All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (12 page)

“Thank you,” Gjerta said. And then she looked down at her hands. “Did he promise a reward?”

Muire shook her head. “No need,” she said. “I’m only here because any decent person would be.”

Any decent person who left my husband lying in the gutter,
said Gjerta’s quirked eyebrow and narrowed lips, but she did not make the condemnation patent. “Thank you,” she said again, and stood, by which Muire understood the interview to be complete.

“I’m sorry,” Muire said again, and allowed herself to be shown the door.

When she emerged into the sunlight, she turned back toward the Well. She walked directly but not too quickly, free hand in her pocket, and could not help but notice the number of Mongrels and unmans on patrol. One group passed very close—two rats and a canine under the command of a Black Silk officer, all pricked ears, smoky eyes, and lashing tail. The cat, a snow leopard by its spots, eyed Muire appraisingly as they passed, but Muire kept her gaze front and walked on, and there was no trouble.

It was no idle supposition: Ingraham Fasoltsen had been in the employ of the Technomancer.

Muire was in it now.

E
ven at midday, the Well lies in shadow, reflected light cold and amorphous upon its streets. The wolf feels it, the weight of all that earth overhead. It reminds him of a cave, the air moist and unmoving in the belly of a mountain, the sense of pressure and clammy chill.

It amuses him to think that when he walks into the Well, he walks from shadow and into shadow. The lights burn summer and winter, day and night. Power is one resource Eiledon will never want for.

The wolf is on a scent.

One he sniffed from Ingraham Fasoltsen’s dying fingers. The scent of a woman who was also a cat. An unman, one of the Technomancer’s perversions. She retrieved Svanvitr before Mingan arrived, and vanished within the Technomancer’s wards, where the wolf could not follow.

But she’ll emerge again, if she hasn’t already. And there are certainly enough unmans and Mongrels on the street. So Fasoltsen’s death has served: it’s brought the wolf’s prey within reach. But now, when he should be cool with the hunt, as cold and detached as he has been these long centuries of waiting, he is troubled and wild.

Because he cannot push aside the seething memories of the last time he visited the Well, and even as he slips among the shadows, they threaten to overflow him. He tastes the whore’s mouth again, and almost chokes upon his collar when he swallows.

Slut,
the wolf rages.
Whore. Strifbjorn would not have
—

Strifbjorn
never.

It was the wolf who sold himself to the enemy, all those years ago.

And that thought checks him, because it’s not the voice of his own mind that says it.
That’s a long time to live to go mad at the end,
he thinks. Schizophrenia wasn’t invented yet when he broke for the first time: there were only the mad and the sane, and some of the mad had been holy, and some had been dangerous. He has words now he did not have then.

To have a name for it does not change what happened.

But he hears her again—
It was never Strifbjorn that betrayed us
—and this time he knows.

It is the historian who speaks to him so.

Not in her own self, but the ghost of her he’s swallowed
down, and the ghost of her he knew, when they were young. He feels as if he might glimpse her at his shoulder, should he turn, and that presence is as much a weight upon him as the mountain of earth and buildings above. He can imagine her in the blue and white of a waelcyrge, her hair in plaits under her helm, her cloak lifted on the wind.

If he turns, she will be there. He’s certain of it.

He could put out a hand to raise and drain the mead-horn she would be holding.

“Go from me,” he says.

I will not,
she says.
You should have killed me. You should have killed me when you killed Rannveig.

“That was not me—”

When you killed Rannveig,
she says.
When we were angels, and we loved. And you should have taken the knife in your own hand, and bled out your life.

The wind brings a scent to the wolf, and for a moment he thinks it too fell from accusing memory. But it’s real, thready and present. The real Muire may not be at his shoulder, but she is not too far distant.

“I should have,” he says to his ghost. “I should have died in the ice.”

People stare, those few that pass. His vision blurs; he sees her face over each of theirs.

Why didn’t you? Why choose to live?

“Thou shouldst have died too,” he snarls. “Why didst not thou?”

Whoever had been staring backs away now, pretending they notice nothing as the wolf bends double, gloved hands on his knees. He shuffles until he bumps a wall, pulls away from the lights mounted in sconces on the building. Shadows, and he
steps into them, steps through the abandoned realm of Hel where the gates stand wide, pulls the cold and ash and the creaking ice of Midgard close.

