All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (41 page)

She was not as surprised as she would have liked to go unanswered. She looked at Kasimir, who stepped across the tideline toward her. His ears came up, and he said,
I have nothing more
, as if asking forgiveness.

“Thjierry fed the Serpent to the wolf,” Muire said. “She had all that energy twisted up in herself and her Tower and her orrery, and she used it to beat me, and she tried to use it to keep Mingan from swallowing her soul.”

Yes. I think so.

“We lost.”

We die in peace,
he said.
That’s something.

Muire slapped his shoulder with the flat of her left hand. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s fetch Selene and Cathoair, and go and die at home.”

W
hen Kasimir returned them to the city, Selene and Cathoair were not—exactly—as she had last seen them. But they didn’t
speak of it that night, and not until a day or so after, when they had retrieved Cristokos’s body and given it to the river, and attended Thjierry’s state funeral—after which Selene went to each of the unmans in attendance in turn and kissed them on the mouth.

Muire could not help but catalogue their reactions when they pulled away and licked their lips, staring at her. Some shaken, some avid, some wincing. As many responses as there were unmans, and there were a great many unmans indeed.

Selene came and stood beside her, after. “I wish I could say thank you.”

Muire closed her eyes, because they stung less when she did. “I understand. Your response to what I did was not . . . uncomplicated.”

“The Grey Wolf was looking for death,” Selene said, when she’d been still long enough that Muire thought she might be dozing in the afternoon sunlight. “So were you, and so was I. A pack of would-be suicides.”

“I found something else,” Muire answered unhappily.

Selene rumbled, leaning her shoulder against Muire’s shoulder. It was a moment before Muire realized she was purring in pain. “It’s broken,” she said, and Muire did not ask what
it
she meant.

As for Muire, she didn’t weep until she got home and turned on her vii, and no-one wished her a happy birthday.

B
efore midsummer, what babies were born, were born dead. Aethelred, Cathoair, and Selene came and went, went and came, never staying long. They were busy with a city in need of hospice care, and with the fall of the Technomancer, whatever
peace was kept in Eiledon was kept by Cathoair or the moreaux.

Muire was no help, and Kasimir did not leave his valley. She could not bring herself to trouble him, though she ached in his absence. How easy it was, to grow accustomed to having a friend. But he had his vigil, and she had hers.

And so she watched the world ending.

She was, she knew, poor company, brief and cold. She could have gone out and doctored the sick, but she only managed the work briefly, when Sig was felled by that winter’s influenza. He lived, though Muire knew it was only a stopgap. Aethelred came and lectured once or twice. She didn’t yell back. She was too tired, through the autumn and into the cold, and something was stirring in her belly, making her hips ache and filling her with sleep.

It will never quicken,
she thought, and indeed, if it lived in her womb it grew more slowly than any mortal babe.

And then it kicked, and Muire feared for it.

I
n the deep of winter she stood at her window and watched the river flow its icy channel. She laid a hand against her belly and said,
Kasimir.

I hear you.

Are you well, beloved?

I am in my valley. I miss Cristokos.

I miss him, too,
she said. She pressed her hands against her mouth. It was becoming a nervous habit. She frowned and forced them down.
Kasimir, I want to come home with you to die. I want to leave this place. Will you come and fetch me?

In a little
, he said.
Give me a few more days alone.

________

T
he last time Cathoair came to Muire, he came alone, very early. She was wrapped in her robe, sitting at the table and drinking the tea Sig had brought, or at least rolling the bowl between her palms. He came barefoot in the snow—he was always barefoot, now that the cold no longer troubled him—and barechested, wearing nothing but a pair of loose white trousers covered in patch-pockets and a swordbelt with a sword. Muire rose to let him in when he knocked. The river was at his back. She smiled at him across the snow.

“You look good,” she said, although his eyes were dark. She tugged her robe tighter over her collarbones, wondering if it would hide what little belly she showed.

“You look awful,” he replied. “I came to talk.”

“I’d like to listen,” she answered. “Come inside.”

She led him into the foundry, which was quiet and dark, the drapes closed. He hauled them open and looked around. “Dusty.”

