The Sea Thy Mistress (29 page)

“Yeah,” Cathmar said. His eyes glittered.

Selene felt her claws come out. “No,” she said. “We can go after her all at once. Aithne, Cahey, Borje and Erasmus, too. Your steed. All of us.”

Mingan turned to her. “I will explain,” he began quietly. “Selene—on the Last Day. When there were rank upon rank of waelcyrge, valraven and einherjar. Then, if we had stood shoulder to shoulder against her, we might have prevailed. Possibly. Not only is she strong—powerful beyond even my ability to match—but she can flee in an instant. To another world, or forward in time as she has at least twice. And I do not wish to face her again. Do you understand?”

Selene sighed. “You’ve been hiding from her.”

“I have moved as craftily against her as I understood how.”

“All right,” Cathmar said, his voice as deadly level as Cahey’s could get, sometimes. “What do we do?”

“You keep her busy,” Mingan said. “While your father learns how to control the Imogen. And Selene and I make a few more angels. Then we arrange a confrontation. She must not know—
must
not know—that you suspect her of anything. Do you understand?”

Selene didn’t dare think of what could happen.
Too strong for all of us, and we send her one innocent boy alone.

And then Cathmar smiled and rolled his shoulders, so like his father—in better times—that were she human, it would have brought tears to her eyes. “I think I do. I’ll keep her busy, Uncle. You go talk to Dad. And … maybe I can get something useful out of her. Since she obviously thinks I’m stupid.”

Oh, but Selene didn’t like the hard, old Light in his eyes.

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

Cahey watched him vanish and, this time, almost saw how it was done. He shook his head, stretching, and looked down at the healing burns on his wrists, the bruises on his hands. Not to mention Imogen’s stigmata.

Will it done.…
He pursed his lips and inspected his hands. Long narrow hands, fingers spidery between knotted knuckles. He examined the spreading bruise beneath the amber-colored skin of his palm. Quirked a smile, amused at his own presumption.

Concentrated, brow furrowing. Pictured the skin flawless and unharmed.
Begone.

It vanished without a trace.

That raised his eyebrow. He thought the ligature marks on his wrists whole as well, and then—out of curiosity as much as anything—he turned his attention to the old, split scars across his knuckles. Scars from bare-knuckled boxing, scars from fighting for his life. Scars from a long time ago.

Gone as if they never were.

His breath caught, elation followed by a wave of tiredness.
So there is a price.

“Ah.” It was an inevitable thought. He glanced up at the statue of himself. Prowled over to it, hesitant. Placed a palm against the cool stone cheek, traced the line of an even older wound.

“Old man,” he said, very quietly. “I didn’t deserve that. Any of it, really.”

He looked his statue in the eye. Cool, black marble eyes. A mocking smile marked by a trace of tenderness.

His own eyes narrowed. “I won’t…” He tried again. “I won’t apologize for who I am, Muire. Or the ways we were wrong for each other. But I am … sorry … that I hurt you.”

He sighed and slapped his portrait lightly on the cheek. Turning, he strode to the glass-fronted bookracks and examined his own reflection in the moonlight shining through the window over his shoulder. The image was dim and murky in spotted and wavy glass, but the raw puffy line of the old unfaded scar stood out against the sepia of his cheek.

He raised his left hand and touched it, gently. Felt the dimple of the missing teeth beneath. Remembered Muire touching the same place, pressing fingers clad in armor to his cheekbone.
Do I want this?

He’d been a child, an adolescent, but already hard by then as the braided leather on the end of a whip. Been in and out of the house, staying with Aethelred as often as not. Learning to fight. Astrid …

Was two years older. She had picked him up like a hunting dog adopting a straggly, starved kitten. Taught him to defend himself; taught him to fight. Taught him as well that there was more to making love than blood and fists and agony.

Astrid. Light. Did I ever thank you for saving me?

He
was dragging Cahey’s mom out of the bathroom. She was sick, but
he
didn’t care, and so Cahey had gone over and put his hand on the old man’s shoulder.

The old man had looked up when he looked at Cahey. And that was a revelation in itself. Soft and careful, Cahey told him to pack and go.

He laughed and threw Cahey across the room. He landed badly, one leg twisted under himself, and struggled to rise. The knee crunched, and it hurt so bad Cahey burned his throat on bile. Later, they would tell him that he’d only dislocated it. They would run a lot of other tests, too, and they would tell him a lot of other things he hadn’t wanted to hear.

Things about genetic damage, and supersoldier flu, and why he couldn’t be considered quite human, sorry, or expect to have kids.

Cahey hauled on a table edge, got up on his crunching knee, and groped for the armor-cutter he’d hidden in his trouser pocket. And then it was in his hand, and he pushed
up
when the old man came for him, and—

Everything was blood. It was in his mouth, all over his hands, stinging his eyes, and Mom was screaming, and the old man was still hauling himself forward through his own guts, groping after the cutter that had fallen out of Cahey’s hand.

Cahey was trying to explain why he had to kill him, while the old man tried to kill him back. Luckily the old man didn’t quite pull it off, but they were both still sitting there in the blood—one dead, one alive—when Astrid and Aethelred came to get rid of the body and take Cahey to a clinic to get stitched up.

“You said you never wanted to have to kill anybody again.”

“Astrid?” He turned, unbelieving.

The image of her. Black braid and skin like honey, too-wide mouth and broken nose and shoulders broad as a plow-mare’s.

Eyes dark hot gold like sunlight.

