“I’m not afraid of you,” I whispered.
“I know,” he said gently. “Which is why I wonder whether I ought to tell you to go alone and not come back until you’re sure you’ll stay forever. Because I thought about not letting you. I thought about locking you up until you changed your mind. I think about how…happy I would feel, if I knew nobody would ever take you from me. Even if you hated me for it.”
I swallowed hard. “You’re not your father, Taran.”
“Not yet. But you haven’t ever left me.”
Most people never had the opportunity to be very good or very evil, but that was just luck. Taran hadn’t always chosen to heal the wounded and free the suffering out of a sheer lack of opportunity to harm and control. What was a good person except someone who’d always chosen to do good when he had the chance?
“Well, if the only thing keeping you from committing atrocities is me, then it sounds like it’s very, very important that we stay together,” I said.
He huffed out a pained laugh. “That is the point you would take away.”
I kissed the corners of his mouth to make them tilt in the other direction, and when he captured the whole of my mouth with his own, I opened my lips and deepened the kiss. I lifted my arms to help him get my clothes off and parted my thighs to help him settle between them.
He wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye. I barely knew this language, the one spoken with his mouth against the fragile skin of my neck and his fingers pressing bruises into my shoulders, but I didn’t think he was saying goodbye. That wasn’t what I was saying, anyway.
Come home with me, I said. AndI’ll wear that green scarf at ourwedding.AndIf all we get is a little stone house and one mortal lifetime, we’ll be happy in it.I said it with every swallowed breath and pull of my hands in his hair, as devoutly as I’d ever prayed for mercy.
I’ll love you till the stars fall out of the sky, he whispered with his mouth against my skin.
It wasn’t until he was asleep with his head pillowed on my stomach that I realized that he must have answered my question about what he was going to do at some point, because he’d promised to answer all my questions, but I hadn’t recognized his answer when he gave it.
34
I woke up whensomething slashed my cheekbone hard enough to draw blood. I was up for hours after Taran fell asleep, carding the soft strands of his hair through my fingers and trying to quiet my rising fear that he’d be gone the next day, and I registered the cold hollow where he’d slept next to me even before the sharp pain on my face.
“Stupid, lazy slut,” Awi chirped, launching her raven-self into the air as fast as I could clap a hand over the place her taloned feet had scratched me. There was an ache on that side of my scalp too, like she’d been pulling my hair for a while. “Wake up already! You need to get out.”
It was very dark in the chamber without any of the lamps lit, and the only light came through the gap left by the bricks Taran had pulled from the window, but that was indirect and white, midmorning or later.
“What’s going on?” I mumbled, even as my heart seized to see Taran’s pack missing from its spot next to mine.
“The tower is on fire,” Awi announced, shifting to the form of a sparrow and hopping to the window.
“What? Why?” As soon as she said it, I could smell the oily, musty stink of a house fire, deadly familiar from the war. Smokewas coming up through the cracks in the floorboards, and I was perhaps five stories off the ground. I shot to my feet and began to fumble around for my clothes, discarded on the ground.
“Because I set it on fire,” the bird said like I was being very slow.
“What?” I cried again, nearly dropping my shoes. “Why would you do that?”
“So that nobody can live here,” Awi said, edging into the gap in the window, as though that made sense. She looked back at me with one black eye, briefly dipping her beak in an awkward show of reluctance. “Well, goodbye.”
“Wait!” I ran to the window after her, but she launched into the air and spread her wings in the direction of the sea. The tiny sparrow blurred into an albatross and gained height in the morning light, vanishing from my sight within seconds.
The smell of smoke was stronger already. With shaking hands, I pulled my scarf from the front pocket of my pack and wrapped it around my face. I put my ring back on my finger and groped for the door handle. Warm, but there was nowhere else to go.
A wave of darkness enveloped me when I opened the door, but I plunged through, doing my best to recall the layout of the tower.
The first glimpses of orange flame were almost like homecoming. I’d almost died in flame so many times that fear fell away. Yes, of course this was how it ended. I dreamed this! I went farther down the stairs anyway. Step by step, keeping to the stone wall. I started to choke as the smoke made its way through the flimsy barrier of the silk around my face, but I kept moving, knowing that every second mattered.
I stumbled one floor down, two, how many had there been, exactly? Awi must have set a fire in each storeroom, not trusting the wooden beams inside the concrete pillars of the tower to carry the blaze all the way to the top. By the third, I started feeling dizzy andneeded all my strength to grip the wall. The floors were hot enough that the soles of my boots began peeling away from the shafts, enough that the skin of my feet began to blister. I gagged on ash. Even if I made it out at this point, my lungs were probably too damaged unless a priest of Genna happened upon me in the next few minutes.
I stopped on what I thought was the third level, considering the flames erupting from the open storeroom. More than hot enough to dissolve bone. Hot enough to melt my ring, probably. There would be no trace of me. If I died here, I’d vanish.
What would Taran think, when the armies of Heaven crossed the sea and found nobody waiting for them? He might think I failed. Worse, he might think there was something he should have done to stop me. He might think he’d been wrong, and he should have locked me up somewhere safe, no matter what I said.
If he’d left me today, it had been because he saw no other way to give me a choice to go and a choice to come back. I couldn’t let him think I hadn’t chosen him.