“I haven’t been using it much.” She waved at the pot, the steaming bowl. “Tea?”

“No, thank you.” He crossed the dark slate floor, spattered with droplets of metal bright as stars, and caught her under the chin with long, scarred fingers. “You loved him.”

“Yes?” She hadn’t meant it to sound like a question, but it insisted on becoming one in her mouth.

“Who I used to be.” He looked to the left, mouth working. “Useless language.”

“I helped invent it,” she said. “Thanks a lot.” And when he smiled, abashed, she found the strength to say, “I loved him. I loved you. After a fashion.”

His eyes gleamed softly, with a blue-white Light she recognized. “I wouldn’t have hurt you for the world.”

“Oh, Cahey.” She brushed his hand aside. “It’s the world that hurts us, you idiot.”

He snorted. “But we hurt each other too. I didn’t want this. I didn’t
ask
for this.”

“What?”

“Immortality,” he said. “Futility. Dying for a cause.”

“It’s not the cause that’s killing you.” She touched his scarred cheek with her fingertips. “If I were strong, I would have done it alone. I could have spared you and Selene.”

“We’ll be the last—”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m a coward and weak, and I couldn’t—” She turned, but he came around her. Escape was not so easy. “I couldn’t—”

“You couldn’t be the last one twice.”

“No,” she said. “I am not strong.”

“Oh Muire.” He looked away, and she flinched from it. But then he looked back and said, “You are the strongest thing in the world. It’s just that there is some stuff nothing can withstand. Not flesh and blood. Not angels. Not the whole damned mortal universe. That’s all.”

“Oh,” she said.

And they were silent for a while, until he touched her arm. “My love is not water in a bucket, you know. It’s not as if someone else can drink it all up and leave none left for you.”

Oh, little boy, when did you get so wise?
She didn’t have an answer. She was selfish, and she always had been, and all she could have said was,
I can’t stand not being first in your heart a second time
. And that was wrong: he was not Strifbjorn, and it was not fair to try to make him be.

Not fair, not fair. But then, she had never seen fair in a thousand years. Why should the world alter, now that it was over? She changed the subject, to sting him free. “Your mother?”

He stepped back and half turned. “Gone.”

“How?”

“Easily,” he said. He closed his eyes. Bowing his head, he pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “In the end. Gone upon a kiss.”

“I would have . . .”

He opened his eyes and cocked his head, and gave her one last smile full of bitterness and glory. He spiraled back to her like a sooty-winged moth orbiting a candle, so she pressed one hand flat against his chest to stop him coming too close. If he embraced her, he’d know; he’d feel the doomed life moving inside her. Better, far better he went away in ignorance.
What the eye witnesseth not, the heart never grieves.

His heart beat evenly against her palm. “Muire. Are you sure you want to die alone?”

“I’m sure,” she lied, for the third time.
Kasimir, come and get me.
“There’s nothing I want from you. Cathoair—”

“Don’t say it.”

“I just wanted to say—” She had her dignity. “—I’m sorry.”

His eyes tight, he jerked away. His hair stuck out like a horse’s docked tail. It was getting longer.

“Fuck me,” he said. “This is the happy ending.” And kissed her forehead across the distance between them before he went away.

________

M
ingan was waiting, wearing his crystal sword, when she came up the snowy iron stair to the roof, where she had heard him moving. His eyes glittered like faceted stones, and not merely with reflected light. He said, “I noticed your lovely child leaving. From the riverbank.”

She did not ask what he had been doing, standing under her window in the dawn.

He ducked his head. His nostrils flared, and he touched her stomach. “Muire—”

“It will never be born alive,” she said. “There’s no life left in the world to feed it.”

“His.”

“Mine,” she answered, and pushed his fingers away.

“I came to ask your hand one final time.”

She touched his arm through the cloak and shirt. He did not seem to notice. “Three times pleaded, and three times refused. Like Jenet in the history of Black Jenet—”

“She accepted the fourth offer,” he answered.

“That was a ballad, wolf.”

“And this is the world. I need you. I’m changing.”

