The Sea Thy Mistress (31 page)

She said nothing, expressionless, watching his face.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be over her,” he continued. “But I’m not going to … Hel. What am I proving to anybody? That I can hurt myself worse than she did?”

He stared into space for a moment, unfocused, vaguely examining the light reflecting off the sand dune outside the window.

“Cahey.”

“Yeah?”

She sat up in the bed, threw the covers off, and swung her leg over his hips, leaning forward to bite him on the nose. “Shut the fuck up.”

Laughing, he tried to push her off. She bit him again, ear and throat, trying to pin his hands while he fended her away. He caught hold of her nightshirt and levered her back with it, but the cotton gave way and she was swarming over him, naked, all elbows and curly hair and freckles and little white nipping teeth.

He’d forgotten about the rest of the freckles, too.

“Ow,” he said, laughing, finally catching hold of her wrist. She twisted around and hit him in the face with a pillow held in her opposite hand.

He grabbed the other pillow and hit her back. She blocked the swing with a forearm, grabbed the pillow-casing, and pulled.

An explosion ensued. Feathers hung suspended, dove-gray and white in the slanting sunlight. She laughed, hit him again, yanked her wrist back and away, red hair backlit, shining like a halo around her face.

He dropped the devastated pillow and grabbed her around the waist, enduring several smacks about the ears as he picked her up, rolling forward until he could get one knee under himself. He pushed her backwards, landing on top of her with his face buried in her midsection.

He blew.

A long raspberry resounded through the empty house. She laughed so hard she dropped the pillow, hands pounding helplessly on the disheveled bed, head lolling over the edge.

Well,
he thought,
as long as I’m here …
He straightened the other leg and slid lower, snaking a wet tongue into her navel. She giggled again, once, then shivered and stopped laughing as his nose reached the hollow of her thigh.

He slid an arm around each thigh to steady her, lifting her hips off the bed. A demanding strength, held in abeyance, rippled under his fingertips. She’d put on some weight and some muscle in thirteen years, and felt soft and solid in his arms instead of reminding him of another skinny girl.

Which,
he thought,
is all to the good, really.

Trout-brown speckles shivered on the buttermilk skin of her belly, soft as he remembered. He felt a different kind of tension in her now: anticipation, and a kind of fluid slackness that he recognized by Mingan’s word,
surrender.

He was flattered by her trust. “I can’t remember,” he whispered, feeling her poised between tautness and relaxation, his own delighted laughter still bubbling in his throat, “when I did anything that was this much
fun.
”

He realized as he said it that he did remember, and it was a very long time ago indeed. Poking halfheartedly at the empty place, he found it still there—but maybe not quite so achingly sore—and took that for an answer.

Humming to himself, he dipped his head down, seeking like a bee after salted honey, hearing Aithne’s moans over the distant susurrus of the waves. She pulled his hair, then, and she bit his shoulder, eventually, and he found he didn’t mind it in the slightest. A gritty, involved lover: she abandoned herself to his touch before regaining the initiative, becoming the aggressor.

And what a silly turn of phrase that is,
he thought, sleepy, half-drugged with her kisses. And then,
I feel clean.

So that was when he realized he
hadn’t,
while she lazed against him and apologized for the bruise.

He laughed at her worry. “I wasn’t about to be distracted just then.”

“I … well. You
are
more fun when you’re paying attention.”

Her coarse, bright hair had tangled, so he combed it with his fingers. The scarred side of her face rested on one of his shoulders: not the bruised one. “It’s good to be an angel,” he said. “Look. It’s already gone.”

She touched it with a fingertip. “Selene mentioned healing fast … but…”

Cahey nodded. “I’ll show you how. I have all kinds of things to show you.… Oh. Watch.”

He raised the hand off her hip, brushed a fingertip across his cheek to draw her attention to the scar. Her eyes focused on it. She frowned.

Before he could reconsider, he focused his concentration and willed it gone.

She frowned. And then her one green eye widened and her body went from slack to quivering in a moment. “How?”

“You just … make it gone. Decide you don’t want it anymore.”

“You mean…” She was shaking hard now, so he pulled her close and held on to her for a little while. “Just like that?”

“Whenever you’re ready.”

“Ah. Ah. Okay. Hang on.” She swallowed hard and closed her eye, and stayed there for a second, as scrunch-faced intent as a child wishing on a flower. “That feels funny. Cahey, did it work?”

“Take off your eyepatch and find out,” he said, trying not to smile too widely.

She reached tentatively, letting her fingertips brush the flawless pale skin of her face. She hesitated. Trembled. Yanked it off like a child ripping off a bandage and sat there blinking at him, dazzled by the sudden light.

Cahey, laughing, fell back against the bed.

“What? Does it look wrong?”

He shook his head, trying to clear the unavoidable image of a splotch-faced, quizzical cat. “No, Aith. It’s just that”—gasp—“there are no freckles where the patch kept the sun off your face.”

“You’ll pay for that, mister.” She grinned.

“Plenty of time to take it out on me.”

Her thoughtful expression brought him up short.

“If you’re staying,” he finished.

“You know how it is,” she said, but her smile held promise. “We’ll see how it goes. I don’t expect you to give up all your other girlfriends for me.”

He raised an eyebrow, hearing an echo of something someone had said to him, long ago. “With the exception of supernatural evils,” he said, “I’ve been more or less unentangled. Since.”

