The Sea Thy Mistress (21 page)

It annoyed him that he was tempted. He might be stuck in a young man’s body, but he was growing an old man’s soul.

He forced back the appalling moment of desire and frowned, looking at her directly for a long moment before glancing away, dismissively. “Does he know what you’re doing here?” Cahey asked her, turning his attention back to the ocean, allowing animosity to stiffen his spine.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her smile blossom. “Of course not. He thinks I’m here to make you see sense. But you’re much more … worldly … than your son.”

“I’m also not a liar,” he replied. “And I won’t do anything to hurt him. Perhaps you should go.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “You’d never do anything to hurt anyone, would you?” There was something hypnotic about her voice. “Not on purpose. Not in malice. I’m sure of that.”

Cahey shook his head, bitterness overwhelming the irritation. “I see he’s told you some things.”

“Some. I have many means of learning.” The girlish note fell out of her voice, replaced by a tone both womanly and knowing. “Do you know who I am?”

He looked back at her, the white curve of her throat bared by hair tumbling in the breeze. He allowed his head to move judiciously from side to side. “I can’t say that I do.”

“I am one who has already been your lover once, and who will be again.”

“I think I would remember you,” he answered coldly.

She chuckled. “Flattery—and a knife. Very nice, Cahey. You’ll make an angel yet. Unless you change your mind.”

“What do you mean?”

She passed a hand over her face.

A chill settled into his stomach when she glanced at him again. “Muire,” he said. But no—the eyes were still too blue.

Raising a graceful hand, she snapped her fingers beside her face. And was Mardoll again. “Am I not powerful?” she said, with the air of one quoting something. “Am I not fair?”

“Who are you?”

“Your lover, and your son’s.”

“What do you want?”

She laid her hand on his shoulder. “To make you an offer, my dear. You suffer needlessly. I will speak plainly: there is history that you would change. You would take someone’s place.”

The realization of what she was offering hooked him through the diaphragm. His heart cramped in his breast.

“Astrid,” he said quietly.

She nodded. “It can be arranged. There would be sacrifices, of course.”

“Why should I believe you?”

She smiled, reached out with a slender forefinger, and brushed his forehead, between the eyes.

… voices raised. Screaming, a stranger screaming his name. Sweat in his eyes, and Astrid, laughing, stepping toward him and ducking low for a spin kick at the side of his knee.

The resilient wet crunching sensation of bones fracturing under his heel …

Cahey shouted, kicked back away from her, back flat against the bluff.

He watched the tip of her finger like the eye of a snake.

“You can change that,” she said, capturing his gaze.

He jerked his head to the side. His hands closed on the little drum: he felt leather and wire, the tiny glass beads detailing the rim. He seized his tongue between his teeth, breathed out slowly, brought himself under control.
One heartbeat at a time. Never get angry. Never get scared.

“There would be no Cathmar.” He didn’t look at her, continuing to run his fingers over the drumskin. It made a whisper of sound that was lost in the rhythm of the sea.

“There would. But that would not be his name, perhaps, although you would have been his father. And he might have been raised by someone more suited to the job. You can’t say that he wouldn’t have been better off with his uncle Aethelred. Or Astrid, for that matter.”

Astrid saved my life. More, she kept me from turning into my old man
. He’d said it the night she died—the night he killed her—and thought it a thousand times:
She was worth ten of me. It should have been me.

“No one to fill my place as angel.” Now he did look, and met her gaze directly.

“Astrid, of course.”

Hope and terror stirred in him. His breath locked in his chest.
Never get scared.
“How can you change the past?”

She touched the thing that glittered at her throat. “I will loan you my necklace. It’s a road, you see. You could take Astrid’s place. But there is a price.”

“What’s that?”

“Four days of passion.” Her hand slid down across his chest, coming to rest on his thigh. So close. She smelled of growing things.

He was getting hard. He willed himself to stand and move away from her. He failed. “Four days?”

“You and I. In a bed with clean sheets. Or here on the beach. I like that idea, actually.” Her hand slid ten centimeters higher, squeezed gently.

He gasped.

“Naked,” she continued, “sweaty.”

Light, that smile.
He almost felt her tongue on his skin. “You’re my son’s lover.”

“I am everyone’s lover, einherjar. I am love. And lust, and passion. I am the irresistible goddess. And if you do this thing, you will not be his father. You will not be anything at all. And our dalliance will not have happened, although I will remember it. But your Astrid … will be alive.”

A long, hard silence. Her hand was moving. The rhythm of his breathing made it difficult to speak. He put his hand on her shoulder to push her back, but she was immovable. It was like pushing at the living bones of the earth.

“Prove it.”

Her teeth flashed ivory in the sun, necklace jewels glittering as she tilted her head. “I knew you were going to say that. Observe.”

Her other hand slid into the braids behind his ear, clenched there, and turned his head by main strength. She laid her cheek to his so they both looked back down the beach, and whispered, “Watch.”

The light changed, became colder and more slanted, as if the sun were lower in the sky. The wind held spring chill, not second summer.

Movement drew his attention. Someone walked there, over the sand to the edge of the waves where the beach gave way to stones. Someone he half-recognized—a tall, lean man with snake braids twisted back over his shoulders. He was walking toward someone, a woman in the water, her crimson skirts swept back and forth by the drag and surge of waves.

