All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (35 page)

She was old, and too worn thin to wonder. But oh, what a beautiful boy he was then.

B
ecause he did not sleep, he could not say he’d awakened. But, lying in the darkness, Cathoair made his plan. Nothing messy, violent, or horrifying. Nothing that would inconvenience anyone, except in the blunt necessary inconvenience of death. Nothing that could hurt a bystander, or whoever found him. He couldn’t help hurting Muire, but there was no remedy for that. What she had thought was comfort, he knew for a farewell.

He discovered in the planning that he did not care how much pain he caused himself.

He thought about leaving a note, but it would shame him to be remembered as an illiterate scrawl. Aethelred would know what to do. Aethelred knew where to find his mother. And if she wanted to give up her life without a struggle—well, so did he. Aeth could give those instructions as well as Cathoair ever could.

He’d be waiting to meet her on the other side of the river. She would have to forgive him there.

Poison would be best. And poison was easy to find. Aethelred used strychnine to keep the rats out of the bar. The cabinet was locked, but Cathoair had duplicates of Aethelred’s keys.

Cathoair would arise in a little, when he had lain here long enough to seem convincing, and he would clean himself up and go downstairs and see about the strychnine.

He was going after Astrid. Aethelred would know what to do.

M
uire found him seizing, because she had been sitting at the bar with Selene, drinking Aethelred’s burned mock-coffee and trying to come up with a plan. They both heard the crash from the stairs, and as Selene swung wide to flank her, Muire headed straight for the door. It was locked, but she broke the lock with her hand, a sharp inelegant twist that pulled the knob apart.

The door burst open to her yank, revealing Cathoair sprawled against the steps, spine arching uncontrollably, blood streaked across his face from where he’d struck it falling. For a moment she paused, considering, and then she was climbing past him, sliding her thigh under his head, just trying to steady him and keep him from dashing his brains out against the steps.

Selene appeared in the door as Cathoair seized again, driving his skull into Muire’s abdomen so she retched. She braced her hands on the wall of the stairwell and said “Get Aethelred.”

The moreau vanished, while Muire endured unwitting blows.
Never stay with anybody who hits you
. Oh, Cathoair.

It wasn’t more than ninety seconds. Ninety seconds like time buried alive, while Muire crouched cramped and fearful in the dark stairwell. It smelled of mildew, as everything in the Well smelled of mildew, and she wondered if this was how Cristokos had felt, wedged shivering into crevices, using his new
freedom of mind to crawl away from home and creator and guardian and everything he knew.

“Strychnine,” Aethelred said, coming across the bar at a trot that creaked his chassis and rattled the building. “Somebody’s been in the cabinet where I keep the rat poison. What did you
say
to him?”

“Only what I thought would help,” Muire snarled back. “Barbiturates. Have you got any?”

Aethelred hesitated, glanced at Selene. “I’d just assumed, a bar like this—” Selene said. And, “If you tell me where, I’ll find them.”

He did, and told her where to find a hypodermic, and gave her the key. “If we can get him into a dark quiet room and keep him warm, get him to stop convulsing, he might live,” Muire said. “Depends on the dose. Death comes from exhaustion. You suffocate because you’re too tired to breathe. We need to move him.”

They had him on the stone floor of the bar by the time Selene returned, Muire still cushioning his head with her body. “Give me the needle.”

“You’re busy,” Selene said, and knelt beside Cathoair, feeling along his arm. The injection she administered was quick and professional, and it triggered another seizure. It was short-lived, though; as the barbiturates took effect, Cathoair’s body slackened, his jaw unclenching. But his breathing grew shallow, and Muire could hear it slowing. She groped for a pulse. “Shadows. Out of the frying pan—”

She closed her eyes. They could move him, try to rush him through the streets to a clinic. She could pay for care—

Muire, he is leaving.

No
. She pressed harder, seeking the faint flutter against her fingertips. “Damn it. Damn it.
Damn it
.”

Kasimir. Talk to him. And come here, please.

I hear.
As softly as a manifesting ghost, he stood in the center of the bar, heads ducked and wings furled tight, his caparison shining white and azure and silver against the soot of his hide. Selene recoiled, her whip in her hand and her back to a corner like a frightened cat, all her fur on end and poking between the straps of her armor.

“Help me get Cathoair up,” she said to Selene. “I have to take him to help.”

Selene stared at her, obviously measuring Muire’s stature against Cathoair’s and finding it wanting.

“Just do it,” she said. Aethelred was already reaching for him. “Careful,” Muire warned. “Don’t burn yourself on the horse. Kasimir, lie down.”

He obeyed, and they managed to get Cathoair draped across his neck, protected by the saddle and the blanket. Muire slung a leg over behind him, and then Aethelred said, “How are you getting that thing out of here?”

“Oh.”
Can we
—

We’re underground.

“We can take him out the delivery bay,” Aethelred said, snapping his fingers so metal clanked on metal. “Follow me.”

And then they stood in the back alley under a floating streetlight, bright moonlight seeping all around the edges of the Well, and Kasimir cautiously spread his wings, so as not to bump either of the fragile creatures standing near him. “We’ll be back when we can,” Muire said, steadying Cathoair across her knees and trying to arrange him so the pommel wasn’t likely to break his ribs on takeoff. She wedged his limp body as best she could, and knotted both hands in his shirt.

“Go.”

His wings swept down and he kicked up, and they were airborne, sailing over the heads of Selene and Aethelred, who ducked even though Kasimir’s high-tucked hooves cleared them by inches.
And where are we going?

You said there was a chance you and I and Mingan were not the only ones left.

I said he was still alive when the Last Day fell. I do not know further.