She moved her hand and touched his chest. His heart beat slowly, unalterably, too close to bear. “Let me see your eyes.”

He turned to her, and his eyes were blind with Light. His hand came up to brush his collar, under the open neck of his shirt. She could see the welt it had worn, cutting into soft flesh. His brow wrinkled vertically and he cocked his head to the side. And Muire almost laughed: he really
did
look like a wolf when he did that. A worried wolf.

“Let us go,” he said. “Leave this world. Let us find another. Your child might be born alive—”

She smelled him, felt the heat of his hand as he laid it on
her arm. A fat, wonderful moon hung overhead, low in the sky near the Tower, clear in the night and undimmed by the faded, still-fading, Defile. Near it, Muire made out the reflected light from two antique satellites, barely visible as disks.

“Refuse a duty? Oh, wolf. Surely you know better. You know what is in you, Mingan. You know what you swallowed.”

“I am the Sun-eater,” he said. “But that was in another lifetime, and the world that was is dead.”

She shook her head. “I mean the Serpent, not the sun.”

Silence. But by the wolf-sherd within her, she guessed what he was thinking. “Thjierry stuffed a god down your throat.”

No laugh, but his eyebrows twitched with the flicker of his eyes. “It’s not the first time. Nor even the third.”

She
did
laugh, and that was fine. She needed it. “You know what you must do.”

“I don’t want it,” he said. “I can’t bear my own burdens. How can I carry anyone else’s?”

Mountains,
she thought.
You can’t get anyone else up them. It doesn’t stop us trying, though.

She smiled. She knew now what was expected, what the end would be. “Neither do I. But I’ll take it from you.”

“You—?”

“Kiss me.”

He stared. “Muire—”

Her heart was a razored fragment in her chest. She didn’t want it either.
But then, what has wanting to do with anything?
“Shut up. You said you didn’t want it. You’re fighting it with everything that you’ve in you. So pass the burden to me. I’m asking for it.”

“It’s not complete.”

“I know how to mend it.” And she did, too—and he had
showed it to her, all unwitting. The eighteenth rune, carved in the root of the world-tree. The thing that brought them back, again and again. The thing that should have brought back the All-Father too, had his death not been so determinedly final.

“Your child—”

“It’s her chance to be born at all, you old bastard. Give
in
.”

He stared at her, but she was adamant. She took his plait in her hand and tugged it, demanding. And so he bent down, softly, and softly kissed her on the mouth. She breathed in, and he breathed out, and her senses filled with the scent of cut grass, the scent of ylang-ylang, the sound of wings and of the ocean.

The pain began, and with it came the glory. Something rang from her—a ripple through water, a peal through still air. Where it passed, the light flickered for an instant brighter.

When he drew back, his mouth was trembling. “I knew the world wouldn’t end yet,” the wolf said. “I just hoped I was wrong.”

“How did you think you knew?”

“Heythe promised me she’d come back.” His smile showed teeth, and Muire almost choked on it.

“You put a great deal of store in the word of a traitor.”

“A goddess,” he said. “The
threat
of a goddess.”

“Oh,” she said. And nodded. “Yes. Are you wearing a knife, Mingan?”

“I have,” he said drily, “the one the Technomancer stuck into my neck.”

“Give it here.”

He did. And she bared her arms, and into each one, carved a rune. The eighteenth rune, the secret one, that she now knew.

When she was done, she gave him back his knife. “Mingan? Come and walk by the river? I think it might be my last time.”

They walked in the moonlight, on the snowy stones, beneath the stars and the shining lights high in Eiledon’s towers. Muire threw a shiny coin—a copper coin, a very old one—halfway across the Naglfar, and thought of too many names to name them all in one blessing.

Mingan, watching, laughed bitterly.

“Mingan.”

He looked up as if his name were a caress, and then as if what he looked upon were a source of wonder. “It hurts you.”

She remembered the ancient, eyeless, wounded Wyrm and bile rose in her throat. But she remembered also Kasimir’s valley, and Cristokos feeding her strawberries that each, individually, tasted of summer and of themselves. And it was too late to change her mind now anyway.