The Sea Thy Mistress (11 page)

She stepped back, smoothing his rumpled shirt over his chest with both hands. “Cathmar,” she said. “Good name. Come back and see me when you have time, all right? I’m always around. You’ll be safe here until they get bored and quit looking for you.”

She turned away, took two steps toward the darkness, and turned back over her shoulder. Light from the high narrow windows glimmered off her amber braid as she bent her head and blew him a kiss.

“Mardoll,” she said. “Don’t forget.” And before he could say another word, she ran back into the darkness. Her footsteps thumped on stairs and she was gone.

49 A.R.
Early Autumn

Four months later, Cathmar stood again in the raucous market, turning a length of brightly dyed cloth over in his hands, trying to decide if it actually could be brighter than Mardoll’s eyes. It
was
brighter than the late-autumn sky overhead.

He hadn’t seen her since her daring rescue, which led him to drift fretfully to wondering how to locate her, and from there to daydreaming about the curve of her thighs.

“Pretty,” she said in his ear, and he jumped into the air.

Sputtering, he dropped the cloth and turned to face her. “Hi,” he said, on the second try.

“Hi,” she said. She reached out and stroked a finger down the warp of the blue cloth, crumpled on top of a pile of other scarves in a dozen silken shades. “That’s a nice color. Is it for your girlfriend?”

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” he blurted, and then felt himself blush. “I mean, I was just looking.”

She gave him the corner of her smile from behind a wing of amber hair. Her eyes
were
brighter. “Oh. Are you doing anything today?”

He shook his head. “Not right now, anyway.”

The smile broadened out, dawn overtaking the morning sky. “Excellent,” she said. “Let’s go play.”

Play,
it turned out, involved all sorts of places he wasn’t supposed to go. She was wearing a shorter tunic this time, with a little circular skirt under it that brushed the top of her knee. The skirt was the same golden color as the fine, soft hairs that glowed when the sunlight hit her calf at an angle.

She kept turning around to make sure he was keeping up, but she never quite let him get within touching distance. Her path led them down twisty side streets and out into a courtyard that ran into a little rough-hewn footbridge crossing the river.

She stopped on the raw brown and gray stones in the middle of the bridge and spun, hair flying out about her in a storm. Cathmar stopped a few meters away and watched until she caught his hands and spun him, too, laughing.

He got dizzy before she did and staggered away to cling to a railing worked in patterns of serpents or vines, watching the brown water roll by below.

“Naglfar,” Mardoll said into his ear, suddenly close and smelling of roses, this time. “Named for the ship that bears the dead across the sea.”

He turned to her, and she leaned in, ran her tongue—moist, ardent—around the rim of his ear. He gasped, and she danced back out of range again, even as he reached for her.

She was laughing as he gave chase through the narrow streets. They plunged down a flight of stairs into the shadow of the University and found themselves among squat shadowed buildings, shanties crumbling with disuse. It was a ghost town within the confines of a bustling city, and Cathmar wished she’d slow down enough for him to look around.

She drew up short on the top of a little slope, a place where the dimpled underside of the University had left a scallop of earth behind. He came up next to her, was about to reach for her, but she caught his eye and jerked her head down toward the lower part of the city, pointing. “This used to be called the Well,” she said. “This part that is always in shadow.”

Something possessed him. “Do you know where Bridger runs into Maple?” he asked.

She nodded. “I live down here. Right on the edge, where the sun gets through the waterfall,” she said, which seemed strange to him. It was supposed to be mostly deserted, now that people could come and go from the city at will. But if she didn’t have family, and she was on her own, she might squat here where no one cared.

He said, “I want to see that.”

She shrugged and linked her arm with his, leading him down the hill into the shadowed, strangely square valley.

It wasn’t far. From his father’s stories, Cathmar almost could have named the building without checking the intersection, although it was abandoned and the door to the basement stair had been bricked up so long ago that the mortar was crumbling. The sign had been torn down, and the basement and first-floor windows were boarded over.

“My father grew up here,” he said.

She grinned. “Wanna go inside?”

He looked at her, eyes wide. “Can we? I mean…”

The grin grew wider. “A-ban-don’d,” she pronounced. “C’mon; I bet there’s an escape around the back.”

There was, and that stirred the memory of another story. He gave her a lift so she could reach the ladder, and then he chinned himself up to it. The whole thing was built of salvaged metal, pre-Desolation welds the strongest part of a twisted and rickety structure, and Cathmar at first was reluctant to trust his weight to it. But Mardoll seemed fearless, clearing two and three steps at a lunge, and Cathmar was damned if he was going to be left behind. Boy and girl clambered up the stairs, giggling.

One. Two. Three.

“This one,” Cathmar said. Mardoll spun in place on the fire escape and kicked the board out of the window.

His eye holographed her at that moment, body extended, eyes clenched as she channeled the power from her hips and shoulders down her right leg—the image of lithe young strength. The board burst into splinters with a report that echoed off the walls of the nearest buildings, almost close enough to touch from the escape.

The way the board shattered told him that either the wood was rotten or she was phenomenally strong.

He was nearly sixteen, and his father had never stinted on explaining the sort of things that go on with one’s body.
The map is not the territory,
he thought, as desire awoke, shivery and ice-hot, at the base of his spine.

They climbed in the window and made their way out to the hallway. The smell of dust hung on the dim air. Cathmar counted doors from the stairs.
Second room on the right.
He opened the unlocked door.

