The Sea Thy Mistress (35 page)

Muire took a single harsh breath. Cahey saw the rise and fall of her chest. “Your life, Cathoair? Are you so tired of it already, when we fought so hard to win it back for you?”

“No,” Cahey answered, not thinking, just speaking. “Not tired of it. But this my brother”—and somehow, it was not quite Cahey’s voice, his phrasing, anymore, but his and Strifbjorn’s together—“has a need, and I beg an intervention to meet that need.”

She pursed her lips. Mingan moved as if to step between them, but Cahey stopped him with a raised palm.

“I need your help, Muire,” Cahey said into the silence, his voice his own again. “I want that fucking collar off him, and I’m willing to pay whatever you need paid to do it.”

“Ah,” she whispered, at the same moment Mingan said, “No!” and caught Cahey’s wrist in the hand that was not cradling the cloak-swaddled cub. That hand, in its gray glove, was shaking.

“I will not permit it. Think of thy woman and of thy son.”

Cahey raised both eyebrows. “Mingan, they know. They don’t approve, precisely, but they know. And so does Selene. This isn’t like the last time.”

“No?”

He shook his head. “I can … repay you, somewhat. Give you the freedom you’ve never had. And I know I’ll be back again. Soon, if I have anything to say about it.”

“Back as someone else. It is not how we need thee.”

Cahey laughed at him and reached out with the hand he was not already clutching, lacing his fingers into the Wolf’s hair and pulling his mouth up to a kiss that he resisted and then leaned into. His mouth was as hot as Cahey remembered it—with his own memories and those of another, burning and wet.
How unfair, that these wars can never end in rest. Not for him. Not for me.

“Mingan, you utter fool,” Cahey said when they broke, noses almost touching. “You have the power to make me remember.”

Mingan let go of Cahey’s wrist, his hand rising to his throat. The cord still choked him with every breath. “It won’t be you. It won’t be fair, either, to whoever you become.”

Cahey looked aside. “So ask him when you find him. Maybe he’ll say yes.”

“Nay,” Mingan said, but Cahey knew him well enough to know that he meant “yes.”

“Done,” said the goddess. “Cahey, get that thing off of him, if you please.”

Cahey took his hand from Mingan’s throat and unlaced the collar of his shirt. “Do you trust me?”

He shivered when Cahey’s fingers brushed his skin. “Aye. With my life.”

“You will find me and give me your kiss?”

“With the last breath in my body.”

Cahey’s fingers were outlined against the pearlescent light of the ribbon, the collar. Slowly, they took on a silvery brilliance of their own. The knot was snarled tight. There were wolf-hairs caught in it, hairs that had endured all these centuries since he was bound. Cahey’s fingers were not nimble enough to free it, so he had to bend down and use his teeth, the heat of Mingan’s body like a brand against his face.

The warm metal of Mingan’s earring brushed Cahey’s cheek, which triggered another vivid memory—this one his own. Mingan stood shivering like a coyote in a leg trap, a little whine in the back of his throat. His breathing was a labored hiss—Cahey was strangling him, but he stood firm and did not flinch.
Hush, Brother. This will not hurt for long.

Cahey hoped it would prove true of himself as well, but what’s a little pain?
How bad can dying be?
He choked on a laugh as the knot began to slip: he knew the answer better than most.

The ribbon snaked free at last and Cahey straightened. Mingan’s gaze crossed his for a moment, and then he closed his eyes.

Cahey slipped the bit of cloth into Mingan’s hand and turned back to the sea.

“Ready as I’ll ever be.” His farewells were made, with the hope that they were farewells only and not good-byes.

“Then I claim my price,” she said, and—unexpectedly—she smiled. He trusted her. He knew what she had sacrificed, and what she had endured, and if there were ever a truly incorruptible soul in all the world, then it was hers.

Her eyes were sorrowful and deep as the sea. Cahey put his hand on Alvitr’s hilt, drawing comfort from the knotted pommel of the blade. “Muire, I’m ready to do it myself. I don’t want you to have to…”
live with that.

Cahey knew a little too much about it to wish that responsibility on anyone.