“Imogen,” he whispered. He glanced down at the bruise in the crook of his arm, the one he hadn’t had time to heal, yet. “Well, that wish didn’t come true, either, did it?”

“My Lord,” she whispered. “Is this the one you need?”

Mingan’s voice in his ear. He almost felt the Wolf’s breath on his neck.
Master her. Or she will master you.

He closed his eyes and turned back to the reflection. The imperfect glass and the darkness robbed the color from her eyes, made them dark and perfectly opaque.

A long moment passed. She took a step closer.

“No,” Cahey said, and she stopped in her footsteps. “Imogen.”

“Aye, Lord.”

“Your own shape, if you please.”

“As you bid.” She molded, melted, stood behind him as the winged demoness.

He turned back to her. “Come to me.”

Uncertainly, she did. “I hunger, my Lord,” she whispered.

“I know. It will wait,” he answered. He tilted her chin up with his long unmarked fingers and looked into her eyes.

Selene. You were supposed to be as soulless as this one. As mindless and as bound to another’s will. Muire’s kiss freed you from that.

And then he thought,
Why is it, given everything, that Gullveig … Heythe … has never once
kissed
me? Fucked me. Raped me. Used me any way she could. Never put her mouth on mine.

“Lord…” Her voice trailed off, her fingers twining nervously behind her back. Eyes focused; her mouth opened, red as a wound in the blackness of her fur. “I beg of you—”

“No,” he said, and she fell silent.
No whimpering,
he heard, and fought the nausea that came with the memory. “First, my name is Cathoair, not ‘my Lord.’ Most of my intimates, of which you surely qualify, call me Cahey. And second…”

Oh, this is probably a very, very bad idea.

Her light-filled eyes grew wide as he called the starlight into his own, lifting her pointed chin with his fingertips. The Light caught on her irises, puddled there, reflected back against his face.

He offered her a tender half-smile. Eyes half-lidded, she leaned toward him, lips drawn inexorably toward his throat.

He shook his head slightly; she hesitated, glanced back startled into his eyes. Holding her gaze every moment, he let his lips drop down to hers.

Shocked, she sucked in a gasp of air.

Cahey pressed breath down her throat.

Somehow, on the inspiration, she keened: a long sustained note that tangled his senses and dragged at his soul like fingers. Black as the space between the stars and yielding as flower petals, her wings came up. She wrapped her slender arms around his neck. Lithe and animal, she softened against him.

The wings enshrouded him like a chrysalis; she sucked at his mouth like a feeding butterfly. He put his arms around her underneath her wings, cradling her against his chest.

She snuggled closer, tilting her head back, and he lost himself in the sweetness of the kiss. The tumble went on and on and on, a limitless spring into a fathomless chasm—drawing him in, sucking him down, losing himself in the darkness where no instinct for self-preservation could find him.

He hung in darkness, shining, a corona of azure Light whirlpooled away from him into the singularity of a companion that existed as appetite only, gravity and need—an essential pairing, he realized.

Waterfall,
he thought, and
shooting star.

And then, from somewhere, concern:

I’m almost gone,
he understood, with an awesome lucidity.
She’s … bottomless.
Something flickered inside him, raised a sleepy head: the wolf-shard, traces of Mingan’s passage through his soul. He fed that to the Imogen, too, that, and the lingering fragment of the Suneater, and his breath, and himself, and the thing like water and …

A little glittering ghost spun inside him. A fragment, a trace, the thread of a presence: Muire’s kiss. The proof of her love and the measure of her devotion, jealously guarded for many long years. He sensed the Imogen’s hunger … nearly replete.

Mercy.
The Imogen whispered inside his ear.
What have I done to earn your mercy?

What have you done to be denied it?
he replied.

Almost. The well filling up. He could do it, he thought. End that gnawing in her. Give her peace.

He also thought that it would cost him everything he had.

In the darkness of the chapel, her darker wings cocooned him. Demoness, trickster’s daughter, child of the night with no soul of her own, only the hunger that never rested, the void that could never be filled …

Just when I had decided not to die after all,
he thought, amused by the irony but not frightened.
Muire.
Something he had never said to her in life, not in so many words.
Lady, I love you.

Surrender.

Imaginary fingers brushed the bright, spinning fragment, swept it, space-free, into motion …

… sailing, rushing, falling, failing into the fathomless, utter gravity of black …

… his sapphire aura flared, pulsed like a heartbeat, distended, burned crimson in fury and perfection—

—shattered into—

*   *   *

Gone.

*   *   *

A new star flared into airless silence. Cahey never saw it bloom.

50 A.R.
On the Thirty-third Day of Autumn

Cathmar smoothed the crumpled bedclothes over Mardoll’s shoulders. Leaning back against the wall, he watched her dream, a crease forming between his eyebrows. He nibbled on the tip of his thumb, wondering how long to let her sleep. A fall of sunlight through cracked glass and a lace window shade patterned her shoulder and hip under the eiderdown.

Wouldn’t want her getting too much rest,
he thought. He watched the light move across her face and considered taking a quick bath, but decided he didn’t dare leave her alone that long. She might wake up while he was in the bathroom.
I’ll just find some excuse to insist on washing her hair, later.

When he’d promised Mingan he wouldn’t let Mardoll out of his sight, he hadn’t realized how long it would be. He reached over to the nightstand and picked up his ’screen, checked for messages. There were several, all from Selene and Aethelred.

No improvement in his father’s condition. Aethelred wasn’t using the word
coma.
Selene, un-dissembling, was.
Do something,
Cathmar prayed.