The look Taran gave me in response was equal parts dismayed and tender, but when I stuck my chin out stubbornly, he ran a featherlight touch over my hand where it rested on his arm, his fingertips lingering on the empty spot where his ring used to be.
“I know,” he said, and I couldn’t help but hear an echo in that of all the times he’d ever said he loved me.
The center ofthe palace was lower than the rest of the structure and open to the night sky above. From the oculus, a curtain of water fell from rooftop cisterns and created an audience chamber whose walls were made of mist, the droplets and sound separating us from the crowd of revelers.
I smelled standing water before my feet found it, the carpet of moss giving way to a thick layer of water lilies in pink and white. It soaked the hem of my dress and slowed our approach, but gave me time to assess the reclining figure on an island of woven reeds, surrounded by a half circle of kneeling peace-priests.
Everything about her was lushly rounded, from the perfect oval of her face to her curved body, obscured more by chains of gemstones and sprays of blossom than the wrap of raw gold silk over her breasts. Flower vines grew up through the reeds like supplicating hands, and they twined slowly around her thighs as though offering a lover’s caress. From time to time, Genna would reach down andstroke one of the blooming flowers, then pluck it and toss it aside. Something about the gesture made my stomach hurt.
Genna’s idols portrayed her variously, depending more on the carver’s idea of beauty than any canon of her appearance. A halo of black curls to one, burnished copper skin to another. Perhaps everyone saw something different. For myself, I couldn’t see a pinnacle of feminine beauty but only the immortal power of the Stoneborn. A woman with golden hair—not gold like a very fair-skinned woman might have, but the gold of metal and stone—and violet eyes like gemstones. For all of her peaceful surroundings, I reminded myself that Genna was born from the stone of the Mountain no less than Death, and she was just as dangerous.
It was hard to see any of her in Taran or in my memory of Wesha. She didn’t look old enough to be their mother, for one thing, or perhaps it was that the lush sweetness of her pouting mouth and little folded hands wasn’t reflected in the lines of her two youngest children. Taran was beautiful too, but his beauty was made up of the many hard, sharp edges to his face and shoulders, and the dark, shadowed sweep of his eyelashes owed nothing to Genna’s indulgent smile as we came to stand before her.
When we were a few feet away, Taran halted and bowed precisely at his waist. At first I copied him, but at Genna’s expectant stillness, I fell painfully onto my knees in the water and bent my head.
Genna wanted her petitioners low andwet, it seemed.
“My priestess, Iona, as you requested, Peace-Queen,” Taran said, pitching his voice very soft, perhaps hoping that nobody beyond Genna would hear him.
“Come a little closer, mortal girl, let me see you,” Genna said after a moment.
I wasn’t certain what the protocol was, but I wasn’t willing tocrawl, so I got to my feet and walked to the edge of the dais of reeds, which put my head on the same level as Genna’s.
Her expression was contemplative but not very impressed as she looked me over. Both Genna’s and Wesha’s cults recruited among the spare children of poor peasants, but I’d been told more than once that I lacked either the looks or the sweet nature to have been taken in by Genna’s temple, and I wondered if the goddess was coming to a similar conclusion.
“My son tells me you sing,” she said, and I jerked a little to hear her describe Taran that way. It shouldn’t have been surprising, but Taran rarely referred to the other Stoneborn by their familial relationships.
“I do,” I said after a beat.
“Beautifully,” Taran added from behind me.
Genna looked again at my hands and face, then she nodded with a little frown of dismissal. I took that as leave to back up, not stopping until I felt Taran’s fingers spread protectively against my waist.
I kept my expression neutral as Genna raised two fingers and beckoned at one of the priests to refill her goblet—made of iridescent stone, the same as Taran’s stolen knives.
I had a sudden rush of anger against her, for Taran’s sake and mine. Even if the other Stoneborn had emerged fully formed from the Mountain, Taran had been young once, like a mortal child. He’d deserved better, just as her priests did, as even Wesha had.
I would never have gotten on with my mother-in-law, Taran. No wonder there was no mention of inviting her to the wedding.
“Where were you trained?” she asked, drinking from her cup before pressing it directly back into her priest’s hands.
“At Wesha’s temple, goddess,” I said, not daring to look at Taran before answering. He’d told me not to lie; I hoped he knew what he was doing.
“Why didn’t you take your vows to her?”
“Death killed her priests. There was nobody left to administer my vows.”
“But he didn’t kill you?”
It took all my effort not to lick my lips. I was walking a very fine line. “Taran found me first. He protected some of the remaining acolytes of the other Stoneborn after your priests left.”
“My softhearted child,” Genna said of Taran, nodding slowly at my incomplete truth. “And so now you are his. I suppose there’s a little symmetry in that. Wesha’s last priest, his first.”
“Peace-Queen,” Taran said, clearing his throat. “You wanted to talk to her about whether your priests ought to return.”
Genna did not like being prompted, but she pursed her mouth only momentarily before continuing.
“I believe you are the last one to make the crossing. The last one who remembers it, anyway. Tell me of the state of the mortal world. Are they doing very poorly?”
