The Sea Thy Mistress (7 page)

Muire, the Historian, who has become what Heythe sought so long to destroy.

Lather floats from her as she plunges her hair to rinse it, white lashings on a brown surface borne away under the arching branches of trees. When she straightens, swinging yellow locks, sun glittering in the strands of the intricate necklace that is the only thing she wears, the water flies from her like a cascade of diamonds.

She stretches, goosefleshed, hands on her hips and her shoulders already pinkening, while the wolf watches from the shadows halfway into another world, and hopes Heythe cannot see him.

He’s never had any real sense of her capabilities except that they are greater than his own and constantly surprising. What he
does
know is that she defeated the assembled might of the children of the Light—or, more precisely, that she caused them to trick themselves into defeat. That she used his own weakness to help bring about that destruction. That nothing is beyond or beneath her. That it was a trivial exercise for her to step forward more than two thousand years in time, to when the Dweller Within should have been dead of the blow she dealt him with Mingan’s unwitting help—or that she had had the wherewithal to make it seem trivial, at least.

He knows also that it must have been a shock to her to find her victim replaced by one strong and hale, without crippling injury. But she is Heythe, and she will take this setback in stride, and move forward in her extermination of everything the wolf finds bright and brave in the world.

Most tellingly, he knows he cannot hope to defeat her if she knows he exists to oppose her. She is stronger and more subtle than he—his methods in his youth were never subtle, but over the centuries he has learned otherwise. If he is to lay her down for once and all, he must do so as the unseen hand in a velvet glove. He must apply her own techniques.

The poetry of it pleases him.

He’d kill her for vengeance, for vengeance is enough. But even more than vengeance, he’ll kill her for love.

Not the love she once deluded him into thinking she bore for him. Not that. But other loves entirely, even if the wolf’s own ancient treachery has rendered them no more clean than what was between him and Heythe. Loves that he can at least still honor in the defense, though he has poisoned them.

This boots thee not,
he growls to himself, cloak furled tight to his shoulders against an otherworldly chill he cannot feel as pain, as much as he might sometimes wish to. This, too, Heythe has done to him. It is not his way, to dwell in the past, to second-guess while his thoughts whine and circle. But in the witch’s presence—even if she does not remark him—he does. She makes him more man than wolf, as always, and as always he is undone by it.

You are brave,
says the great, calm presence at the heart of him.
Most wounded as you have been would not return to the fray.

Because it is such courage to linger here, on the edge of reality, and watch a woman wash her hair.

It is courage to approach a thing that can destroy us,
Kasimir says.
The more so when we have already felt its sting.

The wolf snorts. Beyond his shadowed gateway, Heythe picks her way up the stream bank, wet feet slipping in mud. She passes close, so close the wolf could reach from the oak-shadow he hides inside and clutch her wrist. Her scent is a visceral memory, a twist inside him of lust and hatred and self-loathing so bright and sharp that for a moment he feels nothing else. The growl caught low in his throat surprises him; it’s a moment before he can silence the sound.

If Heythe cannot see him, chances are she cannot hear him, either. But it was not exactly his own growl. Or rather, it was, for though he wears the shape and clothes and words of a man now, two wolves live still within him. One is a gray wood-ghost, a canny old loner, lost to his pack, a sorrowing shadow of the darkling forest. But the other, fire-eyed, seared within by a heat that rises up his throat and burns below the collar that chokes him every time he swallows, is the Suneater, a monster out of myth and mystery, a beast driven mad by pain and despair until murder is its only passion.

The Grey Wolf watches Heythe pick her sun-dried clothes off the twigs of a bush, where she spread them after washing them among the stones, and feels the Suneater stir within. He tastes the mad wolf’s fury; he remembers the savor of steaming blood, rent bowels, torn flesh. He imagines tasting it again.

He will not fail this time. He will not stop until Heythe is dead.

With a curl of the Grey Wolf’s lips, the Suneater smiles. And a growl near-silent, like the deep grinding of glaciers, rumbles in his chest again.

38 A.R.
Summer

The village of Newport lay three miles down the beach from Cahey’s cottage—an easy hour’s walk, with time to let Cathmar down out of the shoulder harness along the way so he could run through the sand between the bones. Cahey also had a heavier sack filled with repaired fishing nets slung over his other shoulder. It banged his hip in counterpoint to his stride as he ambled along, the strap cutting his trapezius.

Cahey set out at sunset, meaning to reach the village when the fishing boats were putting in. His first glimpse of the village came as he rounded the point. It sat inside the curve of the land where the coast hooked around a deepwater harbor, a single long pier stretching out like a hand greeting the sea.

Newport proper sat up the bluff, accessible by a switchbacked road. New construction, houses cobbled together with salvage and ancient, pre-Desolation materials. Good sawn timbers were reserved for boats. Diode lanterns gleamed along the path up, and shone down the length of the pier, illuminating the bustle of unloading fishing craft. The landward end of the floating pier was clotted with rickety market stalls.

Cahey ignored them. He slipped through the crowd, head ducked, the little boy on his back engrossed in tugging his braids this way and that, staring over his shoulders at the crowd. It was familiar-strange walking among people, feeling the boards of the floating pier shift under his feet and theirs also. The old skills of moving in the city came back fast.

The boat he wanted berthed at the far end of Newport pier, the hull painted marigold and picked out in leaf-green and gold letters:
The Merry Fetch.
He caught the eye of the
Fetch
’s brown captain by the bottom of the gangplank and walked up to her, unslinging the bag of nets as he did.

“Merry,” he greeted the captain. She grinned up at him, and thrust out a thick arm for the nets.

“We got a holdful, Cahey,” she said. “Not too much time to chat. Your payment in dried fish to the usual address?”