She shook her head and held out her hands to him. He took a step toward her, took her hands in his. Mingan stood silent witness behind them.

“Kiss me,” she said, and Cahey ducked his head to offer her his lips. Diminutive as she ever was, although a figure wrought of Light, now, and not flesh, she strained on tiptoe to reach him. Her mouth brushed his, soft as a sea breeze, and he let his lips drift open, waiting for the soul-searing rush of his breath and his
self
out of his body.

It did not come. There was pain—the pain of a thing too holy for bearing, that kiss like a brand stroked across his mouth—and there was glory, but there was no
taking.
She let go of his hands—lover, friend, goddess, mother of his son—and stepped away into the sea. “You give me your life, child of the Light, and I give it back to you. Go and lead my angels, einherjar, the way you were always meant to.”

He caught a breath in his throat. “But…”

“The price is a life, not a death, Cathoair, as I well have reason to know. You’re grown-up and powerful now, the thing you were always meant to be. Why would I want to start over?”

“I don’t want to be a general,” he told her at last. “I never wanted to be that.” Not in either life.

She drifted back to him then, as if tossed on the waves, and her hand burned like too-strong sunlight where she stroked his face. “Then be a father to them. But a leader they must have, and that, my dear, is who you were made to be.”

Cahey took a breath to fight her on it, and the words would not quite come out.
I gave her my life.

Her gaze held him fast. “Now go and do my will.”

Mingan looked at Cahey and Cahey looked at Mingan. He glanced down at the bit of ribbon, just a shred of cloth now, soiled and dark. “Oh,” Cahey said, remembering the years Mingan spent arguing this role with his former self.

He drew a deep breath full of Mingan’s scent and the scent of the sea. He stepped out of the water and strolled up the few short steps across the sand to face him. He looked down at the ribbon again, examined Mingan’s face, and then turned to look at the sea.

Mingan raised his hand and let the scrap slide off. It drifted out to sea—against the prevailing wind. When it had fluttered out of sight, he trained his eyes on Cahey’s and smiled, ever so slightly. “You dealt,” he said. “Now pay.”

Cahey heard Muire laughing softly, fading away as the Light died out of the water—or perhaps it was just the murmur of the sea.

Cahey raised an eyebrow at Mingan, reaching out to flip his braid behind his shoulder, stepping close enough to taste the heat of his breath. Salt from his skin flavored Cahey’s lips; Cahey recognized the slight crinkle at the corner of Mingan’s eyes as his truest smile.

“Mingan.”

“Aye, Cathoair?” His shirt collar lay open, and already the bruises were fading from marble-white skin.

Cathoair kissed the Grey Wolf’s cheek and stepped away, there by the border of the sea. “You’ve made amends, you old dragon. I think perhaps that it’s not that you’ve changed. I think the world has. You will be welcome in any hall.”

The Grey Wolf’s forehead wrinkled unbelievingly. “Thou hast not the power to make that happen.”

“Oh, but I do,” Cahey said. “Selene and I between us? No one will cross us.” He grinned, and patted Mingan on the shoulder. “Time to live with just being one of the guys, old man.”

Mingan shook his head, cradling the silent pup closer to his belly. “A wolf is nothing without his pack.”

Cahey placed a hand on his shoulder and turned him back, back toward the cottage with the blue roof, and a light burning in the window. “See? That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Come on. There’s tea inside, and Selene and Aithne are waiting.”

Tor Books by Elizabeth Bear

A Companion to Wolves
(with Sarah Monette)

All the Windwracked Stars

By the Mountain Bound

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE SEA THY MISTRESS

Copyright © 2011 by Elizabeth Bear

All rights reserved.

A Tor
^®
eBook

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Tor
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is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bear, Elizabeth.

The sea thy mistress / Elizabeth Bear.—1st ed.

     p.   cm.

“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

Sequel to: All the windwracked stars.

ISBN 978-0-7653-1884 8

I. Title.

   PS3602.E2475G43 2011

   813'.6—dc22

2010035746

First Edition: February 2011

eISBN 978-1-4299-2830-4

First Tor eBook Edition: February 2011