All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (32 page)

I killed for you once already.
But he couldn’t say that. Not here. And it wasn’t just for her that he’d done the killing.

Brick dust bruising hands and choking the scrape of concrete against his face the smell of garbage please.

Please don’t.

And too much pain. . . .

Not just for her. No. But she didn’t need to know that.

“I know,” she said, though he could barely hear the words through her breath. “If you just tell them to stop the IVs it wouldn’t take long. I don’t have to take food.”

“Mom. Please . . .”

“Please.”
She said, “Cathoair, honey, let me do this for you. I know you can’t afford to keep me here. I
know
.”

Her tone left no doubt as to what, and how much, she knew. He looked down at his hands, the scarred knuckles going pale as his fingers knotted on the sheets, and wondered what else she knew. Not that he’d killed her husband; that was no secret between them, though they had never spoken of it. But maybe more of why than she’d ever admitted.

He didn’t want to think about that, because then he would have to think about why she let it happen, and that was as useless as covering his scar. He said, “I still need you to roll over, okay? I’m going to change the sheets on this side.”

W
hen he left, he wasn’t thinking clearly. He trotted, almost running, working through the sting of his bruised feet and blistered calf. He hopped over the drunks who hadn’t managed to crawl back to their squats. But other than the human sweepings, anything that could be salvaged, was. There was garbage—night soil, whatever could neither be eaten not composted, whatever the rats left—but no litter.

He would not weep. He would not show weakness. And he would not let the grief that wanted to swell up his throat choke him, leave him reeling, easy prey. Because he already knew that he would speak to the staff the next time he visited. He had never been able to tell her no for long.

It affected him, of course it distracted him. But it was not an excuse for his failure to notice the Grey Wolf until Mingan’s hands closed on his collar and swung him against a nearby wall. Effortlessly, like a man swinging a puppy. Except a puppy—Cathoair’s
idea of a puppy: he had never seen one—could bite. Threads snapped; the shirt cut into his underarms. Air burst from his lungs, so he was all but silent, wheezing, though he would have screamed shamefully if he’d had an ounce of breath.

Mingan smiled and set Cathoair down, deceptively gentle. The Wolf leaned him against the wall, barely upright . . . and grabbed his chin in one hand, and the nape of his neck in the other.

Dry hands, hot, callused. Eyes dripping silver light, so it pooled and ran down the Wolf’s creased cheeks like tears. But the look on his face wasn’t sorrow.

He stank of something bitter and sharp. His thumb moved across the scar on Cathoair’s cheek, a sickening caress, and Cahey somehow got his hands up, on Mingan’s shoulders, and shoved. Mingan kneed him in the solar plexus, so if not for the Wolf’s grip on his neck, Cathoair would have gone to the ground.

Mingan might have meant to purr, but his voice was a vicious rasp. “Who would wish to mark such a pretty face? I know a way to find out—”

Cathoair jerked against his hands, eyes streaming, but he might as well have fought an iron shackle. “Bastard—”

“Oh, sweeting. Thou scorned not my money before. Whyso now?” The Wolf wore leather gloves, and still the heat of his body soaked through, so hot Cathoair thought he would surely have burns wherever the wolf had touched him.

Cathoair pulled against it, and did not answer.

And the Wolf laughed at him. “Perfidious candle-flicker,” he said, in a hush. “Remember me.”

And kissed Cathoair.

Cathoair, as an adult, had met very few people who could match his strength. But when he was a boy . . . he had been the next thing to a street kid, and that was another story. Now, he grabbed Mingan’s wrist with both hands and it was like trying to bend stone. He couldn’t fight: a dozen things—panic, anticipation, the rush of catastrophic memories—locked him in place.

Paralyzed by history.

The Wolf’s voice had gone even stranger: still rough, almost gentle now. “My rival,” he whispered, his lips moving against Cathoair’s own as Cathoair tried not to understand. “My sister has excellent taste. What a fragile, beautiful boy thou art.”

Cathoair couldn’t breathe, couldn’t run. Couldn’t even straighten himself against the wall. He wondered if Mingan had cracked his ribs, and thought it wouldn’t be bothering him long if so.
He’s going to eat me. Like Ingraham Fasoltsen.

And then the Wolf’s slick, hard tongue prised his lips apart, flicked his teeth, and when Cathoair tried to gasp a breath, to keep fighting, his left hand tensed on the back of Cathoair’s neck and dragged him close, so the breath went across Mingan’s face, through Mingan’s lips.

Cathoair . . . lost. Lost, and could not have cared less. Nerves, muscles, tendons relaxed, surrendered. Life fled every limb like water running down to the sea through all the rivers in the world.

Bliss. Bliss, and dying.

Cathoair reached out with both hands, his last measure of strength, and yanked Mingan’s body against his own, pressed his mouth down, broke both their lips between their teeth so the bright taste of blood flavored the kiss. Shared breath brought tumbling memories, salty bittersweet jewels. Things he, himself,
had cared not to remember. The taste of someone else’s spit. The bruises left by fingerprints.

And things he could not say how he remembered, because they were not
his,
memories of ice and hope and desperation and someone—
Mingan,
Mingan younger and smiling—kissing him like this, just like this, and his heart leaping up like a salmon—

And then the memory Mingan scoured him for.

It has been years since he had thought of his father’s death as anything but
the murder
. And there it is, the terrible pinch around Cathoair’s throat of the woven belt the old man looped there to control him, once he got too big to be held down one-handed—
don fight me Mouse I don wanna hurt you
—and of course Mouse’s what the old man called Cahey’s mother Miriam, too, and isn’t that just sick and perfect—and the blade in Cathoair’s hand, an old armor-cutter, small enough to conceal in his palm and the shopkeeper he’d fucked to get it said it could cut through steel plate, never mind the old man’s belly, and it does, slice and effortless and all that blood and the stink of the opened guts, but he’s not dead, not so quickly, and Cathoair didn’t think about this part, the old man’s got the blade in his hand and Cathoair mostly gets his upper arm in front of his face, he thinks, but he staggers back out of arm’s length, the old man can’t chase him, not with his guts all over the floor like that, tangling up his feet when he takes a step.

