The Sea Thy Mistress (27 page)

“Stand up,” he said, and let the blade ring to the floor.

Mingan stood, and as the last light of sunset bloodied the stones under their feet he reached out his hand and pulled Cathoair into his arms.

“Thus the art of surrender,” he said into the other’s ear.

Cahey drew his face out of the other’s hair. “I don’t need to know anything more about that,” he said.

“It’s not me you hate,” Mingan repeated.

“That’s an easy thing to say.”

The Grey Wolf smiled. “You hate what I showed you about yourself. Need. Desire. And an ineffectual fury.”

“What do you want from me?”

Mingan placed a hand under Cahey’s chin and lifted it. “Surrender,” he said. “Exactly what I have given you, you must give to fate. Continue fighting the history that shapes you and you will destroy us.”

Cahey jerked away. “I can’t.”

“You must,” Mingan replied. “Learn to give yourself utterly. That way lies divinity and responsibility. Is it not what
she
did, after all?”

“I accept responsibility for my actions,” Cahey said.

Mingan shook his head. “You accept
blame.
Blame is a useless thing.”

“I’m not about to forgive you, my father or anyone else. I’m not in a forgiving mood today, for some reason.”

Silver Light flooded Mingan’s eyes, gleamed painfully bright. “We’re einherjar, boy. Forgiveness is not a part of our purpose. And it is foolish to offer it where it has not been earned.”

Cahey wasn’t quite sure what he was hearing, but he knew that it was not what he had expected to hear. “Then what?”

“Release,” Mingan said. “Once vengeance is served, it is served. Let it go. Forgiveness”—he hesitated—“is not what we do. But when clinging to old bitterness cripples you, it affects that which we serve.” He glanced up at the central statue. “That I will not permit.”

Cahey tried to understand him, and was afraid that he did. “You don’t want me to absolve you of your crimes?”

“My hands cannot be washed,” Mingan said. “There is no absolution for what I have done.”

“What do you want of me, then?”

The Grey Wolf stood, holding out hands to draw his brother to his feet. “Your kiss,” he said, shortly. “Given and received. In trust and honor, a bond between us.”

Cahey chewed his lip. Nausea swelled, coupled with longing, on the remembered scent of musk. Half a century and more, and he still remembered the abandon of that kiss.

The abandon, and the terror. He clenched his eyes.

“Say no,” the Wolf whispered, breath hot on Cahey’s cheek.

Cahey opened his eyes. “Quickly,” he said around the thickness in his throat.

The Wolf crossed to him in a single stride and drew him close. “Breathe,” he instructed, pressing his mouth over Cahey’s.

They kissed.

Mingan teased him, he thought, drawing the kiss out slowly and with a tantalizing touch. It wasn’t the hard rush of ecstasy-touched agony it had been the first time. It was the caress of a lover lingering over the quivering body of his beloved. He stared into the Grey Wolf’s cold starlit eyes.

He doesn’t love me,
Cahey reminded himself.

Shhhh,
the Wolf whispered, inside.
What do you know yet of who I love? For now, surrender.

Cahey thought of Mingan and Selene. The image rose with a bitterness, a violence up his throat. He pictured them kissing, as he was now kissed. Drawing himself up, he grasped Mingan’s shoulders, nearly forcing him away.

But Mingan hung slack in Cahey’s grip, unresisting, and the fight went out of him. The kiss tickled the back of his throat. His eyes drifted closed, and the shove turned into an embrace.

Surrender, Cathoair.

I’m trying.

Trying will help you not.
He heard the humor in the rough old voice. He braced against the anticipated wrenching of himself out of himself. That was when Mingan breathed down his throat.

Which was a shock: he’d thought the Wolf would only take, drawing the soul and courage out of him on a single ecstatic breath. Instead Mingan’s life and awareness rushed into him like water to a man bedroughted, food to a starving soul. Muire had done the same to him once, but she had been awkward, uncertain.

That had not felt like this did.

Mingan
knew
. Knew things that Muire had only just begun to understand when she had left Cahey. Things about passion, and sorrow, and the salt taste of sweat in the darkness.…

Knew, and held nothing back. Cahey felt his brother angel helpless in his arms and realized that it would be an instant’s work—an instant’s pleasure—to kill him. The Wolf’s hands slid down his shoulders, hanging limp at the end of widespread arms. The taut-muscled body relaxed into fluidity, and Cahey bore him up. Cahey’s hand lifted, knotted in Mingan’s loosening braid, pulling the Grey Wolf’s mouth up against his, hard, tasting blood, tasting the slickness of the other’s mouth. He groaned, felt cloth tear in his other fist.

The Wolf’s collar gaped wide, baring the bone-ridged white flesh of his bosom, the hollows black with shadows under his collarbone and each rib. That was as Cahey had expected. What he had not expected was the spill of blue light.

A slender bit of ribbon spanned the other man’s throat: the shirt had concealed it. Tight enough to cut into the tendons of Mingan’s neck, it cast flickering sparks across their skin. Cahey forced a finger under it and tugged, expecting it to part like a thread: it was soft as butter to the touch, but it gave no more than a band of steel. At the pressure on his throat, Mingan gasped and went rigid, clutching Cahey’s wrist—a shuddering terror that made Cahey jerk his hand back as if burned. “No?”

“
Say no,
” the Wolf had mocked, and Cahey saw in the burning gaze Mingan turned on him that he expected the mockery returned. The stare softened, at last, when he realized that Cahey had been asking an honest question.

“Do what you must,” Mingan said at length, through gritted teeth.

“Do you want this off?” Cahey asked, hesitantly tracing the narrow bright band with a forefinger. It was knotted, one end cleanly sharp, the other frayed to a fringe. Shivers chased each other across Mingan’s pale skin, following the course of the touch.