That silenced her. Cahey permitted himself a thoughtful smile, spending a few more moments teasing at the snarls in her hair and the tangle of emotions floating behind his breastbone. He visualized a knot: razor wire, ribbons, leather thongs and binding twine all wound through one another in confusion.
This is going to take a while,
he thought.

“How long was I out for?” he asked, after a little while.

A line drew itself between her eyes—concern or concentration. “Four days,” she said. “Borje found you and brought you back. Mingan realized what you had done. I think…” She hesitated. “You actually flummoxed him.”

They shared a long look, fraught with complexities.

“And you’ve been here since,” he said.

She nodded, biting her lip. “A woman came by. Merry something. She wanted to know why you hadn’t been to Newport in so long. And to say that the kid you sent her was working out fine.” She wasn’t looking at his face.

I’m an idiot.

He touched her arm.

Tossing her hair back out of her face, she examined him. “And I need to talk to you about something.”

He tensed. A moment later, he drew a breath and forced himself to stillness. “I’m prepared to listen to all the lectures I deserve,” he said.

She laughed. “It’s not a lecture. It’s just something I wonder if you’ve considered.” She laid her head back down on his shoulder.

Over the clamor of his instincts, he listened.

“If it was me, Cahey … well. You may love women, but you don’t always understand them very well.”

He leaned forward enough to address a blank look to his redheaded lover.

She grinned at him with one corner of her mouth. Fond wryness colored her voice. “Cahey, you idiot. That goddess you’ve been screwing. Can’t you see that she’s just using you to get to Muire?”

He opened his mouth to retort. Stopped. Thought.
What do you have but her word that she can do what she promised?

In another word. Nothing.

“What purpose? She can’t touch Muire. Not without trying to provoke something like the Desolation.”

Aithne shrugged, rolling her head from side to side. Her neck crackled. “You’re too nice, Cahey. I have to tell you, man: if
I
were raking some woman’s ex-lover over the coals the way this witch has been doing to you, the only possible reason for it would be revenge—or to provoke the woman in question into doing something stupid.”

“Ah.” He thought about it for a while before he answered. “You know, Aithne. Sometimes you sound so much like a girl I used to know, it’s uncanny.”

“A girl?” Back up on her elbows, chin on the backs of both hands. “What kind of a girl?”

He drew a breath and took a moment, then looked her directly in the face. “A girl who meant a lot to me,” he began.

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

Aithne ’screened Cathmar in the city around noon; the message said that she was hiking over the hill to Borje’s cottage, and that his father was expecting him. Cathmar had been waiting for the call. Mardoll was still sleeping.

Cathmar smiled miserably to himself, slipping down the steel escape with his boots in his hand until he reached the street. He leaned against the wall and stood on one foot at a time to pull them on.

Keeping Mardoll “busy”—and away from Cahey, while he recovered—had taxed Cathmar’s guile. And his angelic endurance. And the strength of determination provided by his newly minted loathing for a girl who’d said she loved him.

Contemplating his own naïveté, he tasted bitterness and despair. He glanced back over his shoulder at the worn old building.
I’m never coming back.
He thought about things he might have learned, if he’d listened to his old man.
Yeah, Dad, you were right. You do know when it’s the last time.

I hope she doesn’t think I learned nothing from our association. Maybe Dad can explain why it’s so satisfying to fuck somebody whom you’d really rather strangle.

Sick, Cathmar. Sick.

Erasmus’ taxi waited. He went to see his old man.

The blue wood door stood open, sand drifting onto the tile floor. Cathmar heard his father singing in the kitchen as he walked up the crunching seashell path to the cottage, and winced. And then smiled.
When was the last time you heard him mangle a song? Right. So shut up about it.

He called from the doorway. “Dad?”

The singing stopped. His father stepped away from the sink, shirtless, in ivory-colored trousers, drying his hands on a dish towel. “Cath,” he said softly, and Cathmar hid his startle when he realized Cathoair’s face was unmarked.

Their gazes met and both men spoke in unison. “Dad, I’ve been an—”

“I’m sorry.”

“—idiot.”

“Light, Cath, when the Hel did you get so tall?”

Cathmar suddenly found himself looking down into his father’s eyes as the old man walked across the room to him. “You saw me just a few days ago,” he said.

“Yeah, but…” Cahey shrugged and then smiled. “I think you’ve grown since then.”

“I have,” Cathmar conceded, after some consideration. “You’re right.” He stepped forward and wrapped his old man in a stiff, awkward hug. Cahey squeezed tight for an instant and then stepped back. They looked at each other, similarly expressionless, for a long minute.

“All right,” Cathmar said, breaking eye contact at last. “Time for the council of war.”

His father jerked his chin down in a short nod. “I’ll make tea.”

A little while later, they sat under the wide eaves in the shade, one sand dune away from the ocean. Cathmar sensed that his father was waiting for him to speak first.

He sipped his tea out of a blue china bowl he remembered and asked, “So what do you think Mardoll is up to?”

Cahey’s lips twitched. “Mardoll-Gullveig-Heythe? Well, I’ve got a theory about that. Or Aithne does. Since apparently she’s got all the smarts around here.” He sipped his tea. “I need to ask you something first.”

Cathmar twirled his bowl between the tips of his fingers. “Dad, what happened to your scar?”

Cahey coughed slightly. “Mingan showed me how to heal it.”

Cathmar nodded. “Good. It looks better that way. What did you want to ask me?”

“Sticky question,” Cahey warned, and then winced at his choice of words.

Cathmar frowned, answered the question he knew his father wanted to ask. “No. She hasn’t … hurt me. Physically. Is that what you wanted to know?”