It was empty, but he could pick out furniture scars on the tiled floor. There was a connecting door on his left, and he opened it. Suddenly, he remembered that Mardoll was following him. He turned and held the door for her, admiring her profile as he allowed her to precede him.

“This was my father’s room,” he said as she shut the door behind her.

“Small,” she said, walking over to the window. This far from the escape, it wasn’t boarded, and the light snagged her hair like catching on gold.

Cathmar heard his father’s voice in his ear.

He took a step closer to the girl in the empty room. It was even smaller than he had pictured it: more a closet than a room. The floor was hard tile, and the smell was cold and vacant.
His bed was a mattress under the window. This is where they stayed together, for a little while. It’s not where she left him, though. That was across town.
Cathmar wondered if he could find that building, too—with its courtyard and its tall windows facing the river. That one might still be inhabited. Or, he should say, might be inhabited again.

“This is where my mom and dad were. When they were together.”

Mardoll turned around and smiled. “Really?” she asked. “That sounds like a tradition, somehow.”

He took a single breath that tasted slippery and jagged all at once.
She means that. She means me. I had no idea girls were like this.…

She came to him and caught his face in her slender ivory hands. “Do you want me?” she asked him.

Mute, he nodded.

Flickering like a candleflame, she laughed and spun away. She stood in front of the dust-golden window, framed in its light, and spread her arms wide. A moment, and in one fluid movement she grasped her tunic, raised her arms over her head, and threw it aside.

Light gleamed off her necklace and her hair. Without seeming to stoop, she kicked the yellow skirt off and stood in front of him wearing only her jewelry and her boots.

He thought he’d never seen anything in the world as magical as the sun’s rays limning the edges of her body.

“Well, Cath,” she said, holding out her arms, “what on earth are you waiting for?”

50 A.R.
On the First Day of Spring

“Dad,” Cathmar said, glancing up from his book. “Remember a long time ago, you were telling me about Mom?” The question came out sounding less casual than he had intended.

Cahey, potting a tomato plant at the kitchen table, looked over at his teenage son, sprawled in the bentwood chair by the door. “Many times.” Spring had come early this year, but it was still too cold to put the seedlings in the ground.

Cathmar bit his lip, leaning his head against the gray fieldstone wall behind the chair next to the door. The rough stone snagged his hair. “Do you remember telling me that she thought you were somebody else reincarnated?”

“What brought this on?”

The kid shrugged. “Just something I read.”
Because Mardoll asked me where angels came from. And I couldn’t find an answer in the book.

He watched as his father pressed his thumbs down into the dirt, seating the slender bud more firmly. The old man never seemed to get tired of plants, and dirt. And seagulls. Crap all over the blue tile roof or not.

Finally, Cahey nodded. “I think so, yeah. An einherjar she loved when she was young. Named Strifbjorn. Alvitr was his sword.” He pointed a muddy finger at the pair of brass-hilted swords hanging beside the door. The one on the left belonged to Cahey.

The one on the right was plainer in design, and it had belonged to Cathmar’s mother.

“And what about Aunt Selene?”

Cahey rolled his shoulders and stretched. “I suppose it’s likely her blade belonged to someone else first, too, and your mother thought it was significant enough to mention.” He picked up his tomato plant to take it outside.

Cathmar was silent for a long moment. He tapped his finger on the cloth of his book. Something nagged at him, triggered by Mardoll’s innocent question about angels. By the unhappy thought of her brief mortality.

“Dad…” There was no easy way to broach it.

Cahey stopped midstride and looked at him, a smile tilting one side of his mouth. Cathmar recognized the expression: it was what he looked like in the familiar statue up the hill.
That was how he looked at Mom,
Cathmar realized.

So if he loved her, why did she leave him?

And then a thought he didn’t like at all:
So maybe that smile doesn’t mean “I love you” after all.

“… how old were you when you had your first girlfriend?”

Cahey’s brow creased in puzzlement for a moment before he gave his son a wide, knowing grin. “Oh,” he said, as if it were a sudden realization. “You’re sixteen.”

“For two months now.”

Cathmar instantly regretted his tone, but Cahey shook it off. “Astrid,” he said, thumbs curling over the clay sides of the pot and sinking into the rich black soil. “I could get … very boring about Astrid.” He grinned, but Cathmar thought there was something sharp hidden in it. “Girlfriend’s not exactly what I would call her, though, Cath. We were committed, I guess, if that’s the right word. But we never tried to own each other. I mean … well. She knew a lot of things I didn’t. I…” He paused, and the expression on his face was tangled.

“Yes?”

“Well.” Cahey took a breath, far away. “She was my first. The first one that counted, anyway. The first girl who kissed me. What do you want to know?”

“I just…” Cathmar paused. “I wanted an excuse to tell you about somebody.”

Cahey’s left eyebrow rose a centimeter. “I wondered if there might be a girl.”

“A girl I don’t deserve,” Cathmar said.

His father laughed. “The trick to keeping ’em,” he said, “is to act like you don’t deserve them whether you think you do or not.”

Cathmar raised an eyebrow in unconscious echo of his father. “That’s all it takes?”

“It’s more than you might think.”

Cathmar thought about that for a moment and changed the subject. “Astrid?”

“Ah. Astrid. Well. I was … a skinny street kid, looking for a place to hide from some older boys. I ran down a flight of stairs that I thought led to somebody’s basement.

“It was a bar. There was a match going on. They were just sparring. But this girl…” His voice trailed off in memory. Cahey took a breath, brought himself back to the present. “Cath. She wasn’t pretty; she wasn’t girly. She just was. She totally was; do you know what I mean?”