All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (3 page)

Muire flinched from the light.

She raised her right hand as if to shield her eyes, angling the blade down. The sdada leaped, thinking her dazzled, and she cut it from the air. Nathr went through it, scattering flesh and shadows and bits of bone, leaving Muire staring at her hand and the undimmed blade as if they were a stranger’s.

Muire heard the stallion grunt, felt him lunge forward, uncoiling off powerful haunches. She turned in time to see him catch the fourth vile-wolf by the throat and shake it like a ratting dog shakes vermin. Bones snapped but it still moved, sickly, brokenly. He dropped it to the ground and began tearing out chunks with his teeth.

She stepped forward, around the dragging wing, and finished it with a thrust.

Like a clockwork unwound, she paused there, her blade still transfixing the sdada, her head bowed, plaits and cloak whipping forward as the wind veered behind her. Something stroked her cheek—a tear, already freezing. Her cold fingers numbed on Nathr’s hilt.

The stallion nudged her hard with his muzzle and fell back into the snow with a thump. Muire turned, startled, but there was nothing behind her but the wind. She stood for a moment, tottering, her blade gleaming as bright in her hand as if all her brothers and sisters stood beside her. For a brief, cleansing moment she felt the snow in her hair, the presence of the children beside her.

And then there was nothing. She opened her eyes on emptiness, on blowing snow, on the already drifted corpses of the sdadown that she and the dying stallion had killed—two for her, one for him, that last one together—and shook her head.

Wait with me
, the stallion said.

It was not so much words as a terrible ache in her breast. She turned, plowed three steps toward him, and propped her sword against her hip while she fought with the bosses of his harness. The cold of the metal went right to the bone, aching, but she struggled frozen leather through stiff buckles and shoved the ruined saddle off his back. There was a corpse in the snow a
few steps away—Olrun, tarnished, who had loved swans and the Hall’s lean brindled wolfhounds, dead, and neither an ally nor an enemy any longer. She had fallen half wrapped in a tattered banner. Muire dragged the saddle over beside her, covering her with the bloodstained leather and the blanket, a crude sort of crypt.

And then Muire sat down in the crimsoned snow beside the stallion. She leaned against his shoulder and laid her shining, naked blade across her knees. And he in return draped his unbroken neck over her shoulder, his muzzle pressed to her armored chest. She hooked her arm up and reached around, under his throttle, to scratch behind his opposite ear. Frozen blood flaked from his mane.

“I’ve nowhere else to be,” she answered, and tilted her temple against his silken velvet cheek.

Sometime in the night, the snow stopped falling.

K
asimir was not dead by morning, and neither was the waelcyrge. Her oozing wounds sealed, then stopped, the blood freezing or scabbing over them. She breathed against his cheek, her eyes closed, her heart slowing. Was this sleep? Kasimir knew mortals slept, but the children of the Light did not, not unless they were more gravely wounded than his new waelcyrge.

He considered that thought. His.

He did not
have
to take her. There was no law or rule that demanded he do so. He was valraven, and the choice was his.

He knew this one. Her name was Muire. She was the littlest of all Light’s children, a poet and a historian and a metalworker rather than a warrior. She had loved Strifbjorn, the war-leader, and the war-leader had been gentle with her but he had not
returned her love. Strifbjorn’s heart—as Kasimir knew, as all the valraven knew, and never mentioned—had already been given.

She had been very brave, his waelcyrge. He nudged her with his muzzle to wake her, and she blinked and raised her head.
Kasimir
, he whispered.

At first she didn’t understand. She scrambled to her feet, limping a little less—not healing like a waelcyrge, but healing. Her sword in her hand, she scanned the brightening horizon for some threat.

There was nothing. The sky arched enamel-blue, the edge of the cliff where the children of the Light had turned at bay visible as a ragged line of white against the steelier blue of the sea, far below.
Kasimir
, he said, again, insistently.

Slowly, she turned, and stared at him. She panted, pain etching shadows under gray eyes that gleamed dimly with starlight for a moment before flickering dark. He stared back, until she lowered the blade and straightened, pressing the flat across her thighs. “You don’t have to do that. I will stay with you.”

He let his muzzle drop into the snow.
Live
, he said. He felt the raw desire in her as well, chafing at her resignation, her cold certainty that she had betrayed the Light as surely as the tarnished and deserved nothing.

“I cannot—” she said. And then she looked down at the sword in her hands, the sword that still blazed blue-white, dimmer now in daylight, but unmistakable. “Maybe I can.”

The Dweller Within never came to our aid
, Kasimir said, lifting his head as if he could see more of the ocean.
The Serpent is not dead, but lies dying. That is why there is no Light for you to call on. No Light but your own.

“Oh,” his waelcyrge said, without looking up from her sword. And then she stared at him, her irises transparent pewter,
the glow of the rising sun refracted through them behind ash-pale lashes, and he saw her throat work above the collar of her mail. She rustled softly, rings chiming on iron rings as she squared her shoulders. “I could ask for a miracle. I don’t even know if it will work, if the Serpent is dying. But I could ask.”

Kasimir paused. There was no promise such a call would be answered. No reason to believe that the outcome would be an improvement, if it was. Miracles happened, or they did not, and were wonderful or awful—or both—without logic or rhythm. He could find himself healed, remade, destroyed—or ignored, as they had been ignored as they fell to the tarnished and the sdadown.

Ask
, he said.

The waelcyrge turned her face aside, her knuckles pale on the hilt of her sword, and closed her dark gray eyes.