“No,” he said, understanding that what he saw was himself. “I don’t want to see this. Take me home.”

A blink, and a flash of warmth, and it was again warm. The woman leaning over him continued in a challenging whisper. “If it makes it better, call me by a different name. Gullveig. I’ve used that one before.”

She leaned farther forward, brought her mouth against his ear. Her breath, hot and wet, tickled his skin. His skin jumped, flinching away from her touch like a racehorse from a fly bite. He tried and failed to find the strength to push her away. She made him feel
owned,
and he hated it.

Hated it.

Craved it.

“All right.” Rough words, caught on the nap of a long silence. “But it will be different, this time.”

She tilted her head back, tossed her hair aside. “How so?”

“No more deceptions. I see your true face, no shadow put on to tempt me.”

He saw her considering, saw her smile with an edge of gloating in it. A powerful smile.

“You’ll do as I direct?” she asked.

“I may be a whore,” he said, “but I’m an honest one.”

She inclined her head and smiled. “Do you always talk to goddesses this way?”

“The ones worth talking to.”

She leaned back, fingers relaxing. She didn’t pull her hand back, though. He watched her sweep her glance along the beach, stop, and smile. “Oh, there,” she said. “I like that.”

He followed the line of her gaze and shivered more deeply. A quarter-mile down the beach lay what looked at first sight like the ruins of an ancient domed structure, bleached ivory in the sun. Cahey knew it was the rib cage of some immense sea beast, extinct since the world nearly ended almost four hundred years before.

“You want to make love in a skeleton?”

She licked her lips. “Who said a damn thing about love?”

She preceded him down the beach, sunlight shining through her pleated dress, sea breeze fluttering the colorful scarves that bound her waist. His mouth was dry. His thought—fragmentary, unreasoned—seemed to swell and fade with the pulse of the waves.

He realized he’d left the little drum on the rock.
It should be safe enough there.

She led him down among the bones.

Sex and death,
he thought.
Hand and hand. This could be the story of my life.

He was too drained by his decision to laugh.

She turned to him. “Take off your clothes,” she said. “Lie down. Unless you want to undress me with your own hands.”

He shook his head and obeyed her, feeling as if he moved in a dream. The sunlight was hot on his skin. His body ached with desire and resignation and sorrow. He threw his clothes aside, revealing the hidden bruises, the ones that Cathmar had not seen.

She came toward him, naked except for that glittering necklace, pale as the bones that surrounded her. He settled down on the sand.
This isn’t love,
he thought.
It isn’t passion. It’s not playful or holy or good business or even good fun.

Her scarves—her belt—were in her hands, ruffled by the sea breeze. “I’m going to bind your hands. Does it matter to you how?”

“My hands?” Real fear, hurting fear, spiked through him. Grains of quartz and mica glittered on his skin. “I don’t want—”

“There’s still time to end the bargain,” she interrupted. “You’ll do as I instruct, as arranged. Four times. And then I’ll grant your boon. Or you can go now, walk back up the beach, and that will be the end of it.”

He bit his lip against the well of darkness that threatened to suck him down. It was moments before he could speak. “Whatever,” he said, sick with remembered terror, “you desire.”

He understood now why she’d chosen the skeleton for their bed. The lengths of cloth she wrapped around his wrists were silken soft, almost as blue as her eyes, and she tied the other ends to the arching ribs. The sunlight shone on his face, blinding even through closed eyelids. He turned his head to the side as she drew first one arm and then the other wide, lashing him down.

He groaned through clenched teeth, feeling the muscles in his neck and shoulders tense as he involuntarily tested the strength of his bonds. He remembered brick dust and bruising hands the scrape of concrete against his face the smell of garbage please.

please don’t.

and too much pain.…

The scarves held.

The hands had, too.

Her voice was a teasing whisper. “You’re frightened, aren’t you? I like that.”

He writhed away from her touch.

She stroked his hair, his face, his body, gentling him like a panicky stallion. “It will go easier on you,” she said, “if you give in now. If you don’t, I shall have to break you.”

He couldn’t answer. He struggled, and she sighed and stood and bound his feet as well. He strained like a bowstring. “Enough,” she told him. “Fight until you’ve worn yourself out, and then what good will you be to me?”

Her hand against his neck was cold compared to the sultry sunlight.
Cold as the sea.

The thought brought him back to himself. He remembered her dressed in the guise of his beloved.

I should hate you,
he thought. He hated himself, hated the rising excitement in his body, the will to be taken. He
wanted
her mastery over him. The knowledge closed his eyes, turned his head aside.

I’ve never wanted anything this much in my life.

Then he lifted his head off the pillow of sand, looking down the length of his body at her. “I should hate you,” he said.

She nodded. “Yes, you should.” The sound of her voice, unguarded for a moment, surprised him. There was sorrow in it, and a wild old determination.

But I don’t hate her.

I hate myself.

She came up alongside him, pushed his head back, slung a thigh white as the beach sand across his face, hard feet burrowing under his painfully opened shoulders. “Hate me,” she said. “Hate me, and make me scream.”

*   *   *

“And?” Cathmar said, when she caught up with him halfway up the Eiledon road.

Mardoll dismounted and handed him Elder’s reins, leaning forward to brush her lips against his. “Nothing important,” she said.

Still. A pity.
She thought about the two of them, father and son, and despite herself she smiled.
It would be nicer to keep both of them. But one must choose.