“Careful, darling,” he said in a dangerous undertone. “You keep saying that like you want me to believe it. And yet the only reason your pretty hide isn’t forming a part of Wirrea’s next decorating project is thatyou are mine. Think aboutthaton your way home.”
I went rigid in fury, but Taran must have taken my silence as acquiescence, because he raked his hands through his hair, trying to put himself back into order. He squared his cloak and made an effort to smooth his features. He used to be better at hiding how hefelt. He still looked like he was headed for a battlefield, not a bedchamber.
“I’ll see you when I return to the City,” he snapped and turned on his heel, stalking off to the dining hall without a backwards glance.
My vision wassmeared with red as I limped to our rooms. Marit wasn’t there yet, which gave me the opportunity to pick up an ornamental vase and hurl it at a wall without the fear that I’d spark a tsunami by acting out in front of the sea god.
The pottery fragments vibrated on the floor like they longed to rearrange themselves but didn’t quite have the power to do it. I kicked them, just for good measure.
I shouldn’t have listened to him. I shouldn’t haveobeyed.
What was I doing? Who was I with my breasts exposed in a gaudy dress and my face painted, perched on Taran’s knee like a docile pet? Before I met him, they were calling me Iona Night-Singer. Before I met him, I had survived the disaster at Ereban. Before I met him, I had started a war against Death himself. I was angry, but most of all at myself. If he’d lived, Taran wouldn’t even have recognized me.
Quickly, I stripped the dress off, tearing the fabric in the process, and wadded it in a corner. I put on my warmest clothes; I wasn’t waiting for Marit, the damned coward. I was leaving tonight.
Perhaps by the time I made it back to the City, I’d no longer regret leaving Wirrea’s circulatory system in one piece. Perhaps I’d think of a plan I liked more than rendering Taran unconscious by the most expedient means possible and dragging his limp body feet-first up the Mountain to Wesha.
If I wrapped my ankle well, I could walk for a couple of hours straight, then make my own camp. It was going to be days before Icould bear to look at Taran again, and I could use the time and space to remember Iona Night-Singer instead of whatever I’d become.
Nobody stopped me as I stomped out the unattended front gate, and I even made it to the edge of the courtyard before my vows caught me. Just as it had the night I tried to run from Taran, the pain grabbed my throat and held me in place. The leash had no slack to give.
“That’s not fair!” I cried as though Wesha might hear me over the Mountain and take pity on me. “He told me to go.”
But when I tried to take another step out of Smenos’s domain, the breath squeezed out of my chest and my vow lit my nerves to agony in warning.
“What are you afraid of—he’ll smother between Wirrea’s blessed thighs? Marit’ll drown the lot of them out of shame? Let me go!”
I shouted defiance at the Maiden, but some part of me didn’t really believe that Taran was safe. I didn’t believe he’d survive to take me to the Painted Tower if I didn’t turn around. I knew Death was dangerous, I knew something had happened to Smenos’s priests, and I knew Marit wouldn’t protect him if the situation turned again.
I fought the pain down, wishing I’d never made any vows at all. Part of me had realized it, that day at Ereban. That I could never be any god’s priestess. It wasn’t just Death—they were all complicit, from the Allmother down to Wesha. None of them could be trusted with our freedom. The Taran I’d loved must have realized that at some point.
If I ever wanted him to remember that, I needed to be the rebel he met three years ago, not this half-broken girl with the fully broken heart, crying by myself instead of avenging every life Death ever stole.
I turned around and stared up at the dark shape of theMountain, the broken facade of the palace, considering what I could do. What would I have done back when I was Iona Night-Singer, not his protected darling?
I would have brought him home with me, and left everything else to burn.
I considered Smenos’s vacant workshops, where his hundreds of priests should have been after crossing an ocean, trusting their god to give them life eternal. I thought of the dead crafter-priest whose fire-cursed feet had scorched the carpets he walked on.
I’d always fought Death’s fire best with fire.
The Shipwright should have known better than to build everything out of stucco and timber—I sang Death’s blessing in each of the corners of the valley, using the empty buildings as kindling, and soon pillars of flame stretched up so high I hoped Wesha could see them from her tower.
19
A week after Deathmassacred the maiden-priests at Ereban, I’d walked into his temple, singing. When everyone was asleep under Wesha’s power, five of the queen’s guard crept in after me, their ears sealed with wax, and slit the throats of every last death-priest there. When I fled to the countryside with the other acolytes, more riots erupting behind me, I had a new name. Iona Night-Singer.
That was who I was when Taran met me. A rebel, a survivor, a killer. He never asked me to be anything different.
I didn’t sing Wesha’s blessing of night when I slipped back inside the palace. After the alarm went up, I let the Huntress’s few priests rush past me to the spreading fire, and I sang Lixnea’s blessings instead.Don’t look at me, don’t see me, I’m not here.We’d slipped past enemy lines with this song, Taran and I, whenever we thought it was worth the risk to catch some clever death-priest or loyalist general unawares.
Smenos’s palace was still as I shuffled through its enormous warren of halls cut deep into the red sandstone of the cliffs, uncountable rooms that had once housed crafter-priests now vacant and musty. It must have been welcoming when occupied, but now it felt like an empty beehive with the honey left to rot in the comb.Something terrible had happened here—I saw signs of it in jewelers’ glasses on a side table, a half-sharpened quill fallen to the floor with no one left to sweep the shavings. They wouldn’t have just left when they felt their vows dissolve—not without their tools, surely?
I didn’t have to think about how to find Taran, at least—I just followed the tug in my chest and kept a tight grip on my last knife as I went deeper into the complex.
I was prepared to yank him naked out of the Huntress’s bed if necessary—then disinfect him and my eyes both with strong vinegar—but for a second time since landing in the Summerlands, I nearly collided with Taran. He was barefoot and stumbling in his unlaced trousers, one hand clasped around the neck of a pottery jug of wine, the other holding his ornate cloak shut over his bare chest. He registered my presence enough to stop, but without forward momentum, he lost his balance and slid halfway down the wall behind him, barely keeping to his feet.
I grimaced, assuming he was drunk. Not that I blamed him for wanting to drink off whatever he’d just done with the Huntress, but it wasn’t going to make our exit any easier.
