The Sea Thy Mistress (13 page)

*   *   *

Deep, black, sticky mud sucked at Aithne’s boot. She worked it free carefully and looked up at Aethelred, still waiting at the end of the drier part of the road. The verge was prickled with brown grass and a few very early wildflowers. Alongside the low place—which Aithne was determining was little better than a hog wallow—weeping willows grew.

“This is not the way,” she said. “We could cut across country.”

Aethelred shrugged and held his staff out for her to grab onto and haul herself out of the mud. “How’s the verge?” he asked.

“Slimy,” she answered. “We could go around.”

Whatever Aethelred was about to answer was cut off by an animal scream and a woman shouting. “Bearer of Burdens,” he said. “Through the mud. Somebody in trouble.”

Aithne hauled herself up the staff, nearly leaving her boots in the mud. She threw her pack up into the willows, out of sight. Aethelred’s, bulging with unhappy cat, she hung more carefully.

The two of them left the road and slogged across the moor toward the sound. Once they got around the screen of trees, they clearly saw the shape of a large red animal—a horse, from images Aithne had seen in books and on ’screen—who seemed to be struggling in a mire. A blond woman was leaning on the reins, trying to haul the animal free, but it was beyond her strength.

Aithne hurried to help, Aethelred a few steps behind her. The mud, off the road, was nasty—but nothing like the sucking bog Aithne had been trying to find her way through. Aithne thought the horse would be able to get out, but she was panicking and the woman wasn’t big enough to haul her out by main strength.

Aithne slipped down the little slope into the boggy section and cursed. The blond woman looked at her, blue eyes bright in a mud-smeared face. “If you’re here to rob me,” the woman said, “I’ve got nothing but the mare. And I’ll kill you if you try to take her away from me.”

“I’m Aithne,” Aithne said. “This is Aethelred. Need a hand with her?”

A long appraisal before the woman nodded. “Here, take the reins and pull. I’ll get in beside her and see if I can’t move her hooves forward.”

The mare calmed somewhat with the blonde’s hands on her. Aithne stood in front of her, guiding the reins, talking to her much as she would have talked to her cat. Aethelred grabbed the saddle girth on the opposite side and hauled mightily, using his weight and powerful arms to almost lift the mare out of the muck.

The mare took a hobbling step forward, the blonde helping her place her feet. The mare’s eyes were white-rimmed and rolling and she kept tossing her head, almost yanking the reins out of Aithne’s hands. Black mud caked the mare’s slender legs and dark red hide, but the blond woman kept talking to her, gentling her, and they walked her out of the mud slowly and with care.

They were all mud to the waist and bruises to the neck by the time they had her free, and Aithne bent over to rest her hands on her knees. The other woman thumped her on the back. “I don’t know how to thank you,” she said.

“Call it our good deed for the day,” Aethelred replied, getting his wind back.

Aithne chuckled in the general direction of the mud under her feet. “What’s your name?”

The blond woman nodded. “I’m called Gullveig,” she said, offering Aithne a hand. Aithne took it and straightened up, feeling an odd tingle in her fingertips when she did.
Light-headed,
she thought. “I’m glad to have met both of you. Are you headed for Eiledon? Maybe we could travel together.”

Aethelred shook his head. “We’re for Freimarc right now. But maybe we’ll see you next time we’re out Eiledon way.”

“Excellent,” the woman said. Then she flung an impulsive hug around Aethelred, waved, and led the unhappy mare back toward the road.

“Well,” Aethelred said when she was out of earshot, “that was a little surreal.”

*   *   *

The wolf is the most patient of predators, and he’s had millennia to practice his patience with regard to this prey. Assuming that Heythe is, in any meaningful sense, the prey and not the predator. He stalks her, certainly, but it’s not as if Heythe would be beyond letting herself be stalked, if it suited her purpose.

Were I not a coward, I would meet her face-to-face, and put an end to this.

If you were a coward, you would not fight her at all,
Kasimir says, a warm and comforting weight imagined as if at the wolf’s shoulder.
It is not unreasonable to battle someone stronger by stealth. Especially when you do not know what she is doing.

Making contact,
the wolf says.
Touching them. Weaving her snares around them. Making enchantments and snares.

The way she always does.

*   *   *

The door closed behind Cathmar and Selene. Cahey watched them go from a window, and when they were out of sight he rolled his head on his long neck as if to loosen it.

Fifty years gone.
He sighed, and went into the bedroom to strip and change. There was no bed in there, of course, but it made a handy place to keep his clothes.

Fifty years today.
One thing that hadn’t changed about him over the years was his need for the physical. Leaving the little cottage, following the track down to the beach, Cahey ran.

Down the sunlit beach, along the drum-tight sand at the water’s edge, he threw himself into the movement. In his other existence he’d fought for a living, and then he had fought for his life: he’d worked hard to make his body a strong and perfect machine. As well, the physical effort of exercise had been one of two things he’d found that could come between himself and his pain.

The other had been losing himself in his lovers, and he’d done enough of that, before Muire.

Then Muire changed. Became something that existed to transform misery into joy, to suffer every ill the heart was heir to. Cahey, once he understood what she had sacrificed, had traveled from settlement to settlement, working in each for a season or three, putting his inhuman strength and endurance into the hard, bloody, brutal, blessedly mind-deadening task of rebuilding a world from the bedrock up.

With every furrow he plowed, every roof he raised, he thought of making someone’s life better, of lessening their pain. He thought of one less crumb of suffering Muire would have to absorb, transmute, make clean.

He never considered what his own pain might mean to her.

