Nobody confronted me as I wandered through numbingly perfect lawns and gilded colonnades with an open plate of seafood. I saw sky-priests setting up a race course and lawn games, and I gave them a wide berth. It wasn’t my idea of heaven, but then again, the only paradise I’d ever imagined for myself was the house with a plum tree that Taran had promised at our betrothal.
Solitude was a novelty, one I couldn’t enjoy. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been really alone—not during my training, not during the war, especially not after Taran died.
Maybe the company had helped though. The care of my friends couldn’t banish the black beast of grief, but they’d kept it from digging its claws into me. I felt it tear me open when I found a kithara hanging on a peg in Taran’s sitting room. He played beautifully, but we’d only had my single instrument, and Taran would laugh and say he’d rather listen to me unless I begged him with my nose pressed into the corner of his jaw and my arms wound around his neck. I had hoped to give him his own for a wedding present.
When my eyes began to water, I sternly told myself that Taran was alive and I could go see him right now if I wanted to, but I couldn’t make my heart believe in a Taran that I couldn’t hold in my arms.
I took his kithara down instead. It was heavier and more ornate than my own, but it felt natural in my hands when I tuned it and launched into practice scales. I had always thought more easily with something in my hands, but by the time afternoon slipped into night, I hadn’t hit upon any better idea than knocking Taran out and dragging him up the Mountain in a sack.
My hands were getting tired when the door flew open hard enough to crack against the opposite wall. I jumped to my feet, but when Taran poked his head into the room, he had high color in his fair cheeks and a smile gracing his lips. I wasn’t concerned until I saw he had Marit’s arm draped over his shoulders, and the other god had a golden carafe of wine clutched in his fist. By the way they were leaning on each other, they were well into their cups.
“My new priestess. Were you playing?” Taran said fuzzily, seeing me with his kithara. “I don’t mind, do continue.”
I hesitated as Taran dropped Marit on the divan where I had slept the night before. The sea god’s expression was morose, and I was afraid of the scent of wine and salt that followed him into the room, but Taran shut the door and slouched into the chair next to mine with an expectant attitude.
“What? Oh, yes. I like music too,” Marit said, blearily trying to focus on me. “I think.”
“Please,” Taran said after a moment, finally remembering the word. He folded his hands over his stomach and stretched out his long legs, posture relaxing as I hesitantly began to play again. His expression was indulgent, which made me want to throw something at him, but I also remembered Awi’s advice to win him over, and my music was all I had to recommend me.
Marit’s face crumpled as I picked out the first notes of a simple instrumental ballad, and he loudly choked back a sniffle.
“Did something happen?” I asked Taran without stopping.
“Genna’s reception this afternoon was…not well attended.”
“They all hate me,” Marit said.
He looked to me and Taran as though expecting us to contradict him. I wasn’t inclined to—it was hard to feel warmly about any god who’d killed his own priests, intentionally or not, much less a god who would consider a tsunami to be a reasonable option in any scenario.
“They don’t hate you,” Taran said, a beat too late. He covered his sour expression by standing and refilling Marit’s carafe from a ceramic cask in the corner. He poured out two more glasses, which I ignored and which Marit refused by drinking from the carafe instead.
“If anyone, they hate Wesha, for putting us in this situation in the first place,” Taran added.
Marit tilted the carafe back and drained it. He tried again to focus on me.
“Do I know you?”
“My new priestess,” Taran said again.
“I’m not,” I said, but I finished the song anyway, thinking hard before my next piece.
If this were an epic, I’d change Taran’s heart with my music. There were stories that went like that—I hadn’t come up with the idea of playing for Wesha all on my own. Taran would hear me sing, and he’d magically be restored. Hadn’t he loved my singing most of anything about me? Couldn’t it connect us despite his lies, his death and rebirth, the distance between one of the Stoneborn and the runaway acolyte he’d pretended to be? I started to tell myself that story, even as my wounded spirit told me that nothing was ever that pretty.
Taran had a favorite ballad, a love song, though the lyrics didn’t say the word. It was about a garden full of flowers that bloomed month after month, with each verse describing a different blossom. The love was in the subtext: the reason that the unnamed gardener would tend the earth in every season and describe the flowers so sweetly.
Taran used to bring me flowers on the first of the month, even in the dead of winter—Genna’s power, used frivolously—and I’d tuck them behind my ear and sing this song, which flattered my vocal range and showed off my ability with a ten-stringed instrument.
At first, I almost thought it worked.
He went still when I began to sing, eyes rounding and focusing on me. Halfway through, he sat up and leaned in, hanging on every note. His intensity gave me hope. Did part of him remember hearing this before? In squalid barns, in freezing army camps? With his head resting against my thigh?
In my garden in spring, the plum trees will bloom, all white and snow do I grow in this season.
While I sang he didn’t smile, but a small line appeared between his eyebrows. He could have been hearing some echo in his heart. He could have been realizing there was some rich world of mortal thought and feeling that he’d forgotten.
“That was lovely,” Marit said when I was done.
I didn’t respond, breath held for Taran’s reaction. My heart squeezed when a smile dawned across his face, large enough to make his eyes crinkle and the dimples pop in his cheeks.
