16
For all I’dwanted to go, and Taran had not, he was in a much better mood than I was once we rode out to the east. Where Genna’s parklands had been lushly cultivated and the Moon’s lands had been a pristine forest, we encountered a maze of rocky red hills after a week’s travel toward Smenos’s workshops. Straight, black ironwood trees crowded the tops of the cliffs, obscuring even the sourceless daylight. We saw a few other immortals traveling between the City and their estates, but these travelers dwindled and then vanished as multiple roads converged into a single path through a narrow canyon with severe, high walls.
I grew stiff and nervous as I rode in front of Taran, and he’d noticed it, though I couldn’t explain myself.
This is not how we would have done this when we were leading the mortal rebellion, Taran.
We would never have ridden straight into a settlement of unknown allegiance during the war, let alone done so in broad daylight, via the only apparent evacuation route. We would have sent in a couple of scouts the night before to tell us what lay ahead. We would have put someone under a canvas tarp at the top of the canyon walls to watch who came and went for a few days and cover ourretreat if the approach went badly. But I had the hard-won wisdom of surviving three years of war, and Taran no longer did.
He dropped a hand onto my thigh and chafed it through the thick fabric.
“I’ve got you,” he said into my ear as quiet reassurance, and I wrapped myself tighter into his embrace without relaxing. He’d said that before.
It was my hypervigilance that caught sight of the first rock tumbling into the pass. I leaned back hard, which was enough to make Taran slow, but the rockfall nearly clipped us when half the cliff face gave way. I screamed a halt, and Marit pulled up on his team before the larger boulders crashed down, striking the walls of the canyon and ricocheting into deadly shards and choking dust.
I didn’t freeze—still soldiers were easy targets, and I was a survivor. I tumbled off the horse, taking Taran with me and trusting that the horse was too well trained to kick or rear as I rolled on my shoulder to absorb the impact of the ground and return to my feet as quickly as possible.
Trap. Ambush.
Jagged fear spiked through my veins as Taran looked up at me with wide, astonished eyes, blinking away the dust instead of searching for the source of the threat, because he didn’t remember living through this.
Seizing the front of his tunic, I hauled him toward the nearest cover: a pile of sharp-edged boulders that had barely come to rest. If someone had been waiting for the rockfall to trigger, they’d follow it with a volley of arrows to pin down any survivors and make time for the death-priests to move in with a curtain of fire.
The familiar nausea of combat roiled in my gut as I pushed Taran into the small shadow of the boulder, my mind desperately churning on what tactics our tiny group might respond with. Marit was still wrestling with his chariot, but perhaps he could wash outanyone who came up our rear flank? Could Taran do anything? Genna’s blessings were of limited use in battle, and if he’d forgotten all the others he knew—
I whined in panic, dithering between calling Death’s fire down preemptively and raising more of a defense to give Marit and Taran time to get their bearings. When Taran didn’t go for his belt knife, I chose defense. I sang a cloak of darkness over us, a dome of night that enveloped the horses and the rockfall. It wouldn’t obscure us at close range, but archers couldn’t get a lock on us while we armed and regrouped. Which direction were they coming from though? From above? Behind? I bit off the final words of the chant—oh, Moon, who hides in the Heavens, our lady of dark skies—and listened for the snap of bowstrings or the vibration of booted feet striking the ground to tell me where the enemy was.
And listened.
Instead, all I heard was the ragged whistle of my own breath and the thud of my heartbeat where it pounded against Taran’s chest. The pawing of Marit’s chariot team, a little distance away. Awi, who’d trailed us all the way from Lixnea’s estate, was chirping in confusion, high above. Everything else was still.
I’d tossed myself over Taran when I took shelter against the boulder, and now we were nearly nose to nose, with my body protectively splayed over his.
“Darling, I don’t want to discourage you from throwing me to the ground whenever you happen to become stricken with desire,” he said as I gathered myself and tentatively determined that we were not, in fact, under attack. His voice became a pointed whisper, though his face was just mildly quizzical. “But what are you doing?”
“I—” I listened again, hard. Nothing. What had caused the rockfall? I’d survived ambushes that began exactly like this. “I thought it was a trap.”
Taran’s sculpted lips pursed with consternation. I’d panicked, thrown myself on top of him, and launched a defense using the power of the Moon. Not a reasonable thing for me to do, from what he was supposed to know about me.
“Did you learn that blessing at Lixnea’s villa?”
“I saw her priests use it during the scene changes in a dramatic opera,” I said, true words to conceal a lie.
No. I learned it from scatterbrained, funny Windilla ter Lixnea, who didn’t survive the mudslide in the second year of the war. Our best scout.
I carefully peeled myself away from Taran’s body. Now that my fear was fading, I had half a dozen places where I’d likely be sporting bruises tomorrow and a rising blush that spread across my cheeks and neck.
At Taran’s skeptical look, I added, “Why, what were you doing all this time?”
“Eating pastries and trying to seduce you.” His tunic stretched over his chest as he sat up. It left me with my thighs spread over his lap, and our bodies aligned. My heart thumped a little faster even if there was no danger, and for entirely new reasons. Baser instincts declared that Taran’s muscles were, as expected, very nice to press against.
“Well, then,” I said unsteadily, fighting my fluster. I supposed that casually pursuing me was better than wondering whether I was part of that mortal rebellion he’d been tasked with stamping out, but only just. Taran gently brushed dust off my cheekbone and the tip of my nose.
“You wouldn’t try to leave me for Lixnea, would you?” he asked, in that light tone that he’d always used to calm me when things were at their worst. “Because you know she makes her priests wash the dishes, and I’ll let you toss them on Napeth’s front lawn when they get dirty.”
There were questions in his brilliant green eyes, but underneath them, real concern, and I impulsively hunched forward to bury my face against Taran’s neck. The last of my fear came out in a muffled noise against his collarbone as I curled my hands into his tunic. I’d thought I was losing him again.
“You’re fine, I’ve got you,” he crooned, rubbing the gap between my shoulder blades until I unsteadily climbed off him. Marit had gotten the horses under control, and he rolled the chariot over to demonstrate only mild confusion at the situation.
