The Younger Gods

1

For three years, the god of death tried to kill me. Death collapsed the high temple at Ereban, and I crawled alive from the rubble. He massacred every other maiden-priest, and I survived to begin the rebellion against him. I ran faster than the mudslide that crushed the capital last year, and I quenched so many wildfires that my nightmares stank of woodsmoke, and I survived battles and ambushes and assassins and the near destruction of my entire country-and after all that, I nearly died in the stupidest way possible: tripping over my own feet.

In the hills above us, hidden in the lush groves of figs and almonds, death-priests had been singing down their god's fire since dawn to cover the loyalists' advance. As soon as we spotted the attack, the acolytes in the queen's army began singing the same blessing of flame. Setting backfires. At the beginning of the rebellion we sang for rain instead, but we soon learned that Death's fury could consume even the wettest wood, and only starving it of fuel would stop the fire's spread.

Wasn't that ironic? Our strongest weapon against Death was his own blessing. I trained to be a priest of the Maiden for twelve years, but during the rebellion I mostly sang the power of the husband she always despised. I got very good at singing Death's blessing of fire, probably as good as the priests we spent three years fighting.

We had won several battles with the firebreak tactic, and earlier this morning I thought we had trapped the death-priests against the sheer drop to the south where the hills fell into the sea. Over the past hour though, something had shifted. Huge columns of black, oily smoke wheeled up to the sky and arrows began to penetrate our firebreak, sending us diving for cover.

I called a retreat, but I wasn't sure that even half of my band of half-trained acolytes heard it. Smoke started blowing into our faces as the wind changed, and our scramble down the cliffs toward the questionable safety of the beach was nearly blind.

Falling, like everything else, was my fault; I didn't look where I was going. I was thinking about the retreat and whether everyone would make it down the cliffs. I was thinking that I should have warned the queen that an orchard in a dry summer was a bad spot to camp, though I hadn't believed there were enough death-priests left alive to call this kind of firestorm. Last week our queen had said the war was nearly over, and I smiled when Taran put a hand on my lower back and told her he was looking forward to planning our wedding.

In my rush to escape the inferno, I caught my heel between two rocks, and I stumbled and skidded toward the edge of the trail. A lightning bolt of pain shot up my left leg as I flailed for something to stop my slide, hands closing on empty air. The path down the granite cliffs was narrow, and the drop was sixty feet or more, but my feet couldn't find purchase on the dry gravel.

War flattened people. War stole our thoughts and feelings. War frittered away all the righteous fury I started the rebellion with, sealed off terror and regret and anger. When I lost control and nearly went over the edge of the cliff, I was mostly embarrassed. How appalling of me to splatter on the ground right in front of Taran and all the other acolytes! I'm so sorry, I didn't want you to see me die.

The noise I made shouldn't have been audible over the sound of exploding trees, but somehow Taran heard it from two paces ahead of me. Before I could be trampled or fall to the narrow strip of beach below, he was there, scooping me up and pulling me against the cliff face.

Perhaps that was why I wasn't more afraid-I knew Taran would catch me.

"You alright, nightingale?" he asked.

"A sprain," I gasped through clenched teeth, clinging to his arms to avoid putting weight on my injured foot, which radiated lances of agony.

The trail was barely wide enough to shuffle down single-file, but Taran didn't hesitate. He dropped a shoulder to lift me against his chest and drape my legs over his forearm. He was very tall, and I was not, but I was occasionally shocked by the strength in his lean body. Clutched to the hard, reassuring plane of his stomach, my descent resumed.

"I can walk-" On one foot, at least. Hop, maybe.

"I've got you," he said.

It seemed impossible that he could carry me and both our packs, even downhill, but he did. I tossed my arms around his neck, seeking his warmth with my cheek. With my eyes closed, I could pretend for a moment that we were both safe. The lurch in my stomach told me we weren't.

