choose me the first time.”
