All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (31 page)

I kissed her first,
Cathoair wanted to say, but sensed it wouldn’t be smart.

The other thing Cristokos had done was touch once, lightly, the sword Muire stole from the Technomancer. Then he had wrapped it tightly in linen over silk, and bound and sealed it
with colored cords and wax. “That might hide it,” he said. “From him and from Her. Might not. These ones must hide those, also. For going in, as this one was hidden going out.”

So there were more bustlings, while Cathoair sat on a streamside boulder in sight of the metal horse and soaked his leg in the icy water until they were ready to leave. With a hand up from Muire and a boost from that selfsame rock, he managed to mount the stallion without reburning himself, and the sweep of wings lifted them like a carrier bag caught up in a wind.

There was this about flying behind Muire, clasping her waist: she wanted him. He could
not
have missed it.

They returned to the city more furtively than they had left it, creeping through vaults and booby-trapped medieval sewers while concealed by Muire’s spells of ward and camouflage. This involved her whistling a weird atonal fall of a melody that echoed eerily all around them and made Cahey dizzy and confused, with a tendency to wander off in random directions if she didn’t lead him. He couldn’t follow her explanation. It was all
skaldr
and
harmonics
and
sidereality,
and he gave up after thirty seconds and just nodded.

When they came back to the surface, it was in the claustrophobic back passages where the Badwater district bordered on the Narrows, hard up against Eiledon’s southwestern wall. This was one of the oldest precincts, and had never been opened out for vehicles wider than a hand cart. The alleys and lanes, paved with heaved slate blocks, were so narrow Cathoair could have reached out and laid a hand flat on each opposing wall.

He’d never been in this part of the city before, and said as much, limping barefoot over the oblong cobbles.

Muire looked at him, her small features almost washed off her face by the oblique and shadowless light. “You didn’t tell Thjierry who I am.”

“No,” he said. “Well, I don’t know who you are, exactly—”

“—Muire,” she interrupted, and seemed to find it funny.

“—but I think I know
what
you are.”

She touched her sword. The second one hung beside it, swaddled until it looked like a bundled loaf. “She hasn’t figured it out?”

He shrugged. “She’s a scientist. Who wants to believe in angels?”

“Waelcyrge.”

“Which are angels.”

Her jaw was locked too tight for the sound she made to be a laugh, but it was as close as he thought he was going to get. “Angels imply the existence of god,” she said. And then checked herself and put up her hands. “You know what? Fair enough. I’m the only one left.” They strode side-by-side, him checking his step to make it easier for her to keep up. She drifted right, opening a little space between them, and turned to look at the oft-repaired wall of whatever block of buildings they were passing. The wall had started off stone—pink and gray granite—and over more years than Cahey could comfortably imagine had been patched with limestone, red brick, yellow brick, and great crumbly swaths of mortar. Salvage, all, and some of it no doubt from long before the Desolation. There had never been autos in this corner of the city, but it was year-blackened from centuries of coal fires and motorcycles.

It came to him with mouth-drying exactitude that the
reed-boned blonde on his right hand was older than the wall, older than the street, older than everything he had ever seen except the river Naglfar. “You like it here.”

“This is medieval Eiledon. The city I knew a thousand years ago.” And then she paused, and did put her hand out and let it trail along the filthy wall. “It’s like the Desolation had never happened. And the world went ever on.”

“As long as you never look at the sky.”

“I try not to,” she said, and gave him a shy sideways smile. “For a lot of reasons.”

And for a lot of reasons, that seemed like the end of that conversation, so he went looking for a new one. “I realize we’re probably on the down low, but—”

“Astrid,” she said. “You can send her a message when we get where we’re going. No screen calls. Paper and a messenger. Can she read?”

He checked hard, and then realized she asked because she needed an honest answer. “Sort of. I didn’t give the Technomancer her name, or Aethelred’s address. Though they were pretty slick about trying to get it out of me.”

“For once,” Muire said, “the complete breakdown of record-keeping works in our favor.”

“Where are we going?”

