“The bone is broken here and here,” he explained in an oddly distant voice, like we had all the time in the world. “You can’t put any weight on it for six weeks or it won’t heal right.”
“What?” Taran could knit bones with a couple of minutes of chanting. “I can’t wait for it to heal. You need to fix it now.”
He gave another tiny shake of his head, tangled dark hair falling over his forehead, then stood up and gestured for everyone else to follow. I didn’t understand what was happening.
“Like she said,” Taran told the others, turning away from me. “Build a corridor until the line of fire breaks. I’ll handle Death.”
I grunted a rejection and grabbed Hiwa’s hand to haul myself to one unsteady foot with her help, balancing between her and Taran. Neither Taran nor I couldhandleDeath. We could at most delay him, and I wouldn’t risk Taran’s life too.
“Hiwa, please,” I told the little acolyte, pointing at my ankle.Taran wasn’t the only one who could mend broken bones, just the best at it.
But he stuck out a palm to counter my order.
“Stop,” he said, his tone harsh and entirely unfamiliar. “You’re not going, Iona. You’ve done enough.” My back snapped rigid, and so did the spine of everyone else in earshot. I hadn’t heard my name from his lips in years—it wasnightingale, sweetheart, my love—and I gasped like he’d slapped me.
There was a brief flash of regret on his face, but only for how he’d said it, not that he did.
Starting the first riot against Death was my very thin qualification for leadership, but it was one that had never been challenged before. Taran was the oldest among us, not to mention better at most of the blessings we wielded during the war, but this was the first time he’d ever opposed me in public. The others were as thrown by it as I was, and they weren’t sure who to listen to.
“I’ll heal it when I get back,” he said, softer now. I was shocked again that he thought, after three years, that I couldn’t tell when he was lying.
“No. Don’t do this,” I whispered.
One corner of his mouth pulled to the side in a familiar half smile. I opened my mouth to object again, but he grabbed my chin hard enough to bruise and kissed me with none of his usual finesse, just desperation and a bitter farewell. My lips were chapped and swollen from the fires, making the heat of his mouth more painful than the press of his fingers, and I was crying before his lips left mine.
“You started this war. I’ll finish it,” he said softly, pressing one more brief kiss to my cheek. His eyes held mine, liquid and intent. “And I’ll love you till the stars fall out of the sky.”
“I saidno,” I started to babble, throat clenching with horror. I’d contemplated my own death every day, but not even for a secondhad I allowed myself to imagine Taran’s. “Go with everyone else. Keep them safe, I’ll go, I’ll do it, please, not you—”
Taran still had one hand on my chest, and I’d thought he was holding it over my heart out of sentimentality, but he was actually unknotting my new silk scarf from around my neck. He neatly filched it, then favored me with that shattering half smile again before wrapping the fabric around his own face to ward off the smoke. With his next move, he stole one of the stone knives off my belt, because he wasn’t even armed.
His eyes left mine as he turned to Drutalos. “Get her out of here!”
With an apologetic whimper, Drutalos evaded my attempt to block him and grabbed me around the waist. He dragged me over his shoulder and pinned my wrists against his hip with one hand. I heard Taran and the others go as Drutalos began to haul me up the beach, shaking off my ineffective struggles. His shoulder in my gut nearly had me heaving up my breakfast, but I kept fighting to get free, to get back to Taran.
I screamed at Drutalos to let me go, but the treacherous bastard just whined and trudged faster through the sand.
I hadn’t even said goodbye. I hadn’t even told Taran I loved him.
Drutalos got me perhaps half a mile north before I was under control enough to sing. I was crying so hard that I could barely push the words out, but at least he didn’t recognize the melody. I sang three measures of the Maiden’s blessing of night, the song that gave me my name, and as soon as her power reached my lips, the other acolyte dropped like a stone, limbs falling slack. We collapsed in a tangle on the beach.
The Maiden’s blessing could be dangerous under the best circumstances, so I spent precious seconds to roll him over and check his airway before looking back for Taran. But there was too much smoke. The entire sky was bruise-colored and yellow, and it had already swallowed his figure.
I had never managed any but the simplest of the Peace-Queen’s blessings in three years of trying. I could not have sung the blessing to heal my foot even without tears clogging my throat, so I didn’t try. Instead I heaved and sobbed my way through a very tricky blessing of the Maiden, modified to direct her power toward myself instead of a patient. I got it on my fourth try: I deadened the nerves from my knee down to my toes, and I stood. My foot held. I would reckon with the damage later, if I lived.
Riding this wave of the Maiden’s mercy, I sprinted back down the beach, my breath coming ragged and weak through my chest from the fear and the smoke. Even on a broken foot, I ran as fast as I ever had, eyes fixed on the cliff where Taran had gone. It was so utterly unlikely that we’d both survived so far that I found a childlike faith that if I just ranas fast as I could, I’d make it in time, and the Maiden would protect me and Taran both. I was out of the habit of praying with simple words, but I cried the Maiden’s sacred names on every breath, begging for speed and strength.
Maiden, I did all this in your name, please help me now.
I wasn’t more than halfway to the trailhead before the explosion lifted me off the ground.
Feeling the blast and hearing it were two separate disasters, but they both ended when I hit the sand. Knowing what it meant was the catastrophe that kept rolling through me long after the aftershocks had faded, all the stones had landed in the sea, and my seared lungs had found the air again.
How could a god die? They didn’t die like people did, quiet and still. Death was torn screaming out of the world, his form dissolving into spite and destruction, and his ending took half the cliff with him. The Allmother herself mourned her child, and she made the world shake and roil in her grief. I heard later that the earthquake lasted only seconds, but the Maiden’s belated mercy took away my memory of the rest of the day.
When the survivors reached the promontory, skin singed and ears still ringing, we found only stone and ash. The queen would have liked a trophy, but there was no shining armor, no crown, and no golden blood on the hillside. Nothing to show for three years of war or to prove that our tormentor was gone forever. Our victory was marked in silence and loss, known only by the absence of our gods and their blessings.
We did eventually find Taran’s body. The sea brought it back the next day, still wearing my scarf.
