The Sea Thy Mistress (12 page)

Cathmar nodded thoughtfully. Even when Cahey talked about Cathmar’s mother, there wasn’t this edge of intensity to his voice. Watching his face, Cathmar noticed how dark his father’s eyes became.
It wasn’t just that he cared about her,
Cathmar thought.
It’s something else. He owes her something? Or he just hates himself, still, because of what happened?

“After they were done, she wiped the sweat off her face on a fluffy white towel and walked over to me. I was standing in the corner by the door, hoping nobody would see me, and she walked right over and dragged me out into the light.”

Cathmar found himself chewing on the side of his finger. “And?”

“She saw the bruises on my face,” Cahey said shortly. “She picked me up by the scruff of my neck and she spent … months, years … teaching me to fight instead of running. She. Light, Cath. I’d been through a lot, you know?”

Cathmar shook his head. Some things you knew; some you guessed. But it still didn’t seem right to admit them.

Cahey chuckled darkly. “Anyway, I guess it was a few years later that she decided she liked me for something more than a starving kitten. I was … fourteen? Fourteen. I thought she walked on water. She very nearly did.” He looked at Cathmar with sudden clarity. “We were partners for something like seven or eight years, all told, and … lovers for five. So don’t think you’re too young to find a good one. What’s her name?”

“Mardoll,” Cathmar said, unable to hold back his grin any longer. Trying was stinging his mouth too much. His face got hot, and he hid it behind his book, staring at the old translation—relating to the Last Day and the death of the first einherjar and waelcyrge—without reading it. His father didn’t say anything, but Cathmar felt him watching for a long moment before he continued toward Cathmar and the door.

There were two unclaimed swords up the hill, he realized, and there had been—once upon a time—hundreds of einherjar and waelcyrge. He stared at the page for a moment, and looked back up, coming back around to the original question. “So if it’s all about reincarnation … what happened to all the rest of us?”

“I don’t think it’s all about reincarnation. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it is. If I was somebody else before, I don’t think it matters now. I’m not him.”

“What happened to the rest of the swords? There were a lot, weren’t there?”

Cathoair rolled his shoulders. “We gave them back to the sea. Muire’s mount said that was what we were supposed to do.”

Without a knock, the front door opened. Cathmar, sitting beside it, jumped in surprise.

The pot slipped out of Cahey’s fingers and shattered on the hearth. He moved toward the door, hands coming up, ready to swing.

Morning light silhouetted a furry, tailed female form, clad in leather and ceramic armor and wearing a sword.

“Hello,” she said.

“Speak of the Devil,” Cahey said. His foot smeared dirt. He stared down at it, brow wrinkling, as if unable to understand why his fingers had failed him. Wordlessly, Selene handed down the broom from its hook beside the door.

“Aunt Selene!” Cathmar dropped his book and hurled himself into the moreau’s arms, provoking a loud and startled purr.

“You’re big!” she said a moment later, holding him back at arm’s length. “He’s big,” she said to Cahey, turning her head.

“It’s been a while,” Cahey replied, bending down to clean spilled dirt. “We missed you. Come in; I’ll make tea.”

She laughed. “Tea. It’s a hard habit to come out of, isn’t it?” She dropped her pack by the door and leaned her sword up next to it.

“We have human visitors often,” Cathmar said, shutting the door behind her as if to make sure she wouldn’t get away. She scanned the red and blue living room in an approving manner that made Cathmar aware of how cozy and warm it was, and how clean. “Dad makes fishing nets and helps them farm. We go to the village and sometimes into the city.”

Selene nodded, as if she already knew all that but was too polite to say. “Tea would be fine,” she said.

Cahey busied himself in the kitchen while Cathmar helped the snow leopard out of her armor. Her familiar fur felt like hanks of silk, soft as milkweed tufts. The muscles underneath rippled, and he found himself looking at her in a new manner that he was not entirely comfortable with. Her body was slender, deep-chested, nothing like a human woman’s at all. Cathmar tried to picture her as a girl, and saw only the cat.

He wondered what had drawn his father to her. He wondered how two creatures so differently constructed could have imagined themselves lovers. He pushed the thought away when it became too distressing.

*   *   *

Later, Selene coiled on the hearth-rug, combing her fur before the fire. She was talking. “… Freimarc has been quiet. I think the cities are emptying out again. People found them comforting at first, but now they’re dispersing more widely. There’s still trade and some industry, though, there and in Eiledon.”

Cahey was toying with an empty tea bowl. “I think so, too. When Cath is old enough, I suppose I’ll be on the road again myself.”

Cathmar paused in pouring himself more tea, listening. Wondering if there was a subtle hint concealed in the words.
Does he want me gone so he can get back to his life? I think that sea captain in Newport likes him. I wonder if he wants to go off with her and sail, and not be stuck here raising a son.

Selene folded her comb away into her pack and nodded. “I think that would be good. I’m not sure what I’m going to do next. Keep playing law enforcement, I suppose.” She picked up her bowl and held it out to Cathmar. “More tea?”

“Don’t mind if you do,” Cahey said, and handed her the pot.

Her eyes crinkled with pleasure. As she refilled her bowl, she said, “It’s a special occasion. I brought some goodies.”

Cahey’s face pinched, but he nodded. “It’s only fitting.”

“Special occasion?” Cathmar asked, because it didn’t seem as if anybody was likely to volunteer the information.

“Fifty years,” Selene said, while Cahey overstirred his tea. “It’s been half a century since your mother went into the sea, Cathmar.”

Cahey looked up, touching his mouth absently, as if it hurt him. “She gave us back all this,” he said. “Seagulls, kittens, salt grass and fish, and people able to live outside of bubbles and have babies if they want them, butterflies and beach plums. You name it, it’s all hers.”