“Yes,” he answered. Cathmar bounced on his back, kicking his heels against Cahey’s hip bones. He winced to make Merry laugh. “Anything else that needs mending?”

She shook her head. “Lucky trip. Look…” Her eyes traveled up and down his body. He wondered if it was a blatant pass or a livestock appraisal. His face might be cut up, but his body was pretty enough. And if it wasn’t that, he knew he looked fit for hard labor.

“You look like you can handle yourself. Why don’t you come out with us, next trip? Earn more than dried fish.”

Cahey laughed and bounced to make Cathmar giggle. He knew she could see the bright eyes of the little boy peering around his shoulder. “I’m a dad,” he said. “I stay onshore where it’s safe.”

It wasn’t a lie. Just two facts, and she was free to make connections between them.

She chuckled. “All right. The rate you mend nets at, I suppose you do all right. What the hell do you do with that much fish, anyway?”

“Mostly, I bring it up to the city and donate it to charity,” he answered. “But don’t tell anybody that. It’s our secret.”

She sucked on her lips, obviously disbelieving him. “All right,” she said, pushing an ebony-black tangle out of her face. Her hair might have started the day braided, but it hadn’t stayed that way. He wondered if she was just too vain to crop it. “But remember my offer.
Merry Fetch
can use good hands.”

He smiled and nodded, turning away. “I’ll do that. If I ever find myself wanting to go to sea.”

38 A.R.
Autumn

Aithne straightened, pushing both fists into the small of her back. She flipped the curls that had escaped her braid out of her face and sighed, glancing around her former kitchen one last time. The stained wooden cupboards and the pantry door stood open, early-morning sunlight spilling in the window over the sink. She swallowed the smile that hovered around the corners of her mouth. She wasn’t sorry to be leaving.

Still.
A moment’s image came to her of a lean, shirtless man doing dishes while a gray cat watched with interest from the edge of the sink. She thought about the sunlight catching dark red highlights off his skin, and the smile returned. A spike of regret killed it.

And if he noticed you were anything but a charity case, he might have been worth fighting for.

She kicked her pack lightly with a booted toe. “All right, old man, that’s the last of it. Is there anything else you want to see if we can trade for, or are you happy with what we’ve got?”

Aethelred weighed a traveling pack in his left hand. “I can take more than this,” he said.

“You’re three times my age.” She reached down and caught hers up. It was heavy, but it would get lighter as she ate her way through it. She pointed with her other hand, indicating worried blue eyes peering out of the greenery atop a wounded old hutch in the corner. “Besides, you talked me into this road trip to save the world. So you’re carrying the cat.”

“Does the cat have a name?” he asked, dragging a stool over to the hutch.

Aithne shook her head. “Like a damn cat will come when you call it?”

She watched his massive, thick-fingered hands coax the little animal out from under the philodendron. “Well, men have names. So I suppose that’s got nothing to do with it.”

Aithne grinned. “The voice of experience?”

He turned around and handed her the cat before hopping off the little stool. He landed hard, betraying his great weight. She imagined she heard the mechanisms whine under his skin.

“There,” he said. “You get to pack the cat.”

42 A.R.
Winter

The wolf folds his arms inside the shadows and watches man and boy along the salt-grass dune, racing a kite against the swooping gulls. A twinge closes his throat; he looks away. There are more gulls in every direction, and the wind that blows across the worlds brings the wolf the scent of sharp sea and dry salt.

He steps through shadows to a sheltered corner, out of sight of Cathoair and Cathmar. The dunes march long and iterative in every direction; if he climbed higher, he would be silhouetted, but eventually come upon a road.

Someone is not here, has not been here, who should be. It frightens the wolf, who is becoming accustomed—again—to the slow march of fear in a life he had, for a while, rid of it.

“Imogen,” he says.
Kasimir, can you hear her?

No,
the stallion says.
I think I speak into her, but she does not answer.

“Imogen,” says the wolf, aloud again.

The Imogen does not answer.

42 A.R.
Midwinter

At least Freimarc is warmer than Eiledon,
Selene thought, pacing deliberately down the boardwalk at the waterfront in the curling mists of predawn. The weathered old buildings were different, too: the Free City crouched on the coast of a long, curving gulf that brought warmer water north. Eiledon would be lousy with snow by now. Freimarc’s peeling pastel stucco houses and low-roofed commercial buildings were still snarled with vines and climbing roses between roads stuck about with crooked palm trees, although the blooms were past until spring.

Selene had never liked the snow. She glanced down a rocky black beach at the broad, placid gulf and smiled. In the angled winter sunlight, clumps of seaweed bobbed with the tide.

Freimarc angled up steeply away from the water, ranks of colorful dwellings roof-tiled in red, yellow and blue ascending a series of hills. Many lay vacant still, the uninhabited ones having become overgrown. It didn’t rain much here, but the warm gulf sent nightly fog-banks and morning gloom rolling across the hills to saturate gardens and hanging plants—enough moisture to sustain lush subtropical growth. On the south side of the hills, against a south-facing wall, lemons could be coaxed to grow, and gardens even of uninhabited houses were thick as well with oranges, olives, almonds and apricots—though the latter were out of season now.

Resettlers had come here in droves, for the climate, for the technological resources still in fair repair—for Freimarc had been one of the last surviving cities of the Desolation—and for the easy access to a fine harbor. In the world after Rekindling, these things were precious. While Eiledon’s university still produced the only engineers and technomancers, some were now emigrating to Freimarc, and a few hoverboards and taxis cruised the city’s skies again. In its tropical lushness, fruit-sellers might gather produce in the urban orchards and peddle it along the road to travelers or to householders who had exceeded the production of their own small plantations.