“Backto the Summerlands?” For three hundred years, Wesha had held the Gates closed to immortals. How had he come to the mortal world? Why?
Awi paused as though trying to put her next words delicately. “He got through the Gates three years ago because Wesha’s…sentimental about him. But Genna’s the one that sent him on the errand. Putting the mortal rebellion down.”
“Putting itdown?”
An errand for Genna, who was his mother. Taran had been in the mortal world on an errand for his mother, Genna, the Queen of Heaven, the Peace-Queen. The soot-covered runaway acolyte I’d planned to marry had been on a secret mission for his mother, one of the most powerful Stoneborn—and she wanted my righteous, desperate rebellion against Death, the villain of every single tale of the gods,put down?
Awi had to be wrong. I rejected with my entire soul the idea thatTaran had been sent to stop us. If he’d wanted to put the rebellion down, he could have slipped a knife between my ribs in the first week he knew me. We would never have succeeded without his help—he’d taught me half the blessings I knew how to sing, fought with us against Death’s priests, the loyalist houses—
“Of course,” Awi said, unimpressed. “Of course, put it down! You ungrateful brats stopped sacrificing to the gods who’d blessed you. Turned against the rule of their priests—even killed one of the Stoneborn. What did you think would happen?”
“We stopped sacrificing when Death massacred Wesha’s priests and destroyed the high temple at Ereban. What were we supposed to do?”
“Well, Diopater wanted to send a big wave and wipe you off the map,” Awi said, swinging one enormous foot in a semicircle. “Start fresh. You’re lucky Genna won that argument, sent Taran to bring you in line instead. Didn’t do much for his popularity around here that he made an utter hash of the job.”
My head sloshed with anguished confusion. I’d spent my childhood on my knees, singing praises to the Stoneborn. The last three years falling into a very different kind of devotion. I still wanted to believe that this was Taran being clever, tricking the gods themselves, and at any moment he’d come back and let me in on it. Putting the rebelliondown?
“Why doesn’t he know who I am?” I asked, voice faint.
Awi shook her head dismissively. “He died, and all his power and all his memories died with him. That’s how the Stoneborn are reborn. Made anew by the Allmother from the stone of the Mountain. Brought back to be the god of…well, hard to say what he’s the patron of. Disappointing his mother, probably.”
None of this sounded like Taran. Not the man who knit together the bodies of mortal soldiers, the man who fought and sweated and died with us. Not the man I loved.
I closed my eyes for a moment. Distant music streamed through the windows, but in this room it was quiet. My body clung to the floor like a sack of iron bars. It simply couldn’t sustain this level of distress for long. Human hearts gave way under this kind of pain.
This reprieve of lying on the floor and trying not to think about anything didn’t last, because soon I heard the scrape of furniture being moved outside the door. Awi dove into the form of a tiny bird and took the shelter in the neck of my dress that she’d previously disdained, and I laboriously pulled myself to a seated position for Taran’s return.
8
Taran had losthis fine cloak and tunic somewhere, but he seemed in a good mood nonetheless, considering the dirt and jagged claw marks that covered him all the way up past his elbows. Marit wasn’t with him.
He gave my seat on the floor a curious glance as he went to one of the tiled pools to scrub his arms clean, but he didn’t immediately speak.
“Did you kill them?” I asked when the silence began to press on me. “Those two Fallen, I mean.”
Without looking at me, Taran tipped his head to the side in a half shrug, like he wasn’t totally sure. “Time will tell. But they’re not bothering anyone while buried under Genna’s rhododendron bushes.”
He pulled a towel out of a wooden cabinet and fastidiously dried himself off, wincing in elaborate disappointment when he noticed a spot of blood on his trousers. Sighing, he crossed the room to a clothing chest and rooted through it, eventually taking out a simple pair of linen drawers.
Even though I saw his hands move to the laces at his hips, I was not prepared for him to let everything drop to the floor. I closed my eyes and turned away just in time to avoid seeing more than a flashof muscular thigh. My cheeks heated as I reflexively clapped my hands over my eyes.
Bodies. I’d seen hundreds of bodies, of all shapes and sizes. Sick bodies, healthy bodies, live and dead ones, babies and elderly. I knew in detail how they functioned and how I could fix them. I wasn’t precious about nudity.
But Taran had always been precious aboutme.
“I see you have the infamous delicacy of Wesha’s priests, at least,” he observed, voice dripping with amusement. “Though I might have expected you to wash up when you had the chance.”
Was he calling me dirty?
As I hadn’t bathed since I’d sailed across an ocean, was thrown onto a burning altar, and was thereafter chased by Fallen through the gardens of the immortals, allon his account, I did not look entirely presentable, but he’d previously considered my grooming habits to be not only unobjectionable but the absolute height of sophistication for anyone fighting a civil war. I opened my eyes to glare at him, but he was still dressing, expression challenging as he tied the waistband of his underwear.
“My first impulse upon being locked up was not to take my clothes off.” My voice was weaker than I would have liked.
“Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you.” He said it easily, but the way he said it bothered me—there was a new assumption in his voice that peoplewouldbe afraid of him. He had the confidence of a warrior, the lazy energy of a predator at rest.
I’d always thought he was just very tall, and lean because of that. But he’d filled out since I last saw him. The heavier muscle along his arms and shoulders matched the length of his legs and gave an impression of size and power to match. He was simply not built along ordinary human proportions—he had to have been starving on our diet of charred rabbit and boiled barley mush to ever look like he was.
“I’m not afraid of you,” I retorted, and it might have been more convincing if I’d said it in more than a whisper. He was not convinced, and he gave me a close-mouthed smile to say as much.
