All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (37 page)

“Because I promised the Snake we’d try to heal the planet,” she said. “And that’s why he made you live.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“The four of us—” and he knew she meant Selene and Cristokos “—and Kasimir are going to steal all of the swords from the Technomancer, and use them to free all her unmans and turn them back into einherjar and waelcyrge, too.”

“That’s ballsy—wait.
Back
into angels?”

“Where did you think their souls came from?” she asked, arch but smiling. “And when we have four hundred angels, we’re going to go looking for the rest of the swords. And see who else we can find. I think everybody’s come back, Cathoair. I think all of us are back, and this is our time, and we can put things right. Heal it. Start the process at least, so it can mend itself.” Her chin came up; her face brightened with passion.

“You really mean to save the world,” he said.

“I really do.”

He bounced a half step and kicked air, shadowboxing, his fingers curled loosely, his jaw locked against nausea. But he could do it. If he had to. If he envisioned every blow as murderous, and went in swinging with his eyes afire. He looked at Muire and said, “I don’t think I can hit someone again unless I mean to kill them. You need to know that.”

“Take the sword, einherjar.”

Light, what a word. Archaic, stupid word. He wished she’d just say angel. She did sometimes, spoke sloppily. It wouldn’t kill her.

But she was still looking at him, not blinking, the light from her eyes staining their sockets.

Cathoair drew a breath. “I’ll need to figure out some kind of a sheath.”

“Thank you.” She still hefted that stone. He watched, curious, as she turned it in her hand twice before curving a forefinger around the edge.

“What are you doing?”

“Watch.” She stooped and whirled, arm extended, and launched the rock out over the ocean. It left her hand glowing brightly, wheeling through the rain sheeting light, and spun across the water. Cathoair held his breath, waiting for the double plunk—stone into water and then displaced water into itself again—but there was no sound loud enough to carry over the rain. Instead, the stone just touched the water, brushed it, and lifted up again. And again, and then another time, until it had left a diminishing chain of circles on the surface, illuminated from below by its own sinking light until that light went out.

He watched, entranced for moments after, and only when thunder broke the spell did he turn and say, “Show me how?”

“It’s not magic,” she said. “Except the light part. And it’s not hard. Of course I’ll show you.”

And she did.

She was right; it wasn’t hard at all once you mastered the wrist motion. He got five skips on his sixth try, and after that Muire stood back and watched him try to repeat it for half an hour. The rain stopped during his practice. The squall blew past, and the moonlight glazed the beach.

“It’s all about picking the right stone,” Muire said, and after that he did better. It wasn’t as good as hitting the heavy bag, but it took concentration and focus and precision and tightly controlled violent motion, and since the thought of clenching a fist made his gorge rise it would have to do for now. The split across the ball of his foot had healed along with everything else. He hated it for not bleeding.

The sky was going grey, the pale light of the blade washing out in the pale light of dawn. “Are you ready to go back yet?” Muire asked.

“I just want to watch the sunrise,” he said, amazed that it was suddenly so important. He crouched down and found a disc-shaped rock, gray and grainless, with a white band of cloudy crystal across the middle. The gray part was almost silky, but the band had a different texture, and for a moment he weighed it in his hand, contemplating sending it after the others. But his hand found its way into his pocket, and when it emerged it had left the stone behind. “Then we can go home.”

C
athoair lives.

That was all. Just the stallion’s voice-that-wasn’t, murmuring in Selene’s ear, before the return of silence. She wondered why he chose to speak to her, but relayed the information dutifully. Cristokos made a small chittering noise; he knew Selene cared. Aethelred closed his eyes, laid his rag on the bar, and let his head fall back on the stumpy pillar of his neck, as if exposing his throat to god.

What the stallion said did not prepare Selene to see Cathoair walk in unsupported, however, filthy and damp and lithe and straight-spined and as if he had never known a day’s pain in the world. Nor had she expected the bastard sword at his hip, or the awkward way he kept a hand on it, startling every time it rattled against something—the doorframe, a bar stool.

