All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (22 page)

“I’d like to educate everyone, but the Ark and the Thing would not permit it,” she said, and he believed the regret in her voice. “I’m sorry. They’re afraid of all you new folk.”

Holding her hand out, as if in evidence of her own decayed humanity, she glided up before him. Old and frail, completely helpless. Except, of course, for whatever he could not see.

“You’re the Technomancer. You do as you please.”

“Alas. You would think so.” Thin shoulders rose and fell under the sweaters. She reached out and touched his hand, her fingers warm and papery on his skin. He expected the wires to somehow alter how she felt, but she was just an old woman, and her hands felt like his mother’s hands.

“You’re not truman either, though.”

“Not anymore. But I’m the Technomancer. It would go ill for them if I permitted myself to succumb to the ravages of age. And so, what they cannot survive without, they are forced to endure.” And then she changed the subject with a wave of her gray-skinned hand. “I interrupted. Gunther was asking about Muire. And the enemy she’s hunting, who is also an enemy of mine.”

“You know her?”

“We knew her,” Gunther said. “Long ago. Before the Desolation.”

“But—”

At least he had the sense to stop himself before he went any further. And the Technomancer nodded, as if she understood his distress. “Did you assume she was mortal? Truman?”

“No,” Cathoair said. He closed his eyes. “Of course not. Any fool can see she’s something else.”

M
uire brushed at the spots of scarlet on her armor, expecting them to smear—but they were only rose-petals, adhered by melting snow. Her lacerated hands didn’t sting. She supported herself against the trunk of the enormous tree with the other hand, panting, and expected when she stood on her own her palm would leave smears of blood to freeze upon the bark. But the only dark wetness, illuminated to her preternatural eyesight by the starshine, was the melted snow.

Her hands were healed. And more—the scars on the one Mingan had crushed remained, but they were old and white, and the bone-deep ache had faded.

“You healed me.” Her hair fell across her eyes when she lifted her head. She did not trouble herself to shake it back. Her grimace—she couldn’t call it a smile—felt on her mouth like an animal’s snarl. Light surged from her mouth and from her eyes, dazzling beams that cast Mingan in stark brilliance so his shadow stretched long on the trammeled snow behind him.

“You healed yourself,” he said. “As in the old days. How does it feel to be strong again, angel?”

“I hate thee,” she said, and then her perfect, unblemished hand flew to her mouth.

He was not touching her. He could not actually speak into her mind. But she heard him, close and tender as if his breath warmed her ear.
Then in this we are united
.

Of course it wasn’t really Mingan. It was merely the splinter of him she carried—would always carry—a shadowy, complex, and twisted thing she did not begin to apprehend. She wondered, if she had married, if she would be better prepared to confront the soul-shard of an immortal. Or if what Mingan had given her—what Mingan
was
—was as unlike the breath of a child of the Light as it was unlike the clear pale mortal simplicity of Ingraham Fasoltsen’s memory.

But whatever, he was in her; she could taste him on her lips as plainly as vomit. Such a small word. So inoffensive.

Thee.

She pawed at her lips as if she could stuff it back down her throat. The Light that seared from her—the Light that he, tarnished, had returned to her with all her lost strength—flickered and paled.

“Carry me under thy heart, sister,” he whispered. And the Grey Wolf smiled upon her, and vanished.

Judge me again.

Oh, but she did not
care
to understand him. He was an enemy. It should be enough.

One of his side steps into shadow, the faint rill of Light along his tangled hair, and then where he had stood, nothing. The moment after he was gone, there was Kasimir, ankle-deep in the snow, wings fanned, necks arched as he surveyed the battlefield.
Yes
, she thought,
battlefield
, selecting the word with a poet’s care. “Nathr,” she said. “Is she there by you?”

You are well?

“Not exactly.
Do you see my sword?
”

She is here. Muire
—

This time, the note of repressed panic in his not-voice pierced her own fear and disorientation. She waded through the snow to him, knowing he watched her, that he noted her tangled hair and the light shifting through her irises as if through water, her ungloved hands and bitten mouth—no, that was healed as well—knowing that he
knew
.

And somehow she endured, stumbling through drifts until she could retrieve her blade. The sword blazed in her hand as it had in the dawn of the world, bright as a battle cry, wild as a shout. And Kasimir watched her, and did not judge. There was no need—this sin, she could judge on her own. Was duress an excuse?

Surely not for an angel.

Muire dried the sword with care, blade and hilt, but did not sheathe her. She couldn’t bear, just yet, to be parted from the Light, even though it flowed from a polluted spring, sourced in all the lives the wolf had stolen.

Oh, yes. She knew now why silver might tarnish. And Kasimir, watching her, resting softly in her mind, knew also.

She thought of sending him away again, and going after the wolf alone, a tainted hunter in pursuit of tainted prey. She thought of remonstrating with Kasimir, of showing him what she had fallen to. Each time she thought there was no more bottom, somehow she wound up demonstrating the descent.

He snorted his answer. And she looked at him, her sword burning in her hand with an unclean light, and said, “I don’t understand this.”

You are not tarnished.

“How do you know?”

Your blade knows.

Against that, she had no argument. But she weighed it in her hand a moment, and looked at the way the light fell, the stark blue light and the black tree-trunk and the snow-white snow and the red roses crushed like blood in the pattern of the their struggle. And then she went to him anyway.

She held her hand to his fire, pressed naked flesh tight to withering metal, and felt only warm strength. And then the weight of his head as he reached over her, and pressed his cheek to hers.