“I have a place.” She turned left across him, guiding him down the narrowest lane so far.

Her place was a fourth-story walkup. She must have had it magicked somehow, because he walked past the stair door until she called him back and physically placed his hand on the knob. He kept a straight face somehow when she touched his wrist, but it wasn’t easy, and he turned away a little to hide his reaction.

On the other hand, if he could kiss an unman, what was to say he couldn’t kiss an angel?

They stepped inside, into a room that looked as if it had been closed up for the winter, sheets thrown over the furniture and the windows draped heavily. Muire crossed to them and flung the curtains wide so light streaked through dingy glass. Cahey moved around the space, pulling sheets off things, wincing on behalf of his bruised feet but stubborn.

If Muire wasn’t going to complain about hiking through sewers and over cobbles barefoot, neither was he.

“Wait,” she said. “Not that one—”

But he’d already dragged the drape off whatever it was, and then stood staring at the shimmer of patinaed bronze.

A statue, life-sized, of a small woman in medieval clothing, with long wrist-thick braids framing a face as sad and stern as the moon’s. He stared at it for half a minute before he realized that it was Muire.

“Your face is on backwards,” he said, because it was the only thing he could think to say, and without turning away from the window, her knuckles white on the held-wide draperies, she said, “I sculpted it in a mirror. A kind of compulsion. I put it here so I wouldn’t have to look at it,” and that was that.

He let the sheet fall from his hand. No point in covering up what you’d already laid plain. “There’s not a lot of dust. Do you come here often?”

“Stasis spell,” she said. “Junior cousin of the one that keeps the Tower in the air. I haven’t been in here in a hundred years, so it should be safe.” She let the curtain slide from between her fingers, and turned to study them in the light through the filthy window. “We are corpse-maggots.”

Flat. Toneless. Her shoulders curved in defeat, and he
thought her eyes were closed. He said, “I don’t understand you.”

“Corpse-maggots. We are. What do you know about coffins?”

He shrugged, realized she couldn’t see him, and put a hand on her shoulder. “People used to bury their dead.”

“Generations,” she said. “Generations of flies can breed and feed and mate and die inside a coffin, until the body within is bones. But they are still breeding in a coffin. And one day they will gnaw the last sinew from the last bone, and there will be nothing left for them to eat.”

She put her back to the window. He had not known her face could arrange itself into such sorrow. He nodded to show he understood. “Except each other.”

“Sooner or later, not even that.” She folded her arms, but it seemed more as if she meant to keep herself in than keep him out. He stepped closer, and she gave him no ground.

“Angels with no god,” he said, bent enough that his breath stirred the hair beside her ear. “So what do you serve?”

She closed her eyes. “We thought we served the Light.”

And he leaned across her folded arms and kissed her.

And she let him.

A
t first, just permission, as if that was all she could manage. And then her lips parted, and her arms opened, and she rested her hands on his shoulders, face tilted up so he could better reach. He waited a moment, still, before he touched her with his hands—until she made a small noise of inquiry, and then he rested the palm of one hand against her cheek, fingers spidering lightly around her ear. He touched the collar of her tunic, and
she didn’t push his hand away. He was holding his breath, and she was staring up at him, an indistinct sort of foxfire rippling through her clear gray irises as light ripples on the bottom of a disturbed pool.

And then he laughed, leaned back far enough to get a breath that wasn’t full of the scent of her, and said, “When I thought about this, I thought about taking your armor off.”

Her pupils dilated, the radiance under her corneas flickering dim in a manner he would have dismissed as a trick of the light, if he had not known what she was. “You thought about this?”

He kissed her again, soft and quick. “Don’t be ridiculous. You didn’t know?”

“I’m not—” she lifted her hand from his shoulder to make a hopeless gesture “—good at things.”

“You’re fabulous at everything I’ve ever seen you try.”

“I’ve never done this before.”

Whatever he had been expecting her to say, it wasn’t that. “Never.”

“It wasn’t a priority,” she said, but it was feeble and he thought it would only make things worse if he pretended to laugh.

