The Sea Thy Mistress (17 page)

“It means,” she said, “that I am not alive. Precisely. Which is why I need you. There’s … you cannot understand.”

“I can try.”

She smiled, showing teeth too even to be real. “I can’t die, Lord. But I can get hungry. Hungrier. And hungrier. And only you can fill me. And only I can bring you peace.”

He closed his eyes. It was truer than he liked to admit. “And what happens when you get that hungry?” Within himself, he felt a long-ago left-behind fragment of a predator shift and awaken. A shard Mingan had left in him when they kissed.

Deep in his core, the ghost of the Grey Wolf blinked awake, and with it the ghost of the Suneater, the old mad thing the Wolf contained. The Suneater understood hunger.

Cahey cringed, feeling unclean from the inside out.

She didn’t answer.
Bad things.
Mingan’s knowledge, and a warning:
Take control, Cahey.
He ignored it, pushed it back, untrusting of the source.

The Imogen shifted closer. The last red light of the sun came through the window, over his shoulder. It snagged in her strange eyes and fluttered there. “You find me desirable?”

“Of course I find you desirable. That’s what you’re made for, isn’t it? That, and to feed off my pain.” Her pupils, he noticed, didn’t constrict against the sunlight. “You want to barter your sexuality for your … meals.”

“No. It is not what I am made for. I am a weapon. But I have other uses. Whatever you need, I can be.”

A sharp flare of pain and longing. He tore his gaze away from hers, trained it over her shoulder at the gray stone wall with its woven hangings. “You can’t be what I need,” he answered. “You don’t need to
pay
me, Imogen.”

Silence. Waiting.

He listened to the rhythm of her breathing.

He choked on the next word. “Anything?”

“Everything.”

She came toward him, shrinking, growing pale, until she was slight, fairskinned and shining. Ash-blond hair swung even with her chin. She gave him the blade of a wry smile.

Breath snagged barbed in his throat. He reached out to touch her shoulders. She looked up at him, but her eyes were golden instead of gray.

“No. Light, no.” Her eyes were wrong. They should have broken the spell. But he didn’t step away.

“I will give you forgetfulness,” she said.

“I don’t want to forget.”

“I will give you peace.”

A strangled sound escaped him. “This is not good for either of us. This is not what I want.”

She came a step closer. “I was created to know what you want.”

Silence.

“Cahey,” she called him, a gently mocking nickname in the voice of a woman he had loved. Agony flared in his breast, bright as an arc-welder.

She kissed him with closed lips, and he shut his eyes, breathing in the scent of her. Her lips slid down his jawline and nestled against his throat. Her hands stayed down, laced behind her back. The only contact was her pursed mouth, wet-sealed against his skin.

His heartbeat pulsed against the pressure of her tongue. Delicately, with precision, she sucked.

He tasted salt and copper.

The pain surged, seared, ebbed.

50 A.R.
On the Twentieth Day of Summer

It took Cathmar some time to get used to the sensation of the red mare’s spine jostling his ass and balls. Her hooves thumped on sand and salt grass as she cantered toward the little cottage that sat starkly shadowed by the unforgiving moon. Mardoll sat in the saddle, and Cathmar rode behind her, arms linked around her waist, watching the fast-shut wooden door and the one light on in the kitchen.

Holding tight to the girl beat getting knocked on the butt by the back of a horse. She’d twisted her hair up on her head, and her necklace glittered against the white skin of her neck. Cathmar leaned forward and kissed her right below the hairline.

She giggled and tossed her head back, tickling him with pinned hair. The necklace prickled against his lips, shimmering in a half-dozen moonlit colors as he pressed his tongue through the weave of it, against the scratch and chill of the stones. She shivered, rolling her head back, leaning against him.

The coolness of the night hung around his shoulders. “I am in so much trouble,” he whispered against her skin.

Musical laughter. “Should I drop you off here? Instead of coming in?”

He sighed. “Probably. You should meet him under … better circumstances.”

She twisted in the saddle to kiss Cathmar’s lips before he slid down.

“Ow.”

“It’ll feel worse tomorrow. Make sure you move around. And stretch!” She drummed her heels against the mare’s sides. “Elder, ha!” Her mount circled and vanished with a tattoo of hoofbeats.

Cathmar watched her go, unable to really credit how sore his inner thighs and rear end were. He turned toward the stone cottage just as the door opened, casting a wedge of light across his cheek and shoulder.

“I heard something,” Cahey said, deceptively mild.

Cathmar nodded. “Hooves.”

“And voices. Is your … girlfriend here?”

Cathmar shook his head. “No. She dropped me off.” He could still hear the distant drumroll of the hoofbeats, and he knew his father could, too. “I’m sorry I’m late.”

“You’re lucky,” Cahey answered, holding open the door, “that Borje saw you heading up the Eiledon road. Or I’d still be out looking.”

Cathmar walked in, dropping his pack and hanging Nathr on the rack. His father shut the door behind him. “And you would be in even worse trouble than you are.”

Cathmar nodded. “I should have told you—”

“No,” Cahey interrupted. He reached out, put a scarred hand on his son’s shoulder, turning him around. Cahey’s voice was level and hard. “You think you’re a grown-up now. I understand. I’m going to treat you like a grown-up from now on.”

Cathmar looked up into his father’s brighter blue eyes. “I don’t—”

“If you want to stay out late, that’s fine. If you want to come and go where you please, that’s fine, too. You’re an adult now, and I was on my own younger than you.”

He’s throwing me out.
Of all the responses Cathmar had envisioned, this wasn’t one of them.

