All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (36 page)

The Snake rose from shallows that could not have held its bulk, a long lean coil of pearly light, tattered golden tendrils surrounding a narrow, thoughtful face. A serpent of incomprehensible size, dwarfing the wreck of the carcass down-strand. Great wounds and sores putrefied along the length of body vanishing back into the deeps, and it swam toward her, coiling and uncoiling, moonlight trapped within the writhing translucence of its bulk. And she understood, with awful clarity, just how it was that the Light had failed, that the Dweller Within had failed to come to their aid in the last battle. He had cut them off, silenced himself, drawn wide . . . so they would not live his pain along with him.

No abandonment, nor forsaking. Rather, a sacrifice.

I
WAS A LONG WAY OFF, SMALL SISTER, AND HAVE COME BACK A LONG WAY IN ANSWER TO YOUR PLEA
. S
PEAK, THAT
I
MAY KNOW YOUR NEED, FOR
I
HAVE LONG LEFT THE WORLD BEHIND
. The Wyrm bowed its scarred head over Muire’s. The snout
swung to and fro, stately as a massive pendulum. It seemed to sweep its gaze along the beach, but only empty sockets marked where eyes had been. T
HEY’VE MADE RATHER A MESS OF IT WHILE
I
WAS AWAY
.

Muire could have stood, but she would have had to release Cathoair’s hand. And what did a snake care if you met it standing? She clutched tighter and asked, “Elder brother, who hurt you so sore?”

I
T IS A POISONED WOUND FROM LONG AGO
. A
ND IT IS
T
IME
. I
AM THE BEARER OF
B
URDENS, AND THE WORLD HAS GROWN SICK AND OLD
. There was nothing of self-pity in its voice, despite black tiredness. Rather, it mocked. It opened its mouth as it spoke, and Muire saw the ropelike tongue rolling a small shining object among rotting teeth. B
UT
I
ENDURE
. Y
OU HAVE BROUGHT ME A BROKEN ANGEL
.

“Is he an angel?”

O
N THE VERGE OF IT
. A
ND ON THE VERGE OF BEING NOTHING AT ALL
. I
COULD ENVY HIM THE LATTER
.

Muire closed her eyes, but forced them open again, and wondered if what she was about to offer was just more selfishness, again. Because yes. The Snake had only spoken something she felt herself.

She supposed he knew it. But she still said, “I wish an intervention.”

T
HE PRICE IS A LIFE
.

“I wish to take his place.”

Y
OU OFFER YOUR DEATH FOR HIS LIFE?

“I should have died for him in the snow.”

The great Serpent coiled, and considered. N
OT MUCH OF A BARGAIN
. I’
VE ONE WOULD PLEASE ME BETTER
.

She knew better than to trust gods when they grew mocking.
But Cathoair’s hand grew cold in her own, and she could barely hear Kasimir’s breathing, when it had been like a steam engine moments before.

“Tell me.”

Y
OUR DEATH FOR HIS LIFE, THAT IS NOT EQUITABLE
. S
OMETHING YOU CRAVE FOR WHAT YOU ACCOUNT AT NOTHING
? Its forked-lightning tongue flickered briefly, offering another glimpse of its toy. Amber, she thought. A nugget of amber. Y
OUR LIFE FOR HIS LIFE, THAT’S A FAIR BARGAIN
.

“I have always served you.”

Y
ES
.

“Then how can you—”

T
AKE MY PLACE
, it said. B
EAR MY BURDENS
. A
ND HE WILL BE HEALED
.

Rotting flesh, sores and gangrene. Kasimir rattled out a breath. The Snake dropped its head, and Muire smelled the death on it, rotten meat and the befouled sea. Its tongue flickered out to taste the hollow of her throat, a touch as light as a featherfall.

“No,” she said.
Coward. Coward. Did you ever pretend you were anything more?