Oh, Cahey,
Astrid said when she saw him.
Who did that to you? What happened?

He had been so in shock he told her.

Then she—and Aethelred—helped him cover it up, make it look as though both he and the old man had been attacked by a cutthroat. They never spoke of it again.

But that was past. So long past, and so long ignored that when it came before him he felt as if he could put a hand out and let the history run through his fingers. Someone else’s rape. Someone else’s murder. Someone else’s pain.

But in the now-time, someone whimpered, someone cried out, muffled by another’s mouth, and Cathoair—some detached fragment that was drawn back, observing, impassive to his own ravishment or death—did not recognize the voice as his own.

Mingan. Weeping into the kiss, weeping as he killed him.

Crying for me? Light, why?

Because I have failed thee,
the Grey Wolf answered, and then he blew Cathoair’s breath back into him. And then it was like Mingan was inside him, wearing his body and soul like a coat. Looking through his eyes, blinking, stretching into his skin. Brilliance flared about them, so bright it burned its afterimage on Cathoair’s eyes despite closed lids.

Dying seemed a tiny price to pay for such a kiss, and now he knew why Selene had fallen away from Muire so disconsolate.

Cathoair was still choking after the taste of it as Mingan threw him on the stones and he slid ten feet. The Wolf stood over him, panting, disheveled, running a red tongue over a bloody mouth. Five seconds, ten, they stared like circling fighters.

Until the Grey Wolf collected himself: flicked his cloak about his shoulders, shook his queue down his back, and dusted gloved hands. He lifted his chin and smiled. And then he
winked,
like it was their little secret, and his cloak swirled heavily against the tops of his boots as he turned and strode away.

S
elene picked up the nearman’s trail in Dockside, close by the old cloister at Britomart and Barber that had become some kind of hospital now. He might have been injured in the escape, but if that was the case, not too badly: he smelled of liniment and antiseptic, but he was alone and moving under his own power. And quickly, away from the hospital. Toward Citadel, into the old quarter of the city.

His scent was fresh, and strengthened by a falling dew. Even without a canine, Selene could track him almost as fast as he could run. She was a little surprised when she
caught
him, though, halfway through Hangman, not far from the old gibbet in the marketplace from which the precinct took its name.

Once she had located him, she didn’t know what to do next. Bring him in, of course, no question. Her instructions were perfectly clear. But then here he was, sitting splay-legged against a wall with his palms fallen open on his thighs and his head lolled forward. The air stank of blood and the Grey Wolf, and she thought for a moment his neck had been snapped.

But no. The areaway he lay in echoed with the rasp of rough breathing, and when Selene padded close he lifted his head as though the motion hurt him. His hair had come free of
the usual ponytail, so fleecy locks protruded in every direction; his expression was slack and unchanging. Clots of blood drooled down his chin and streaked his cheeks, as if he had been struck in the mouth. His eyes caught the light as he moved, flashing blue-silver like an unman’s. Dark-adapted, Selene thought, in addition to the speed and strength that she had learned first-hand.

But he was incapacitated now, or very near it. She squatted beside him, weight on the balls of her feet, carelessly allowing her claws to furrow stone. “Cathoair.”

If he had seemed less injured, she never would have come so close. Nor would she have offered him her wrist, claws loosely folded inside her hand, as a prop by which to lever himself to his feet. And she was not unwary. If he had been only so fast as when they wrestled before, what next transpired would not have.

He lunged into her arms, moving as fast as Diana, bowled her onto her back, crushed her body under his own. She yowled, arms spread wide against the reflex to eviscerate, and his mouth covered hers.

She
would
have bitten him for that. But some unfamiliar reflex twisted in her breast as the taste of his blood and the Grey Wolf’s filled her mouth, and instead when he breathed her screech in, she kept breathing it out, and accepted what he gave back a moment later.

What Muire had done. The same thing, irksome and terrible and sweet. So simple. So sweet, filling her until she was nothing but breath and light and will—

He recoiled, rolled to the side, and measured his length on the stones. “Snakerot,” he said, staring up at the sky. “I’m sorry. I’m—I thought—” A deep breath. He pressed his hands over
his eyes, and Selene, dazed, imagined she saw a ripple of light around his fingers. “I thought you were someone else.”

“You were distraught.”

“I am
so
sorry.”

“It’s nothing.” She touched her mouth. To wipe the blood away. And pushed herself upright and glowered at him, not that he could see her with his hands like that. “If I give you a hand up, are you going to molest me again?”

“No.” He planted a hand on the ground and levered himself maladroitly upright without assistance. “How did you find me?”

“You can’t hide from Black Silk,” she said. “Not for long. Not in Eiledon.”

“You’re here to arrest me.”

Selene shook her head, although he was correct. But when she opened her mouth to say the words, what she heard her own crystal sweet voice say was, “Actually, I’ve come here to defect.”

W
hen Muire returned to the Ash & Thorn, she carried crumpled paper in her left hand and a lifetime’s cold fear in her heart. The bar was quiet in chill sunrise, and things had changed: Hrothgar met her at the top of the stairs and held the door.

Are none of them even the faintest bit jealous?
she wondered. She had grown old.

The future was an alien world.

At least taverns were familiar. And this one was growing into a sort of home. “If I don’t stop coming here, you’re going to start charging me rent,” she said to the bartender, a flat attempt at humor.