The Sea Thy Mistress (5 page)

“Cahey,” Aethelred said. “He’s Muire’s little boy. What would you ever do to hurt him?”

Aethelred clapped a callused palm to the young-seeming man’s cheek and smiled. “Take the time. Raise your son. You’ve done enough for a while; the world will wait for you. Borje will keep an eye on the chapel.” Then he turned away and walked off down the beach, whistling, leaving Cahey forlorn by a locked door with a toddler in one hand and a set of keys in the other.

Never get angry,
Cahey reminded himself.
Never get scared.

He felt like he should say something. But what was there to say? Aethelred would have answers for all his arguments before he, himself, even thought of them.

The einherjar stood for a long moment, watching Aethelred go. Then he looked down at the child and shrugged. “Well, kid. I guess it’s you and me against the world.”

He put the key in the lock. It clicked when he turned it—well-oiled, of course. He opened the door and they went inside.

37 A.R.
Summer

Darkness. Deep darkness, and a musical sound. The Imogen lies half on her side, and feels where the blood has pooled in limbs unmoved for centuries. Awareness returns slowly.

What she hears is not music. It’s water. Trickling. Echoing in a rocky and convoluted space that builds itself out of sound in her mind.

When she opens her eyes, she sees that the darkness is leavened by a dull glow. A red light, or the black-red below red. She sees by the reflected heat of her own body, and by that light she sees also that the space that drinks that heat is cold.

Not brutally cold. Not dangerously cold—well, dangerous for frailer things, enough cold to make a warm animal breath mist in the humidity but not freeze to rime. But the Imogen has never met cold that could discomfort her, in neither this world nor the dead one.

She smells her brother in the dark, but the scent is old. Days gone, and soaked into the stone. She is alone. She has been a long time awakening.

Something twists inside her. The lenses of her eyes flex, alter, stretch wide. Her eyes enlarge, the sockets growing to encompass them. Now she sees clearly, as if in broad and detailed afternoon.

She rises up from a pallet of hard stone and steps out of her coffin, feeling the restless flex of pinions along her spine. The wings strain out, broad vanes made visible by the heat of blood within, and strike against the hard, low stones overhead.

There was a fire here, but it has burned to char. Fire, coals, smoke. The smoke must have gone somewhere.
Mustn’t it?
The scent of burning hangs on the air, coupled with an odor of bitter musk.

The smell of the brother.

She scoops a handful of charcoal and ash, brings them near her face. There is no heat left in them. The rock is wet, the ash saturated. When she wipes her hand on her thigh, pale caked streaks remain behind.

The sensitive hairs on her skin trace the ruffle of air movement. Upward, outward.

With the force of instinct, she knows what she must do.

Upward. Outward.

Or die.

She understands
die.
She does not prefer it.

The winding corridor twists and forks and forks again. But she feels the shape the echoes describe, smells the smoke, smells the darkness. Smells the path the brother took, and the cold remains of his second fire, and the meadow and the flowers beyond.

The Imogen moves into the air. It holds her, pushes back. Her feathers cup it, find resistance, row her forward on wingbeats silent as an owl’s.

Echoes splinter off the falling water, but there is brightness beyond. The Imogen beats hard for speed, pinions feathering sand and stone, then folds her wings tight and arrows through the fall.

The water strikes her like a rockfall, snapping her down feet in the instant it takes her to pass. Then she is through, dazzled by unspeakable brilliance, slapping her hands across her eyes as her wing tips skim the water. On a still pool, each touch would leave spreading ripples, but this turbid water eats up the evidence of her passage as if she had never been.

Too brilliant, the dark. But when she peeks between her fingers, her eyes have adapted. The silent trees await her, verdant against a sky silver with night. The sun has barely dipped below the rim of the world. One side of the sky is royal-blue, the other gray as dawn. It is possible to see the face of the lady moon, pale in the washed-out twilight, once the Imogen’s adaptations coax away the painful brightness. Two bachelor moons—damaged satellites—trail her forlornly, but the moon is platinum and they are brass.

She will not have them. One of the little ones is most pitifully scarred. Around them, in the dark half of the sky, the Imogen can discern a salting of stars.

It is their light that has awakened her.

On the bank of the pool she settles, pausing to trace with her fingertips the hoofprints that were not made by any deer.

The Imogen rises, and follows the stream on down. It tumbles from pool to pool, the lower ones more still and limpid. She crouches beside one, where the light of the sky filters between black-green pine boughs to fall over her shoulder. It is not still water, but it smooths beneath her shadow, making a dark, silvered surface.

In that shadow she sees the thing from which she takes her name, or what passes for her name, if a name she must have.

The form in the mirror.
Imogen.

Dark as sorrow, skin like black velvet. When has she seen velvet? How does she know the sleekness of its touch?

Skin like black velvet: dull, soft, plush across the naked body, which is muscular and long, small-breasted, taut-tendoned. Black wings, lusterless in the twilight, soft as an owl’s. Eyes lucent, amber held up to the sun, the pupils changing shape as she peers into the inexplicable silent water.
What are all these things in my mind?

She has never seen herself before.
Have I?
Has she? She must, because this is familiar. Familiar even as it changes, her face reshaping under her own probing touch.

I am like nothing in all the world
.
I am a trickster’s daughter.

It sounds right. A trickster’s daughter. But then, what is that? What is
trickster
? What is
daughter
? What is
brother
and
shadow
and
mirror,
for that matter?

She knows the answers without knowing how she knows them. She thinks she has forgotten much, in her long slumber, but the knowledge comes with no sensation of loss. It is enough that she also knows—as she knows everything, with interior conviction—what she must do, where she must go.

