All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (24 page)

In the echo of her mind, there was no answer. And when she stepped out of the trees into a broad clearing, there was no Kasimir.

Rather, she confronted something she had never expected
to see again outside of archived images: a steam locomotive, mulched halfway up its driving wheels in loam and leaf litter, hulking antique, derelict, and enormous in the afternoon light. Behind it was a coal car and three passenger cars, and at the back, a peeling green-painted caboose.

Muire paused, hands hooked inside her helmet, at waist level, and regarded the thing. “You didn’t fly this entire train up here.”

There is a rail under the soil.

Of course. Things get buried in a forest. “It’s been here since the Desolation? Why isn’t it rusted?”

She heard the crunch of footsteps approaching, and that warned her enough that she was not surprised when a voice that was not Kasimir’s answered. “Cristokos is fixing,” it said, and the diction and phrasing were odd enough that when the speaker hove into view around the sweep of the locomotive, Muire was not surprised to find that he was not human.

“You’re Cristokos?” She thought she knew the answer, but it seemed polite to ask. “I am Muire.”

His nose twitched at the tip of his parti-colored snout. “This one is Cristokos.” Then he shocked Muire by leaning forward at a precarious angle, extending his hand, and waiting for her to respond.

She’d never shaken hands with an unman before. She’d never, honestly, thought of one as an individual. But she unlatched her gauntlet, wiggled it off, and reached to make the clasp.

The crooked collection of bones and sinews that made up his hand was stronger than she’d expected, his grip firm and warm. She shook it once and stepped back, reestablishing the distance between them, hiding her shock of recognition.
It’s all of them,
she thought, and wondered how it was that she had not noticed
before. But Mingan had. And now she carried the Wolf within her. He had known about Cathoair before she had, too.

Cristokos straightened, permitted his hands to fall to his sides, concealed by the draping sleeves of his striped homespun robe. The waist was cinched by a braided leather belt, and a flute in a case hung from it. But it would not be the
right
flute, and Muire forced her attention back to the present, and her eyes away. “You’ve been restoring the locomotive.”

“It is something to do,” he said, turning his body away, but glancing invitingly—or warily—over his shoulder. “And the work was waiting.”

She took it as an invitation to follow. “It will never move again.”

“It is so,” he agreed. As soon as she fell in beside him, his gaze fixed on the ground. “Does that one wish refreshment?”

“Don’t let me take your food. I don’t require it.” Glutted on the Grey Wolf’s spirit, she suspected she would not feel hunger for a long while.

But Cristokos shrugged and said, “More grows than is needed, and jars for canning are precious. There are strawberries. What is not eaten will only go to compost.” He paused, and shot her a sly sideways glance. “Or into the pony.”

His delivery was both dry and perfect; in her fragile state, it made her laugh out loud. When she glanced back at him to share the joke, though, he seemed to be studying her, and she realized that his comment had been a test of some sort. “The pony can have as many strawberries as he wants.”

“Hmp,” said Cristokos. “Here, that one may sit on the steps and rest. This one will fetch what there is.”

The steps he indicated were the steep narrow swinging steps to the first of the three passenger cars, and Muire sank
onto them with relief. Cristokos bustled off toward the tree line. She laid her helm and gauntlets aside and busied herself loosening the straps of her armor. She paused halfway up the first greave, however, and thought of Kasimir.

Is this safe?

I would have told you, were it otherwise.

She let a sigh escape and continued running her hands up the clasps, which opened to her fingerprint.

And Cristokos. Does he know your name?

She had, she told herself, no cause for jealousy. She had abandoned Kasimir, had left him in isolation for centuries.

He is not my rider
, Kasimir answered.

But he is Yrenbend.

Yes
. Unhesitating, but in what would have been a hush, had he but spoken aloud.

Kasimir. Are they all back?

I know not. I should not have asked
you,
if I did.

Kasimir.

I know not!
And then, soft as the wind.
Ask Cristokos about the swords.

She pressed him, but he would not answer. And so she stripped her armor off in silence and piled it beside the train, then resheathed Nathr across her back. She stood, arms wide, letting the wind dry the sweat from her garments, and examined her surroundings.

There were fields not far downsteam. She identified nodding grain, still too green for harvest, and the broad leaves of bean plants. From here down, the valley did widen, descending in rock-walled terraces. Cristokos must keep quite busy.

She wondered what purpose all his industry served, when he was here alone and could no doubt have subsisted by foraging.
Nevertheless, when he returned carrying a dripping basket, she was happy to sit down across from him on the blanket he spread on the grass.

In the basket were strawberries, protected by cheesecloth and kept cold, apparently, in the glacial stream. There was also soft bland un-aged cheese packed in a glass jar with a screw-on lid and a loaf of bread wrapped up in a towel. That latter must have been placed in the basket after it was removed from the stream, however, because when Cristokos produced it and broke off a piece for Muire, it wasn’t soggy at all and the center was still warm.

The only drink was water, and it was yet the best meal she had tasted in ages. The strawberries were no bigger than the caps of the glossy toadstools, and each one had a slightly different flavor from all the others—sweet, tart, viny—so there was adventure in eating them. There were eggs in the bread, and the cheese was
cheese,
not a tank-farmed substitute.

Muire licked a dab off her dirty forefinger and asked, wincing at the faint aftertaste of her own salt.

“This one keeps goats,” he answered, and stroked his homespun garment. “Cloth and milk are thus provided. There are no cattle in the valley.”

The blade across her back kept Muire sitting straight. She reached for the cold mountain water and did not drink, but cradled the pottery cup between her palms. Had the wolf been walking through the world all this time, seeing the faces of those he had slain worn like masks by random strangers? No wonder he was mad, if what Muire saw wasn’t merely evidence of his madness infecting her.

