“Come on,” he said, voice still dripping with fury as he climbed up behind me on Marit’s horse and reached for the reins.
“No, wait,” I begged, striving to keep Marit’s jewel-like scales in view as Taran turned the horse to follow the thin lip of the canyon. There had to be something I could do. Sing Wesha’s blessings or Skyfather’s. Take my tiny stone knife back from Taran—
“Will it help him to watch?”
Again, Taran’s question was real, and I knew the answer from bitter experience. Marit wouldn’t want us to stay and watch, any more than Taran had wanted me to run after him on my broken foot.
But I couldn’t help but look back through eyes blurred with tears. I looked over Taran’s shoulder as he urged the horse to run in the opposite direction of its master.
I saw the moment the winged lion pounced on the sea dragon and began to tear golden rents in his sides, but that was my choice, and I wished I could spare Taran the sound of Marit’s strangled roar when Death bit viciously into the side of his neck. The delicate fins were shredded in moments, and his vestigial legs could find no purchase. Marit’s coils looped uselessly around the body of the larger god as his waves began to recede, but teeth and claws alone were not enough to kill an immortal. All the time, he continued to scream as he struggled in Death’s grasp.
The Allmother had commanded the Stoneborn not to fight, but Taran had worked out how they could kill each other—theirmother’s stone. So it was the Allmother who ended it; she heard her son’s anguish and shrieked in answer. The Mountain erupted, turning the sky black and the smoky air to dust. Her stone arms had become pillars of lava, bright enough to leave flowing afterimages on my retinas when I blinked tears away.
It was Marit’s cries that finally let the Allmother locate her disobedient youngest son, teeth still caught in his brother’s neck as water turned to steam and earth to flame. The Allmother’s fire-flowing hands grasped for her children, seized them, and, in a final flash of light, dragged them all down beneath the stone.
Taran rode onlong after the cliffs turned to forest. It was almost dawn before he stopped, at a shabby stone structure by a small pond, as humble as any building I’d seen in the Summerlands. Little curricles were stacked outside. Some immortals enjoyed fishing, I supposed. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought we’d made it out of Smenos’s lands. The night smelled like wet grass and fresh dew, though smoke still clung to our clothes.
Taran didn’t speak a word as he lifted me off of Marit’s horse, though when my foot still couldn’t bear my weight, he scooped me back up to carry me inside.
There were no beds in the single room, but there was a thickly woven rush mat in front of a cooking hearth, and I gratefully slumped to the floor there. My breath emerged in shaky spurts as I tried to calm muscles that were releasing days’ worth of fear. Instincts from three years of war compelled me to rest at the first moment of safety, because safety never lasted long.
Innocent of that experience, Taran puttered around the room first, opening drawers and rattling window shutters before his feet dragged closer to me. He lay down on his side, facing me, studying my silent collapse.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
I shook my head, and Taran scooted closer on the mat.
After picking a few loose strands of hair away from my face, he rolled on top of me.
He’d never done that before, but the heaviness of all that muscle felt wonderful, and after a second of surprise, I welcomed his weight and wrapped my arms tight around his waist. I’d thought he was still angry at me, but he’d just had what was surely the worst day of his new life—of course he wanted comfort. So did I. I tucked my face against his shoulder, the warm scent of his skin registering beyond the smoke and blood.
We lived today. He’d saved me, then saved every person who made it out of the underground prison. I felt more than in any moment since I reached the Summerlands that I had him back, the same person I’d lost. Maybe I’d never have to let him go again.
Taran shifted his weight after a lengthy inhale, gathering my hands into one of his and tangling my legs with his own. Even then, I didn’t recognize that he wasn’t holding me but pinning me down until I felt the edge of my own knife prickle against my neck.
“Alright, darling,” he said softly. “I’m ready to collect on that debt you owe me. Let’s start with some answers.”
22
Taran had somany reasons to be angry about my short but eventful tenure in his immortal life that I had to wait for him to explain which of my sins we were going to discuss first. His tangled hair nearly brushed my face, and I deliriously wondered whether he’d be open to having this conversation in a different position, because I was too tired to fight back and his eyelashes were distracting.
“You’ve been remarkably untruthful for someone who can’t lie to me,” Taran said in a low, furious rumble.
At this accurate but somewhat irrelevant accusation, I exhaled, letting my head tip back and my gaze drift to the ceiling in pure wonder. With my unparalleled talent for disaster, I’d managed to get Taran tortured, his only friend killed, and a second great war in the Summerlands started—just today! Gods were dead! He was barefoot and bleeding in the wilderness. But no, what he was really exercised about was thatIhad kept things fromhim.
I teetered on the edge of breaking into hysterical giggles. I’d lived under the axe of my secrets and the prospect of it falling felt like relief. Was that all? A few lies of omission?
Sorry, Taran, sometimes the people you love will disappoint you. Life is complicated.
“You lie all the time,” I pointed out. “And I try not to hold it against you.”
His eyes widened in outrage. “I am not a mortal dependent on the gods’ mercy.”
“I’m a mortal you’ve basically kidnapped and attempted to force into eternal servitude,” I said, giddy at the opportunity to speak my mind.
“You—” He made an incoherent noise of frustration and shook his head. “We are going to address the thingsyou’vedone. Your little blessing that opens locks. Where did you learn it? Tell the full truth this time.”
“I already told you,” I said peacefully. “I learned it from the man I was going to marry, and I don’t know which god it invokes.”
