All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (7 page)

T
he boy is a whore. For slightly less than the price of a good meal—food which the wolf has no use for—that wolf could hire his mouth, his hands . . . other things.

He considers it, in the early hours of the morning, his back to the wall in a corner of the Ash & Thorn. If the ragged, uneasy fantasy that nags him when the boy’s scent strokes his face could be dignified as
consideration
. He can almost feel it: moist air on his neck in a cold alley, sheltered by the Well, rough brick snagging the wool of his cloak, the filthy trickle of water following the crude granite verge. The boy on his knees, his flesh cool, as everyone’s flesh is cool to the wolf’s touch.

It’s not as if they’d ever had a bed, when they were angels. Squalid stones and unclean drizzle would only be appropriate.

Right now, with the taste of Muire’s life hot on his lips, filling him with a restless passion, the temptation is unbearable. In the end the wolf could own them both. Both on the same instant, possess them, prove at last who it was whose weakness brought down the Last Day, and the fall of all that was.

The boy who was Strifbjorn is a whore. It’s an irony the wolf should be prepared to savor, before he leaves the boy to his
fate. The same fate as everyone else. No need to single out one for special treatment. Whatever he was before, he’s but a candle-flicker now. A beautiful one, polished and glossy, all the more perfect for the terrible, disfiguring scar that puckers and knots the right side of his face when he smiles. It doesn’t seem to bother the young man’s admirers; if anything, the wolf thinks some of them find it erotic. The boy shies away like a startled horse, an animal he will never see, when women and men wonderingly brush the raw-lipped pink line.

He looks nothing like he did. But he is still ruined, and still beautiful. And the wolf has an earring, a gift from an apprentice sorceress, that shows him Truth. He knows who this was, when he was something other than a tall, pretty young whore.

The wolf suspects he might even have known him without it.

Delicious. Delicious irony, that they should come back together at the end of the world. Again. And that the wolf should know all, and the boy know nothing. As he means . . . nothing.

The wolf stalks him anyway, this accidental discovery, this pale-eyed, scar-faced child who was not a child, two thousand years gone by, when the wolf loved him.

It’s an addiction. An obsession. It is not safe.

He comes anyway, knowing that Muire could find him, now, if she had the strength to drag herself. If he had not left her spent and helpless on the stones. She might, in fact, anticipate him. Might come here, as if she could protect this child. She knew why he was drawn here. She told him as much—

She was never subtle. If she’d guessed that the fall of Freimarc drove him here, she might easily have let that knowledge
slip. He should have killed her. He has never
forced
his kiss upon an angel before.

He licks his lips and watches the boy fight. Watches him sell himself, and return, insouciant, laughing by the bar with the other fighters, the ones who whore and the ones who don’t. Considers . . . and considers withdrawing, as well. Delicious to know you could have him. Delicious to know that you could
save
him.

Delicious to know that you can choose not to, and leave him to his fate.

Surely, it’s a harmless hobby. A way to pass the time, a little cruel pleasure while the world winds down. Surely it is only the cord binding his neck that makes his breath sting when the child catches his eye and—puzzled—frowns as if he thought he knew him. It’s like a gift, a little added joy in the end of everything, that Strifbjorn is back for him.

The wolf barely admits it, even to himself. But this time, he considers, they might die together.

He stands, the chair scraping because he does not care to prevent it. He wipes his mouth on the back of his glove, the last sting of liquor fading, and shrugs his shoulders to make the cloak swing free. There’s scrip in his pocket; it’s easy to come by. He pulls his presence around himself, the stillness of aspect, the conscious smile. The boy still smells like Strifbjorn.

C
all.

Muire staggered, cradling her broken hand to her armored breast. Age-rounded stones clutched her boots; she stumbled, but pride stopped her fall. The voice rolled over her like storm air rolling down the flank of a mountain. Not Ingraham’s
thready memorial plaint, nor the harsh luxuriant purr of the Grey Wolf’s flawed seduction. This was as silent, but also resonant, electric. She knew it in her bosom, her throat, her spine.

