I elbowed him in the stomach.
“How about you come up with a strategy where you keep your clothes on this time,” I said, fighting a burst of jealousy.
“I’d be happy to, ifyoucome up with a strategy where you don’t set anything on fire,” he retorted, grabbing my arm and wrapping his securely around it.
“No deal,” I said. We walked on. The night was beautiful and silent and empty, but all this empty loveliness was fragile, ready to crack. I didn’t know whether it was true that the Allmother had built the Summerlands out of mortal dreams, but those mortals had limited foresight. This was all too flammable.
“And you?”
“What about me?”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
Taran spared me a curious look. “Well, I bowed and headed out through Skyfather’s kitchens, as I mentioned, to get our dinner. And when I realized that my single, solitary priestess had wandered off to preach insurrection, I went to collect her…what do you want me to do next?”
“We need to get ready. Evacuate all the people who can’t fight across the Sea of Dreams, organize the ones who can to fight back. If there are any of his Fallen or death-priests still in the City, we need to eliminate them so that Death doesn’t have the power to sacrifice even one more person on his altar,” I said, not abandoning my joking tone, even though it wasn’t a joke.
Taran halted, which forced me to stop too. Half my mind had already moved to what he’d brought for dinner. He looked down with a long-suffering expression, even though he wouldn’t remember suffering more than a few weeks of my direct approach to difficult questions.
“Is that all?” he asked faintly.
“I have some more concrete ideas, but let’s eat before we do anything else,” I said, craning my neck toward Wesha’s former palace.
“I mean…Iona. My darling. That is not a fair request.”
My heart squeezed at the real concern behind his tight smile. I’d seen that look before, and I’d always thought it was because he loved me and was afraid where the war would take us.
“I didn’t think it had to be fair. You asked what I wanted you to do.”
He laughed, another pained noise. “Mortals are fickle. Can’t you want something else? Ask me again to dump you at Wesha’s doorstep. Better yet, ask me for something I can give you. Jewelry? The head of someone who’s offended you?”
“You can do this. We did it before,” I pointed out.
“Which is something I am finding…difficult to believe.”
I gestured at myself in the dark. “Why is it hard for you to believe?”
“You are a single mortal girl, and I’m the youngest of the Stoneborn, one with the unknown and unheralded ability to open locks.”
“We also had a couple dozen teenage acolytes and some of thequeen’s guard.” What we didn’t have, that I really missed, was Taran’s three hundred-odd years of painful survival in this place and the quiet empathy it had sparked in him for other people who had suffered.
“And your betrothed, who caused heart attacks instead of healing them.”
“I can do that, if it’s necessary,” I reassured him, trying to guide the conversation away from any pointed questions about the third person between us, who didn’t exist.
“I’m working on one right now,” Taran muttered. “What I’m trying to ask is why we, of all people, are the ones who ought to deal with what I’ll admit is the rather daunting problem that Death presents. Genna did eventually end the Great War, after all.”
I didn’t like Genna’s solution. I didn’t like any of the gods’ plans, the ones that always asked for someone else to make the sacrifices.
“I never thought I was the best person to lead the mortal rebellion.” I limped faster toward Wesha’s palace. My stomach was making audible noises and felt ready to bite out the knobs of my spine if I didn’t feed it soon. “I was only eighteen. All I’d ever wanted was to be a priestess of Wesha—to sing at children’s ceremonies and treat patients. I didn’t want to be in charge.”
“Why were you, then?”
“I didn’t think that nobody elsecouldlead the fight against Death. I thought that nobody elsewouldif I didn’t,” I said, voicing a thought that I’d wrestled with many times, whenever I’d felt scared and stuck. It wasn’t like I was totally selfless. I’d wondered more than once what would happen if Taran and I just…left. Fled abroad, like most of the nobles. But I had also thought that Death might not stop at the border when there was nothing left to burn.
We reached the dawn-colored palace. Taran didn’t say anything else until he’d closed the door to his sitting room. My attention wasimmediately drawn to the roast pheasant laid out on a sideboard, as well as the endearing image of Taran smuggling it out of Skyfather’s kitchens whole, but before I could display my bad table manners again and rip off a wing with my bare hands, I realized Taran was still staring at me, his face thoughtful.
“What?”