“Cathoair—”

He looked at Selene as if he was looking back from the top of a thousand-mile climb. “Apparently, we’re angels,” he said,
and walked past her, and past Aethelred, and into the stairwell where he had nearly died.

She heard him rising.

Muire had stood in the doorway, watching, a frown on her face. She entered the room as Cathoair left, stopping next to Selene just in time to watch the door click shut. “I try not to be jealous,” she said, apologetically, her tones low enough that Aethelred could pretend he hadn’t heard.

Selene sneezed. “It’s not your most engaging trait.”

“No,” Muire said. “It never has been.”

“I can’t use him for what you want him for, you know.”

Muire just looked at her. “Selene—” She swallowed. “If you talk to Thjierry like that, she’ll never believe you’re the same creature.”

“I’m not,” Selene said, her tail lashing. “I can’t. I can’t be her again.”

“You want to?”

“It was easy.”

“Yes,” Muire said, and Selene did not think she was talking about Selene. “It was.” She looked down and scraped her boot across the floor. Sand fell from her trouser cuffs and scattered the stone. “I’m going to ask you to confront her. And to intervene to win freedom for the other moreaux.”

“Freedom,” Selene said. “What’s that?”

Muire shrugged. “Mostly unpleasant, from what I’m learning. Was that a yes?”

“It’s a yes,” answered Selene. “But only because your stallion convinced me of something.”

“What’s that?” Muire looked up then, tilted her chin and looked Selene in the eyes over the bridge of her china-doll nose. Who would have expected a warrior angel to look like a child’s
plaything, with freckles on milk-white skin, and grey-glass eyes?

“That choosing what you serve is different than being owned.”

“Hey,” Muire said. “Enjoy choosing. Let me know what that’s like, would you? I need to go pick up another sword. And my fiddle—”

Selene shook out her ruff, pricked her ears. “It’s safer for me to be on the street than you. I’ll go. Tell me where.”

S
afer for Selene to be on the street, and probably also not safe for Muire to be on the rooftop. But she climbed anyway, up the rickety outside stair, noting that it needed—in places—to be repaired. And she sat down on the tar paper, laid the sword that was not Nathr down beside her, and folded up her legs. “I owe you an apology, Bright one.”

You owe me nothing.
She imagined him swishing his tail, slapping at imaginary flies. Not that a real fly could pierce his hide.
What do you owe yourself?

You’ve caught me out. I was unjust. I left you alone.

Do you desire forgiveness?

Just your attention.
If he were standing over her, both giant heads would have swiveled just then so he could watch her sidelong, as horses will, with the full attention of a single wise eye in each.
I have tried to be sorry you chose me. I can’t.

An alarm bell rang somewhere in the distance. In her mind’s eye, his ears worked, twisting forward and back. Muire breathed deeply, as if she meant to put what she had to say into real spoken words.
I think you saved me. I think
—and no mercy, there, because the voice of the mind could not catch in your
throat and spare you—
I think if I had left you in the snow I would have been tarnished. And I may be diminished. But I do not think I am damned.

He said nothing, but she felt the motion as one giant head dipped before he shook it up again, tossing his forelock back.
We are what we are,
he said,
and that which we are shall be sufficient.

“I wish I had your faith.” She covered her mouth with her hand.
What have I done to Cathoair?

Saved him.

He did not want to be saved.

Then he can make that decision for himself, again. He does not want for courage.

She pressed her face into her hands. “No, just sense.” The words were a mumble against her fingers, but Kasimir would hear them.

Kasimir?

He listened. She could sense his listening.

Tell the wolf I want him to come talk to me.

I can ask,
the warhorse answered,
but I cannot say if he will answer.

M
uire was still sitting in the shadows on the roof of the Ash & Thorn when he came up behind her. She didn’t turn. She could smell him, musk and bitterness and beneath it all, the clean scent of the ocean that Cathoair would never see.

“Speak.”

His voice was soft, and very close. And Muire thought she heard a trace of her own tones on it. She felt him in her belly. “Did you ever love him?”

“Even as I love you,” he answered.
You
.

Muire the Historian spoke the first lie of her life. “You want me, you mean.”

