“It’s not safe here. We should go farther up the beach.”
I opened my mouth to object—we needed to stay close to the injured—but then I did hear something. Yelling.
“Iona! Iona Night-Singer. Where is she?”
Among all the soldiers fleeing down the cliff path was one with the queen’s purple standard embroidered along the edge of his tunic.
Taran grabbed for me, but I raised an arm before he could pick me up. I hadn’t seen any of the queen’s retinue or her small corps of professional soldiers reach the beach yet, and this man looked like a messenger.
The messenger saw my wave and sprinted across the pebbled shore to our group. The rebel acolytes wore nondescript clothing rather than draw fireballs from death-priests, and I was fully covered against cinders and ash, so the queen’s man had to duck and peer beneath my hood for my distinctive red hair before he was satisfied that he’d found me.
My broken foot throbbed despite Taran’s efforts to stabilize it, but I smoothed my face to reassure the soldier as I took his message.
“We’re cut off,” he bit out, pointing at the wildfires above. “Half the army. We’re trapped between the cliffs and the fire. I was the last one who made it out.”
My head jerked up.
“That’s impossible,” Drutalos objected. “We came in from the west. There was nothing behind us. They can just withdraw the way we came in.”
Taran didn’t say anything, eyes still on the cliffs. The beach ended in front of us with rock dropping straight into the ocean, and there was only one path down the cliffs, but the army should have been able to retreat to the west.
“It’s the fucking god of death himself up there,” the messenger said, spit flicking from his lips in his haste. “He’s pulling fire out of the Earth. There! On the point.”
Every other acolyte had leaned in to listen, and there was a sudden babble of frightened voices.
Death’s crimes were the reason for this rebellion, but the lastwe saw of him was the day he destroyed the temple of all the gods. Death was a coward, one who let his priests and his bestial children fight his battles for him, one who only attacked by surprise. Still, he was also a terrible power, one even the other gods had always appeased rather than opposed.
I followed the line of Taran’s gaze and just barely made out a tall figure in golden armor standing on top of the promontory on the opposite side of the trail’s terminus. After seeing him in every flame, every funeral, every pang of hunger or hollow cheek, it was almost confusing to see something shaped like a man, though he was as tall as a house, his armor shining like the noonday sun despite the smoke in the air. Death’s arms were outstretched as his hands tossed wheeling gusts of fire into the fruit groves.
Taran started shaking his head. Sayingno, keep retreating up the beach. We’d thought today was just a few loyalists.
This was my fault.
“The queen and half the army are trapped up there,” the messenger repeated, eyes wild.
Suddenly I could name it. The breakthrough emotion I felt after numbing myself for months wasn’t embarrassment, after all—it was shame. I’d started the rebellion against Death, but how could we defeat a god?
I shouldn’t have asked so many people to fight this hopeless war alongside me.
I should have married Taran the day he asked me.
“Everyone, back up the cliff,” I said. My words were curiously thick until I realized my teeth were chattering. “Sing the blessing of rain. We’ll make a corridor for the army to withdraw.”
“What about the god?” one girl asked, her pretty round face pinched and frightened. Hiwa ter Genna. Another acolyte of the Peace-Queen, like Taran. All of sixteen years old.
I licked ash off my lips. Maiden’s mercy. I had to send them allback up into that fire, and I didn’t know whether I could protect them.
“Taran will heal my foot. And then I’ll find out whether the Maiden’s blessing of night is stronger than Death’s flame,” I said, trying to sound like that would be an interesting experiment in theology, rather than suicide. It was the only thing I could think of that might slow Death long enough for the others to escort the army out through the inferno up above. “I’ll distract him while you get everyone out to the west.”
I turned back to Taran, some tiny part of me hoping he’d thought of a better plan, but he was looking down at my foot, and his face was as pale as mine had to be.
He wrapped a large, strong hand around my ankle, and I waited for him to start the blessing, but he remained silent.
“Taran?” It wasn’t like him to freeze.
Everyone looked at him. Waiting for a reprieve.
Instead, he gently tapped my foot with a fingertip.