There were friends, too, where he thought he could make joy, where his inevitable leaving would heal rather than harm. He’d been einherjar and scarred, but he’d also been young and strong and an excellent listener.

And there had been redheaded Aithne, living alone in a forgotten old house just a little north of Ailee.

He’d stayed with her longer than anywhere. Eventually his hand laid on her shoulder no longer shocked her into a unicorn-like startle and flight. By then, she’d started to be annoyed—he thought—by what she saw as his hovering.

She was unicorn-like in that, too—a creature of spirit and wilderness. The memory of coarse red hair and a pistol never far from her sinewy hand brought a wistful smile.

His body bore him along.

There had been no one since, in the thirteen years he’d spent in the house by the sea, raising his son.

And though he still spoke to the ocean sometimes, he’d also never once so much as dipped his hand in her.

Fifty years.

Cahey ran.

He loped easily along the sand, long legs eating up first one mile and then another. It seemed a long while before he noticed a red-clad figure in the distance, walking toward the beach from the waves. Something about her silhouette caught him with memory: the sun gleaming in golden highlights off ash-blond hair, the slenderness of her frame, the angularity of bare shoulders.

He broke stride as he drew closer. She stood calf-deep in the surf: it whipped her red-velvet divided skirt back and forth with the ebb and flow of the waves. His heart came up in his throat, hammering, almost burning him with a sudden, incandescent heat. Her face was still indistinct with distance when he broke back into a run, a hard run this time, toward her.

She didn’t hurry. He had plenty of time to record her image as she strolled up out of the surf. She was dressed as he’d never seen her before, in the crushed velvet skirt, ankle-length, and a laced bodice in crimson silk embroidered with snarling golden dragons. Ceremonial dress.

A bridal dress.

The sunlight caught her face as she stopped walking and watched him come.

He crossed the border from strand to sea without hesitation and swept her up into his arms, laughing and weeping simultaneously. He spun her around, calf-deep in the ocean, spray flying up around them like hurled fistfuls of diamonds, and set her back down where her footsteps would have been if the breakers had not taken them. He thrust her out to arm’s length to study her, and then pulled her to him again, knowing he copied the gestures of a romantic drama and doing it anyway. Her eyes seemed more blue than the pewter he had remembered, but he supposed that was only natural.

“Muire,” he said, “your dress…”

He meant to question her, to kiss her, to praise and berate her in equal parts. But before he said anything more, her mouth was moving against his collarbone, sliding along his skin in almost exactly the way he remembered. She dragged him down into her arms, into the surf, and the water was like fingers on his skin. The waves closed over them, and he didn’t resist.

Her clothes and his were shredded by the force of the water. She pressed her body against him, eel-slick, and a blue-white phosphorescence crackled over his skin. The sand and the surf scoured his body as streamers of Light tangled and unknotted and retangled around them, the ends tattering and sparkling like confetti shredding through the breakers.

He wanted to linger over her skin, her mouth; he wanted to draw her up out of the thundering water and make love to her on the shore. He wanted to lie with her head on his shoulder, after, and watch the gulls she’d bought with her soul wheel overhead. And then he wanted to walk back up the beach when night fell and introduce her to her son.

She was having none of it. The sea was in his mouth, in his eyes, blinding and deafening him. Sea-nymph, undine, she was cold and hard and slick in his arms, and then she was taking him before he knew it. Fever-hot, demanding, she was slicker still inside. The breakers crushed him in her arms, beating, bruising him. Her body went taut against him and he would have kissed her but she tangled the sea and her fingers in his hair and turned her face aside.

I cannot,
she said in his heart.

I thought I had a goddess in my arms before,
he thought. He remembered very little after that.

*   *   *

Cathmar’s girl was nowhere to be found in Eiledon, though Selene spent the better part of the day following him to her squat and a series of other favorite haunts after he failed to raise her on her ’screen. He feigned unconcern, but after all these years Selene was good enough at reading the apes to know it for a construct.

Cathoair was not in the house when they returned, and the hearth had gone cold. Selene and Cathmar came looking for him after moonrise. They found him sprawled naked on the beach as if sleeping, cast up by the waves.

There wasn’t a bed in the house, but Selene made him a nest of cushions and blankets in front of the fire. He shivered badly. Cathmar had carried him home in his arms, and he and Selene had stood Cathoair in the shower until the crusted rime of salt and seaweed had flaked off his skin. The salt smell and sticky-crumbly texture reminded Selene of clotted blood. Then she tucked him into his makeshift pallet and came back with the bottle of whisky she’d traded for.

Cathmar walked out into the night, and Selene let him go.
Triage. Worst wounded first.

“Were you trying to kill yourself?” she asked matter-of-factly. She saw Cathoair try to decide if it was an accusation or not. She could still read him very well.

“No,” he said, pulling the fuzzy blankets tighter around his shoulders, still shivering. He coughed, wiped spittle tainted with sand-and-seawater on the back of his hand. “I saw Muire.”

“You saw the Wyrm?”

He shook his head, and another coughing fit took him. Selene poured whisky into a blue china bowl and then held it for him, steadying his head. After the coughing subsided, he seemed strong enough to hold the bowl himself, and she let him.

“I saw
her
. She … made love to me.” He choked on a laugh, washed it down with another sip of whisky.

Selene felt her upper lip try to tense into a snarl. She smoothed it away and lay down beside the einherjar, warming his cold skin with her furry body, overcoming her feline desire for space. She laid a hand flat on his belly, careful to keep her diamond-sharp claws retracted. Her entire body was an engineered weapon, and she never forgot it. She could disembowel him in a moment of distraction.

“She could have killed you.”

“I didn’t care.”