It’s worth a gamble when the alternative is losing.

As it was the last time you asked for a miracle?

Just take me to the ocean, horse.

S
elene watched them rise and envisioned her life gone with them, torn away on the horse’s iron wings, shredding behind him like a wedding veil. As if with his passing, he had torn away her illusions, and she was only beginning to understand what she had lost. Certainty. Service. Devotion. Love and community, a home, brothers and sisters, someone else who took responsibility and guarded and warded and kept one safe from everything hard in life. Because fighting wasn’t hard; patrolling wasn’t hard; protecting people from predators wasn’t hard at all.

What was hard was making decisions, choices. Taking responsibility. Knowing that when you caught one you let another fall, and living with that choice.

Selene did not think she wanted it.

A coil of air too dank to be called a breeze brought scent. Cristokos has slipped outside, staying within the shadows of the doorway. She was about to gently reprimand him for carelessness,
but then she realized it didn’t matter if he were seen. Unless one of them who was not a traitor to Her saw him, he was just another unman, and a rat at that. Who could tell them apart?

You feared me.

“Horse?” she said. She looked around, feeling like an idiot when Aethelred and Cristokos both turned to stare. But she didn’t know what else it could be. It was a sound that wasn’t sound, the memory of someone with a vast deep quiet voice having just a moment ago spoken.

It is I. You feared me, in the bar. Do not fear me.

There was something in the voice, some passionate emotion. It was deep and cold and lonely, and Selene ducked her head, only mouthing the words she said next. It must have been enough. “You are frightening,” she said. “And the first time you appeared was the beginning of the end of my life.”

You are free now.

“And do you like freedom?”

A pause.
I choose service.
And then a longer pause.
But it is service
I
choose.

Ineffectually, she tried to stroke her fur flat where it had tufted through the armor. She gave up, after a moment, and curled her own claws into the unarmored part of her upper arm. Warm blood welled around the claw-roots. but she did not drag and tear, only flexed. The pain was wonderfully focusing. “I’m alone,” she said, and turned to face the wall. “Like Cristokos.”

Like everyone.

“Oh, everyone who?”

Everyone you stand among. Everyone who has just left your presence. All alone. Each of us.

Oh,
she thought.

And he said,
Think about it
.

T
en miles downriver from Eiledon, the sea was terrible to behold. Kasimir set down with his hooves clear of the tide, wings held high and daintily like a gull’s.

It didn’t smell like an ocean. Muire had been born from the sea, named for the sea, had spent the first six hundred years of her life at its very verge. She knew its scent in her bones, like the ache of a long-lost love.

This was not that.

The waves that moved against the shore seemed oily, heavy in the moonlight. Stiff foam floated on them like clots in milk. The beach was barren—no weed tossed up in clots of seawrack, no shells nor fish-bones. Nothing but the skeleton of some immense creature beached on its back a half-mile west, below a bluff, gleaming in the moonlight like sculptured stone.

Kasimir dropped to his knees, and Muire clambered down his side, using his foreleg as a step ladder. Her boot smoked, but she didn’t feel the heat. She pulled Cathoair down after her and cushioned his fall as best she could. He was limp; she could feel no heartbeat; she could not tell if he was breathing.

“You left me here once, you craven bastard. Don’t you
dare
die on me again.”

He cannot hear you.
Kasimir’s breath came painfully, for no reason Muire could detect. Slow, and heavy, and with a pause between as if each one left him almost unable to draw another.

“Kasimir—”

I breathe for him. Call the snake.

Cathoair’s skin was chill. Muire laid him on his back on the
sand, below the tideline but above the poisoned waves, and hoped she was not doing him more harm. She composed his hands and feet, and knew it for nervousness, for stalling.

She made her way down the beach and stood where the waves could hiss by the toes of her boots, tugging at the sand. There was no stability anywhere in the world, but here it was made manifest. She took a breath and raised her voice, let it ring out as it had when she had been a poet, and declaimed. “By moonlight, by earth and by ocean, bearer of Burdens, I summon You.”

For long moments, while she waited, nothing at all. Muire doubled over, hands on her knees, the astringent cleaning-fluid smell of the waves overcoming her.
And what if he doesn’t come?

Then the world is truly dead. And there will be no renascence.

Muire straightened. She rubbed at her fingers, as if the tips kept stinging from where she’d struck Cathoair. He lay still on the beach, so still, his palms upturned and open as if to catch the moonlight.

Muire went and sat beside him, on the stand, and slipped her fingers through his own. “He’s gone,” she said, meaning the one they had come to beg for assistance. Kasimir was still breathing like a man in a press, and she hoped he would stop before he followed Cathoair all the way down. But it would be futile to remonstrate. She could tell him nothing of which he was unaware, and he was fighting each breath like a battle in a losing war.

She should have kept the barricades high, manned the battlements of herself a little better. It had come to nothing; she had accomplished nothing. Nothing, except more death. And having let them touch her, Kasimir and Cathoair, she would only lose them after all.

And the world lost with them.

Muire laid her cheek against her free hand and murmured something she had never thought to hear an angel say.

“It isn’t fair.”

No,
SISTER
. N
OT FAIR, NOT BRIGHT
. N
OT NOW, NOR NEVER WILL BE
.

At first the light was hard to see. It could have been the reflected radiance of the setting moon or the rising brilliance of the sun shimmering across the ocean. Cautious tentative fingers of light spread through clotted water, until slowly the sea began to shine. Music echoed in her ears—faint, unearthly, chiming: song swept down from all the windwracked stars above. Arpeggios and falls, teasing Muire’s hair like a breeze, a distant and almost forgotten chorale.