He shook his head and went to pull out his mismatched and undoubtedly stolen silver cutlery. “Just imagining you. What you must have been like when I met you.”
I took the offered knife to carve off the wing I’d been eyeing, then sighed in satisfaction at the first bite of cold roast poultry. “Same as now,” I said, gesturing at myself with the bone. “Just younger. A little more self-righteous, maybe.”
“Moreself-righteous?” he said, and I let that fly, because he had brought dinner. “No, I can picture it. The little priestess of Wesha with your white dress and red hair, ordering the entire world to reshape its very foundations just to suit your ideals.”
“When you put it that way, I sound obnoxious,” I said, mouth full of bird.
“Not at all. I have to think I was dazzled.” The crooked line of his mouth made my chest squeeze tight and painful.
I forced myself to chuckle. “I doubt it.” It had been a year before he’d said anything. We’d grown close, not started that way—not least becausehe’dbeen dazzling, and that had made me shy.
I liked holding on to the possibility that he’d fallen in love with the fact of me. I’d never been beautiful, and I woke up grumpy and didn’t improve much throughout the day, but I had tried very hard to be good. I’d never lied or broken a promise before Wesha sent me here. The things I thought were worth loving about myself were things he could have only learned over time.
“What, did we not get along?”
“No, we did,” I admitted.
He gave me that direct stare under his eyelashes again, like he was trying to peer into my mind. But the things I still held back were the things most precious to me. He’d told me that he loved me more than every beat of his heart. I didn’t want to find out that hadn’t been true. I didn’t want to hear him speculate about what he’d thought of me.
I tried to play it off casually and sat down next to him to eat. I thought I’d managed to move the conversation away to the likely allegiances of the other gods when Death returned from the Mountain, but Taran wasn’t easily sidetracked.
“What color was your scarf?” he asked once he’d put the dinner dishes outside his door, where for all I knew they’d vanish the way all clutter seemed to. “The one you said you sent with me.”
“Green,” I said after a beat, wondering where he was going with it. “You still don’t believe me?”
“I don’t think you’re lying, because you can’t,” he said, the same pensive expression on his face. “But there has to be more to it. That first day—waking up on Wesha’s beach, it’s a bit of a blur. I felt terrible. But I do remember the scarf.”
“Do you still have it?”
“Somewhere,” he said vaguely. “But why your scarf?”
“Your hand was very badly burned,” I muttered, tiptoeing along the wound in my soul and miming how Taran must have ended Death’s last life with a thrust of my stone knife. “I wrapped it for your funeral.”
Taran didn’t look away. “But whyyourscarf?”
He was uncomfortably close to asking for the answers I didn’t want him to have.
They had to drag me away from your body. It was all I could send with you if I couldn’t go too.
“You gave it to me a few weeks before you died. Said it would look nice with my hair,” I mumbled, and that true statement was so close to a lie that it burned in my throat.
“I think you stole it,” I added, my cheeks heating from the effort of holding back the truth.
“Sounds like me,” he said softly.
It could have been my vow punishing me, or maybe it was the lonely note in his voice, but I grabbed his hand hard, the same one that had been scorched almost down to the bone, and wove my fingers with his. That felt like relief, even if part of me demanded more—to weep and kiss his face and tell him I’d cried so hard at his funeral I’d made myself ill.
“If you came back with me, everyone would be…so happy to see you. Even our friend Drutalos, who still owes you money.”
Taran looked down at our clasped hands, visibly struggling to keep up the same light tone. “I suspect your rebels would be slightly less happy to see me once they realized I wasn’t mortal, or there to save you from Death’s flames.”
I couldn’t argue with that, especially with how I’d reacted.
“Maybe, if you could explain it,” I said, my voice trailing off.
“If I could explain it,” he softly agreed.
I wondered what he pictured when he thought about his funeral. What he was capable of imagining of the mortal world, when the only mortals he knew were me and the priests of the Stoneborn. The idea of it shouldn’t make him feel lonely. He’d been loved, and not just by me. If the Allmother really did rebuild the Stoneborn in the shapes they’d died in, he should feel it somehow that he wasn’t lonely for the last three years of his last life.
