We should get married, Taran had announced one morning as we swept up the farm kitchen where a dozen of us had slept in a huddle for warmth the night before. Apropos of nothing. We’d been fighting Death’s forces for months, and the main variation in our days was the degree of desperation. At the moment of his unexpected proposal, I’d felt something of the same shock I felt right now, the sense that I’d failed to notice something important when it had been obvious to everyone else. I had also wondered if he might be teasing me. Embarrassment nearly made me run out the door.
Why would we get married?I’d asked him instead. I tried even then to conceal what I felt, though I instantly decided I would never speak to him again if he dared mock the beautiful secret thing I’d carried through a year of war and destruction. I still recalled the exact look on his face, because it colored my every view of the world after. The way he tried to smile at me, heartbreakingly vulnerable when he was so rarely straightforward about anything.
That’s what people do when they’re in love, isn’t it?
I loved a man who didn’t exist. I didn’t know why the gods had done many of their great and cruel works, and I doubted they felt love the way I understood the meaning of the word, but at a minimum, every moment I had known Taran had been based on a lie.
I wished I could cry, but I just shook. I noted in a distant, clinical way that I was experiencing symptoms of shock and someone should wrap me in a blanket. It would have been a relief to pass out or stop breathing or feel my heart seize in my chest, but time continued to pass, the way it had stubbornly continued after Taran’s death, when I had wanted it to end.
After half an hour or so, the unfamiliar ache of inaction prodded me to lift my head.
There was only me. Maybe there had only ever been me. But, as I had noted when I landed in the Summerlands, I could still decide what to do. I would get free if I could.
I was in a room with ornate black-and-white tiles covering the floor and walls and three fountains running from invisible pipes into hip-deep pools for bathing. Carved cedar clothes chests and a stand mirror made up the furniture. The only door was behind me. There were open windows high in the walls, probably too narrow to fit myself through. I jumped for one anyway, pulling myself up with all the strength remaining in my exhausted limbs to look out, and came nose to beak with a startled little owl. Awi.
She fluttered to a perch on the sill as I fell on my rear out ofsurprise. My reaction time was better than she’d expected when I sprang up to catch her in my trembling hands, and I evaded beak and talons to pull an immediate target for my anger into the room.
“Come here, bird, you’re going to answer some questions,” I hissed, digging my fingers into dappled brown feathers. Her circular eyes went even wider with betrayal before she shifted, and then I had my hands wrapped around the long, naked neck of an angry, feathered creature the size of an ox, standing on long legs capped with deadly, finger-sized talons. She immediately kicked me in the stomach, and I let go.
I staggered back, trying to get control of myself. Awi might be the least of the immortals in this world, but she could probably throw me through a wall if she put her mind to it.
“Glad to see you’re alive!” she snapped.
“Am I?” I asked her. I hadn’t been certain. I remembered Wesha cutting my throat and feeding me to the altar.
She only rolled her beady eyes at me.
I touched my throat again, where there was still a clot of dried blood. I was tired and so, so lost. My last surge of energy expiring, I sank to the floor, then to my back. Even the ceiling was tiled. Beautiful abstract shapes in black and white and rose, to match the single wall mural of dawn rising over the Mountain. I’d never seen anything so grand as this bathing chamber, and I’d been to the royal palace and the high temple at Ereban.
“Who is he?” I asked the ceiling.
“Who?”
“Taran.”
“You found him already?” Awi asked, sounding pleased.
“Obviously. Who is he?” I demanded again. “You knew his name.”
“Taran ab Genna?”
“Yes!” I almost shouted. “Who is he?”
Awi ducked into my field of vision, her strange, shovel-beaked face somehow judgmental. “Everyone knows him. ‘Taran, son of Genna.’ The bouncing baby bastard Genna foisted on her husband. Her infrequent pride and occasional joy.”
“Genna, the Queen of Heaven,” I managed.
“Did you not know this?”
“No, I did not know this. Of course I did notknow this.”
“You came all the way here, and you thought he was just some mortal?” This was delivered with even more judgment.
I bared my teeth at her in a useless snarl as my stomach throbbed with another lurch of distress.
“He’s…he’s a god? Or one of the Fallen?”
Awi gave a short laugh. “He’s an arrogant little pain in the ass, is what he is. He’s got a good streak of mortal blood in his veins, but since he came back to the Summerlands, he’s been saying he’s one of the Stoneborn.”
