I could do no more than bare my teeth and pant as he shook his head at my folly, but when he sighed and reached to pick me up, I managed to grit out a singlestop.
“It’s late, Iona,” he said, but he didn’t touch me as I slowly rolled back to my stomach, then dragged my knees underneath me.
I wiped the blood off my face with the sleeve of Wesha’s dress.If I was going to live, and if I was going to have to live here, at least I wouldn’t have to wear it again.
I had to take Taran’s hand to get to my feet, but I tried to make it back without more aid. As though I had any dignity left. My knees buckled at the threshold of Wesha’s palace, and Taran, who’d been shadowing my slow shuffle, gave up on letting me walk. He scooped me into the same embrace as the day he died, frowning when it made a sob squeak out of my throat.
If he’d said anything likeI didn’t ask you to come here, oryou made those vows on purpose, I really could have hated him, even though those would have been true things to say. Instead, he just pressed his cheek to the top of my head and murmured, “I know, I know.”
It didn’t sound like a lie, but how could he possibly understand?
He carried me inside and set me down on his cot, where the bedclothes were still warm from his body. After a moment, I heard the door close.
He went somewhere else to sleep; I didn’t see him again for two days.
12
The first giftTaran ever gave me was a single perfect snowflake in a tin cup. Winter had come early that year, and he’d been monitoring the clouds with growing excitement for days, like he’d never seen snow before. He shook the frame of my tent just after dawn.
Look, nightingale, it’s snowing!
When I blearily stuck my head out, he presented the cup to me with a flourish, only to find that the snowflake had melted in the transferred heat of his hands. He ran off shouting that he’d catch me another one, returned ten minutes later with a selection.
I’d only known him for four months then, and I’d already fallen in love with him.
When Taran finally came back to Wesha’s palace, he brought me more gifts. As promised, he found me a set of bedroom furniture and arranged it in the solar for my use. A bed—better than the cot where he slept—and a trunk for my clothes, plus a small desk with a polished bronze mirror. He brought me new clothes. Two silver combs and a glass bottle of rosewater. A kithara with ten strings and a lyre with ivory inlay. Small and beautiful objects he readily admitted to pilfering from the other Stoneborn.
I wasn’t familiar with how Taran might go about courtingsomeone, as every gesture I’d recognized as romantic had come after we were already betrothed, but it felt as though he was not so much wooing me as attempting to tame me, the way a small boy might try to lure a wild creature inside his house with patience and a handful of grain.
“I’m your prisoner, not your priestess. I don’t need any of this,” I told him, dumping the latest pile of expensive baubles on his bedroom floor.
“Prisonershatepresents,” he agreed with syrupy sarcasm before flouncing off to another of Genna’s endless calendar of ceremonial parties.
When he reappeared to ply me with plates of prepared food and other obvious bribes, he was unforthcoming about the intentions of the Stoneborn. While Genna’s plan for a cold peace was prevailing by default, he admitted that every immortal could feel the silence that had replaced the words of devotion formerly lofted across the divide from the mortal world. Sacrifices no longer arrived in the storerooms, and the residents of the City were growing anxious as the gods’ power slowly dwindled. Not Taran though—I would think, if I hadn’t seen him with my knife in his hand only a few nights ago, that he was perfectly content.
I thought often about leaving tacks in his bed.
Weeks into our standoff, I woke a couple of hours after dawn to Taran shouting my name and banging a silver serving platter against my door.
I glared at him over my thick feather coverlet; he’d never previously disturbed my privacy, although he made no secret of his scorn for the hours I was keeping.
“Finally. You’d think I had you making bricks all day, the amount you sleep,” Taran said.
“I know a blessing that will stop the blood flow to every extremity below your heart. You know the ones,” I mumbled at him.
“Brilliant. Would love to learn it. But right now you need to get up and pack. We’re leaving.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.” I rolled back over.
Undeterred, Taran threw open the shutters to let the sourceless morning light in, then snatched the coverlet off of me. I balled up around a pillow, but he grabbed one ankle and dragged me to the edge of the mattress while I groaned in protest.
“I know you’re very busy feeling sorry for yourself,” he said, still cheerful, “but I didn’t actually ask. We’re going, and you can walk wearing clothes you picked out for yourself, or you can go in a nightgown, thrown over my shoulder.”
I begrudgingly got up and shoved some clothes into a pack as he hovered, nearly bouncing on the balls of his feet. I’d cut up the terrible carnelian-encrusted frock to make a hood, and when I was dressed, Awi hopped into the space between the fabric and my hair, uninvited but apparently determined to keep an eye on me.
Taran shot me an unaffected look of glee when we reached a wide stable yard on the City’s outskirts, and I saw the reason for his good mood. There was a chariot constructed of half an enormous, iridescent clam shell yoked to a team of four silver-dappled horses, and not even Marit’s position as driver could entirely dampen my awed reaction to the gorgeous creatures. Marit’s horses were famous—enormous and unearthly, with hooves that did not quite touch the ground they pawed. Legend said they could run across the crests of the ocean waves, though it would have been centuries since Wesha let anyone test that myth. As Taran was watching me closely out of the corner of his eye to see if I was impressed, I kept my face blank.
“Where are we going?”