I shall not lose you.

A
nother time, Muire might have waited until they were out of the snow to interrogate Ingraham on his silence. But not today—if days could be said to have any meaning here. Nor was she in a mood to argue with this mortal scrap, not here, calf-deep in the drifts of a dead world. She was healed now, fatted on poisoned strength, and she had Mingan. Though the memories he had left her were fragmentary and confusing, she was determined that they would be enough. One hand on Kasimir for support, Nathr an anchor in her hand, Muire turned herself within.

It was unlike meditation, and also unlike searching one’s own memories. More like searching the fragments of a dozen mirrors heaped in a pile. She had fragments, unreconstructed glimpses and imaginings. Too much of it was random, unreadable. Sheer chaos. But there were things both ghosts had found important, which were recent to each memory.

It had gone beyond simply avenging the dead, and—no matter how she sought to deny it—into some deeper mystery.

Ingraham remembered how he had died. And Mingan
remembered how he had done murder. And—though neither of them was happy to share with her—that was a place to start, while she sorted through shatterling histories.

She knew at once when she found the right moment in Ingraham’s memory. The scent and texture of the air, the echo of his footsteps, the cold patter of rain on his hair—all conspired to remind her of the night he died. She walked with him, felt the raw chill of the night and the long, soaked cloth package in his hand. That was the delivery. The important thing. The thing Ingraham Fasoltsen had died for touching.

An unman met him at the foot of the stair he had died upon, and Muire saw her with a shock. A shock that Kasimir echoed, because under the fur and armor, the inhuman proportions and the lanky outline, both he and Muire knew her as soon as Ingraham looked into her eyes.

In Ingraham’s memory, the Black Silk extended her hand to take the bundle, and Muire reached out with her own left hand as if to lay Nathr across her palm. Then she jerked back, staggering in the snow, slipping against Kasimir’s obdurate shoulder. She bruised herself falling, but she was beyond burning now, and it didn’t interrupt the memory. Inside her head, Ingraham extended his arm, and slid the bundle into the unman’s grasp.

As if it were a real dream, a nightmare, Muire hauled herself free only with effort. She leaned on her steed’s shoulder, thickheaded and disoriented, and tried to shake the rag-tatters of phantasm from her psyche but only made her own head spin. If she had stayed with the memory a few minutes longer, she would have lived Ingraham’s death with him again. And she could have lived it through the Grey Wolf also, but she did not care to experience that particular luxury again.

Instead, she considered the unman. Muire had seen her the first time and thought nothing of her. But now she had the wolf in her, and the wolf knew—

Selene. Her name was Selene, and Muire knew it because Ingraham knew it. But that had not always been her name.

Herfjotur.

Kasimir blew a massive breath, snow melting before both his noses. With great sweeps of his antlered head, he swept aside drifts, as if he meant to crop the grass beneath. But instead, he sighed more softly and said of the slave soldier who had, in another life, been his rider:
Have we all returned?

Two is not all.
“And if we have? What for?”

And what good does it serve if they know not what they were? If they do not recollect what was, they might have stayed dead, and saved us the pain of remembrance.

“Kasimir—”

He waited, alert to her following question.

“The wolf said you were half-siblings. That his sire was your dam. How is that possible?”

It is not
, said Kasimir.
I have no forebears. I was made as I am.
And then a pause, while he shook the snow from his antlers.
That is to say, only paler.

Whether he had meant her to or not, she laughed. From the smug expression he twisted over his shoulder, it was no accident, but his next question after she controlled herself was serious.
And what sword was that, that Ingraham brought to the moreau?

If he would not call her Herfjotur, then neither would Muire. And if ever Muire had wondered if the Light was all an illusion, if there were in plain truth any world-girdling, world-guiding hand, she doubted no longer. Strifbjorn
or

Herfjotur might have been a coincidence. But both of them, reborn and unknowing? No mere trick of fate could be so spectacularly cruel.

Taken in that light, the answer to his question was obvious. “I know what sword it is,” she said. “And if you think a moment, so will you.”

Svanvitr,
he said.

“Of course,” she answered. “All you have to do is think about who showed up to claim it.”

And failed
.

“Well, yes.” Muire stepped away from Kasimir’s shoulder, half confident she could stand on her own, at last. She slipped Nathr into its sheath across her back, using both hands to steady. “Failure is his habit, after all.”

Kasimir lifted both heads to stare at her, as if disbelieving she had said what she had said. She had never heard bitterness enter his tone, but she thought if she would have, it would have been now.
They are
, he opined,
very dramatic failures. As a rule.

That made it her turn to snort and kick at the snow, so she obliged him. “Saddle, please.”

He made her one in a whirl of light, while she found her helm and gauntlets and pulled them on. As she stretched up to the stirrup, her left hand fisted in his near side mane, she said, “Oh, you know another thing?”

Perhaps
.

And useless to point out that it was a rhetorical question. “The Wolf accused me of complicity with Thjierry. Of some blasphemous conspiracy. Now that we know what we know . . .”

It has to do with the swords.

“It must. But I don’t know what use they would be to anyone not waelcyrge or einherjar.”

Kasimir went silent and still, motionless as the statue he resembled. The only sign that we were not frozen in time all over again was the rhythmic drift of steam from his nostrils, a plume for every exhalation.

“Kasimir?”

His diction grew as ponderous as the timbre of his voice. She had never heard him speak this way, as if choosing his words with great care, and the emphasis made her fist her gauntleted hands together.