“It doesn’t
come
off,” Mingan snapped.

Cahey could feel the Wolf trying to relax and failing utterly, but he did manage to bring his arms down, clenching his fists at his sides. Cahey, in pity, drew his hand away. “How long?”

The Wolf smiled bitterly. “Since before the beginning of the world, einherjar.” He leaned close again, mouth open, the heat rolling from his body as he raised his hands to pull Cahey down again. Cahey let their mouths touch, but caught his breath around that nakedly hungry mouth, gasped clean rank air. The bitter scent of musk overrode the smell of the sea. He
wanted,
badly. And more: Mingan was reaching for him, pressing to him. All Cahey had to do was continue to breathe in the other’s life, and his ancient enemy would be dead. A shattering trust.

Mingan breathed out into his mouth, and Cahey accepted it.

How like you to teach by example. Bastard.

Hard-fought, giving back the kiss. Tasting luxury, struggling with his hunger and fury, Cahey mastered himself and breathed into his enemy’s wet, open mouth. Mingan twisted against him, drew him deep. Back and forth, and now Cahey had a sense for the nuance. There were threads submerged in the Wolf’s presence—Mingan himself, gray and cold; the Suneater with its mad yellow stare; Muire, sad and sane … and something else, a taste as transparent as water, that Cahey could not identify.

More cloth tore. His outreached hand banged the stones, cushioning a hard fall.

Surrender,
he thought, as they toppled to the polished flags.

50 A.R.
On the Twenty-ninth Day of Autumn

Some time later, the wolf draws himself upright. Combing his unbound hair with his fingers, he tastes blood. Some of it is his own, and he finds he doesn’t mind the flavor.

Cathoair sits with his back to the dais, head leaned across it, baring his unmarked throat. He’d learned to get the Imogen to leave her bruises in less obvious places. The wolf had found some of them, under shredded clothing.

A brave start, but not yet a finish.
The sensation of white wings ruffled and settled.
The bone is straightened, but it is not yet set.

The wolf’s smile becomes a frown. “Brother.”

Cathoair’s eyes crack open, a thin glitter of color behind tear-clotted lashes. He straightens where he sits, rolling stiffness out of his neck. Lips press thin as his jaw works. “Brother.”

“You need to hear about the Imogen.”

“Imogen,” Cathoair echoes. His fingers probe a welt on the inside of his elbow. The wolf thinks it’s an unconscious gesture.

“If you do not master her,” the wolf says, “she will master you. More than she already has.”

The younger einherjar shakes his head. “I don’t understand.”

The wolf offers a hand to lift him to his feet. Cathoair frowns at it and then shrugs, as if he has moved beyond pride. He rocks unsteadily for a moment, flinching when the wolf presses the bruises on his hands from when they fell against stone.

“I’ll show you how to heal those in a moment,” the wolf says as Cathoair finds his balance. “As for the Imogen … she’s a powerful tool, Cathoair, but soulless. And she feeds on pain. Soul-deep pain. And you, einherjar, are a creature on the verge of being nothing
but
soul.”

“I understand that.”

The wolf shakes his head. “No. Not even a little do you understand. She must have the pain of angels. Nothing else will do. The deeper, the wilder, the more textured and resonant and many-layered the pain, the sweeter and more nourishing it is to her. Best of all is pain that is both old … and fresh.”

Cathoair falls silent for a moment, understanding flickering across his face. “Oh.”

A sharp sea breeze flickers in the open window, riffling the wolf’s tangled hair and furling his cloak. The scent it carries is rich and complex, redolent of green life and rot.

“Yes,” the wolf says. “Oh. And in the end, if you let her have what she wants, there will be nothing left of you, but that which exists to feed her.”

Cathoair stretches, biting his lip, intelligence and focus coming back into his gaze as he considers that.

Ah, Muire. Perhaps you chose well after all.

And in which of us did she choose poorly?

Hush.

Not silence so much as the impression of an irritable snort.
Would you rather have been left so alone as you feared?

Cathoair speaks into Mingan’s musing quiet. “I don’t want to destroy her. She’s … innocent. Can you say a monster is innocent?”

“Monsters are nothing but innocent. You cannot destroy the Imogen. She is undying.”

“And how do you know so much about her?”

“She is my sister,” says the wolf. “I shut her away, long ago, before the Last Day. I was her partner, you see.” A bitter admission, even now. “She was too dangerous a weapon to use against my brothers.”

“And how did she get out again?”

“I released her.”

“You…?” An hour or two previous, Cathoair would have been feeling for his sword. Now, the wolf sees him reminding himself of fresh lessons. “To come to me?”

“You’re strong enough to bind her,” says the wolf, negligently. He knows Cathoair sees through him, knows that from now on he will. Something more than brotherhood but alien to friendship had been sealed on the ice-cold alabaster stones. “And she will be needed. Soon.”

“You said—
she
said she was a weapon.”

“She is,” the wolf says. “Heythe—the one who calls herself Mardoll, and Gullveig, and a half-hundred other names as besuits her—will be most put out with you when you refuse to destroy yourself to suit her whim.”

“How did you know about that?”

The wolf smiles around his sorrow.
Pointless deaths, all of them.
“Heythe. This is not her first attempt to bend this world to her wishes. But of those that might remember the last one, only I and my mount remain. This time, at least, she has no army.”

It takes a moment, but Cathoair at last looks up with wide eyes. “The Last Day. You and she—”

“There is much you need to know. And I will have to give you some history. For there is surrender, and there is capitulation, and they are not the same.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will. There are stories older than our world, Cathoair, and I am going to tell you one of them. Part of it, anyway.” The wolf glances up around the dark chapel before leading Cathoair over to sit on one of the slab benches near the racks. He takes a breath, taking on his storyteller’s voice, making his words sonorous and rich.