Selene touched his arm, reaching across the distance between them to lay the back of her fingers on flesh. “You’re not still mad at her?”

“She could have told us. Beforehand. Included us in her choice.”

“You’re not,” Selene reiterated, “still mad at her.”

Cahey shrugged. “I got over it eventually. But you know how I found out she was dead?”

“Transformed.”

He shrugged, gaze unfocused, as if he were staring through the walls. “I found out because I saw a bird. I’d like to tell you it was something special, a red one. A cardinal. But it was a city pigeon. Dirty white, with sooty splotches. First bird I’d ever seen.”

Selene pulled her hand back. He looked down. “When I figured out what it meant—for a long time, I was very sorry I hadn’t wrung the neck of that little white bird.”

“Cahey!” She laughed, cupping both hands around her tea, but looked away.
“Male.”

She said it so disgustedly that both Cathmar and his father had to laugh. But then Cahey touched her hand, in his own turn, and said, “Where did you go after she … sacrificed herself, then? You never told me. Was it straight to Freimarc?”

She said, “You left, too.”

He got up, as if to refill the teapot, but didn’t lift it from the table. “After we split up, I mostly just walked. Walked and found things to do. Here and there. I picked a number of cats out of trees. Cats.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Out of trees.”

“Meow,” she answered, steepling her fingers. “So when are you going to find a woman again, Cathoair?”

He raised a hand, teasing, as if to ward off a blow. She put the teapot in it. “All right,” he said. “All right then.” Moving toward the hot plate, he continued, “There hasn’t been time. And besides—”

“There was time for the redhead.”

He rinsed the pot out and set it on the sideboard. Water rang into the kettle as he filled it. “That was—she was working on dying when I found her. Would you have had me leave her in the weeds?”

Selene sat back and crossed her arms. Cathmar just made himself small in his chair, hoping his father wouldn’t remember he was there and stop talking.

Cahey said, “You were building the chapel—”

“Not just me,” she said.

Cahey nodded, but it looked like a dismissal. “I couldn’t. I—” His breath caught, as if his throat were too narrow for the words to squeeze through. He said, “I know I more or less lost touch with all of you while you were doing that. I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t want any part of it,” she said, tail-tip lightly tapping the leg of her chair. “I get it. You were talking about the girl.”

He set the kettle on the burner and stayed facing it, hands flat on the counter on either side. “Cats in trees,” he said. “There wasn’t much left of her by the time I got there.”

“Brigands,” Selene said. “I met her, remember?”

“She wanted to die. I remember what that was like. When the whole world wanted to die. But she
wasn’t
dead, and her body had its own ideas about if it was ready to give up. I backtrailed her to her house, a little north of Ailee, and cleaned her up and sewed her up and put her to bed. Pretty bed, wrought-iron. She must have salvaged it. I can picture her, too, dragging it home one piece at a time from Hel knows where. It would be like her.” Cahey measured tea into the pot, not bothering to warm it first, the way you were supposed to.

He said, “When she woke up in it, she cursed me out like a sailor for saving her life.”

“So you stayed.”

“For a year or so. Until she was strong again. And you came to get me.” The kettle whistled. He lifted it off the heat. “And then I met Cath, and I was busy for a while.”

*   *   *

Morning found Cathmar shrugging into his pack by the front door and clipping his sword, Nathr, to his belt. “I’m going into the city,” he said.

Selene, who had apparently been meditating on the knotted hearth-rug, rolled over and looked up at him. “I’ll come with,” she said. “Let’s visit Borje along the way.”

Cahey came in from the kitchen with the latest of many pots of tea. “This may involve a visit to a girl,” he said, as Cathmar felt a slow, deep blush warm his skin.

“Like father, like son,” Selene said. “Cats excel at vanishing. Fear not.” She winked at the boy, who blushed deeper.

He hoped she didn’t see him cringe at the comparison.

His father stepped back into the kitchen as Cathmar called out to him, changing the subject. “Do we need anything, Dad?”

“Tea!”

Selene chuckled, a throaty purring sound when she made it. “I’ll pick up a bottle of whisky. It’s time you and I had a good sit-down talk.” She pointed from her own chest toward Cahey’s vanishing back.

“I don’t drink anymore,” he said from the kitchen.

Her tail flickered. “Tonight you do. Today,” she said. “Fifty years.”

He turned and came back into the room. “I know,” he said. “We had this conversation already.”

50 A.R.
On the Second Day of Spring

Fifty years,
Selene thought, holding aside young branches of the beech trees that crowded the Eiledon road.

Cathmar tromped along behind her through the black spring mud, not the least bit tired yet, stepping over roots and rocks and bits of old bones. The only new einherjar in fifty years.

They’d tried.

Light knew they’d tried.

She’d even attempted to get pregnant, which had worked about as well as she had expected. And then there had been Cathmar. It must have been Muire who made them, they had concluded, and if she wanted more like them she was just going to have to do it herself.

Selene shook her head in irritation, as if shaking water from her whiskers, and glanced back over her shoulder at Cathmar, passing him a slender branch, showing him her feline smile that might almost have been a snarl.

He knew the look, though, and grinned back at her. They walked in silence for a little while longer.

Fifty years.

Selene mused, nodding to herself. She stole another glance at Cathmar out of the corner of her eye: the image of his father, but with his mother’s focused gaze.

Intent. Watchful. Introspective.

Precious.

Irreplaceable.

Selene turned back to the trail. She couldn’t complain, really. She had a partner—she squelched an almost-human grin—and she had a friend, and she had a nephew, of sorts, to help raise.

Still, there was a lot that needed doing. Angelic doing.

And four pairs of hands wasn’t much, to carry a world.