“Kasimir.”

She meant to think it only, but her lips shaped the valraven’s name.

Call to me
, he chanted.

I’m fine.

His silence was a tolling bell.

“I’m
fine
!”

If you were not arrogant, beloved, he would not have done what he did to you and walked free.

It wasn’t arrogance. Muire shook her head, forcing her spine straight when she wanted to cringe protectively over her hand. It wasn’t arrogance.

But it would be arrogance to say so.

Together we might match a wolf.
He showed her flashing teeth, eyes like furnaces, sdadown shredded in the bloody snow. She glanced down.
There are only us three left in the world
—
and perhaps one other. Let us be allies again.

“One other?”

There was the Serpent. He was not yet dead on the Last Day.

“If he’s not dead, he’s abandoned us.” But Kasimir was right. Right also that alone she was not Mingan’s equal. The Grey Wolf had always been greater.

This was not the first time Kasimir had spoken to her since they parted among the dead. But it was the first time he’d spoken to her since she
knew
their old grinning nemesis walked the bones of the earth, a silver earring in his ear.

It wasn’t arrogance. And it wasn’t pride that kept her from the valraven.

And if it wasn’t either, she could swallow both to call for help, when duty demanded.

You are wounded.
The voice came like the voice of the soul that speaks a true love’s name. Muire flinched to hear it. The dawn breathed over Eiledon and the undercity, vampiric, glided toward slumber. Above, where she could not see them, jeweled lights would be twinkling out sudden as falling stars.

A wet, ripe smell rose from the gutters. She bent, wobbling on unsteady knees, and smoothed the hair of the murdered boy.

Rest in my shadow.

That was the joy—and the pain—of the Grey Wolf’s offer; to be no more alone. She left the body where it had fallen and walked on, toward the scentless, sterile river.

We are the Light that remains.

She stood in a narrow courtyard overlooking a small quay and watched the water ripple. His silence nagged her like a splinter. “Come,” she said, and he did so.

The wind that struck her reeked of the forge and was loud as the rattle of shaken metal. The shroud of his wings scraped the walls on either side, black and glittering. He tossed his antlered head, the heat rolling from his body like a physical blow. But his eyes were calm and moist and alive, and he curved his necks to her.
Is it yours to judge, sister, or yours to carry out judgments?

“It’s my failing that no one’s left to make judgment.” She pressed her hand to her chest and cradled it there. The tears that streaked her face dripped with light; the stallion hovered close
and his heat shocked them to crusts of salt, but he only breathed on her.

“He let me live,” she said. “He called me sister.”

It implied more than she could bear. A coward—she would accept that judgment. But she was not a monster.

The stallion’s exasperation prickled as if it were her own.
Ride
.

His hide would burn her. She could no longer thrust her hand into living flame and cup it like water from palm to palm.

“How, Bright one?” The old epithet no longer suited him.

I am the Light
, he said, and gently he opened his shadowy wings. Feathers clattered, each perfect, each cast in something harder than steel. Brightness coalesced about him. It wrapped his chest and withers, and when it faded it left behind a saddle of white leather and a saddle blanket, also white, with a thin, scrolled border of gold.
This will shield you.

No stirrups. No safety straps.

The valraven’s laughter sounded in her heart.
I will not let you fall.

And so what if she did? He half knelt and she vaulted into the saddle, as best she could; her hand hurt so much it made the bridge of her nose feel pinched. But Kasimir’s searing hide was only pleasantly warm through the tack.

He fanned those incredible wings. It seemed impossible that their tips could clear the ground, the walls on either side. And then he leaped into the air as if hurtled from a crossbow, sailing over the river before his wings completed their stroke.

Higher, higher, the rush of air, her gasp blown back in her face. The city gyring below, the lights and the dark patches, the cold breath out of the Well. The twin waterfalls of the north
branch of the Naglfar shimmered with the city light reflected through them; the river still flowed through the Tower, as it had when it was only a campus, but now it had to fall forty stories in defiance of gravity to cling to its accustomed bed.

