The Sea Thy Mistress (30 page)

Mardoll stirred in her sleep, her necklace—the only thing she wore—glittering in the afternoon light. Cathmar tried to rearrange his expression into something more pleasant than a scowl. Being gentle with her had not been easy. Although.

Although the sex part was easier to manage than you expected, wasn’t it?
He frowned. Not a pleasant thought.

Watching his betrayer sleep, Cathmar realized that he’d never
really
been angry before. Was shocked by the intensity of his urge to reach out and wrap his fingers around her slender neck, turned on a curve as she burrowed deeper into a plump white pillow. Almost, he felt the blood springing to the surface of his hands as he drove the wires and jewels of her necklace into the white skin of her throat.

That necklace. She never takes it off.

Never once.
And why did that never strike me as strange before?

Very, very softly, he reached out and flicked the catch with a fingernail. Another, harder touch, and he realized that it would not open, and remembered what Selene had said about the bargain Cahey had cut with Mardoll.
Four days of love, if you can call it that. I wonder if that’s what she paid for it. And if she paid, if I can pay the same. I wonder if she really can use it to walk time and place, she could use it to escape, again.

As she did on the Last Day, when the first einherjar all died. Mardoll came—elsewhen? Now?

Heythe. Her name is Heythe.
Remembering the conditions of that deal had brought back another thought:
And I would really like to wring her neck.

He tried to dismiss the image and it returned, disquieting. The more disquieting because of the satisfaction he took at the image … and the passion it stirred in him.
Passion. No mistake that the word for sex and for anger is the same, is it?
His lip wanted to curl. He smoothed it.

I’ve never hated anybody before.

She stretched in her sleep and smiled. He recognized the signs of her awakening and left the bed softly, returning with a breakfast tray as she opened her eyes. He poured her tea, handed her the bowl, and settled down on the bed beside her again.

“Go anywhere?” she asked him after taking a sip of the tea.

He gestured down at his unclothed self. “Just here with you.”

Her gaze lingered. “Mmmmmm. So what occasion breakfast in bed?”

He took her empty hand, kissing the palm so he wouldn’t have to meet her eyes. “Things have been strained lately,” he said.
Angels don’t lie. Thanks, Mom, for the easy set of rules to follow.
“I wanted us to spend some time … closer together.”

“You are insatiable,” she said. “I had some things I wanted to do today—”

He kissed her wrist, the inside of her forearm, more with his breath than with his lips. He felt her shiver. He’d rather have twisted that arm behind her back. He stroked her tousled hair off her cheek with his other hand.

“What sort of things?” As if feigning interest to be polite. He should be bothered that he was good at this. Really good at it.

“Marketing … oh.”

“I’ll do it for you later.” He stroked her throat with his fingertips, imagining …
No. Don’t think about that.
Pausing with his fingertips brushing her necklace as if only just noticing it, he asked, “How come you never take this off?”

“Hmmmm? Why?”

“Oh.… I just realized I’d never seen you naked.” Making it into a little joke.

She giggled. “It’s magic.”

“Okay.” Putting just enough disbelief into the tone. “It makes you beautiful? Without it, you’re an ugly…,” pause, “old…,” longer pause, “witch?”

“Mmmm. You expect me to talk while you do that?”

His silence indicated disinterest in whether she was talking or not. She caught him by the chin and lifted his face up. “It’s a map,” she said. “A map of the stars. I stole it from a dead goddess. With it, I can walk anywhere. Other worlds, even.”

He laughed, meeting the regard of her bright blue eyes. “You think I don’t believe you.”

“You’re right.”

“Love,” he said, turning away again, “why would you ever have to lie to me? It would be beneath you.” And pretended that he thought the sudden tension in her body came from the touch of his hands.

50 A.R.
On the Thirty-third and
the Thirty-fourth Days of Autumn

Cahey awoke to cool, airy night—awakening itself a sensation that had become so unfamiliar it took him a moment to understand what had happened. He stretched, senses other than sight filling in the familiar smells and darknesses of his back room: the scent of the sea; of woodsmoke; and another odor, familiar enough to tickle his memory but not easily identified.

He was home. Smooth sheets slid over his skin. Someone had undressed him, bathed him, and put him to bed.

Bed? There wasn’t a bed in his room. But here he was, eiderdown pulled up to his chin, soft pillows under his head. That scent: elusive. He almost remembered it.

He had not expected to wake up at all, and …

Somebody had also fetched a bed. He reevaluated how much time had passed. He stretched again, testing his arms and legs. Everything seemed in working order.

He started to sit up and the dizziness hit him. A moment later, it was followed by the memories. And the lack of them.

He’d rarely thought consciously of the splinter of his lover’s self that he’d carried within him all this time, but it had been there. A little comforting shard of light, a taste of her that never left him.

Where it had been was an empty corner. A starless darkness.

The sensation of hollowness was followed by the pain.

He bit down against the first sob, turning it into a yelp. The one that followed came out a raw-throated howl.

Imogen,
he thought, even as he knew that this time she wouldn’t be coming to take the suffering away. His grief crested and washed over him like the wild, terrible sea. He thought it would rip him open like a gaffing hook: real, searing, physical pain. All the hurt he’d never given voice to, so many years ago.

Curled around his emptiness, he barely noticed when the bedroom door swung open and someone came in. A soft body in a nightshirt pressed against him, strong hands pulling him close, holding him down.

Her hair fell around him as she pushed his face into her neck. He recognized the smell of her then, but the shock of her presence wasn’t enough to jar him out of his grief. Not yet.

