With another casual toss of Marit’s hand, a wave knocked theHuntress and her archers off their feet, and Taran leaned us forward, urging the horse into a canter in the direction of the winding canyon that fed into this valley. We sped past Wirrea’s position and now had only ruins between us and the road back to the City.
Marit had cleared a corridor for us to escape, though we were the only ones who could use it.
“Marit, the priests!” I yelled, twisting around despite the clamp of Taran’s arms to point at the mortals who’d fallen beneath the waves.
This was all for nothing if they drowned within sight of safety.
Marit was only a few feet behind us, keeping pace with his horse despite planting his feet in the surging floodwaters. He blinked his swirling eyes at me with mild affront, then made a cupping gesture with both hands.
“I know, I know. I won’t let them drown. I wouldn’t!”
Like leaves in a stream, the crafter-priests quickly began to bob to the surface, faces terrified but alive as the sea god’s power lifted them up and carried them in his waters. All of us were borne forward, past the ruins of Smenos’s workshop and away from the battle.
I started to laugh when the surge flowed high enough to bring us to the top of the canyon and the hooves of Marit’s horse struck stone instead of water. Not today, Death! Not by fire or by water! Death had been punched in the face by his upstart brother-in-law and then reprimanded by his own mother, yet somehow we’d lived to thwart him again.
Taran pulled up the horse to watch as Marit floated the mass of crafter-priests past a concealing bend of the canyon, then allowed the waves to recede.
I beamed at the sea god, ready to chant every prayer of thanks I’d ever heard. Sing sea shanties all the way back to the City. Pour his wine myself, even if I ended up swimming home.
Marit nodded with satisfaction when the last crafter-priest was back on dry land, then turned toward the inferno, face alert to his mother’s angry cries.
Taran realized what Marit was about to do a moment before I did. He lunged fast enough to topple himself off the back of the horse, and he managed to seize a handful of Marit’s tunic but not to quite land on his feet.
They struggled awkwardly, Marit trying to shrug off Taran’s grip without letting him fall and Taran attempting to drag the sea god back from the lip of the canyon. A wave already hung suspended in midair, poised to carry Marit to the Allmother and her battle with the other Stoneborn.
“Don’t do it, you idiot! They don’t care about the Allmother’s laws, and she doesn’t even know you’re here.”
“Letgo,” Marit yelled.
Taran grunted in pain when Marit landed an elbow in his gut, and the scuffle ended with Taran staggering back, dazed.
“Marit, no,” I gasped. Napeth was as fat as a tick with the power gained from all those sacrifices, and Marit had no priests left. Even the waves had to have taxed his strength. The other Stoneborn would kill him.
But Marit drew himself up to his full height and glared down at Taran. His soft, childish features shifted, turning hard and inhuman.
“You can’t talk to me like that,” he thundered in a voice whose echoes lifted the hair on the back of my neck. “I am the god of thesea, and my mother made my bones centuries before Genna even knew the word for peace.Ikeep the laws, even if no one else will.”
At Taran’s stricken expression, Marit sighed and turned his back on us. His voice still carried. “You’re my friend, Taran, but really, you’re just a Fallen, aren’t you? You wouldn’t understand.”
I couldn’t recognize the emotion in Marit’s voice, though Iknew the grief in Taran’s when he called again for Marit to come back. But Marit didn’t flinch—he stepped onto the crest of the wave and let it carry him away from the canyon, past the flooded valley and to the chaos on the Mountain.
He didn’t say goodbye, but what reasons were there for goodbyes between immortals?
The smoke made it hard to see Marit’s change, but it wasn’t so much a matter of a man’s shape growing into a monster’s as a shift in what my mortal eyes were allowed to see.
There had always been a jeweled serpent as well as the odd, wounded man I’d met that first night in the Summerlands—I just hadn’t noticed. Now the great sea wyrm of legend that sometimes wrecked ships and sometimes led sailors to shore spread delicate fins and waded into the melee. His scales were all the colors that his eyes could shift between, chalcedony to onyx, and his long, strange shape was familiar. He’d carved it from driftwood last week at Lixnea’s palace—beautiful and deadly in the water but vulnerable to the fire and rubble flying through the air.
As more priests and immortals crawled out from beneath Smenos’s palace and reached the safety of the water, little waves carried them away from the Huntress’s arrows and the Shipwright’s boulders. Marit was saving who he could, all the stragglers who’d fallen behind after weeks underground, but Marit wasn’t safe himself. The Allmother’s grasping arms had not yet pinned Death, and the winged lion was leaping closer and closer to Marit, whose long, trailing tail and stubby legs made him ill-suited for battle on land.
Taran ran to the edge and teetered at the precipice like he wanted to leap after the sea god, but the sheer rock drop wouldn’t even let him climb down.
“Can you do anything like that?” I demanded, pointing at Marit’s scaled form. Anything to even the odds, anything that would save Marit from what I knew was coming.
Taran’s fists bunched helplessly at his sides. “If I could, don’t you think I would?”
His angry stare made the question real, and I was instantly sorry that I’d asked. He would have saved his friend if he could have.
And I then knew, just as strongly, that he hadn’t held back before. He would have lived through his own battle with Death if he could have, but it had been him or me, and he’d chosen me.