T
HERE ARE THINGS THAT ARE BROKEN BEYOND MENDING
, M
UIRE THE
S
CHOLAR
. T
HERE ARE THINGS THAT CANNOT BE SET RIGHT
. F
OR THOSE THINGS, ALL WE CAN DO IS BREAK THEM AND FORGE THEM ANEW, LIKE SHATTERED SWORDS AND RUINED WHEELS
. A
RE YOU THAT THING, SMALL SISTER
? I
S THE WORLD ALSO
?

Muire imagined Kasimir white and shattered in the snow, and Gunther wasted on his deathbed, and Strifbjorn eaten alive, reaching out his hand as he fell, as she turned and ran. She saw a city ripped by lightnings, and a great battle raging in the sky
overhead. She saw poisoned earth and sorrow, and the rotten wounds in a great Wyrm’s side, and she recoiled.
It is not
all
my doing, this evil!

N
ONE OF IT WAS YOUR DOING
. I
T WAS MY EVIL TO BEAR
. I
ASK AGAIN
.

Dying, all dying—Eiledon, the world, falling into Shadow and red light: the pain of the world, the black knife cutting, the wound at its heart. The Snake, twenty-five hundred years dying. And so close to the end.

She could give him surcease. She could save Cathoair.

She looked at the pus dripping and turned away, cheek pressed to her shoulder. The hardest thing. Not to die, but to live.
Live!
, with Kasimir’s heart, through iron and fire. What she had said to Cathoair was true. It were cowardice to lie down. “And you, Snake? Are you that thing?”

I
AM OLD
.

“So is the wolf.” Thunder rumbled over the water, the first fringes of cloud fingering the moon. Somewhere far out, Muire could hear the hiss of dead rain. “And if I could heal you? If
we
could heal you? Would you tolerate the pain of healing? Or are you a thing that can only be reforged?”

Y
OU CANNOT
.

“Are you even willing to let us try?”

A life for a life. Not a death for a life. No, no easy bargains here.
Coward,
Muire told herself, as the first drops hissed into the water and against her stallion’s hide. To ask of another what one would not oneself do—

The water falling from the dark sky was freezing cold, and not a start-of-summer rain at all. And well . . . they were all cowards under this rain, then. Except Kasimir.

“You said he was on the verge of being an angel. Einherjar. So make him one. His life for his life. Isn’t
that
a fair bargain?”

He stared at her. And then if snakes can smile, he smiled, and if snakes can wink, he lidded his eyes. It is done, he said, and vanished into the water.

T
HOU LOVEST THE WORLD FOR THOU ART THE WORLD
. T
HOU ART BLASTED AND BLACK, THERE ARE CORPSES AND BONES UNDER THY SKIN, BUT THOU ART LONGING TO BE HEALED
. T
HOU ART FEARFULLY ALIVE, SMALL SISTER, AND FEARFULLY WEAPONED, AND FEARFULLY WOUNDED—AND THE SOUL IN THEE IS AS CRIPPLED AS THE EARTH UNDER THY FEET
. B
UT THOU HAST TAKEN THIS LAND AS THY WARD
. N
OW UNDERTAKE TO SET HER ARIGHT
. L
OOK TO THE EDGE OF THE SEA
.

Something glinted there when the lightning flashed, and then it shone between flashes—brighter and more, as the rain washed the sand away. Now Muire laid down Cathoair’s hand. Now she stood up from the wet sand and crossed the beach, and now she crouched and brushed the clinging sand aside.

She knew this blade, even more so than she knew Svanvitr. She knew its plain round pommel and its straight, broad blade, so much heavier than Nathr that it seemed ridiculous that the same word meant both weapons. Sand clung to her palm, and she rubbed her fingers against her palm to dust it away. And then she reached down and lifted it free of the strand.

It glowed softly in response to her touch, and the rain that washed lingering sand from its blade dripped from the point like burning candlewax, glowing with its own contagion of light. Kasimir breathed easily now, picking his way toward Cathoair with all the delicacy of a giant, pensive cat, while the rain steamed off his sides.

He breathes.

His eyes opened as Muire came up to him, the hazel washed away in a ghost of silver light. He sat up, drawing up his knees, arms wrapped tight around them. Silently, Muire extended the sword, pommel-first. “It’s name is Alvitr,” she said. “Does that mean anything to you?”

