Her face fell. “So you’re going to tell Taran to leave me here?”
I shook my head. Even if I was callous enough to demand that Wesha bind herself to the horrific lord of the Underworld for eternity, I couldn’t ask Taran to be the one who imprisoned her.
“I think you should choose. If you want to be the goddess ofmercy, you should choose that. Stay here. Hold the Gates closed. Tell Death yourself that he can still decide to stop. But it’s not a sacrifice if we make you do it.”
For most of my life, I woke up and lay down praying to Wesha, goddess of mercy. There was no meaning in her true story—just wickedness and tragedy and the echoes they had spread across the entire world. That didn’t make mercy meaningless though. If it was up to me, I’d show it to her even if she had none for us.
I excused myself from the table and left the Maiden with the dishes and her regrets.
Taran had storedmy packs in the vacant priests’ barracks, a pointed message that I pointedly ignored, and I tried doors on each floor until I found him. As in every other room but the top chamber, the window had long ago been crudely bricked up, but Taran had pushed a few blocks out to create a small porthole with a view of the night and sea, and he sat on the simple cot below it.
Taran held a kithara and pick, and he was trying to play a ballad, unsuccessfully. When he closed his eyes he could follow the melody a bit, but every time he opened them to look at his hands, he fumbled the notes. He’d forgotten how to play.
When he saw me, he tossed the instrument to the foot of the bed and flopped over to face the wall. He was already stripped to his waist, so I put out all the lamps except the one on the nightstand and crawled in with him. The linens were clean and crisp and new. Nobody had ever visited Wesha.
His body was stiff and unwelcoming until I wormed my arm under his elbow and pressed my cheek into the gap between his shoulder blades, and then I felt him unwind by fractions until he covered my hand with his own, right over his heart’s reassuring thud.
He ran a few degrees hotter than other people, and I didn’t know if that was a trait all immortals shared or something he’d inherited from his father. I’d thought of it as unique to Taran.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
He pulled my arm more closely around him. “What do you want me to do?”
Even though I was fairly certain he knew how I’d answer, I responded anyway. “Let her go. Let me go.” I paused, spoke with my lips directly against his skin. “Come with me.”
He craned his head back, made a counteroffer. “Stay.”
I didn’t voice my refusal, just tightened my arms and closed my eyes, summoning every memory that told me who Taran really was, because he was mine more than he’d ever been anyone else’s.
“Wesha is selfish, and that selfishness turned Napeth from a caretaker to a tyrant,” he warned me. “She’s only thinking of herself, no matter what she told you. She’ll disappoint you.”
“All children are selfish, and she never got a chance to be anything else. And you—you’re not giving yourself a chance either.”
At every turn, he’d sacrificed himself for others. Wesha. Marit. Me. If he was capable of it, so was Wesha. And even if she wasn’t, it wasn’t right to found Genna’s peace on her daughter’s unwilling sacrifice.
What the two of us had given up had been given freely. I had to believe that mattered.
Taran rubbed fingertips along the crest of my knuckles almost to the point of pain, his muscles still tense.
“Can you promise me that this is the last one? Say we convince your mortal queen not to throw her people against the ships of the Stoneborn when they arrive. Will that be enough? Can we go home then, if the other gods forgive me? Would you stay with me longer than the length of one mortal life, if I do this for you?”
“I don’t have a single secret from you now. Do I have all of yours?” I murmured against his back.
“Yes,” he said after a moment, and he sounded honest.
“I don’t remember my father’s name. My mother left me with the maiden-priests when I was six, and I never looked for her again. You’re not your parents, Taran, and neither am I. We’re our choices. I can’t say what will happen tomorrow or when we reach the mortal shore, but I’ll probably want to do exactly what you imagine I will. I will love you with every single heartbeat. I will never want to be apart from you for a single minute of my life. I will still have made every mistake I ever made—and I’ll probably make a lot more. I can’t promise more than that.”
He exhaled, a long, painful sound in the near darkness. I could feel his power swirling through the room, clinging to my skin and battering the stone walls around us as he struggled with what I’d asked him to do.
“I don’t want to go. This good person you thought I was, who was trying to help—I don’t think I ever was that. I think I knew better than to join your rebellion, and I did it anyway. For you, Iona. And so if I go with you—that’ll be the only reason.”
He rolled over to face me, nearly nose to nose. There was a shine to his irises that hadn’t been there before—a glow clinging to him even in this quiet moment—but I brushed my lips against the solemn line of his mouth until the tense set of his jaw dissolved.
“What do your reasons matter now? All that’s left is what you did and what I remember. Why don’t you just let that be the whole truth?”
Taran lifted his hands to my face, thumbs pressing against my cheekbones.
“Because I know you think I became a better person, but I wonder if I got worse. The list of things I wouldn’t do to keep you getsshorter and shorter. That ought to scare you. It scares me, sometimes.”
