I wouldn’t have gone without you, Taran.
I should have told him that.
I was just going to have to live.
“Taran!” I yelled, thinking of all the times he’d heard me when I thought he wouldn’t. I coughed smoke from my lungs. Marit, I’d sing Marit’s blessing. We never used it for putting out fires, because the waves it called were just as likely to wash away rescuers as extinguish a blaze, but maybe Taran would look back from the Mountain and see the sea change.
My voice was thin and reedy as I stumbled a few more steps down the grand staircase.Waverider, ocean lord, dancer on the waters—was there a key change in the chorus? I couldn’t think straight.
I slumped against the wall, feeling the hem of my dress begin tosmolder. Nothing had happened. Maybe Marit didn’t have enough priests yet, or maybe I wasn’t singing it right. I was only trained to be a maiden-priest, after all, and Wesha had abandoned me, just like Taran had said she would. He’d set us both free, but we would both disappoint him, when he’d never failed anyone he loved in his entire life.
The stones of the tower vibrated under my feet, and it could have been the waves or it could have been the mortar melting. I fell to my knees, and my head swam too much to stand again.
I stopped praying to Marit and thought of Taran instead.
I’m sorry. I really did try to survive this time.
35
I woke with Taran’smouth on mine and his breath forcing its way into my lungs.
That first lurch of my diaphragm to push out the foreign air and the pounds and pounds of black soot in my throat hurt like an arrow to the chest. Worse, actually, than the time I’d taken an arrow to the chest. My throat cracked and tore as I rolled in the sand, body convulsing in an attempt to expel everything I’d breathed in. I gagged and hacked, desperately seeking control of my most basic functions. But I was alive, and Taran was holding me.
Surprised to be alivewas a recurring realization, but it had never felt as sweet at this one.
Every inch of my body ached when Taran snatched me up to cradle my body against his—not just the parts of me that had been singed, but the ribs he’d broken when he’d restarted my heart and the bare skin that shivered under a steady downpour of rain. He tangled his hands in my hair, making a noise that was close to a sob as he clutched me closer to his pounding heart.
My eyes were too gummy to see more than the vaguest shapes around me, but there were flames farther down the beach, and the shadow of the tower loomed from only a few feet away.
“What happened?” I tried to croak, but my throat was too raw to force even a single word out.
“Don’t try to talk,” Taran said, wiping my face off with his sleeve. “It took ten choruses ofPeace-Queen, beauty and gracejust to get your heart beating again.”
I let my body go limp again under the familiar weight of Taran’s prayers. His voice wrapped around me like a velvet shawl while Genna’s power dripped down my throat, soothing my burns and mending the cracked ribs. It was nearly painless—nobody is better at this than Taran, I thought deliriously.
When he was done, I nestled my head into the curve of his neck, savoring the tiny contact of my wet skin against his much warmer body.
“Awi set the boats on fire too?” I mumbled.
“Wesha didn’t want anyone following her, I suppose.” His tone was humorless and bleak.
“But why would Awi help Wesha escape?”
Wesha was the one who’d kept Awi trapped here for three hundred years!
Taran forced a dark chuckle through a chest that still sounded tight with fear for me. “AwiisWesha. Another thing she never told her priests. Only her mortal form was trapped here while she held the Gates.”
At that mention of the Gates, I instinctively looked for the entrance to the Underworld. There were a few phosphorescent green dusk-souls at the end of the beach, but instead of drifting toward the mouth of the cavern, they milled back and forth by the boats as though confused.
Taran followed my gaze.
“We’ve really done it this time, nightingale,” he said with one hand pressed to his forehead, anger beginning to replace relief in his voice. “Wesha left the Gates wide open.”
Open to the gods, open to Death, open to every dusk-soul in the entire Underworld? Did Wesha really hate us all that much, that she’d destroy the world as soon as she got her freedom? What happened to all that regret?
“But she told me—”
“She lied. They’re all liars. Itoldyou that.” He was working himself into a well-deserved fury.