He raised his gaze to hers, and his face was terrible, impassive, stern behind the scar. The face of a warrior. The face of an einherjar. He unwound one hand from his knees and laid it on the hilt.

“Who gave you the right to choose for me?” he asked.

She looked at his face, and made hers the same. “Who gave you the right to leave me behind?”

O
pen air. Open rain. The slip and twist of sand under bare feet, scouring uncallused arches. The wind on his neck.

The lightning. The hiss of the waves.

Cathoair left the massive sword Muire had thrust upon him shoved point-first into the sand beside her stallion. It shed an eerie blue light, shimmering through the glass beads of the rain. His head was full of poetry, music, light, the sound of an entirely different sea.

Muire walked beside him and would not return his sidelong glances. The fey light made her look inscrutable. Inconsolable. And Cathoair found himself thinking that there should be a word for the way the hair sticks in curls to the neck of somebody you ought to have learned to love but didn’t, when you are walking with them at night, down a beach in the rain.

But because that word didn’t exist, what he said instead was “I’ve never seen the ocean before.”

She seemed to study the sand. It was perfectly trackless before them; there was nothing alive here to leave a trail until they had wandered over it. Behind, two sets of footsteps stretched back toward the light, hers shod and his naked.

“This isn’t really an ocean,” she answered. “Oceans aren’t dead.”

“It’s the only ocean I’ll ever see.” He turned into the rain. It slapped his face, smarting, leaving a faint smell of camphor behind. “What would happen if I walked into it?

Then, she looked at him, her face made all crooked and peculiar by the inconsistent light. Or perhaps that was just her expression.

“Nothing much, now, most likely. You’re immortal now. Unless something kills you—”

“And what can kill me?”

“A sword through the heart,” she said. “A bullet through the brain. Are you going to try it?”

He rubbed his neck, the back of his skull through the hair. It seemed like it should hurt. He remembered the convulsions, and how Muire had held him up. He’d known that strychnine was a painful death. But no one had ever told him that it left the victim in perfect wakefulness throughout.

He wondered if he would have chosen something different if he’d known, and remembered a woman in his mother’s neighborhood who had killed herself by climbing atop the fire in her grate. If you wanted oblivion badly enough—

“No,” he said. “I think the moment’s passed.”

She rolled her shoulders to ease her back. He heard the crackle of vertebrae. “Cathoair, why didn’t you tell me about your father?”

“I’m going to smack that son of a bitch.” And having said it, he bit his lip at the unthinking violence of the words, wishing he could repudiate them. Wishing they were not windowglass into the buried truth of who he was.

A killer. A brute. No different from his father.

She shook her head, and the wet hair blew into her eyes. She growled at it and scraped it back with stiff fingers. He wondered if maybe he did love her a little after all. “He assumed I knew.”

“There are things people don’t talk about. Because nobody wants to hear them, and nobody wants to be the broken thing that gets left behind after they happen, all right?”

He wouldn’t have pushed against himself, in this mood. But then, he was newer at the angel game than she was. She said, “Do you . . . would it help? To talk?”

“Done some. Probably done some forgetting. If you want to know, I’ll tell you. It won’t help me, and you won’t like it.”

The quiet hung there in between them for a little, being the noisiest silence he’d ever heard. She coughed. “I thought . . .”

“You thought?”

“I misjudged you,” she said, in tones of apology. “I thought you were . . . fast. Reckless. A footloose greedy narcissistic kid.”

“I know,” he said. “I like it when people don’t get me. It’s like being three steps to the right of where they think I am. They’ll never hit me in a million years.”

She grunted—did angels grunt?—and they walked in silence for another kilometer until she bent down suddenly and fumbled up a flat stone. “Alvitr. The sword. You know you’re keeping her.”

“They’re for killing people.”

“Aethelred told me something about that, too. Anyway, that one is for more than just killing people.”

His hair dripped cold water down his neck. He half raised his hand, and then shrugged. He couldn’t get any wetter.

“Alvitr,” she said. “It means ‘all-white.’ You’ll take her.”

“Why so pushy about it?”