Before I could talk myself out of it, I climbed into his lap and curled his arms around me again. I pressed myself against his chest like I was demanding admittance into my home in his heart after months away. It was what I’d wanted to do the night Wesha sent me here, and my body quivered in relief that I’d finally allowed it.
Taran was surprised, and when he turned to look at hisbedroom door, it was obvious that his first idea was that I’d made an untimely and inelegant request to be carried off there.
But I rubbed my forehead against the pulse in his neck until he wrapped me tighter in his embrace.
“Taran, you’re alive,” I whispered.
There was a little hitch in his breath before he responded.
“I couldn’t blame you for having some mixed feelings about that, given everything.”
I pulled away just enough to let him see my wide eyes. “No. Not at all. Not even for a single second.”
His body finally relaxed at that, and I put my head back on his shoulder so he could stroke my hair for long, quiet minutes. No matter what else happened, I got this. I would still have crossed the sea just for this much of him. This much was a miracle by itself.
Taran recognized my sigh when I slid out of his lap asgood night, but he held up a hand before I could go.
“Show me Death’s blessing again.”
I was tired, but I nodded and we rolled the rugs to the side of the stone floor to clear a big enough area.
“Hail Death, who kindles flame,” I sang, and we both watched the fire sputter out on the ground.
“Hail Death, who kindles flame,” Taran sang, but he didn’t make the first two syllables ring like he should have, and nothing happened.
“It’s better to copy my intonation exactly until you understand the logic of it,” I said, which was what Taran had said when he taught it to me.
He frowned in frustration, but the next time he sang it back in almost my voice, and flame fell from his hands as it had from mine. He watched the embers dissipate between his boots, and by the time they were all gone, he was smiling again.
25
Three weeks later,the Mountain still belched smoke and flame into the sky. Death’s palaces in the City were quiet and apparently empty, but Taran would not let me go in to check.
Or to make them empty, if they weren’t.
“Did I really let you just murder people?” he asked, though the answer should have been obvious by now.
“Oh, Taran, some of our very best times together were killing death-priests,” I said, concealed below the hedge that marked the border between Wesha’s lawn and Death’s.
“Then explain why your boundless sympathy for mortals who made poor choices in their vows runs out with Death’s people,” Taran whispered with a cautioning grip on the back of my neck, like he expected me to make a berserker run across the lawn to the palace where I’d first landed in the Summerlands.
I turned my head to smile at him. I’d treasured Taran’s gentleness, the way it tempered my anger, even if I didn’t always agree. “You do care.”
“No, I just think this will be a more pleasant place to live if nobody’s priests are indiscriminately slaughtered.”
Did he still think, after what we’d seen, that there was anyliving with Death? There hadn’t been peace in three hundred years; Death’s campaign to destroy the world had just been slower and farther away from the Summerlands before now.
“Death’s Fallen, then. There were more in the temple besides the two you buried alive.” They would be even more of a threat than death-priests once Death was released by the Mountain. Even more adept with their father’s blessings than death-priests, and harder to kill.
“As a former priestess of Wesha, you might be expected to believe that the children of the Stoneborn shouldn’t suffer for the sins of their parents. Let’s not murder any immortals just for the misfortune of having Death as a father.”
I slapped the dirt, frustrated. “Well, what are you going toletme do? You know what he plans to do as soon as he gets free.”
“I let you do quite a bit, darling,” Taran said smoothly.
It irked me because it was true, but it wasn’t enough. I was trying to build a firebreak by myself, with one garden trowel.
Once Smenos’s people began to stagger into the City, half-broken in mind and body, Genna’s priests had been happy to care for them. There were healers who’d gone decades without patients, and when I told them to set up field hospitals, they did what I asked.