He falls to his knees in the dead world.

“Why didst not thou?”

As if her hand touched his cheek, he feels her speaking. “Because I was a coward.”

He looks up, and she is crouched before him, knees nearly touching the frozen soil. She shimmers. He can see the stars through her. There is nothing behind her but the cinders rolling in the frigid wind.

It does not stir the loose hairs escaping her plaits, as it does his. No gooseflesh rises: this is Muire the demigoddess, and human frailties cannot touch her.

She rests her elbows on her knees. “I was craven. I was weak. And I was unfit for war. What’s your excuse, Suneater?”

He kneels down, lets his palms fall to the earth. It’s cold enough to burn even immortal flesh. “I wanted to see the world die.”

“Liar.” Not mocking, but level. Soft. And all the more mockery for it.

He opens his mouth to curse her. And she smiles at him, gray eyes alight with starlight, snub nose and face made plain by braids too severe for such mild features.

“Vengeance,” he says. “I stayed alive for vengeance.”

“Upon Strifbjorn? He was dead, Mingan. Your monsters ate him.”

“They were not my monsters.”

“They were your wolves,” she says, and for that he has no answer.

He covers his face in his hands. “Upon a wicked queen,” he
answers, and though he cannot see her he knows the ghost of Muire frowns. He feels it as if on his own mouth, and scrubs the glove across his lips. It’s not her frown, not precisely. It’s another man’s, that of another ghost he swallowed.

As he senses his dead love’s expression on the lips of the waelcyrge, the wolf recalls himself. Muire is not here; she is not real. She has no power to call him to tribunal. She is only a scrap he’s swallowed, half-nothing next to swallowing a sun. If he’d had the sense to kill her, she would by now be long consumed.

“Oh, yes,” says the ghost of Muire, who has become the ghost of Strifbjorn, and who stands impassive before him in a cloak made of the pelt of a white bear, hands folded on the hilt of his crystal sword. His face is stern and noble, his hair nearly as pale as ice. His eyes shatter light like faceted diamonds. “Heythe. Why would you seek vengeance against her?”

“She spoke of returning,” Mingan says. “At the end, when all is lost. Hers is a conquering heart.”

“And you await her in service.” Strifbjorn’s ghost drips scorn. It is Mingan’s own scorn, his own self-loathing. It is only what he imagines Strifbjorn would feel.

The wolf could say that there is no proof that she will return. He could say that she was a liar more than anything, easy in her lies as a human, something no child of the Light could ever be.

But he is arguing with himself, in the form of these ghosts, and he knows it. So instead he says, “I await her in vengeance. I serve her not.”

“Would a wolf betray its mistress, whom it loved?”

“I never loved her,” Mingan says, and wishes the words did not ring so hollow.

“No,” says Strifbjorn, in Muire’s voice. “And those were not thy monsters.”

M
idweek meant bill-paying, which meant rising early. Sponged clean in soap and cold water, dressed in what passed for presentable in the undercity, Cathoair pinned bundled scrip inside his shirt, laced his boots, and made his way through the dank stinking half-light to a hospice on the river’s north bank before lunchtime.

He paid, folded his receipt—Aethelred and Astrid, between them, had seen to it that he could figure if he could not read—and walked as softly as he could through the old cut-stone corridors of the sanitarium. It was better than most such places. It didn’t stink, except of illness and antiseptic, and the floors and walls were scrubbed.

He could never have afforded a private room, but the wards were tolerable. His mother’s had a cheerful purple-and-yellow-painted door, which he nudged open with an elbow. Her bed was the third from the wall.

He had half hoped she would be sleeping. But luck was not with him: she sat up, propped on pillows, her rust-colored robe falling open at the collar. She was absorbed in a game of concentration on her monitor, but when Cahey crossed the floor, boots clicking, she glanced up and paused it with a smile. “Hey,” he said, and plunked down on the edge of the bed, careful of whatever might be going on tubewise under the covers.

“I was hoping you would come,” she said, and opened her arms.