The earth heaved under the snowdrifts. The waelcyrge lost her footing and pitched backward into the snow a second time, her flailing arms carving angel wings in the white drift behind her. All around Kasimir, the surface cracked like the crust of an over-risen loaf; the frozen ground softened beneath him. He thrashed—whinnying, dragging himself to his feet, tossing his antelope-horned head, dragging the antlered one—but the earth bucked again and heaved him to his knees.

He could not stay down. Even a winged horse is terrified of unstable ground, and Kasimir’s wings were shredded hobbles.

His waelcyrge scrambled backward, regaining her feet none too nimbly, and the earth split wide as the snow around Kasimir’s hooves vanished in rushing hiss. Steam billowed around him, searing, bellying from deep below.

S
TAND
, K
ASIMIR
.

It might have been Herfjotur’s voice. He couldn’t know
over the roaring and the hiss, but he was sure it was not Muire’s.

What mattered was that it was a voice he trusted. He locked his three good legs and his broken one, bone grinding, rasping under his weight. He lifted his head and stood his ground, and did not shy as metal oozed glowing from the steaming cracks.

He did not shy. But he screamed, and kept on screaming.

M
uire could not go to him. She had been waelcyrge, and fire no more a threat to her than ice. She had been a smith, able to scoop metal from the crucible with her bare hand and pour it palm to palm like mercury. And when the earth yawned open and the white-hot iron smoked through the snow, she could not walk through the fire to Kasimir.

More cowardice. But at least she would not close her eyes.

He screamed while the metal crawled over him, fingerling rivulets broadening into a red-hot weld. It
was
like mercury, like a gold ring dipped in mercury, the quicksilver bonding to the surface. Yet this was no cold quicksilver, but molten metal, rising from the belly of the land in response to Muire’s ill-considered prayer.
All-Father, have mercy.

But mercy, in the end of things, was not what Othinn was for. Not the god who had hung on the world-tree for nine nights and nine days, who had sold his eye for power. And anyway, he had been left behind in Midgard. He had promised he would follow, that he would come to lead them in the new world. But he had not. And they had proven decisively, Muire thought, that they could not do it alone.

________

S
omehow, through it all, the stallion stood.

And when it was done, he
shone
.

Impassive now, he straightened slowly. Both heads on their long necks turned to regard Muire, white rings already fading around living brown eyes in sculptured faces. His new skin cooled, his new bones hardened, and his bright steel-blue wings opened and flexed, feather-perfect.

The soft whisper of tiny interlocking barbs on the pinions was like a declaration of war. Steam hissed under pressure as he moved. He shook out his mane, and each hair of it was a single, gleaming wire. The snow sublimated under his footsteps as he came to Muire. He nosed her chain mail–covered breast, not hard, and she gasped at the startling heat. The earth smoldered under his footsteps.

She laid her hand flat against his cheek and jerked it away in a moment, scalded. “What are you?”

Kasimir
, he answered.
Metal and meat. Sorcery and steel.

“What are you?” she asked again.

His eyes were warm and soft.
I am War.

“No,” she choked, before her voice failed. The world was new and empty, changed from the world it had been at the sunset, and the valraven had changed with it.

And Muire would not change, did not wish to change. “What have you become?” She reached out, but snatched back scorched fingers. “You are the future.”

I am the world, what the world will need, and what the world will be.

She turned her head, finally allowing herself to look away. “Why did you tell me your name? I am not worthy of you.”

I would not choose one unworthy.

“I fled.” He graced her with the steady regard of four patient eyes, and she could not lift her chin to meet it. “I fled the sdadown, and the tarnished, and I hid while our brethren died.”

Heat rolled from him; the heat of the forge, the heat of a summer’s day: a physical pressure. Her torn arm ached: it was bleeding again. Her thigh felt like knotted and dried rawhide.

“I am a coward. I will bring you pain.”

What pain could equal the pain of creation?
The antlered head ducked with a hiss of hydraulics. He folded his remade wings neatly and began to vaporize the snow about his hooves with short, sharp nudges of his muzzle—shyly, and so like any horse.

“Kasimir,” she said, softly, just to taste it once, to taste the wonder of his offer. “You said it yourself. The Dweller Within is no more. The Light has failed.”

The Dweller Within still lingers. We are the Light that remains
.

She could not answer.
He
had not broken and run. “No,” she said. “Oh, no . . .” And while she still could, she took the first step away.

His wings rattled and rustled
. You will come back to me. I am Kasimir. I am the new Age of the World.

When you name me, I shall come.

With a masterful leap he was airborne and gone. The splayed feathers of his wingtips wrote a benediction on the snow, and she was blessedly, terribly, finally alone.

S
he lived because she fled; he lived because she did not let him die.

I would not choose one unworthy.

When he was gone, when her tears were mastered, Muire began to gather the bodies and build over them a cairn. There would be no second miracle; she asked and was not answered, as she would ask and go unanswered for centuries to come.

Her hands cracked and chapped and swelled with chilblains; her nose dripped blood and snot. She grew thin. She grew weary. She grew—as she had never before been—hungry.

There were only a few brothers and sisters missing, all tarnished, and when she had finished with the dead atop the sea-cliff, she scoured the rubble at the base for those that might have fallen. She found her brother Hafgrim there, broken on the rocks, gored by a valraven’s antlers.

And there she found also the sword Svanvítr, but no sign of the Grey Wolf, its master.

O
ne thousand years is a long time to go hungry.

The Grey Wolf wears a sun burning under his heart. A gnawed cord cuts his throat with every breath. He has devoured gods and outlasted the endless snow. He has thrown away his sword. He has eaten everything he ever loved.

He is immortal and alone. He is walking south, to a sword-age, a storm-age.

He is the wolf, until world’s end.

Any day now.