The Sea Thy Mistress (32 page)

“Good.” Cahey eased a white-knuckle grip on the handle of the teapot, managed to refill their bowls without spilling any, until Cathmar spoke again.

“She hurt you.”

Tea slopped. Cahey wiped it up with a mild curse. He set aside teapot and napkin and looked his son in the eye. “She … worked on a hurt that was already there.” He shook his head, ponytail bobbing. He opened his mouth to speak again and then thought better of it and drank his tea.

Cathmar let the silence rest a moment. “Your theory. Aithne’s theory.”

“Oh. Yeah. She said she’d met you?”

Cathmar nodded. “Briefly.”

“What do you think of her?” The question was a little too carefully casual.

Cathmar drank his tea very slowly. “I think you’re the biggest idiot I’ve ever met, Dad, where girls are concerned. But they do seem to like you, so maybe there’s something to that.” He watched Cahey studying his face, held on to the laugh as long as he could, and barely managed to swallow the tea without spraying it across the table.

It took a second, but Cahey started laughing, too. “Is that your way of saying I don’t need your approval?”

“Well,” Cathmar replied, “of course you need my approval. But that’s beside the point. What you don’t need is my permission, okay? I think we’re kind of beyond that.”

Cahey was still studying him, in a thoughtful manner that made him smile nervously. “What?”

“You turned out okay, kid.”

He laughed dismissively, met his father’s concentrated stare. Realized that Cahey wasn’t kidding and flushed, looking down into his bowl. Ran his tongue across his teeth while he thought.

“Dad—well, you did okay.” Cathmar startled himself with the realization as he said it that it wasn’t just a comforting noise.

His father opened his mouth. No words came out.

Cathmar glanced away and changed the subject. “So can we get on with dealing with … her?”

He thought he caught relief in his father’s face. “Yeah. Anyway, Aithne pointed out to me the possibility that it wasn’t about us.”

“What do you mean?” Cathmar rubbed the edge of his forefinger across his lips.

“Well,” his father said, “we do have something in common. Other than”—a dismissive shake of his head—“Gullveig. Or whatever her name is.”

“Mingan says Heythe.”

“Right.”

“So what do we have in common? Being einherjar. The swords … Oh.” Cathmar felt the ill-defined betrayal and fury that had haunted him for days suddenly crystallize, a lump of basalt hardening under his solar plexus. “Mom.”

“Sure. And I can’t think of why else she’d be doing some of the things she has, except … to get to your mother. If she could do what she offered me, that would be a blow against Muire in itself. And if she can’t, well, having me half-crazy and you on a string certainly weakens us.”

Cathmar gritted his teeth in sudden comprehension.
How could I have been so blind?
“Yeah,” he said, “by about fifty percent.”

His dad must have seen the look of realization on his face. “Any idea what she wants, Cath?”

Cathmar nodded. “Hel, yes. Dad. She wants Mom’s job. What else could it be?”

His father’s face went very still as Cahey leaned forward the table. Cathmar thought his own must look much the same. Cahey took a deep breath and let it out on a curse. “No, she doesn’t. She doesn’t want to take up the Burden. If she did, really wanted it, I think your mother would hand it over cheerfully.”

“So what does she want?”

Cahey licked his lips. “Mingan said she worked to destroy the world before this one. That she brought down the children of the Light. He gave me—” He shook his head, looped-back braids falling in a mass over his shoulder. “He gave me some knowledge. Some fragments of things I remember now. She wants the Bearer dead. It was her killed the first one.”

“That’s
stupid,
” Cathmar said, unable to restrain himself.

“She’s tearing down something made by someone she hated,” Cahey said. “Killing a child to punish the father. It’s just revenge. That’s all it is. Just revenge.”

Cathmar leaned back, steepling his hands before him, and rolled his head from side to side to ease the pain in his neck before he realized that it was his father’s gesture. “Now for the next question: what are we going to do about it?”

His father tapped on the table with fingertips, twice, and then the flat of his hand. “Well,” he said through a smile that wasn’t, “she wants me to be bait. So I guess bait is what I am.”

*   *   *

Borje twisted his hoof against the tile, almost but not quite pawing at the slates. “I’m coming,” he said, starlight gleaming in his wide brown eyes.

Aethelred leaned his staff against the wall and stood up straight. “No, you’re not. You’re staying here, and so is Erasmus.”

Looking around his living room for support, Borje found nothing. Selene, Cathmar, Aithne were all either stony-faced or shaking their heads. Erasmus stood in the corner, plumed tail wavering slightly. Mingan was nowhere to be found, and Borje knew Selene, at least, was frantic; he could see it in the way her tail coiled around her ankle and clung. Cahey had already chosen his vantage: a high, open place, readily visible from a long way off. “It’s not safe.”

“Bearer of Burdens. It’s never safe, Borje.”

As if the old priest had not spoken, Borje continued. “And we should wait for Master Wolf.”

Selene hissed softly. “Borje. I haven’t heard from him. Or his steed.” Her hackles bristled, and it must have cost her to speak levelly. “I don’t know where he went, and he may not be coming back.”

“Why do we have to do this now?”

Aethelred sighed. “Because you’re as sensible as a rock, and you and Erasmus are part of the community. And if every last damned one of us fails to come back from this little expedition, and Heythe wins…” The old soldier walked up to the bull, grabbed a steel-shod horn in his hand, and pulled the moreau’s head down so he could stare into his eyes. “You two are our insurance policy. Our fallback position. Because every moreau within fifty miles was freed by Selene, and if we die trying, the two of you will have to turn them into an army and go after what’s-her-name.”