The bruised smudges under her eyes were like inky fingerprints, darker than her rosewood skin. When he touched her,
that skin slipped over her bones like tissue paper wrapping some complex jewelry. No resilience remained.

“Don’t I always?”

“Mmm. Nearly always,” she said, and he laughed, and touched her cheek again. “The doctors—”

“They showed me the chart,” he said. Not out of kindness, but out of selfishness. He might have been sparing her, but even if she wanted to say it, he didn’t want to hear it. “I—”

She shrugged. “It’s no matter. I’m not getting better, Cathoair.”

“No,” he said. She covered his hand with hers. He turned his over, and wrapped his fingers around her own. “Whatever I can—”

But she pulled free. Her shoulders were back, her neck stiff. He never had been able to comfort her, or protect her even a little. Any more than she had ever been able to do for him. “It’s over,” she said. “I won’t have you sacrificing yourself for nothing.”

“It’s not a sacrifice,” he said, through gritted teeth. “I’m doing fine.”

“Mmm.” She looked at him, direct and level, her eyes dark and hard to read. “You’re still taking classes? You’re still working at that bar, then?”

And Cathoair, without looking down, smiled at his mother and lied.

S
ome indignities are more palatable than others. Cathoair should have slept when he came back to the Ash & Thorn, but he found himself too restless for his narrow pallet and the small room Aethelred gave to him and Astrid. Astrid was off
somewhere—out with Hrothgar, Aethelred said—and although Cahey spent forty minutes working over the heavy bag in the storage room, he didn’t have the focus. He emerged from behind the curtain with bruised knuckles and a pout and sulked across to the bar.

Where Aethelred handed him a broom, and said, “Well, then make yourself useful.”

It wasn’t an unkindness. Cathoair, already stripped to the waist and barefoot, leaned the broom against the bar and drank two tepid glasses of water, then wiped his mouth on his hand and started pushing sawdust and scraps into tidy piles. There wasn’t too much of it, but the day was humid. Sweat trickled between his shoulder blades despite the chill of the Well. Hrothgar had propped the door—they were technically open through the afternoon, but most of that time Aethelred just spent polishing glasses—and a faintly desperate breeze found its way down the stairs now and again, sometimes bringing the sounds of the street.

The sawdust was so damp that wind couldn’t stir it. But the wind
could
carry the tap-tap of light footsteps as they paused before the door and descended the stair. Aethelred looked up from his brass-polishing and Cahey let the broom still.

He didn’t know, in that half-second, what he was waiting for, but his heart skipped a beat and it seemed as if his sinuses filled with the eye-watering musk of the man in the gray wool cloak. Blood roared in his ears. He bit his lip for the focusing pain, anything to slow the thunder of his heart.

Just a trick,
Cathoair reprimanded himself.
And why are you getting so hung up on a john, anyway?

He could ask himself the question, but he couldn’t force himself to answer. But he almost swore under his breath in relief
when it wasn’t the wiry man with the gray-streaked braid who paused at the bottom of the door and glanced around curiously.

It was a woman.
The
woman. Even smaller, pale and fragile-seeming, so that Cahey thought of recordings he had seen, of sparrows. She cocked her head from side to side like a bird, scanning the nearly empty bar, and by that gesture he recollected her. She looked very different, stripped of her armor, in skirts and a blouse.

But she came forward, still blinking as her eyes adjusted to the dimness, and he saw the hilt of her sword over her shoulder, poking from the folds of her wrap. That wrap half concealed it, but her right arm was in a sling, too, the fingers that protruded purple and knotted with bruises. His lips parted, as if to say, “Oh—” but her eyes slid off him and she walked past, spine erect, bootheels clicking a little more aggressively.

Maybe she didn’t like whores, he thought, bitterly, and went back to sweeping while she spoke with Aethelred.

Whatever was going on at the bar, money changed hands. Cathoair heard the woman murmur, “No, I’m looking for someone,” and Aethelred’s demurral. Cathoair almost dropped the broom and intervened when the woman reached across the counter to touch Aeth, but all she did was tap the bowed and rebowed Serpent pendant at the old halfman’s neck and ask, “You’re a believer?”

Aeth, of course, tipped his head. “Got me through the war,” he said. “And you’re not?”