When Taran gently set me down on the pebbled beach, I saw our band of former acolytes beginning to regroup. I had known most of them since the day Death began demanding human sacrifice-the day I was supposed to take my vows as one of the Maiden's priests. Their young faces were grim and sooty, but they sighed in relief to see me, even carried in like a small child. I didn't know whether anyone regretted joining me in the disastrous riot that became the rebellion, but as Death hadn't apologized, I hadn't either.

"Did everyone make it?" I panted to Drutalos, a barrel-chested acolyte of the crafter god.

"Not yet," he said anxiously.

Before I could start calling out names, Taran squatted next to me and tried to pull my boot off. I yelped and grabbed for his hand as a fresh bolt of pain burst through me, my vision nearly whiting out when my foot was jostled. It was already beginning to swell.

"Is it broken? You said it was only a sprain," he scolded me.

"Also sprained," I weakly defended myself just to hear the reassuring rumble of Taran's laughter.

The small beach was filling up with soldiers covering our retreat, but I spotted some of my missing acolytes with them. Those who could invoke the curative blessings of Taran's patron goddess were singing their best hasty triage. Taran also hummed under his breath, one melody to open his mind to the extent of the damage to my foot, another to stabilize it. His low, smooth voice barely had to shape the words to send a wave of the Peace-Queen's power through my body and lower the swelling enough to get my boot off. Taran was better at this than anyone else: blessings that took peace-priests a lifetime to master flowed out of him as easy as breathing. I, on the other hand, could barely manage the simplest of those prayers when I was rested and concentrating.

It violated a terrible taboo to invoke the blessings of someone else's patron god, nearly blasphemy. The first time I heard Taran sing one of the Maiden's blessings, I reacted like he'd just desecrated one of her altars. But like so many beliefs that once shaped my world, I'd abandoned that taboo in the interests of survival. I still thought of myself as almost a maiden-priest, but I sang for fire and rain and healing as I needed them. Instead of taking a vow of celibacy, I had Taran's betrothal ring on my finger. Instead of delivering children, I fought to keep Death from sacrificing more.

Sometimes I wished I'd had the chance to know Taran before the war wrote faint sadness into his face, wondered what he'd been like. Peace-priests were sworn to nonviolence, acted as healers and bureaucrats, but Taran also put his knowledge to a very different purpose than he'd probably once intended.

Today, his vivid green eyes were bloodshot enough to turn them into chips of glass, and new lines of stress bent his full mouth and thick dark brows, more worrying to me than the line of wildfires at the top of the cliffs.

Taran was unusually beautiful for a man-not just tall and strong, but so remarkably lovely to look at that we all teased him about it. He'd been sleeping on the ground and trudging through the mud like the rest of us, but it touched him less. Exhaustion wouldn't affect his thick eyelashes or the bold lines of his nose and square jaw, but it never even carved shadows into his perfect face. He didn't complain, never faltered, and this wasn't the first time he'd carried someone off a battlefield. But his glance at the cliffs above was worried, and that was different.

"What's wrong?" I whispered. If Taran was worried, the rest of us should probably be gibbering in fear.

"Just realized it's my turn to cook tonight," he said lightly, arranging my unwrapped foot in his lap. I expected him to start healing it, but he cocked his head and went still, his gaze flicking up to the cliffs again. I didn't hear anything new above the roar of the inferno and the calls of the retreating soldiers, nor could I see through the smoke and flame. Taran hesitated though, then stood.

"It's not safe here. We should go farther up the beach."

I opened my mouth to object-we needed to stay close to the injured-but then I did hear something. Yelling.

"Iona! Iona Night-Singer. Where is she?"

Among all the soldiers fleeing down the cliff path was one with the queen's purple standard embroidered along the edge of his tunic.

Taran grabbed for me, but I raised an arm before he could pick me up. I hadn't seen any of the queen's retinue or her small corps of professional soldiers reach the beach yet, and this man looked like a messenger.

