The Sea Thy Mistress (19 page)

Mardoll lay upstairs, hard asleep, and Cathmar had a mind to spend the early morning doing good deeds.
Everybody’s got to have a purpose in the world,
he thought.
Mom was a street vigilante. I bet I can do that, too.

I’d better keep my head and remember what I know about fighting, though.

His father had taught him a lot about hand-to-hand combat, as had Selene—who had also given him some weapons instruction over the years. He hadn’t gotten that from his father. Cahey bore Alvitr like the victim of an arranged marriage and made it no secret that he wasn’t fond of blades. Or guns.

But Mingan
did
understand swords, and he also understood the subtle art of spotting the enemy’s weakness and overpowering him with his own fear. “Be absolute in attack,” Mingan had told Cathmar. “Alert. Do not fear to delay for an opening, but once the opening is perceived, do not tarry in exploiting it.”

“And always watch the shadows,” Cathmar remarked out loud. “Come out of there, Uncle.”

Mingan chuckled and stepped from an unlit doorway. The mist flowed around him, disturbed by the swing of his cloak. “Nicely observed, lad.”

Cathmar smiled at the compliment, and then frowned at Mingan’s next remark as the Grey Wolf fell into step beside him, boots silent on the cobbled street. “Are you going to let your hair grow? You’ll be a warrior in your own right soon, you know.”

Cathmar shrugged. “Mardoll likes it short. Who am I to argue?”

“Mardoll. Your lady love? The attractive blonde.”

“You’ve been watching me.”

“I watch everyone,” the Wolf said. “It’s as useful to know your allies as your enemies, don’t you think?”

“I suppose.” Cathmar knew his sullenness colored his tone, but he didn’t bother to amend it. “What do you think of her?”

“That’s not a question one should ask, Cathmar, unless one wishes a truthful answer.” Mingan’s voice, dry as gin, held habitual amusement.

Cathmar checked his stride. “What’s wrong with her, then?”

Mingan turned to face him, lean body angling to the side. “She’s not to be trusted. She’ll use you and discard you, and she’d older than you think.”

Cathmar heard a trace of some old pain in Mingan’s words and thought he knew where it came from. “This is about Mom, isn’t it?”

Mingan frowned—at Cathmar’s bitterness? At unpleasant memory? “Believe what you like,” Mingan said softly, starlight blossoming in his eyes. “But no, I am not untrusting of women because of hurts passed between your mother and I. Rather, I know something of darkness, and I know something of your woman, in particular. And that is all I came to tell you.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“Very well.” Mingan smiled edgily. “I will not call on you again while you dwell with her.”

“Uncle—”

“For my own safety,” he said. “Also, it would be best if she never heard my name from you. Trust me in that, if in nothing else, einherjar. And trust as well, if there is need, if you are in danger, Selene will know where to find me.”

Cathmar’s throat felt dry. He swallowed against it.
Why is everyone abandoning me?
He nodded.

“Excellent.” Mingan drew his gray cloak about his shoulders as if he were cold. It trailed into the fog that surrounded him. Cathmar knew him well enough to realize that he had planned the effect. “Oh. And you also will not mention this conversation to the lady with the red mare. If you are as wise as I think you are.”

The Wolf tipped his head to Cathmar and stepped back into the mist. Cathmar, watching, thought he almost saw how his uncle vanished into the shadows.

He shivered and stepped into the fog himself, tracing the Wolf back into the dimness of the doorway he’d vanished into. Cathmar crouched to examine the pavement, though he knew what he would find: no sign of presence, no trace that anyone had stood here recently. Just the wolf-scent, musky and pungent, already dying into the dank cold of vapor and stone.

For a moment, Cathmar’s thoughts pinned him there, head bowed. Then he turned and walked the few short steps to his door and back inside.

He hung Nathr on the foot of the white pine bed and lay down beside his sleeping lover. A moment, and she rolled over and cast her arm across him, the striped wool blanket sliding down the curve of her back as she snuggled close.

“Back quick,” she whispered.

He chuckled and pulled her tighter with an arm around her shoulders. He wondered suddenly if he heard a little disappointment in her tone. “Decided I couldn’t go out there alone in the mist and chill when you were in here.”

She sighed and laid her head down on his shoulder. “You’re the sweetest boy I’ve ever known.”

It wasn’t that it was a lie. But there was something inexact in the way she said it that made him wonder.
Damn you, Mingan.
“How many boys have you known? I mean, intimately.” He knew he wasn’t the first. It hadn’t bothered him until just now.

“Cath! What a question. Besides, I don’t keep a list!”

“I’m sorry.” He kissed the top of her forehead. “Guy moment, I guess.”

She snuggled closer, seeming to drift on the edge of sleep. But he wondered. She hadn’t said
kept
a list.

Mingan, damn you.

50 A.R.
On the Sixtieth Day of Summer

The other problem with going on foot,
Aithne thought, her work gloves slipping on the slick wood of the beam,
is that you keep finding all those people with problems. When you’re in a hurry to get somewhere.

Aethelred grunted on the other end of the pole. Wet and charred, it was also heavy. Aithne strained at her end, determined that no man in his seventies was going to outwork her. Whether he was modified and dead fit or not.

Besides, I walk as much as he does.

“On three,” he said. They swung together, counting, and tossed the burned wood down into a narrow ravine. Aithne’s boot slipped in the muddy grass, but she windmilled her arms and didn’t go in. She caught a glimpse of wet black earth down the side of the gully, the ever-present white fragments of bone protruding from the side of the gully like roots from a freshly dug grave.