He expected her to hush him, to bury his tears in her shoulder and rock him quiet as his mother would have. Not so.

“Good,” she said in level tones, her voice reasoned rather than soothing. “Good. Scream, kick, bite. You need it.” He knew her voice even before he felt the strap of her eyepatch against his cheek.

She hung on to him, inhumanly strong, and let him fight his grief out against her. Another woman had done the same thing for him once, after a death that, he was finally starting to understand, might not have been meant to be his. He’d held Aithne the same way, on more nights than one.

There was a lot of grief to batter through. Aithne clung to him, protected him with her body. At long last, he fell back, spent, and she pulled him against her and stroked his hair.

“Aithne,” he said, when he was too tired to scream anymore. His voice sounded clotted.

She hummed in his ear, something wordless.

“I never thought I’d see you again.”

In the darkness, a small cat jumped up on the bed, investigated his ear with ticklish whiskers, and left.
Aithne’s still got that cat? It must be very old by now.
The incongruity of the thought, or perhaps the continuity of lives he no longer touched that it implied, startled him.

“You haven’t seen me yet,” she answered. It was too dark to detect her grin, but he heard it in her voice.

“Why did you come here?”

“Blame the kitty-cat,” she said. “Blame the priest.”

She drew back a little, slid under the covers, and wrapped her arms around him. She still smelled the same, but she felt different in the darkness: softer, womanly, strong. His body remembered hers brittle and angular, a grown girl’s, not the lusher curve of breast and hip through cotton jersey. Soft. And muscled under that.

Her skin, though, was and always had been softer still. He tried to think about something else.

She noticed, of course. “Cahey, do you need to make love?”

He laughed, surprised to hear some genuine humor in it. “Of course I do,” he said, “but why don’t we put it off till morning and I’ll see if I can manage ‘want’ instead of ‘need’?”

In the silence, he heard her breathing.

“Unless … you’d rather not,” he said belatedly.

She picked her head up off his shoulder. Something flickered in the darkness, caught like an edge of waxed paper dipped in fire. Her one eye blazed silver in the darkness. “I could find me a nice mortal boy instead,” she said.

The answering ripple of Light filled his own eyes. “How?”

“Selene,” she said. “And Mingan.” He saw her smile by starlight. “Muire gave me my sword yesterday. Her name’s Sceadhu. Selene thinks that’s funny, but I don’t underst—”

He laughed, and looked at her by the light of her own shining, and laughed some more until she started giggling, too, and pounding her fist on the bed. It was a long time before they fell quiet, not daring to look at each other.

Aithne broke the silence first. “It wasn’t me, was it?”

Cahey thought about it for a long time before he answered. “I thought … you’d be better off with somebody like yourself. And if I left, I…” He shook his head, feeling his hair matting against the pillowcase.

“Wouldn’t have to watch me get old,” she finished for him. “It’s okay. I thought you pitied
me,
and it pissed me off, so I wanted you gone. Sometimes. There’s only so much pity I can take, and I was filling the bill all by myself.”

“Mercy, wasn’t it?” The word came out before he remembered where he’d gotten it.

“Sometimes, mercy is served with a knife.”

“ ‘In my house,’ ” he quoted darkly, “ ‘there is an end to pain.’ ”

“I still don’t want your pity,” Aithne answered. “And, even now, you don’t need mine.”

He shook his head. “I’ve been more about the self-pity. But you … you deserved somebody who could just love you, and not have to think about burying you someday.”

She nodded. “I’m still getting used to it. The idea that … Here I am, and I’m going to be thirty-five forever. And everybody else is not.”

“You’ll be getting used to it for a long time,” he said after a silence.
A long time, and it never gets easy. I hope.
Sleep was welling up over him again, his body’s need for time to heal overwhelming his spirit’s ability to mend itself.

She snuggled against his shoulder. He listened to her breathe until drowsiness coiled him under again.

He woke to morning light, the sea breeze stirring the green gauze curtains and a redheaded angel’s smile. The freckles on her nose had faded over the years, but the eye was still green as a cat’s.

“Thank you,” he said.

She laughed at him. “Slender repayment. But it looks like I’ll have a long time to make it up to you.”

“You’ve changed,” he said, still studying her face. “You have laugh-lines.” He thought about it and decided that he liked them. They made the scars seem more like part of a tapestry and less like a vandalism. And then he thought,
I can show her how to fix those.

Her grin rearranged both. “You’ve changed, too. You’re not dead-set on saving me anymore.”

He sat up in bed, realized that he was still naked under the covers. “Ah,” he said.

The grin got wider. She rolled over and leaned on her elbows. “So, morning-breath, you wanna find out if the sex is any better when we’re both halfway sane?”

He pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth. “Old times’ sake?”

She snorted. “Fuck old times,” she said. “Old times sucked. I’m more interested in finding out if you’re capable of a halfway decent lay.” She was still grinning, and her tone held mockery, but no sting.

“Halfway decent…? I didn’t think I was
that
bad for you.”

She traced a fingertip down the center of his chest. She still bit her nails. “You…” She looked up at him, pressing her lips together. “A girl can tell,” she said. “When she’s not the place a boy wants to be.”

“Ah,” he said. “That was my problem, not yours, you know.”

She nodded. “I do. And now that I’ve met her … well. I could never compete with that.”

“It’s not about competition,” he said. “It’s about me getting my head out of my ass.” He looked her in the eye, bit his lip, and turned toward her under the patchwork eiderdown.