His father’s voice stayed dead level, but the long fingers squeezed convulsively on Cathmar’s shoulder. “But here’s the deal. If you don’t tell me where you are and when to expect you, I won’t be there to back you up. I’m going to assume you’re just fine unless I have evidence to suggest the contrary. And I’m going to expect you to act like an adult.”

Cathmar didn’t answer.

“All right?”

He nodded. His mouth was dry.

This wasn’t what he had expected, either.

His father’s eyes held his for a moment longer, and then Cahey nodded. “Good,” he said. “The water on the fire is warm if you want to wash up.”

He turned away, and Cathmar peeled his boots off and tossed them toward the door. He stank of horse, and—more pleasantly—of girl.

He walked across the knotted rug and bent down to pull the kettle away from the fire, taking a rag off a hook by the mantel as he did so.

The feather almost escaped his notice. It was pinned against one of the firedogs, almost invisible in its blackness, wreathed in shining flames. Cathmar reached through the fire and picked it up.

It wasn’t even scorched.

Cathmar turned around, accusing. “Dad? What’s this?”

Cahey looked over his shoulder. “A feather,” he said.

“Imogen was here.”

Cahey, leaning back against the counter between the living room and kitchen, hesitated before he nodded. “For an hour or so.”

“Aunt Selene said—”

“Aunt Selene,” Cahey cut him off in a voice that sounded
wrong,
“doesn’t know everything.”

Cathmar came over to his father, the feather still in his left hand, the kettle forgotten in his right. He realized it, looked down, and crouched to set the kettle on the tile where it wouldn’t burn anything.

His father, motionless, watched him.

Cathmar reached out with his right hand and grabbed hold of his father’s shirt collar, yanking it open.

He hissed. A fresh livid welt purpled Cahey’s long neck, a little well of blood still slicking the raw center of it. Two others—older, fading—showed alongside.

“Dad…”

Cahey shook his head. “This is not an open topic,” he said. He reached up and disengaged Cathmar’s hand from his collar. “Not now, not ever.”

He walked past his son, opened the door, and entered the night.

Cathmar watched him go, the inviolate feather crumpling in his fist. A long moment after Cahey vanished, Cathmar turned away, walked into the kitchen, and slapped his hand down on the viscreen contact hard enough to make a thump.

He waited while it dialed.

*   *   *

They met him inland along the Eiledon road early the next morning. Mingan’s steed relaxed beside the trail, grazing. Mingan and Selene sat on the short green grass in the stallion’s shadow. They stood as Cathmar approached.

Selene walked forward to meet him, grabbed him hard around the shoulders, and pulled him into her embrace. He held himself taut for a moment before the warmth of the contact eased him. “Did he come home?” Selene asked when he stepped back, finally.

Cathmar shook his head. “I tracked him a little way. I think he walked up to the chapel. Or Borje’s, maybe, but I didn’t go there.”

Mingan came forward, gloved thumbs hooked in his sword-belt. “He’s not with Borje.” The Grey Wolf stood a little apart from Cathmar and Selene, planting his boots in the grassy verge. He jerked his head back over his shoulder, a gesture that spoke to Cathmar of impatience and disgust.

Cathmar raised his eyes to the little chapel on the hilltop. “I didn’t go up,” he said.

Selene nodded. Her tail lashed. “Good choice,” she said.

Mingan’s face was expressionless, as always. “Twice in one night is too much,” he said. “Selene. You and Cathmar … go somewhere.” He looked down at Cathmar. “I’ll talk to your father.”

Cathmar blinked, uncertain how to describe the emotion lighting his chest. Relief. Apprehension.

And possibly something ugly.

He nodded.

50 A.R.
On the Twenty-first Day of Summer

The long grass tugs at the wolf’s boots as he strides through it, up the little rise, past Borje’s cottage and up the windward side of the bluff.

The door of the chapel lies on the lee side, the right side to anyone facing the ocean. If the wolf should glance right along the beach, he would be able to pick out the blue tile roof of Cathoair and Cathmar’s cottage. He does not look that way.

He kicks sand over the flagstones as he stalks up to the door and pushes it open, spilling morning light over the interior. Until the sun comes overhead enough to cast light through the ceiling it will be dim within, although the single window will eventually frame the sunset over the ocean.

Cathoair stands before the statues. He turns, clearly expecting Cathmar, and freezes when the wolf enters. Cathoair’s hand falls to the hilt of the sword he is not carrying, the one he must have left at the cottage when he stormed out.

The wolf smiles. The lines appearing around his old rival’s eyes tell him that it is an unsettling one.

He glances away from Cathoair, lets his gaze flicker starlight over the inside of the little chapel. The Imogen, clothed in the form of a mortal woman, stands before the glass doors that the wolf helped Aethelred design, examining the hanging spindles of books without touching them.

“Imogen,” says the wolf. He waits until she turns and catches his eye.

She meets his glance with the placid, passive expression of an herbivore, something she is manifestly not. The wolf can smell the blood on her breath, on her heart.

“It’s time to return to your mountain,” he says. “Your master and I require privacy.”

His tone is level, a suggestion that carries a command. She still stares for a moment before she walks out past him, bootheels clicking on the pale flags. Without turning his head to watch her go, he still catches the moment when she comes parallel, turns, and inhales with her eyes half-closed—drawn like a hound scenting the breeze.

She should be able to do neither of those things—the hesitation, nor the disobedience.

“Imogen,” he says, in the same tone. “Go.”

She turns away and sulks out, striding stiffly. Cathoair’s eyes follow.

The wolf steps inside and shuts the door between them, the morning and the departing demoness. With the closing the chapel falls still and dark, Cathoair a silhouette against the indirect brightness of the window.

“Storms blow in,” the wolf says. “Off the sea, through that window. The books are never damaged.”

“You…”