“Was any of it true?” I asked through a cracked throat.
“Some of it,” Wesha said while Taran gave a harsh laugh. She frowned at her son. “Yes, some of it was, and I’d know better than you, since it started before you were born. My father was Carantos ab Lixnea, the mortal fool Diopater killed for cuckolding him, and my mother handed me off to Lixnea without a second thought.”
“Yes, poor you, left to be raised by the gentlest of the gods amid a court of poets and dreamers,” Taran said mockingly.
“I was a Fallen in a world the Allmother made for gods and their priests. And as soon as I was no longer a sweet baby to hold in her arms, even Lixnea had no patience with me. I grew up lonely.” Taran fell begrudgingly silent, and Wesha turned to me, her young face proud and wounded. “When I was seventeen, Genna finally invited me to the City. Gave me that palace you’ve been staying in, took me into her court—and let it slip that she’d promised me to her own husband as a concubine. As an apology for my birth.”
There had to be more to it, if Taran expected me to be unsympathetic. This part sounded perfectly like Genna, who always spent other people to buy her peace. His face was expectant.
“Needless to say, I wasn’t willing. I decided I’d flee across the ocean, find my father’s family and live as a mortal. But when I reached this shore and tried to cross the Sea of Dreams—I met Napeth instead. Right where this tower was built,” Wesha said.
“And he wasn’t a monster yet,” I said, remembering what Lixnea had told me.
Wesha sighed. “He was beautiful and powerful and kind to me. When I told him what I was running from, he said he wasn’t afraidof Skyfather, and that the Summerlands would be emptier if I left. I thought…then I thought I could stay.”
“But you changed your mind,” I said softly.
“No, not immediately. He gave me everything I asked for. When I told him I was afraid of Diopater, he promised to keep me safe. When I told him I’d been lonely, he promised to love me forever. And when I told him I felt powerless, he gave me half of his. Those blessings you sing—for sleep, for surgery, to end pain—those were his.”
“Which somehow wasn’t enough for you,” Taran said into the wineglass.
“We were happy for a few months while I did my best to push off Diopater’s interest. But then Napeth took me to his citadel in the Underworld, where he’d built me a walled garden full of crystal trees and a wedding bower of night-blooming flowers inside a locked castle. Which was when I discovered that he’d promised me his love and my safety, but not my freedom. He wanted me to be his little songbird, singing in the dark forever while he tended to the dead on their journey. And I realized that my soul was still as mortal as it had ever been.” She looked out the window at the dark sea. “So I ran. I went back to the Moon’s domain. I thought she’d protect me, let me be a child again, not a bride, not someone’s concubine. But then—”
Taran finally met my eyes, expression shadowed as he finished her sentence. “—then, inconveniently, there was me.”
Their tones made Taran’s very existence sound like a tragedy, and my heart ached for how easily he seemed to accept that conclusion.
“You gave him to Genna? The person who tried to sell you to her own husband?” I guessed, my hands curling into fists. How many childbirths had I attended in Wesha’s service? How many feverish babies had I sung back to health? It made a mockery of herentire cult. Wesha hadn’t even cared for her own child, let alone mortal ones.
“Napeth and Diopater had started fighting over me,” Wesha said, eyes downcast. “Lixnea was outraged at Genna’s bargain, so Genna agreed to claim Taran as her own to make it up to her. I thought she might take a little more care with Taran, since he was nearly one of the Stoneborn.”
“And yet you didn’t think to offer me to my father,” Taran said, face rigid with anger. “Who might have actually wanted me.”
Wesha frowned. “The Stoneborn don’tlovethe way people do. You would have been a hostage to use against me, the way he tried to use the entire world against me.”
“The Great War,” I said. “He started it over you.”
“His priests hounded me wherever I went. And he became—horrible. Did things no Stoneborn had ever done before. Murdered and stole. Scorched the world. Genna asked me what I’d take to return to Napeth and make him stop.”
“What was it?” I asked, because Taran’s stony face suggested that there had been no real sacrifice on Wesha’s part. No noble choice to spare the world the consequences of Death’s wrath, like I’d always believed.
“Nothing,” Wesha said bitterly. “I never agreed. I was tricked. She tricked me.”
“You did agree,” Taran said, eyes slitted. “You gave your vows to a dozen of the Stoneborn. That’s why you’re here in this tower, holding the Gates shut.”
Wesha tilted her chin in a challenge. “Genna told me Diopater and Napeth would never give up while they could still win me. So I said I’d marry if she promised me a handsome husband to cherish me, a beautiful home that no one could enter against my will, and the full power of a Stoneborn. This tower was supposed to be ahome, not a prison, and that power was supposed to be my freedom, not a chain to the Gates.”
“But Death was the bridegroom, not some handsome mortal stranger,” I guessed, feeling begrudging compassion for her.
“I’d given my vows, so I had to go through with it,” Wesha said, looking at Taran.
“Youimmediatelytried to get out of it.” Taran’s voice was dropping, angrier. “You askedmeto get you out of it.”
“But you were just a child, and you weren’t strong enough,” the goddess said sadly. “So you stole the stone knives from the Allmother and told me to free myself.”
I bunched my shoulders, thinking of a frightened boy caught by the enormous living Mountain who’d snatched up the gods with her stone hands. Taran had obviously loved Wesha the way children always loved their parents, no matter how bad at the job they were, and he obviously still loved her to be as hurt as he was now, centuries later.
Wesha saw herself as the victim in this story, and to a point, so did I. She’d been betrayed by her mother and treated like a war spoil by the other Stoneborn, had seen her former lover turn hateful and cruel. If she’d made mistakes, they were the same mistakes mortals frequently made in love.