It is not
.

If I were crazy, you would say that also
. She was met by silence; if he had a rejoinder, he kept it to himself.

She had found Strifbjorn once, centuries before, and wondered if it were a sort of doom that had befallen him, to be reborn endlessly in ignorance, to play out a tragedy time and again. But then there was Cathoair, who was the antithesis of tragedy, and there was the cat-faced moreau Selene, and there was Cristokos with his bizarre dissociating circumlocutions.

Muire wondered if he were damaged. Maybe the urge to serve was so deep-wired into the moreaux that they could only attain self-direction with an injured mind. It was a terrible thought, and it brought with it a wellspring of discomfort with Thjierry, with what she might have done to secure the future of Eiledon.

And then she thought,
But I was also created to serve. And is it so different?

Muire looked at the unman and gnawed her lips.

“Cristokos,” she said, “my steed brought me here to speak with you. About the Technomancer and the wolf. The Grey Wolf.”

It wasn’t easy to read his face, the jet-bead eyes and the pie-bald splotches obscuring any expression more subtle than a cringe or a snarl. But it was easy enough to understand the way he glanced down, attention fixed on the bread in his hand and the cheese he spread over it.

Muire thought of taking his wrist, demanding attention, but she thought that unlikely to garner what she needed. Instead, she rocked up onto her knees, reached over her shoulder, and grasped Nathr’s hilt. The blade slid free of her sheath with a sound like a stream of water ringing into a bowl. Most things that were not immortal would have flinched from it.

Cristokos sat straight, glanced up, leaned forward. Muire laid the blade across the picnic blanket, and—though her fingers
were reluctant to release the hilt—sat back. “My blade,” she said. “Nathr. She’s not the first such you have seen.”

The unman’s broad throat worked. He glanced away. “Those are Her tools,” he said.

“They’re not. Not unless she has appropriated them.”

“She has many.” The bread in his hand must have gone forgotten; he looked at it in surprise and covered his distress by taking a bite. Strong gnawing teeth made short work.

When he swallowed, Muire leaned forward again. “Cristokos, please.”

That
was
a snarl. Just a flicker of one, wrinkles on each side of the long snout, quickly smoothed.

“Does that one say please when she commands her steed?”

If his briefly bared teeth could not make her pull away, the tone of his voice was sufficient. “It is more that we serve the same ideal, than that either of us serves the other.”

Cristokos’s long fingers could move quickly, a deft dismissive flick beside his face. “But that one accepted his service.”

“I did not wish it. And I have a feeling there’s no winning this argument with you. Either I did not resist him strongly enough, or I abandoned him when I should have been there to protect him. Is it so?”

He looked up at her, a glance through lashes that could have been coquettish, but she thought was rather mulish now. She nudged the sword toward him with the backs of her fingertips, nails clicking softly on the hilt. “Thjierry took yours, didn’t she? She didn’t ask. She created you her animal, and she bound you to her will. It was written on your bones when she made you. She carved the runes deep.”

The moreau flinched. He set aside his supper and covered his face with his hands. “She did what She thought needful.”

And how it hurt him to defend Thjierry, Muire would never, she thought, comprehend. But still, even now, even here in his hard-won freedom, Cristokos could not sit and listen to Muire speak ill of her who had been his mistress.

Yes. She
had
been created to serve. And though she had failed her service, she understood now with terrible clarity that it meant something, to be allowed the option to fail.

“How many swords are there, Cristokos?”

He shrugged. “An approximation, four hundred.” Not even half of the swords; not even half of the children, who had never been many. “Her unmans are forbidden to touch them.”

“And how many moreaux?”

He looked longingly at Nathr, laid across the blanket between them. Muire made her hands very still and looked away: tacit permission. “An approximation? Four hundred.”

Muire closed her eyes. But she did not hear the whisper of cloth that would mean he reached forward to touch her sword.

He cleared his throat. “This one touched such a blade by accident.”

“And then you escaped,” Muire said. Not damaged, then. Just unbound, only partially, under uncontrolled circumstances. He still carried the Technomancer’s bond. But he had externalized it, made it other.

And there had been a price.

Cristokos shrugged. She could hear the cramped spaces and fearful hiding in his tone when he said, “This one is a rat. Rats are for sneaking.”

She turned back to him. He reached out softly and laid his fingertips against the black crystal of Nathr’s blade. And deep within, barely visible in the strong afternoon sun, an eddy of starlight answered.

S
he’s at least five hundred years old,” the Technomancer said. “I suspect she’s much older, but that was as far back as I could trace her.”

“She’s from before the Desolation.” From the vantage of Cathoair’s nineteen years, it was a span beyond bewildering, into incomprehensible.

“Well.” The tilt of the Technomancer’s head was an old woman’s mockery of a young woman’s simpering. It charmed him. “So are a few of us. But not all of us are quite so well preserved. I presume, from your startlement, that she had not taken you into her confidence, Cathoair?”

He shook his head.

She sighed, her hoverchair scooting backwards in response to a command he did not catch, and beckoned him to follow. “It was too much to hope for,” she said, as he walked alongside. “She never trusted Gunther either, did she?”

“Not with that,” the disembodied voice answered.

It did not take a great deal of native genius for Cathoair to figure out that they wanted something from him. He thought of Muire quoting poetry in the darkness, his own flip dismissal of the religion behind it, her pursuit of the Grey Wolf. He
thought of the sword in her hand, and shook his head and snorted through his nose. Ridiculous. Ridiculous to imagine. The more ridiculous because he suspected he was right.