Bracing myself, I let the cloak fall to the floor and fought the urge to hide. In response, Taran took a step away so that he could look me up and down with a broadening smile on his face. It lit his face up, made the dimples in his cheeks pop and his green eyes sparkle with warmth.
He used to tell me I was beautiful. Not from the beginning. Later. After he’d already told me that I was brave and clever andgood. After I’d promised to marry him and after he’d promised to love me past the end of the world.You’re beautiful because I love youwas what I’d heard.
His hands had never touched the places his eyes brushed now, but my body tingled all the same.
“No, that’s a good idea. And I’m glad nobody will recognize you,” Taran said, minutely shaking his head without looking away.
“But?”
“I just wanted to see you in that dress.” If anything, his smile grew wider until he nearly shone with suppressed laughter. I would have swatted him and thrown him out of the room to put on something more concealing, but his grin was so conspiratorial that I wanted to soak in it.
He didn’t have to say it. He was delighted with how I looked.
Taran opened drawers until he found a tray of cosmetics to offer me. I would have just rubbed on a little rose salve, but he wet his thumb in his mouth and stuck it in a jar of powdered gold dust. He delicately wiped a little over each of my eyelids, then ran his thumb over the center of my lower lip, pulling it down until the inside of it caught on the salt of his skin. I marked the contraction of his pupils where they hung on his thumb against my mouth.
“You look…” He shook his head again. “Like I imagined you would.”
My heart beat faster—not from fear anymore, but from the heated promise in his eyes. A different kind of promise, one not about life and death but about bodies and heat, my lips and his hands.
Someday I’d let him keep that one.
“Are you ready?” he asked again, leaving a smear of gold against my mouth when he finally pulled his hand away.
I nodded and squared my shoulders. Although I might as well be wearing nothing, I didn’t feel the chill anymore. I’d meet Deathagain, and this time Taran would be at my side. Perhaps everyone would survive this evening.
Taran paused just before we stepped into the hall and took in my resolute face.
“A hundred years from now, you won’t be afraid anymore,” he murmured. “I promise.”
He was too much a Stoneborn to be making that kind of reckless vow, but as it wound through me, as comforting and solid as the cloak I’d left behind, I couldn’t be anything but glad for it.
18
The crafter-priest whoserved the dinner was dead, although I didn’t see a body anywhere. He had the white beard of an old man and the brown smock and gold amulets of a master artisan, but his nearly transparent outline gave off the same foxfire glow as the dusk-souls I’d seen on Wesha’s beach, reflecting on the copper-sheathed walls of the Shipwright’s great hall. It was a fortune in metal, beautifully wrought with bas-reliefs of his great works, but all I could think as the dead priest pulled out chairs and poured wine was that it smelled like old, rotting blood.
The expression on the dusk-soul’s features didn’t vary from abject horror, but his hands were by turns smooth and scarred from a lifetime spent fashioning little treasures. These jeweler’s hands trembled under Death’s control, but the Shipwright, his patron in life, did not spare him a glance.
This spectacle, the enslavement of the dead—this was Death’s oldest power, and only Taran looked even a little sickened by the display of it.
The souls of the dead rose from their bodies after three dawns, and if they were not laid in running water to journey to the Sea of Dreams, dusk-souls stalked single-mindedly toward the same destination. It was bad luck to even see one, and whatever they touchedwas cursed. Grass shriveled under their feet and animals fled from the sight of them. During the rebellion, we did our best to attend to the dead after every battle, but we always missed a few, and the distant flare of green figures walking to the sea haunted many of my night watches.
When the dead crafter-priest placed a stone bench for me a short distance behind Taran’s chair, I tried to catch his eye.
What happened to you?I mouthed at him, but he didn’t see me. All he could see was his task and his own death, and when the first course was set on the table, he left the empty banquet hall.
There were only four chairs around the single table for five gods, and Wirrea instead sprawled across Death’s lap, her legs spread to offer Taran a view up her short, rabbit-fur tunic. She’d made a joke about the lack of seating—by the end of dinner Marit Waverider will be under the table anyway, and Taran ab Genna bent over it—and I was ready to leave then, but Taran had laughed and looked through her like what she said didn’t matter.
It was Death he looked at, and he didn’t let his smile slip when he was introduced to the god he’d killed. Seeing the two of them together, I had a dizzying moment of déjà vu. Some memory or understanding that my mind had flinched away from, hidden with Taran’s death. My gut churned—this had been a mistake. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want Death to look at Taran and smile back.
Death was smaller than the two times I’d seen him before, no taller than Taran. There was no more golden armor or bronze lion mask, so I saw him plainly, but I could never have smiled at him. His form was a warped reflection of Taran’s immortal beauty: very similar in the lines, nearly painful in its perfection, but obscuring the horror of the soul beneath.
My eyes couldn’t quite focus on his bright hair and eyes—white and blue, like heated metal—but it was his stillness that unsettledme. He was still like a candle flame, still like a stone, and this was not the stillness of a living being.
Taran had barely passed for human, and none of the other Stoneborn would, but the way Death moved and spoke turned my stomach when even Marit’s swirling irises and always-wet hair did not.
What had Wesha ever seen in him? His power? Wondering whether he was handsome was like wondering whether a house fire was handsome. He and Taran might both have admirable cheekbones, but I didn’t see how someone could ever look at Death and see anything but a hungry monster whose appetites were as cold as his fires were hot. Still, Taran had rallied his effortless appeal and taken his seat with good manners intact.
I did appreciate the things Taran’s winning smile had done for me over the years, but I thought it was the wrong weapon for the battle ahead.