Kasimir burst through the up-fall in a joyous flare of wings and a mad hiss of steam. Carbon flaked from his hide, temperature-shocked, leaving him blue in places. The water evaporated before it could fling like hurled beads from his feathertips.

No water touched Muire; his body sheltered her from the upward fall. She leaned forward and called into Kasimir’s ear, forgetting he could hear her across half a world if he chose. “Where are we going?”

Your hand must be seen to,
he answered.
And then there is the matter of the widow.

“Widow?” She flinched. “Oh. How did you know that?”

I have chosen you. You may as well learn to like it.

“It’s not—”

—
as if there were a lot of choices,
he interrupted.
If it soothes your guilt, you may forget that you saved me. And you may assume that I have chosen you only because you were the last one left untarnished.

If it makes you feel better.

He furled his wings among the gargoyles on the rooftop of a granite building just a few blocks from the place where Muire had stayed for the last hundred-odd years. “A cash clinic?”

Assent from Kasimir. She turned to dismount. But as she lifted her leg over the cantle, the world went edgy and dark and she slid bonelessly down.

Kasimir lifted his hoof out of the way adroitly. Muire’s head struck wet tarpaper instead of hot metal. Gasping, she lay on
her back and looked up at him, the silhouette of his dark heads.

“You said I wouldn’t fall.”

You didn’t, when it mattered.

W
as it bad? He looked . . . hard. Your last one. You were gone a long time.”

Cahey turned in the darkness, slid his shoulder under Astrid’s lifted head, tucked his arm into the indentation of her waist. “No,” he said, shaping his mouth around the word before he said it. “He was gentle. He . . . wanted me to make it last.”

Gentle wasn’t the right word. Not really. But the man’s fingers had cradled Cahey’s skull in a tender curve, a touch that was as affectionate as it was uncomfortable. And so very wrong, for a business transaction.

Astrid poked him soundly in the chest. “Ow!”

“Answer the question.”

He winced, but admitted: “I didn’t hear it.”

“I was asking what he wanted. But . . . Cahey. You don’t seem okay.”

She knew. She didn’t know what was wrong, and that was fine. He didn’t know what was bothering him either. But he loved her for looking for it, like a thorn to be plucked from his paw.

He kissed her. He’d cleaned his teeth. And Astrid had her own ways of paying the bills; she wasn’t squeamish. Whoring was better than working the meat tanks, like his mother had done. “I . . .” He shrugged. She nestled closer, breasts molding to his chest, hair a snake down his shoulder. Honesty compelled him to add, “He paid too much.”

“Too much?”
How much?

He didn’t answer.
A lot.

“So . . . what?”

Cahey pressed his face into her neck, where her skin smelled of soap and the flat metal of stored water, and breathed it in as if it could scour him. He couldn’t very well say, his scent. Which was part of it. Not dirty, which Cahey was used to, living in the shadow of the Well where there was neither running water nor rain to fill water towers. But rank, animal, raunchy. Wild.

Her hand cupped his groin. “You’re hard.”

“That’s not for him.” It never was. Paid sex rolled off his back like so much greasy rain. If they wanted something he had to get it up for, he thought about Astrid, or Hrothgar, or Aislinn, and shut his eyes. “Are you too tired?”

“Never,” she said. She shifted, pulled her arm out from under his shoulders, pushed him onto his back. “Are you?”

His hands slid up her thighs from the knees as she settled over him. “Love, all I want is to make love to somebody who knows my name.”

She leaned forward, squinted at him through the darkness, lips almost brushing his nose. “Sure thing,” she said. “Now, which one were you again?”

C
urled in snow, among the roots of a tree so large whole worlds fruit on its branches, the wolf dreams of clean rain and wakes weeping.

These are not his dreams. He does not dream.

He does not sleep.

Once he dreamed waking; once he moved through the
world as a dream. A wolf-dream, a sword-dream. No longer: there are no wolves nor einherjar to need his dreaming now.