To consider it, I flexed my feet, clad in doeskin sandals that tied with brass clasps in the shape of daisies. They’d appeared in my room this morning with a new sleeveless gown of beaded celadon silk to match, but I knew better than to ask Taran questions aboutwhere things had come from by now. If I saw a naked, barefoot goddess limping along behind Genna, I would plead ignorance.
“I could. But why?” If it was just to be shown off on our approach, I’d have to twit him for vanity before I agreed.
Taran gave me a slow grin. “I’m sure we’ll be stopped for a while, and I’d like to take you by my villa.”
I cautiously nodded, and he held out a hand to help me down from the cart and into the chariot. With an arm around his back and my hip against his, I was able to brace myself well enough when he snapped the team into motion again. I worried that we’d fall too far behind when Taran circled his chariot around and doubled back toward the City, but the speed of the horses once we left the procession put it out of my mind. Before we reached the farthest walls, Taran turned west, following a barely visible path through the trees.
“Whose villa is it, really?” I asked, the wind catching the words in my mouth.
“It’sreallymine.”
The glee with which he’d answered made me laugh. “You really have a villa?”
“Of course I do, I’m one of the Stoneborn. Did you think I was some landless peasant?”
I was fairly certain that if he had a villa, he wouldn’t have been squatting in Wesha’s palace since returning to the Summerlands, but I knew I’d get nothing else out of him.
We cut through a forest of white oak and pine for hours, aiming at the Mountain’s face south and west of the City. The ground sloped into gentle hills, with the woods finally opening to a pond fed by a little stream on one side of a clearing and a flat, clear valley on the other. In the middle, at the terminus of the path, was a rectangular felt tent, as big as most houses, with a peaked top and all the sides tied down.
“Behold,” Taran said, pulling up his team. “My villa.”
My arm was still around him from the ride, so it was easy to tilt my face up and give him a skeptical pout.
“This is a tent,” I pointed out, one thumb pressing into my lower lip. I didn’t see any permanent structures, and the trail was just a horse path.
Taran hopped down and caught me around my waist, spinning me so that I ended up pressed against him with a breath-halting moment of friction between his hips and mine.
“You don’t see it yet?” he asked with feigned incredulity. “The fountains, the colonnades, the grand entrance? I’ll show you.”
I giggled at his grandiose tone as Taran took my hand and led me toward the tent. It was hard to resist him when he tried to be sweet like this, when I naturally wanted to feel his joy with him. This had to be the land Genna had promised him if he went to the mortal world, and his pride was palpable.
He got the front flaps open and tied back to let light into the interior, which was large enough that I didn’t have to duck to follow him in. The inside was crowded with a bandit’s hoard of stolen treasures: dozens of ornamented wooden chests, mismatched divans and tables, fat feather cushions, rich carpets in careless stacks, and a small pallet of layered fur cloaks that appeared to have been slept on. Tools too: axes and lathes and shovels, some new, some well used.
At the farthest end, there was a full set of armor on a stand, the first I’d seen in the Summerlands. I didn’t know with what weapons the Great War had been waged, because no immortals carried any, deferring to the Allmother’s command against fighting each other. It was unlike anything else stored here, and set carefully aside.
Taran flicked the breastplate with a thumbnail to make it ring before opening a cedar chest that contained bladed weapons wrapped in canvas. We’d lived with the queen’s army for most ofthe time I’d known Taran, but I’d never seen him in armor, rarely even armed, and I was surprised he’d bothered to steal swords when he used to be able to drop an entire cavalry charge with Wesha’s blessings.
I took a closer look at the armor’s breastplate and its embossed patterns of flame in gold filigree. Then at the helmet, with a golden plume over the face of a snarling lion.
“Taran, did you steal this armor fromDeath?” I asked, appalled.
He looked over his shoulder without concern. Put a sword on the table, continued rummaging. “Well, unlikely he gave it to me as a present. But who’s to say now? Neither of us would remember.”
“Does it even fit you?” I asked, running a finger along the sharp edges of the faceplate. The teeth of the lion were tipped with rubies, and if Taran wore it, he’d look like he’d been swallowed whole. I pulled the helmet off the stand, uneasy at holding something that had belonged to Death. I didn’t want to imagine Taran in it.
Taran smirked at me, then tossed another sheathed weapon onto the floor. “It does. I look fantastic in it, in fact. But look at these.” He made a throaty noise of pleasure as he unearthed a set of vellum scrolls bound with scraps of ribbon.
“My villa. Or at least the plans,” he said, beckoning me back outside with a bounce of excitement in his step.
The wind smelled good here, ripe with grass and the scent of the stand of chestnut trees by the stream that formed one border of the cleared field. We walked to the precise center, where Taran spread the scrolls on the ground and weighted them open with stones.
“Did you draw these yourself?” I asked after a moment, attempting to decipher the plans’ architectural symbols and lines. Someone had thought long and hard about these buildings, spent years imagining the tiny details, down to the willow-tree pattern on the tiles in the entryway of the guest quarters.
“I’m not sure. That’s my handwriting, but I can’t make sense of a lot of the drawings now.”
In the next pause, I considered that I’d never seen his handwriting: an angular, masculine scrawl instead of the precise lines of a temple scribe. Another piece of the full person he’d been when I met him.
“Genna told me about this place when I came home. In light of my abject failure to return the mortals to their proper state of obedience, she was tempted to take it back. But since I couldn’t say what had happened, and those wily mortals had managed to murder Death too, she decided to be generous.” Taran took a deep breath, expression faintly self-mocking. “So I rode here and found all this…stuff. I must have thought I’d come back and start laying the foundation. The grading is finished at the southern end, and there’s a section of retaining wall started near the pond. See, the main building will go right…here.”
