“Aren’t you?” the Moon said gently. “You remind me a bit of her—though not her priests, who were very stuffy. The little Fallen girl I raised.”
“You raised Wesha? Not Genna?”
Lixnea flicked her eyes toward the ballroom.
“Wesha’s father was a moon-priest. That was no secret, even if it was a shame. Do you not tell this story?” When I shook my head, she ducked hers in fond remembrance. “Her father was Carantos ab Lixnea. He was so handsome, and so talented, that I brought him across the sea before he took his vows. Ah, that boy! When he sang, even the birds gathered to listen, and the Stoneborn too. I lost him to Genna—the personal attention of the Peace-Queen must have turned his head. Poor child had more in the way of looks than common sense. Of course, Skyfather then scattered his body across the width of the Summerlands when he found out Genna had strayed, which made me rather cross, but Wesha’s arrival a few months later made for some small recompense.” Lixnea sighed at the memory, looking up into the sky at those luminous, too-near stars. One seemed to wave at her. “I love my children, but I had them when the world was young, and they’ve been out of my arms for a long time. I was glad to have another baby to hold when Genna dropped Wesha here. I should have raised Taran too. I would have done a better job of it than Genna.”
I swallowed hard. Part of me wanted to know the entire story,and part of me hated everything I’d never known about Taran. But ignoring the truth didn’t change it, and if I was ever going to escape this tangle between Taran and the Maiden, I wanted to know where it began.
“Is there more?” I asked Lixnea. “I only know the Maiden’s story from the moment she walked down the Mountain to marry Death.”
“Ah,” Lixnea said with growing interest. “Perhaps you’d like to see her garden?”
I nodded, and the Moon goddess waved me away from the railing and led me around the side of her palace. She moved slowly, either due to her age or because she noticed my limp, and I had time to gather myself before we reached a damp, green garden that flanked the waterfall feeding the lake. It was one of those gardens that looked wild until I found the patterns, saw the harmony in the arrangement of night-blooming datura and faintly glowing mosses.
Lixnea arranged her black skirts on a stone bench and gestured for me to take the seat next to her. Wesha was the Dawn goddess, and this garden faced east. I imagined the girl I’d met as a child, seated on this same bench, watching the sunrise.
“Poor Wesha. The changeable heart of a mortal, not to mention her father’s attraction to power. I think that was the root of her tragedy.”
I made a small noise, and Lixnea renewed her focus on me. I would have swallowed it, but the shrewd gaze of the goddess made me speak.
“You disagree,” she said, narrowing her eyes.
“Why do you say it was her mortality that made her heart changeable?”
“We may be deceitful, cruel, stonehearted—but never inconstant,” the goddess told me, but I still shook my head.
“Immortals can forget all they loved. Like Marit forgot the ocean,” I said, even though I was thinking of Taran.
Lixnea shrugged. “We are always what we are. We maybechanged, as Marit was changed by his ordeal, but only a mortal could imagine trifling with a god, the way Wesha did with Napeth. For a god, to love something is to grow around the shape of it. She knew he loved her, which meant he had to have her or forever feel the lack. But she didn’t feel the same—she couldn’t.”
At the mention of Death, I sat up straighter. “Before the Great War? Or after it?”
“That story is no secret either, though I regret to speak of my own part in it. Death loved her from the moment he set eyes on her, with her father’s voice and her mother’s grace. I didn’t discourage him—I thought she might meet a worse fate than being adored by the youngest of the Stoneborn. But Wesha was like an infant reaching out for a candle flame, only thinking it was lovely and bright. She soon learned that fire burns as well as it warms,” Lixnea said, voice dropping into a hypnotic register as she recited a story she had to have told before. “For a fire, having is consuming, and it scared her. She tried to run away, but he pursued her, and eventually the entire world was aflame. Yes, he went to war for her.”
“And Wesha sacrificed herself to end it,” I murmured. Genna negotiated peace at the price of Wesha’s hand in marriage, with Wesha to remain forever at the Painted Tower, holding the Gates shut against the souls Death would command in the Underworld. “We learned that song first, in Wesha’s temple.”
Lixnea nodded. “It’s lovely, isn’t it? Though Taran couldn’t stand it. He recalled the events rather differently.”
I’d been lulled by the evening and the sound of the waterfall, but when my mind belatedly processed those words, it was like plunging into the cold lake. I had a moment where I lost my bearings.
“What?” I cried ungracefully. The events thatfoundedmy temple?
She had been watching me carefully, and she was keen for my reaction. The Moon was the goddess of secrets and dreams, and not all secrets were good secrets, nor all dreams. She might be one of the gentler members of the pantheon, but she was still enjoying my shock.
“He was still a child then, and Wesha rarely gave him a kind word, but he cried and cried when she was imprisoned in the Painted Tower. I thought she might finally take some interest in him then, but alas, it was mostly self-interest.”
“That was three hundred years ago,” I said, my voice soft and fuzzy.
The Moon goddess nodded. “Taran went to his grandmother, the Allmother, and asked her to give him the power to strike down Death and free Wesha. But the Allmother will not abide violence among her children, and she refused him.”
Lixnea grimaced in the direction of the noisy great hall. “So Taran made himself his typical charming presence in her court until he got what he wanted anyway. He stole stone blades from the Mountain for Wesha, who promptly forced her new husband across the sea at the point of a knife. And that was nearly the end of Taran.”
I held very still as Lixnea concluded her tale. “The Stoneborn were horrified that their weakness was exposed, and most of them wanted Taran buried at the bottom of a pit where he was unlikely to be found, with one of his new knives through his heart. Genna and I were against it, but I’m hardly a power to contend with, and Genna was angry too. In the end, Genna made him swear to obey her until she was satisfied that he’d learned to act in a manner befitting one of the Stoneborn.”
“Three hundred years ago,” I repeated, still reeling at the idea.
I didn’t doubt that it was true. It sounded like Taran, or at least the person he used to be.