The messenger saw my wave and sprinted across the pebbled shore to our group. The rebel acolytes wore nondescript clothing rather than draw fireballs from death-priests, and I was fully covered against cinders and ash, so the queen's man had to duck and peer beneath my hood for my distinctive red hair before he was satisfied that he'd found me.

My broken foot throbbed despite Taran's efforts to stabilize it, but I smoothed my face to reassure the soldier as I took his message.

"We're cut off," he bit out, pointing at the wildfires above. "Half the army. We're trapped between the cliffs and the fire. I was the last one who made it out."

My head jerked up.

"That's impossible," Drutalos objected. "We came in from the west. There was nothing behind us. They can just withdraw the way we came in."

Taran didn't say anything, eyes still on the cliffs. The beach ended in front of us with rock dropping straight into the ocean, and there was only one path down the cliffs, but the army should have been able to retreat to the west.

"It's the fucking god of death himself up there," the messenger said, spit flicking from his lips in his haste. "He's pulling fire out of the Earth. There! On the point."

Every other acolyte had leaned in to listen, and there was a sudden babble of frightened voices.

Death's crimes were the reason for this rebellion, but the last we saw of him was the day he destroyed the temple of all the gods. Death was a coward, one who let his priests and his bestial children fight his battles for him, one who only attacked by surprise. Still, he was also a terrible power, one even the other gods had always appeased rather than opposed.

I followed the line of Taran's gaze and just barely made out a tall figure in golden armor standing on top of the promontory on the opposite side of the trail's terminus. After seeing him in every flame, every funeral, every pang of hunger or hollow cheek, it was almost confusing to see something shaped like a man, though he was as tall as a house, his armor shining like the noonday sun despite the smoke in the air. Death's arms were outstretched as his hands tossed wheeling gusts of fire into the fruit groves.

Taran started shaking his head. Saying no, keep retreating up the beach. We'd thought today was just a few loyalists.

This was my fault.

"The queen and half the army are trapped up there," the messenger repeated, eyes wild.

Suddenly I could name it. The breakthrough emotion I felt after numbing myself for months wasn't embarrassment, after all-it was shame. I'd started the rebellion against Death, but how could we defeat a god?

I shouldn't have asked so many people to fight this hopeless war alongside me.

I should have married Taran the day he asked me.

"Everyone, back up the cliff," I said. My words were curiously thick until I realized my teeth were chattering. "Sing the blessing of rain. We'll make a corridor for the army to withdraw."

"What about the god?" one girl asked, her pretty round face pinched and frightened. Hiwa ter Genna. Another acolyte of the Peace-Queen, like Taran. All of sixteen years old.

I licked ash off my lips. Maiden's mercy. I had to send them all back up into that fire, and I didn't know whether I could protect them.

"Taran will heal my foot. And then I'll find out whether the Maiden's blessing of night is stronger than Death's flame," I said, trying to sound like that would be an interesting experiment in theology, rather than suicide. It was the only thing I could think of that might slow Death long enough for the others to escort the army out through the inferno up above. "I'll distract him while you get everyone out to the west."

I turned back to Taran, some tiny part of me hoping he'd thought of a better plan, but he was looking down at my foot, and his face was as pale as mine had to be.

He wrapped a large, strong hand around my ankle, and I waited for him to start the blessing, but he remained silent.

"Taran?" It wasn't like him to freeze.

Everyone looked at him. Waiting for a reprieve.

Instead, he gently tapped my foot with a fingertip.

"The bone is broken here and here," he explained in an oddly distant voice, like we had all the time in the world. "You can't put any weight on it for six weeks or it won't heal right."

"What?" Taran could knit bones with a couple of minutes of chanting. "I can't wait for it to heal. You need to fix it now."

He gave another tiny shake of his head, tangled dark hair falling over his forehead, then stood up and gestured for everyone else to follow. I didn't understand what was happening.