Her fingers worried at the knotted brass pommel and wire-wrapped hilt of the sword laid across her lap. Silence. The heat of his breath warmed her throat, the back of her ear.

“I gave him up,” she said. “I might even have won him, but as soon as I saw he might want somebody else, I walked away. I was too afraid of what he would choose, and so I made the choice for him.”

“Walking away,” he said. “We have that in common.”

Still she did not turn, though she could feel him over her shoulder.

“This war will be the death of thee,” he said. “Thee, and thy steed as well.”

“So what? I should come away with you?” Now, she had to see him. She craned over her shoulder at his tired profile, leaning away. And he turned and looked her in full in the face, and touched her cheek with gloved fingertips.

“Leave me no more alone. Let the world end; the world is ending. If you crave living over letting go, we can go elsewhere, as others have.”

And Muire smiled, and oh, the sudden light in his eyes. He was perfect: predator, avenger, hunter in the twilight. He crouched beside her, the Angel of Death—dark as a lodestone, and shining as a knife—and begged her not to die.

“Is that a knowing you have on you?”

“No,” the wolf said. “There is no seeing and no seithr. The days of prophecy and heroes are ended. But I know it as I know the taste of blood; ascend, tonight, and thou wilt not come down again the same as thou art now.”

“I owe her vengeance.”

“Damn vengeance,” he said.

“I am waelcyrge,” she answered, holding his gaze. She rolled to the side, put a knee down, and stood with the sword hanging cloth-bundled in her hand, only the hilts peeking free. She closed her hand over them, but he didn’t step back, only rose to face her. “I am
for
vengeance.”

“Then you owe me vengeance before her.” He spread his arms, the cloak rippling, baring his breast. “Did you call me here to take it? To pay back her servant’s life and be free of his whispering, always the whispering?
Vengeance, vengeance, vengeance.
”

It was an eerily accurate mockery of Ingraham Fasoltsen’s litany. But then, of course, Mingan had swallowed his soul.

And Muire shook her head. “I have chosen my vengeance for Ingraham Fasoltsen. He will have to content himself with the death of his employer. Probably,” a small smile, “in the fullness of time, because I have no plans to kill her.”

Mingan raised an eyebrow. Muire raised her right hand—the left one on the sword—and touched his cheek. “The children of the Light did not decide. We acted. We were the Snake’s hands and teeth. Decisions . . . decisions are a divine prerogative, or a human one. Angels are not
deciders.
”

He gazed at her, his face as still as water.

“When we chose something other than our destiny—when we chose something other than dying in the snow, under the weight of the tarnished—we both debased and elevated ourselves—”

“
Now
you believe in free will?” Rich, cold, his voice rang with irony.

“There comes a time when you have to decide for yourself,
and damn the voice of authority. And tonight, if I ascend not, there is no one but me to answer for the truth: that our world will pass from beneath us and be gone.”

“Let it happen. Let it die.”

“I know why you hunted her,” Muire said. “The Technomancer. I know what the outrage was—”

“And you watched, two hundred years, and did nothing.”

“I did not know.”

“You did not care to know.”

Muire closed her eyes and nodded.

His voice grew soft and distant, as if he spoke more to himself than to Muire. “But do not attribute to me a morality beyond what I contain. I am old, and the world has worn thin on me. I welcomed the Desolation. I
craved
it.”

“Where were you,” she asked him, “when the Desolation fell?”

He paused. “Freimarc.”

Muire laughed. Deep and sure, ringing, while Mingan frowned at her like a cat whose sense of social niceties has been offended. She shook her head. “And your presence preserved it, as surely as my presence preserved Eiledon. And Kasimir’s kept his valley. Because we were there, and what we were, and full of the life the world was losing. Ironic, isn’t it?”

He stared at her. And then he closed his gleaming eyes, tilted his head back, and laughed in agony, fell and sorrowful.

She reached to touch him, let her hand fall as he raised gloved, iron-hard hands and scrubbed tears away. When he stopped, swallowing, his plait bouncing on his shoulder as he ducked his head, he would not meet her eyes. “So,” he said. “I will live in your new world, candle-flicker, and I will continue alone.”