Damn depth perception.
It affected her shooting, too, but she had learned to compensate.

Aethelred turned around and surveyed the devastation. Aithne watched his face.

There was one man dead in the wreckage of the house. His partner, who had made it out, was under sedation in a neighbor’s cottage. Aithne squinted against the afternoon glare and watched other neighbors moving cold burned wood and furniture. She glanced over at Aethelred, who was unconsciously scrubbing blackened hands on his trousers.

Within the past twenty days, there had been a family massacre, two other fires, and a series of lesser delays. Aithne wondered if she had been maybe a little slow on the uptake, frankly, but all the trouble was starting to feel somewhat intentional.

“If I didn’t know better,” she said, “I’d suspect we were being distracted on purpose. Hasn’t it seemed busy lately?”

He looked up from examining the soot ground into the lines of his palms and turned his face toward her. “Yeah,” after a thoughtful moment. “Since we turned back east.”

“If somebody were trying to slow us down, it would take a lot of mobility. A lot of subtlety.”

“And a tracing device. Or magic.”

Aithne straightened up and strode abruptly back toward the house. “Come on. Let’s get that body out and get back on the road. And quickly.”

Aethelred swung along behind her. “And tomorrow,” he added, “we replace all our gear.”

50 A.R.
On the Seventh Day of Autumn

In the months that followed their argument, Cahey did not call Selene, did not return her messages. Cathmar, now living in Eiledon, stopped talking to Mingan after a conversation that neither one of them would discuss with her. Mingan continued cryptic, frequently absent, frustratingly uncommunicative.

Preserve us from sulky men,
she thought, whenever playing itinerant angel—Muire’s term, and Selene wondered if it would ever stop stinging each time she thought it—left her occasion for thinking. Cahey had been happiest working hard in fields and farmyards. Selene specialized in keeping the peace in larger habitations. Which was, after all, what she had been bred and built for, all those centuries ago.

Finally, worried beyond pride, she visited.

Opening the peeling blue door, he invited her in. His face was drawn, his complexion grayish-purple with weariness. Her whiskers flattened as she looked at him.

“Well,” he said, “I guess you’ve come to tell me that I’m acting like an arrogant shit?” He shut the door behind her.

She crossed the small living room and perched on the granite counter edge that divided it from the kitchen, swinging Solbiort to the side so the sword wouldn’t stick straight out. “Have you seen Cathmar?”

He shook his head and went into the kitchen to make tea.

“And no,” she said. “I’ve come to tell you I’m sorry, Cahey, and I want you to not be angry anymore.”

He came around behind her, leaning over the counter from the kitchen side, staying a careful ten centimeters away. She felt him studying the side of her face as he leaned his cheek on the knuckles of his right hand.

Ten centimeters. Just about as close as she could usually stand to have anybody. Her ears flickered toward him.
He tries.

“Ancient history, right?”

She was turning toward him with an answer on her lips when she glimpsed something behind the collar of his shirt. Selene reached out, turning his head with fingertips that caught on his skin like burrs. She snarled at the line of bruises flowering dark against the silken skin of his throat: some fresh, still purpling; others fading into rotten mottles.

Days’ worth. Weeks’.

“Cahey,” she said.

He caught her hand and squeezed it in his own. “Demon hickeys,” he said with a laugh. “Don’t worry; they look a
lot
worse than they are. It’s actually sort of pleasant when she does it.”

Selene frowned. “I think you need to talk to somebody about her.” She pulled her hand free and stood, turning to face him.

“ ‘Talk to somebody’? What does that mean, exactly?” The tone in his voice gave her pause. She’d never heard him sound like that before. Defensive.

“Mingan. He knows things that you and I don’t.”

He turned his head. She saw that he was gnawing on the inside of his cheek.

“Cahey, you are … unreasonable … with regard to the Wolf.”

“Unreasonable? Really? With regard to a murderer?”

She looked away from him and shook her head slowly, ears lying flat, forcing her fur down. “He has changed, Cahey. I’ve been spending time with him, and … he’s just changed, is all.” She couldn’t meet Cahey’s eyes.

She could feel him looking her over, examining the turn of her head, the line of her neck. She heard his sharp intake of breath, and her nose twitched as his scent peaked hotly.

She recognized, as well, the dead, controlled tone of his voice.
Furious.

“You’re fucking him.”

“Not exactly,” she answered.

“What the Hel does ‘not exactly’ mean, then?”

“I let him…” Her voice failed. “We kiss.”

“The son of a bitch who turned my son against me? You’re ashamed of it, at least.”

“No,” she said, drawing herself up and turning to face him. “Not ashamed. Unhappy to have hurt you.”

“I did not ask you to leave me, Selene.”

“You drove me to go! You never stopped wanting … needing … things I could never give you!”

“I never pushed you for anything,” he said. “Not once.”

She snarled. “I could
smell
it on you. How badly you wanted—needed—to be touched. The only time you were at peace was when you were away from me. What could I have done to help you, except go?”

The sound of the sea outside the window.

“I was never at peace,” he said. “It had nothing to do with you.”

“I care for you. I could not bear to watch you suffer.”

“Ah,” he spat. “So, since you couldn’t stand to have
me
touch you, you went to
him
instead?”

She backed away a step, trying and failing to smooth the fur along her spine. Her tail bristled. “
He
could be happy with what I had to give. And
he
isn’t hiding from his pain in the arms of a creature without a soul.”

Cahey paused. His voice was glacial when he spoke again. “She needs me, Selene. And … it helps. It hurts less when she’s done.”