The Sea Thy Mistress (28 page)

“An axe-age, a sword-age; a shattering of shields

A wind-age, a wolf-age; fate is heard in the horn

The wrack before; the ruin of the world.”

When the wolf hesitates, Cathoair keeps watching him, seemingly fascinated. “Muire used to quote poetry to me.”

The wolf clears his throat and speaks again in normal tones. “She wrote most of it, Cathoair. She was our historian. A quiet little thing, unlovely compared to the others, overlooked: a kestrel among eagles. But the wit and the will in her—none of her sisters ever matched that.” He silences himself, too late, for sudden comprehension flares blue-white Light into the other’s eyes.

Cathoair opens his mouth to speak; nevertheless, a long moment passes where the wolf hears only the wind and the sound of the sea. “You never told her.”

The wolf turns to the window, frowns at the sky beyond. “Her choice lay elsewhere. And I never dreamed she would have survived the Last Day. She was not so much a warrior. Compared to some. But … painfully bold.”

“And then to find her again…”

The shape of his own honesty lies strange in his mouth. “I tried to kill her.”

“You couldn’t.”

“Aye. I could not. And lost her again.” The wolf tastes fresher blood. “She always preferred beautiful men,” he says softly, glancing back at Cathoair, who watches intently. “And I am not that.” He raises one hand and gestures vaguely in the direction of the three statues. “See for yourself who she loved.”

He closes his eyes, feeling the pooled starlight itch against the backs of his eyelids, blinking back the streamers of Light that want to ribbon down his creased cheeks. Cathoair lays a hesitant hand on his arm, and the wolf resists both the urge to break it and the one to lean into the touch.
He cannot know. And you cannot have this.

Taking a breath, he blinks his eyes open. He holds his gaze on the glass-covered walls of books, the filigree of metal decorating the doors.

“To speak briefly: There was another world before this one. Perhaps many worlds, but one that mattered. Gods and giants ruined it in a tremendous battle, and the children of the Light—the first einherjar and waelcyrge—were created out of the destruction. We made a new world. This world.”

“I know most of this.” Cathoair’s voice remains wondering and strange. Enduring his sympathy had not been one of the prices the wolf had been prepared to pay.
But then,
he thinks,
we don’t always get to choose.

It was bravely done, and brightly.

Thank you, Kasimir.

She would be pleased with you.

To that the wolf has no answer.

“I don’t think so,” the wolf replies. “Muire couldn’t have told you all of it. Because Muire never turned away from the Light, and didn’t know what the tarnished knew.”

“And you did.”

“Yes.” The wolf falls silent for a moment before forcing himself to speak on. “There was a survivor of the other world. She escaped, walked between worlds and times to find us. Would you know more?”

Cathoair nods, speechless.

The wolf recites again, trying not to feel how his collar tightens against his breath.

“Fetters burst; the wolf will rage:

Much do I know; and more can see

Of the fate of the gods; the mighty in fight.

The sun burns black; earth shatters in the sea,

And hot bright stars; from heaven are hurled.

Now do I see; the earth in foam

Rise green and renewed; from the waves again—

Then fields unsowed; bear ripened fruit,

All ills grow better; in Baldr’s return.

Would you know yet more?”

He finishes with a half-smile. “That’s us, of course. Until:

“Know too of Gullveig; many-named, many splendored,

Spitted on spearheads; burned in the high god’s hall,

Burned thrice, born thrice; yet she lives—”

Cathoair leans forward.

The wolf pauses. “She survived the war; she fled. She came to us, changed, I think, by her torments. She must always have been seductive and ruthless and strong, but something also made her cruel. Desperation, I suspect. Or the aftermath of torture.” He speaks a few more lines of poetry:

“From the depths below; a dark dragon flying

Pinions weighted; with the bodies of men,

Soars overhead; I sink now.

Would you know more?”

Shaking his head slightly, the wolf purses his lips. “Still, she was seductive. She seemed so right. So
proper
a leader. The war I walked away from, when the world was young and the stars were bright—” He closes his eyes, rolls his face up to the obscured sky. “We were fools, Cathoair. We were young and we loved her like a queen, like a goddess. We would have done anything to please her. I know—”

The wolf does not look, but he knows his brother watches carefully. “I know your wounds, for I have felt them as my own.”

“You walked away,” Cathoair says.

The wolf brushes the words aside. “About surrender: this is only the start.”

The newer angel frowns, thoughtful.

“The true surrender, the difficult one, is to yourself. There are times to surrender to your anger—your wrath, your passion—and let it move you. Like Odhinn on the tree—which is another story from an older world—you give
yourself
up for the power that changes the world. It is not capitulation and it is not resignation of which I speak. It is ceasing to divide your strength by fighting against yourself. You’re einherjar now, Cathoair. It’s time to understand that Will
is
Action.”

Cathoair’s nod is cautious, but present. “Who is Odhinn?”

“Was,” the wolf replies, licking his lips. He turns his face aside, wincing strangely. “A god. The father of the gods—many of them, anyway. Not your Heythe, though—she came from a different clan. He was a fighter who sold his eye for a drink of water, it’s said, that gave him wisdom to rule. And then hung himself for nine days and nights on a sacred tree to obtain the strength and magic to fortify that wisdom.” The wolf shifts on the bench, glancing again at the statues now barely visible in filtered starlight. The wolf tastes a memory of blood, and closes his eyes again.

“He paid for it,” Cathoair says. “Like Muire paid for this.” His gesture takes in the room, the sea, the world beyond.