So he moved his hand against her face and said, “Snakerot. What were you waiting for?”

“You weren’t here,” she said. And that might have been romantic, in an over-the-top kind of way, if she hadn’t sounded so damned much like she meant it.

Still, nervous as she seemed, he had to respect her for trying. He caught her hand in his, lifted her fingers to his mouth, and bit her knuckles softly, as he might his own if he were thinking.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go lie down. I have all kinds of things to show you.”

I
n the evening, they argued. It started when he told her he had to leave, and she would not consent until he told her why. He might have pushed past her anyway, but without her help he couldn’t find the door. And so he had to bargain.

“It’s a personal errand,” he said. He knew where the door was.
Exactly
where it was. They’d come in through it, after all, and he didn’t forget spaces. But he couldn’t find it; his eye slid past as if from ice. “I have to pay a bill.”

“Urgently. Today.”

“Yes,” he said. And then, because her jaw was set and her arms were folded, he said, “And I have to visit my mother.”

“Cathoair, we’re
hiding
.”

“I know,” he said. And then, because he had to, and because it wasn’t like it was a secret, exactly, he told her. About the hospice and the cancer and why he really did have to go, and she couldn’t come with him.

And she blinked at him and unstubborned all at once. And said, “You should have told me you needed money—”

“I did.” He smiled. He meant to smile, anyway, but from the stretch of his face it might have been more like an smirk.

She didn’t look down, though. “You didn’t say why.”

“Was it any of your business, then?” He shook his head. “Look, I don’t want charity because we’re sleeping together—”

“I don’t sleep,” she said, which cracked him up and defused the tension a little, at least, so when he said, “I don’t want the money and the sex getting tangled up for us, okay?” she was able to just nod and say, “All right. Do what you have to do.”

“I always do.”

She grabbed his collar and pulled him down to her level. Then she kissed him on the cheek and let go. “And be careful.”

He winked. But didn’t answer.

C
athoair walked in past the private rooms to his mother’s crowded ward in the back. He could see from the doorway that she was failing. But at least the hospice could medicate her, and dull the worst of the pain. He tried not to dwell on what an irony that was, that it seemed not even death could rescue her from suffering and humiliation. And for another irony, what was killing her was just cancer, the old-fashioned kind, the kind that had been cured before the Desolation and was still treatable, if you had money. There were new diseases, engineered, that killed more quickly.

There was no such thing as a good death. But Cathoair wished the world might have shown her some chip of mercy.

She was tough. It kept her clinging to life far longer than Cathoair had hoped. In honesty, longer than he had prayed, not that he believed in the efficacy of prayer. And less so now, having met Muire, than ever.

She was sleeping when he arrived, and he hated to wake her to change the sheets, so he sat for a while holding her hand, listening to her breathe. When she was young, she used to be so beautiful. Cathoair wished he had a picture, but all that was long gone. No data from his childhood.

Just as well.

His fingers must have tightened on hers, because—without opening her eyes—she said his name. He kissed her on the forehead because her lips were ulcerated. “Hi, Mom.”

Her voice was breathless, and he wondered how long it would be before she lost it. “And me without . . . my lipstick on.”

She squeezed his hand hard while he pretended he was laughing. “Don’t wear yourself out talking, okay? We can just sit, once I get your bed fixed.”

Her eyes cracked open. “I want to talk.”

“You know you’re everything to me.” No matter how gently he touched her, her hair brushed off when he smoothed it.

Her tongue flicked across her lips and he rushed to pour her water. Awkward, when she would not release his hand. “I want you to do something.”

“Let me change your sheets. Let me help you roll over.”

He stood, and twisted his hand gently to make her let go. He steadied the glass for her while she sipped, and then set the glass aside. She spoke more easily after, though he wished she wouldn’t. “I want to go to the river. I want you to help me cross the river now, Cathoair.”

He started pulling out the hospital corners on the right side of the bed. “Hey there, edge over.”

She closed her eyes. “Not fair to ask.”