“Iamimpressed,” I said, hand over my heart, trying to lighten the mood. “Fivefountains, Taran? How extravagant.”
That made the smile fade and the intensity grow, and he pressed a hand over the back of mine. My heart thumped faster, because every time Taran had looked at me like this, my life had shifted course.
“I did it for you, you know.”
“Did what?”
He tilted his head at the land. “I can’t imagine caring enough about a bunch of blaspheming mortals to give this up. Certainly not enough to die for. But I can imagine caring about you. I must have done it for you.”
It was too close to the real heart of things for comfort. I didn’t want him to have done it for me, because I wanted him to have been the kind of person who would have done it anyway.
“No. No.” I shook my head, and Taran took it as rejection and started to pull his hand away, but I grabbed and held it. “I mean that youdidcare. I know you did.”
“Because I did every dangerous, exhausting task you set me to in your endless campaign against the fundamental forces of the world? That would not look much different from right now.”
I gave him a pained look. “It wasn’t for me. You could have hadme, if that’s all you wanted.” I could have loved him for less than half of the kindness and decency he’d shown. I would have wanted him just for being handsome and gentle when everyone else had treated me like an idea, not a person.
“Really?” He didn’t look content with that answer, but he was intrigued. “Even though you were going to be married?”
I looked down at my sandals, struggling for a way to answer that wasn’t a lie. “That wasn’t until later.”
“So I just missed my opportunity? I must have hoped your lover would catch an arrow in the back.”
“It wasn’t like that. I didn’t make you help. I didn’t evenaskyou.”
“You constantly ask me. You ask me by everything you do! I can’t look at you without seeing the two dozen things you think I ought to do to be a better man. But I couldn’t have been then, if I’m not now,” Taran said, pushing with his palm until I had to firm my feet to hold my place.
Questioning whether he was a good person wasn’t evidence to the contrary. It proved that he cared about the answer. I gathered up his hands and brushed his knuckles gently with my lips
“I’m sorry, my love, you are just going to have to live with the knowledge that you were once a tireless, unselfish hero.”
The corners of his eyes crinkled as he tried to put a smirk back on his face. “Setting that aside, as hard as it is for me to believe I’d give this up rather than execute a few insurrectionists and go home, it’s harder for me to believe that I didn’t always want you.”
My pulse quickened out of both hope and fear. “Maybe you did. We’ll never know for sure.”
Why would he now, if he didn’t then? But if he did then, why wouldn’t he have told me everything?
Taran took a slow half step closer to me, then bent his head so that our foreheads nearly brushed to consider our clasped hands. When he exhaled, I could feel it against my lips again.
“You never thought about it?”
I couldn’t lie, especially not when I still thought about it every day. Imagining a world where we somehow fit together, Genna’s son and the woman who started the riots.
He was asking me to share his life here, I finally realized. Like he’d once asked me to marry him and live in a little stone house with a plum tree by the front window. Were these different questions or the same one, repeated? The size of the house wouldn’t have mattered, or the ring on my finger. It was that helovedme.
My breath trembled in my chest. “I wish you’d told me why you were there. I might have understood.”
“If you might have understood then, trynow. You know now. I wanted you so badly that I’d betray the other Stoneborn and break the Allmother’s laws, if that’s what it took to bring you here and keep you with me.”
The tugging on my heart was more insistent. “You think this is what you wanted to happen when you ran off to confront Death alone?”
“I must have thought you were worth it.”
“But you died. You don’t even remember me—you’d have known that you wouldn’t know me.”
“Death doesn’t remember Wesha. And yet as soon as he woke up, he started looking for her. I think I was looking for you, even when I didn’t know you existed. I think I died wanting you, and now I live wanting you.”
His voice was soft, but it still rattled me. When I let go of his hand and tried to step away, clear my head, Taran seized me by my arms, forcing me to stay facing him. “So what do you want?”
