Death slowly smiled to see it, the expression more disgusting on his face than a rictus of fury would have been. “Well, then. Look how quickly we can all agree to peace when we decide to be reasonable in our requests. I’ve also heard about your apologies, Taran ab Genna. How skilled you are at giving them.”
“After three hundred years, I ought to be,” Taran said, but I couldn’t understand why I was the person he turned to look at when he said it, anger carving deep into every line that love had ever softened.
The tension was too much for Marit; he collapsed to the floor and sobbed until my shoes were soaked with seawater.
Taran begged amoment to see me off Smenos’s lands, then dragged me roughly into the hall.
My hope that it was a show for the other gods was flagging, but it was the only scrap of protection I had left. I clung hard to it, and as soon as we were alone, I bunched the muscles in my calves to runwhile Taran planted his feet and glared at me like I’d been the one to insult his sister instead of the one who’d saved him from being turned into a pile of charcoal.
“Are you so tired of eternal life that you want it to end this quickly?” His voice was a low hiss.
“He was going to kill you,” I said, my shock at Taran’s reaction finally shifting to my own anger. “He almost did! If I hadn’t stopped him—”
“He can’t kill me! I just showed you—he’s no stronger than I am! I broke his damn nose! I beat him in front of an audience, and if you hadn’t tried to take our hostess hostage, we could be on our way home right now.”
“You have no idea what you’re dealing with,” I snapped. “You remember six months of sipping wine in the City. You don’t know what Death can do!”
“And why do you know? Because Wesha sold you out for a fancy home and the power of a Stoneborn. Stop thinking like a maiden-priest—nothing would have happened to you if you’d let me handle this.” He clenched his hands in front of my face instead of yelling, which he obviously longed to do.
“It’s not that. Forget Wesha. Something is terribly wrong here,” I said, trying to get myself under control and be persuasive, when what I really wanted to do was shake him. “Death’s not like you or Marit, he’s not powerless. He’s hiding it somehow, but I could feel it, only for a moment…and something is wrong with the Shipwright too. Why is he alone? Where are his priests—the living ones?”
“His priests left him because his death released them from their vows. And because mortals are fickle. And ungrateful,” Taran said, eyes still bright with what I was beginning to recognize as fear.
He was afraid of what the other gods wanted from him as anapology, and he was going to go anyway.
Don’t accept it. Don’t accept that they have the right to demand it.He would have agreed with me once.
“Then let’s go right now, before they notice,” I begged Taran, splaying my hands against his chest imploringly. “We’ll figure it out later.”
“Go? Where would we go? Really. Tell me. Where would we go, that this wouldn’t follow us. Four people just saw my priestess put a stone blade to Wirrea’s throat. Any of them could go to the Allmother, and any of the Stoneborn would hand me over to her justice.”
As he spoke, my eyes landed on the serving station at the entrance to the dining hall: the unserved courses, the vegetables and roasts that had been sliced for the coals in the center of the table. The white bones that had been stripped clean for the meat course were too slender to be beef and too long to be pork. Their shapes were familiar to me from my first lessons in surgery.
No wonder the dead crafter-priest had wept.
I gagged and covered my mouth as my stomach convulsed.
“Do you see—” I squeaked, pointing to the butchered remains of the crafter-priest.
Taran had known. It was why he’d told me not to eat anything. Tears sprang to my eyes as a wave of dizziness swept through me.
“Yes,” Taran gritted out without a trace of sympathy. “Wirrea has some disgusting habits, which is why Ididn’t want to come in the first place.”
I should have shoved that blade home in Wirrea’s throat, but that regret didn’t help us now. We needed to get as far away as possible.
“It’s a straight line down that hall to the courtyard, and the stables are in the south wing. We could be gone before they notice,” I urged him.
White lines of anger framed his mouth. “And then? What next.”
“We—we could go east, up the Mountain. To the Painted Tower. And then we’ll take one of the boats on the shore back to the mortal world—”
“Back!” Taran pressed a palm against his forehead, bending at the waist as though looking to the Heavens for assistance. When he wheeled on me, it was the angriest I’d ever seen him. “We are never goingback.We live here.” Each word was hurled at me like a weapon, punctuated by a jab of his finger at the floor, and I inhaled sharply at the viciousness of the tone.
With visible effort to regain his composure, he swallowed hard. “Iam going to stay here and pay for your little outburst, on my fucking back if I’mlucky, and hope it doesn’t take three hundred years this time to get free.Youare going to wait until Marit is sober, and then he will take you to my rooms in the City, where you will stay and speak to not a single other immortal until I return, whether that is next week or next year. And then, we are going to have a lengthy, lengthy discussion of how I expect my priestess to behave.”
“I’m not your priestess,” I snarled, fists at my sides.
It was an even more bitter laugh that rasped out of his throat, and he loomed over me, close enough that I shrank a half step away.
