“What is—is it time to go?” Marit yawned, making a face like a sleepy kitten.
“Yes, right now. We’ve worn out our welcome,” Taran informed him while I peered out the narrow slit of the window.
The courtyard was full of rubble and flame, but the guest wing was mostly intact, and so were the stables. Unfortunately, between us and the mouth of the valley were the workshops, where my own fire had spread among the wreckage caused by the Allmother’s battering arms on top of the Mountain.
When I craned my neck in the other direction, I spotted the Huntress and a trio of hunt-priests, who’d taken a position on the roof of one of the intact buildings so as to pick off people fleeing down the front steps. Her arrows must have been tipped in gleaming stone, because in the few moments I watched, I saw a slender being whose body was covered in segmented copper plates fall with a bolt in their throat and dissolve like a drop of honey in wine, leaving only a puddle of gold ichor on the stone.
Some people were making it past the Huntress though. She couldn’t catch everyone.
“When we come out of the front entrance, we need to hug the wall on the left and head straight for the stables,” I told Taran urgently. “I can cover us on the way there, but when we ride out, we’ll be totally exposed.”
Taran nodded gravely, and my heart twisted to see him that serious. The last time he looked at me like that, he’d died.
“It is not very polite to leave without saying farewell to our hosts, and…” Marit began to say, but he stopped and turned in thedirection of the Mountain, hearing something in the din that my mortal ears couldn’t discern. His eyes widened. “Mother?”
“Yes, she’s here, and she’s still not happy with me either,” Taran muttered, yanking on Marit’s arm to pull him out of the room after us.
Despite what I’d said, I paused as soon as we were outside, Lixnea’s shroud on my lips, just to gape at the smoke and rubble that had replaced the Shipwright’s domain. The earth was convulsing and shaking with an endless earthquake, and above us—
I nearly died as a boulder fell from the sky and crashed against the spot where I’d been standing before Taran tackled me to the side.
“Keep moving!” he yelled, hauling me back to my feet before the shards of rock had finished vibrating on the ground. Under the cover of the Moon’s darkness, the three of us sprinted toward the stable, and this last bit of effort was what made my foot give up for the day. I collapsed in the open door by the hayloft, then twisted on the floor to stare up at the battle above Smenos’s palace.
The Mountain behind us was alive. I couldn’t separate the Allmother’s shape from the jagged peaks anymore. Her angry, grasping arms reached out as columns of rock, smashing the Shipwright’s holdings into smaller, smoking pieces.
“Napeth! Napeth, I’m here. Where are you?” she howled in a voice like a hurricane, blindly patting through the rubble in search of her youngest son. As I watched, one arm snatched up a death-priest squirming in his red robes and dragged him beneath the ground. When her stone hand reemerged, he was gone without a trace.
But Napeth had not acquiesced to her punishment, nor had the Shipwright and his wife. They fought back in the rubble in their primeval forms, dwarfed by the size of the Mountain but still enormous and deadly.
We of the Maiden’s cult rarely sang the songs that described the oldest shapes of our gods, and we might have said that the language these songs were composed in was now archaic and difficult to understand. The truth was that we did not like to remember that our gods only sometimes took the shapes of men. More and more often as centuries passed and as more of the world was cultivated and turned to man’s will did our gods reflect our own nature, but there was still much of the world that did not bow to our hands, and that history was flesh in the nightmares that brawled in the flames.
The Huntress’s shining green-golden eyes were lanterns in the smoke as she brought down her targets with stone-tipped arrows. The Shipwright was a hulking machine of iron and timber, tossing boulders at the lesser immortals who scattered before him. And Death—
All my life, I had seen depictions of the winged lion in the stonework of his altars. Artists had made the creature beautiful when they rendered him in gold leaf and carnelian. His form used to decorate the backs of coins, a symbol of strength before the war.
The reality was worse. The lion’s mane was fire, and his mouth was grotesquely wide, big enough to swallow horses whole. Big enough to eat the sun, in the oldest story. More than large enough to swoop from the sky and bite a crafter-priest in two.
The Allmother was trying to defend her children, but she couldn’t see her targets, and when she reached toward the Stoneborn who’d broken her laws, she just as often swatted down the little gods who were attempting to flee. Bodies were strewn everywhere, death-priests and crafter-priests alike, and gold blood spread on the stone where immortals fell too.
“Why are they fighting her? She’s our mother,” said Marit, voice puzzled and sad.
I was dimly aware of Taran behind me, trying to coax Marit’s reluctant horses out of their stalls and toward the inferno beforethe stables were struck from above, but Marit drifted into the doorway where I was still sprawled on the ground.
His reaction to the great violence of the scene was unexpectedly muted. I would have worried he’d respond with one of his fits, but his pearly pink lips were pursed with nothing more than sadness as he took in the nearly impassable road out of the valley between the fires and the rubble.
“Smenos let Napeth sacrifice his priests and retainers to rebuild his power,” I said, trying to at least roll to my knees. “They tried to hide it from the Allmother.”
Marit’s face brimmed with grief. “They shouldn’t have done that. Our mother warned us not to hurt each other. That was thefirstthing she told me.”
He turned and saw Taran bridling Skyfather’s horse. I lifted my arms for Taran to put me on the creature’s back, but Marit shook his head.
“Take one of mine,” he told Taran. “I’ll go behind you.”
A wordless understanding seemed to pass between the two men, and Taran nodded. As soon as we were both seated on the bare back of one of Marit’s gray chariot horses, Marit swatted its hindquarters, then lifted his arms in the gesture I now recognized as a Stoneborn gathering power.
From the rear of the stable, from nowhere, seawater rushed in. Marit’s horses did not startle, even though I did, especially once the water lifted their feet off the floor as though the surface was glass instead of brine. Marit also rose with the tide, feet planted in the cresting wave that swept us forward into the courtyard.
More water flooded into the valley, extinguishing flames even as it slowed the fleeing crafter-priests. It rose faster than any storm could have filled the space, and within seconds I could no longer see the earth under the whitecaps.