It has always been so, the wisdom bred in her, the wyrd written on her bones. She is the Imogen, and she has always done as she was made to do: fed her hunger on a master or at her master’s command, and gone hungry between. Hungry always, as is her nature, and always unsatisfied.

She must go. She feels the pull, the command, the echo inside her. Her brother—her master—has spoken, and bid her find a new master and cast herself in his service.

The Imogen does not wish to do as she is bid.

Almost without warning, the wings unfurl, the tendons stretch, and she is skybound—for the first time? Once again? Moonshadows fall about her like tattered rags, and the waterfall begins to splash again.

She rises.

38 A.R.
Spring Solstice

Footsore in mendicant’s sandals, Aethelred leaned on his staff. It was his second since he’d set out from the cottage some nine months before, and now he used it as a prop to rest each foot by turn, like a mule cocking one leg up to sleep standing.

He’d gotten to meet a few mules since Rekindling, though the Dweller Within knew where they came from. Well, now that he thought of it, the Dweller probably did know, at that. As she no doubt knew everything. More or less. The trick was getting her to do something more informative than casting up mysterious babies.

Aethelred liked mules, with their long floppy ears and solid common sense that brooked no tomfoolery. He wondered, somewhat idly, if there were any mule moreaux.

He raised his hand and scratched around the rim of the chromed side of his face. The bright spring sun felt like a pressing iron applied to his face, and the old burns still itched. He could feel the heat in them, soaked deep into living tissue where it would never come out. It warmed his fingertips where he pressed them to ridged scars.

Aethelred shook his head, rolling heavy shoulders eased by the warmth of that same sunlight that scorched his face. He’d walked a long way to find this place. There was no point in hesitating now. The dirt track under his feet led past a little shingle farmhouse slumped, broken-backed, into a shaggy green hillside. Weathered cedar shakes caught the light that angled between fluffy clouds, silver over gray like the wings of a moth. The roadcut ran black through moist earth on the sunrise side of the house. Aethelred could make out the tea-stained gleam of broken bone in the dark, living soil.

A little north of the Ailee resettlement, just as Cahey had said. Not that the kid would have told him if he’d known Aethelred planned on coming here. And Selene’s elemental loyalty would never stretch to telling Aethelred where she’d tracked Cahey down if she thought he didn’t want Aethelred to know.

Aethelred shrugged. Some people, righteous as they were, didn’t possess much sense.

I’m getting too old for so damned much walking.

He kept on down the lane.

He was here to see about a girl.

She was outside, hanging sheets up on a line, her copper-colored hair catching plasticky glints off the day. The image didn’t remind the old preacher of his childhood: there hadn’t been much in the way of sunlight or clean sheets hung out to dry in Eiledon. Before times changed, anyway, and the soil and the sea came back to life.

He grinned to himself. Things were different now.

He didn’t make a lot of noise coming up the lane to the gate, but she turned around anyway, pushing escaping hair back off the eyepatch that punctuated an ugly, haggled scar. Her hand dropped to the pistol at her belt, so he thumped his staff on the ground. She hesitated. He rewarded her with a cheery wave.

“Hello the house!” he called out. “Got a drink for a mendicant man?”

She dusted her other hand on her trousers, leaving a loamy smear on canvas. He saw her watching his face to see what he made of the scars.

They were pretty bad. Not as bad as Aethelred’s, but he wasn’t a pretty redheaded girl of oh-about-twenty-two. And he still had both eyes. Shame about hers.

Her brow creased—with concern, not concentration. When she finally nodded, it carried an air of resignation.

“Come around back,” she said, not taking her hand off the pistol. “We’ve got a well.”

We.
He glanced around. A small gray cat coiled through the woodpile and a chicken scratched in the hardpacked yard. Aethelred hadn’t yet gotten over marveling at the existence of so many plants and animals. There sure hadn’t been any before. As miracles ran, he allowed, Muire had done pretty good.

Aethelred didn’t think that anybody lived here but this young woman—too young to remember Eiledon, and the life there bounded on all sides by the Desolation. But it was all right with him if she wanted to lie a little for safety’s sake.

He wasn’t an angel, after all.

After he’d drunk from the dipper he turned and handed it back. She hung it up on the yellow wooden wellcover while he studied her profile. She was damn pretty, really, if you didn’t mind the eyepatch and the fading cut lines on her arms and face. Interesting nose and an interested expression. Freckles on slightly sunburned skin, and all that red hair braided back away from her face, except where it was draggled with sweat and getting away from her. Not hiding behind it. That took courage, too.

Provisionally, Aethelred thought Cahey was an idiot. Well, he
knew
Cahey was an idiot; he’d as good as raised the kid. But after a life spent tending bar and lifting Burdens, Aethelred fancied himself a pretty good snap judge of character. And he hadn’t thought Cahey was enough of an idiot to walk away from a girl like this one.

He said, “I hope you don’t mind if I ask you a question.”

She stiffened a little, but didn’t look ready to snap. Aethelred took it for permission. Something about her, the lift of her chin when she felt herself challenged, reminded him of someone he used to care for. It was not until she snapped her head aside to toss her braid back that he identified who, however, and understood abruptly why Cahey would have found her both irresistible and unbearable.

She moved like Astrid, who’d died in a useless accident for which Cathoair had never forgiven himself.

Aethelred took a breath, crunching his shoulders down to look as small and inoffensive as he knew how. “I’m called Aethelred,” he said. “And I wonder if your name might be Aithne?”