The bull took a breath to argue.

Aethelred stepped back, cuffed him on the shoulder affectionately. “Cleanup is the job nobody wants,” he said. “But when you draw it, Borje, you know for sure your buddies trust you. All right?”

“Hel.” He tossed his horns in irritation. “Hel. Yes. Man. But if you don’t come back I’m kissing the first Black Silk I see and putting him in charge of the operation.”

Selene laughed. “Damn straight, Borje,” she said with a more normal flicker of her tail. “See? Aethelred said you have a good head on you.”

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

She is sent for by name.

She remembers him now. From long before, in another world. She remembers … so much.

He waits for her on a green hilltop beside his steed, the steed who spoke to her and bade her come to this place, at this time. He calls her, and she does not have to go to him. But if she goes to him, there is nothing now to stop her.

Almost, she tastes his blood in advance, imagines the crack of his bones in her teeth.

Almost.

She furls her wings, plummets. The wind kisses her face, her feathers. Standing before him, she exults in the shadow of fear that touches his silver eyes.

“I hear you, Wolf, but you may not compel me.”

He inclines his head. “I know that.”

“You fear me. You freed me.”

“I do, Imogen. I did.”

“You who first chained me.”
Blood and bones.
She runs her tongue over the sharp edges of her teeth. She tastes his death … but the anticipation sits uneasy.

She does not like that.

He nods. “I’ve come to bargain, not command.”

Stepping closer, the Imogen smells his fear. His pain. Whetting her appetite. She traces the line of his cheekbone with her forefinger. He does not flinch. She thinks about the mark of his own ancient bondage that she know lies taut around his neck, one end frayed and torn. She is not the only one who has been chained.

She is not chained anymore.

His steed tenses behind her, but even that one cannot match a trickster’s daughter. Even that one has nightmares. And his rider holds him in check: she sees it in the warning glance shot past her.

“What have you, Mingan, that I could not take?” She’d never spoken his name before. Always, he was “Lord.”

But he was not cruel to me.

Whence that reminder? A voice inside: unfamiliar, not the voice she knows. The voice of the almost possible.

“You could not take my service,” he says, proud eyes flashing. “I will serve you as once you served me, Imogen. I will place myself in thrall to you, if you wish it.” She smells the fear on him as he makes the offer. Death he courted. This thing he offers her … frightens him. “But grant me first one boon.”

“What gift?” She wants to shred him, assuage the old hunger with his flesh and agony. She needs … unbound at last, she needs what she has ever been prevented from taking. So what stops her? Her hand rests now on the side of his neck. Her fingers curl, and her claws draw blood. One skitters off the impervious surface of that collar, wrought as it is of improbable things.

He shows no pain, but she feels it in him. “Destroy the one called Heythe.”

He is weaker. He is prey. Succulent. Why can she not close her hand?

Her soul.

That which frees her. Binds her.

She shoves him away, spins, spits, screams. She wants him. She could crush him, this creature whose father is her father, too. Split his skin, shatter bones, rend meat. Pulp, immortal pulp and pith and nothing more. She whirls on him. He does not try to stand. His stallion surges toward her, stops as if hauled up on invisible chains—a moment before she would be forced to address him with her claws.

“Take my life as the price for taking hers,” he says, very softly.

She turns on the one called Mingan. Two steps and she mantles his prone form with her wings. Fury, hunger, wroth, nightmare …

… pity.

Pity?

What, oh what, is it that you have given me, Cahey?

“I reject your offer,” she says to him. With the heavy downdraft of wings, she returns to the sky, owing service to one only.

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

Cahey waited for her on the flag-paved hilltop beside the chapel, knowing she would come. By moonlight, he suspected.

He was right. She strolled across the flagstones, limned in silver. Smiling, gorgeous, cloying. “You are so very beautiful,” she murmured, raising a hand toward his cheek, “but I think I liked you better with the scar, pet.”

Cahey stepped back when she reached for him. “I can’t do this.”

“This is the final night of our bargain,” she said.

“No more.”
Buying time. Never get scared, Cahey.
And then, a comprehending smile.
No. Go ahead, get scared. But do what you have to do anyway.

She raised a golden eyebrow at him, cocked her head as if considering the source of his grin. “Really,” she said. “Threatened? You can tie
me
to the bed this time if it will make you feel better.”

“Actually”—amused to know that she did not understand him well enough to recognize the poisonous levelness of his tone—“I’ve discovered I rather like that part.”

She said nothing for the moment.

“What I do
not
like is feeling filthy everywhere you’ve touched me.”

“Men don’t refuse me, Cathoair.”

“This one does.”

“Am I not powerful?” She smiled at him, blue eyes bottomless as the sea. “Am I not fair?”

No. Not quite as bottomless as the sea. Muire did what she did for me. For all of us. Not in spite of us.

“You are those things and more,” he told the goddess. He felt the hesitation leave him, and smiled. “But you are not anyone that I could have loved, and you will have nothing more from me that you do not take. You will certainly not have the place of the woman who gave her life for me.”

“You condemn your Astrid to death.”

He laughed behind gritted teeth. “I release myself to history. Now get off my beach, get out of my world, and take your seductions elsewhere. If you please.
Pet.
”

The expression on her face was all the warning he got.
Oh. This is going to hurt.

She struck. A backhanded blow loosened teeth and split his cheek open. He grunted, rocked backwards.

He raised his hands, settling into a fighting crouch.
One,
he thought, the way he had learned as a child. To occupy your mind, and because sometimes he would ask how many times, and you would have to know, or he would think you hadn’t been paying attention.