“Surrender.” The wolf smiles and bends closer to Cathoair, eye to eye, nose to nose. His collar cuts his throat. In him, a hungry mad thing snarls. “Now consider what it is you’ve paid for, Brother. Because paid you surely have, and in the dearest coin of all.”

In the silence that follows, Cathoair stands, walks a few steps, and frowning intently turns back to the wolf.

Mingan stands as well and meets Cathoair’s eyes. “But the hardest surrender is the one that remains. To yourself, to the totality of what you are meant to be. And
that
last yielding—that, I cannot help you with.” He closes the distance between them and, reaching up, brushes bloody lips across the other’s mouth, waiting to see if there would be a flinch.

Cathoair closes his eyes but stands steady, drawing a ragged, powerful breath.

“Still not broken.” The wolf steps away. He pauses. “Ah. The healing.”

Cathoair opens star-filled eyes. “Yes.”

“You are not flesh anymore, boy. You are spirit. Will it done, and it is done.” He hesitates, mostly for effect. He can’t quite help himself. “Although there is, of course, a price.”

The Grey Wolf vanishes into the shadows with a smile.

50 A.R.
On the Twenty-ninth Day of Autumn

Cathmar didn’t lift his head from Selene’s shoulder when the door to Borje’s cottage opened. Rather, he heard the intentionally crisp footsteps on the walk and turned away, wishing to see neither who came through that cedarwood portal nor what the expression on his face might be. There were four possible answers, and it was three to one that something had gone utterly wrong. He drew his knees up, pressing his face against her neck, and hid himself in her cloud-soft fur.

Selene squeezed his shoulders and stood, drawing him to his feet. “It’s Mingan,” she said. “I think it’s okay.”

Cathmar turned his head to see. The Grey Wolf looked torn and bloodied, although he must have healed himself on the way back down the hill. Cathmar licked his lips. He met the Grey Wolf’s silver eyes.

Slowly, pushing his tangled mane of hair off his face, Mingan nodded. “I believe he’ll live,” he said carefully, “although the battle was hard-fought.”

Selene gave Cathmar an extra squeeze before she walked over and touched Mingan’s breast, claws catching on the nap of his rag-torn silvery shirt. “Yours?” she asked, of the blood that streaked it.

“Mostly,” Mingan answered, meeting her eyes. “He is truly well, Selene. And so am I.”

Finding his voice, Cathmar took a step forward. “What happened?”

“We had words,” Mingan replied, pinning Cathmar in turn with that level gaze. “And then we found our peace, I believe, and a measure of understanding. Brotherhood. I used you to provoke him, which was unkind, and you should know of it. But I believe it is forgiven, now.”

“So you took turns hitting each other until you both fell down?” Cathmar asked. His voice was more curious than dismissive.

“That was part of it.” The Grey Wolf watched Selene’s face when he said it, and not Cathmar’s.

Cathmar, following the look, saw complexity of emotion in the back-flicker of her ears and the tilt of her whiskers. It resolved, after a moment, into the relaxed tail and forward-pricked ears of amusement.

“I see,” Selene said, not turning to look at Cathmar. Mingan was the first to break the steady contact, glancing down.

Cathmar waited a moment to see if more was forthcoming. Mingan cocked his head at the boy and smiled. “You’ve watched Svanvitr for me, I trust?”

Cathmar nodded and went to get her from Borje’s bedroom. The bull had gone for a walk with Aethelred, Erasmus and Aithne. They had things to discuss, apparently, relating to choices, and duty. Mingan took the sword back with a gracious thanks. And then a thoughtful breath that made Cathmar pause.

“What is it, Uncle?”

Mingan clipped Svanvitr to his belt before he spoke. “Gullveig. Your Mardoll.” A wryer smile. “Heythe, as I knew her of old.”

“Yes.” Cathmar somehow knew exactly what the old trickster Wolf was going to ask of him: tasted it in the air somehow. He was nodding acquiescence even before the task was assigned.

*   *   *

Selene watched the young man and the old man lean together in conversation almost as if forgetting her presence. She listened to their soft words—soft to human ears, plain to hers—and thought about what Mingan had just nearly told her.

“You must take up a dangerous task,” Mingan said. “For your father’s sake. And for your mother’s sake as well. Heythe must be distracted until Cahey has time to regain his strength and gain control of the Imogen. I knew Heythe, more than two thousand years hence, when her manipulation and her lovemaking divided the children of the Light and set us against one another. I would have been among them, that day—the Last Day—and she would have been triumphant. Except I hid away the weapon she meant to use to win the field. Do you understand?”

“A little,” Cathmar answered. “Not much. Dad was always fuzzy on the Last Day, but I do remember what you’ve told me.”

Selene leaned in the corner, silent, watching the two of them, youthful and ancient, and feeling the fear for their lives like a stale smothering blanket thrown over her head.

“Excellent,” Mingan replied. “She came to us from elsewhere, you understand. A world before, she said, a beautiful lost world on the other side of a gulf of time. She said she fled its destruction, and that she was a goddess. I was not alone in that I knelt to her, then. She has a way—”

“Of making you feel she understands you,” Cathmar interrupted.

“I see I don’t need to explain.” Mingan smiled like a knife.

Cathmar grinned back, all boyish spontaneity. Selene had to restrain herself from reaching out to caution him.

“I’m about to send you into danger,” Mingan said.

“You need her kept busy.”

Selene saw surprise at Cathmar’s quickness, and then approval. “Any way you can,” the Wolf whispered. She thought he knew exactly what he was asking, and from Cathmar’s quick glimmer of recognition and clenched jaw she saw that he did, too.