I managed to lose Hiwa in the turns of the corridors and came out of the former temple not via the petitioners’ courtyard but the kitchen midden, which sloped down toward the rocky oceanshoreline. Nobody was nearby—the herb gardens were long dead, and the sacred trees had been chopped down.
I made my way to the gray basalt shoreline and nearly crawled to reach the water. Pulled open the neckline of my dress and splashed seawater on my burning neck and chest. It could soothe my flushed skin but couldn’t cool my anger at everyone who expected me to recover from Taran’s death, much less my anger at Taran for expecting me to do this without him.
My impulse, always, was to fix things, no matter how drastic the cure was to the illness. Cut out the tumor. Purge the infection. Take my surgical knife and fight the death-priests who were burning down my country. But there was no curing death, not even for the most talented maiden-priest.
As the salt dried tacky on my chest and cheeks, I slumped onto a larger rock to stare out at the sea. If I turned my head to look up the coast, I could barely see the peak of Mount Degom, nearly fifty miles away, where the Allmother had given birth to our gods. Ereban lay in Mount Degom’s shadow, where the maiden-priests who raised me had died.
Somewhere across the sea, there was another mountain. Every day I looked out at the sea, wishing I could see it.
When people died, we built funeral boats and launched them to the east. They passed through the Gates that Wesha’s eternal prison guarded to reach the sacred Mountain. Our absent gods were up above in the paradise of the Summerlands with their priests, and Taran was down below, in the Underworld. My patron goddess lay between us, no doubt wondering why nobody prayed to her for mercy anymore.
Against my will, I was still here alone, grieving the lack of vows that would have made me a priest or a widow.
I’d spent most of my life wanting to be Wesha’s priestess and the rest of it wanting to be Taran’s wife, and I’d never get the chanceto promise myself to either of them. Both Taran and Wesha were across the sea forever.
For three years, I awoke most nights from the nightmare of Death’s flames and the collapsing temple in Ereban, the queen’s daughter dying on the altar, the riots, and the massacre of the other maiden-priests. I never expected to recover from it—my entire temple died! That would have been enough to haunt one mortal life, and somehow I endured.
I was not going to live through this. That realization, as strong as a vow, came as the first moment of relief since Taran died. I was not going to finish his work. I was not going to live without him, was not going to marry Lord Fentos or take up a trade or convince the queen to seek the blessings of the gods. I would just refuse to do it.
Neither could I serve Wesha, not anymore. I couldn’t be a maiden-priest without my goddess’s guidance or her blessings, and I had no idea what she’d want me to do now that her husband was defeated and her temple destroyed.
But there was still something Icoulddo.
If everyone I loved was across the sea, I could sail there too. The Maiden had shut the Gates between the Summerlands, the Underworld, and the mortal realm, but if she could shut them, surely she could open them.
If she’d do it for anyone, she’d do it for me.
For three hundred years, the Maiden had locked her husband out of the realms of the gods and the dead, and in return he had killed us, stole from us, and tormented us. Maybe she even owed it to me, to give mine back.
I rubbed the dried salt off my face with the sleeve of my white dress and looked to the ocean horizon.
With my decision, my soul was finally calm.
3
One month later
The acoustics ofthe lower southeast fish-market were very poor for my last performance. Flat, wide-open, packed-dirt floors swallowed most of the sound I picked out of my kithara, and this particular song had actually been written for the lyre—a gutter instrument, by my teachers’ estimation, though perhaps more appropriate to accompany this folk song about a sexually adventurous milkmaid, her well-endowed lover, and a bucket that advanced the rhyme scheme more than the plot—but I amused myself by inventing a complex harmony on the fly, making my sacred instrument sing.
Three tipsy fishermen handled the vocals, the crowd clapped and stomped their feet in accompaniment, and everyone shouted the explicit last lines together.
Not my favorite genre of music, but the tips were better when I took requests.
I couldn’t perform Wesha’s epics, because there was a guardsman loitering nearby. Death-worship was a capital offense as of the last week, and the queen’s guard might not make fine distinctions betweenworshippingandsingingabout.I didn’t think a song about how Death’s own bride had locked him out of Heaven would winthe god any new devotees, but then again, I had often been surprised by the number of people who willingly joined his cult.
There were new songs about the rebellion that I might have legally performed. Some were even about me. But they were very to the point, not composed in the epic style they deserved, and it would have not just kicked at the shattered pieces of my grieving heart but also offended my artistic sensibilities to sing about the tragic events of my life like I was giving directions to the bathhouse. So tonight’s musical performance for the lower southeast fish-market by Iona Night-Singer, formerly Iona ter Wesha, was about milkmaids.
As I plucked the last chord of the charming tune, I saw Drutalos’s appalled face in the back of the crowd. My heart lifted. I’d been waiting for him to return for weeks, so I bent in a half bow and put my instrument in its case to signal the end of the concert, receiving a round of disappointed clamors for an encore before I handed a wooden bowl into the crowd for tips. People were smiling, but not Drutalos.
“You’re playing in the fish-market for coin?”
Hello, Iona, you look well under the circumstances, beautiful instrumental work there.No such luck. When he reached my side, Drutalos hissed at me in a low voice—or what he thought was one. That last big explosion on the beach hit all of us differently, and he couldn’t hear well anymore, so he yelled.
“It’s an honest living,” I said, tilting my face up so he could see my lips.
I positioned my cane and waved off his silent offer of help as I got to my feet. I didn’t need the cane to walk the short distance we were going, but my foot stiffened if I sat for a long time, and I stumbled as it complained under my weight.
Damn it, Taran, I thought, more cheerfully than usual, since I hoped I would see him very soon.
