All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (6 page)

He didn’t know her. And she looked like a girl playing dress-up in her brother’s battle suit. But she licked her lips and startled when he looked her in the eye, and Aethelred was right; she looked a hell of a lot safer than the Man in Gray.

“Put five kroner on Astrid for me, would you, Aeth?” he asked the bartender, and—cupping his refilled bowl in his hand—started through the crowd toward the gray-eyed girl.

S
he knew him
. A shock of recognition like the taste of ice water, and then the tall, elegantly boned young man at the bar turned around and fixed Muire with a contemplative gaze. She’d come down the stairs into this teeming underground as much for the wry neon sign by the stair naming it the “Ash & Thorn” in two runic symbols as for the trace of Grey Wolf. And now, here was this man, who shocked her to recollection like the smell of summer flowers.

He sidestepped through the crowd to reach her (trumans and nearmans here, only—no moreaux, and the cybered landlord behind the bar was the only halfman. Muire could hear his chassis creaking under his skin even through the thump of the music and the excited shouts of the crowd), and her breath felt as if it would rasp a hole in her throat.

Because she didn’t. Didn’t know him, had never seen him before, with his musculature like a classical statue and his oiled brown-black ringlets bound back in a ponytail not so much darker than the polished warm tone of his skin. The broad handsome features, the sensual lips, the smooth-bridged Islander nose and the pink, proud-fleshed dueling scar disfiguring his right cheek
and pulling that corner of his mouth up in a mocking involuntary smirk were foreign to her, as foreign as the black slate tiles of this club and the thumping music swinging bodies across the pillared dance floor.

But the
recognition
didn’t care. It was strong enough that it almost shook free her tenuous grasp on her spell, and for a moment she forgot to track her quarry’s presence as she watched the young man come toward her.

The last time I saw him,
she thought,
his face was ruined, too
. And she wondered for a moment if it was his wyrd now, a punishment for the infamous beauty that had brought them all low, or if it was her punishment for cowardice, to meet him again and again, remembered in a mortal hide, and be powerless to save him.

He moved with an athlete’s grace, maybe limping a little, but the smile was all hustler, as was the way he ducked his head to speak into her ear. “Are you lonely tonight, pretty lady?”

Light,
Muire thought, and closed her eyes. He looked nothing like Strifbjorn. Nothing at all. His eyes weren’t even gray; they were a blue-flecked hazel, though still far too pale for the darkness of his skin.

But the voice resonated in the fallible vaults of memory, and she would have sworn it was the same.

But before she could answer, the presence she’d been following evaporated. She jerked her head around and stepped sharply away. “Damn me,” she murmured, and didn’t even bother to shake her head at the pretty, scar-faced gigolo as she turned and ran back up the stair without thinking too hard of what she was leaving behind, except in that it explained why the Wolf might have come here.

________

A
t the top of the stairs from the dark, crowded underground bar, Muire hesitated. She knew she wasn’t alone. He had seen her, maybe even known her, when the young man had crossed to her with such haste, drawing eyes. And he was waiting for her here, now, in the darkness of an unlit alley halfway down the block from the intersection of Oak Street and Pleasant.

The Well was full of them—little blind alleys and side streets, crooked ways that went nowhere, fire escapes and roads that skipped over crowded rooftops, almost close enough to the light-laced underbelly of the Tower to scrape dirt from it with your fingernails. Muire unbonded Nathr, drew the earth-dull sword into her hand, and turned south, where the Wolf awaited.

She wondered if the rain was still falling. It couldn’t
fall
here, of course, but rivulets gathered to streams, and pools collected in the low places of the city, where pumps labored ceaselessly to lift the water to the river. It had been a pleasant riverfront once, with walks and bridges and pubs built feet-wet in the very canal. Now, the scent of it hung ropy on the moist breeze riffling her hair, and she tugged the hood of her cloak up, picking her way between nighttime strollers and the neon-steeped puddles on the clumsily cobbled road.

A group of Mongrels hung about the entrance to a strip club, interchangeable in their green and black livery, keeping the peace merely by the dangerous weight of their presence. They wore their titanium ID bands on their right wrists, and the oldest couldn’t have been twenty. She nodded to Muire as Muire passed, her brows drawn together in a way that suggested she was hoping, maybe, for a little trouble.

“The Technomancer provides,” Muire murmured, and the
gang relaxed. Bored or not, they were there to keep the peace, and it wasn’t as if she needed a license to go armed. She turned down the alley, made two blind corners, and paused in the darkness to let her eyes adjust.

She did not pause long.

Something thumped wetly on the pavement ahead and rolled a half-turn, mewling weakly. Muire lifted her sword, calling Light. A single dim spark ascended the blade like a raindrop rolling in reverse. It cast little brightness, but enough: the figure was that of a young man in his teens, and Muire felt him dying. With the last of his strength, he turned his head to the guttering light, and Muire stepped back from the reflections in his eyes.

A child, a child,
Ingraham whispered in Muire’s heart.

Night was all around her, but a denser patch flowed forward, stepping over the dying boy to pause beyond the reach of her blade.
His
eyes were a gray so pale as to be silver, ringed about the iris with a darker band. They glimmered in shadow, cloaked in frantic starlight as an ember is cloaked in rippling heat.

“Name thyself,” he demanded.

Muire’s fingers tightened on the gridded hilt of her sword. “Muire, child of the Light.”

She had forfeited her right to the title, and here, with that sad spark trembling along Nathr’s edge, the ridiculousness of it ached all along her bones and in the space between her eyes. So frail to raise the Light up as a shield against
this,
before which it had already quailed.

He inclined his head as if to study the stones beneath her feet, the crass meat of her form. “The Light is dead, little sister.”

His name flew from her lips as if on the wings of a swan.
“Mingan.” A legendary darkness: the hungry void, given flesh and form in tarnished silver. She’d found his sword, but not his body, and so she had the honesty not to pretend surprise at encountering him again. Still, Nathr’s Light stuttered when Muire met his gaze.

Vengeance,
whispered the voice of a mortal man. Bitter on her tongue, Muire tasted her fear. The Grey Wolf’s nostrils flared; he could smell it.

“I am that.” He stepped one step closer on the unbloodied stones. He cast open his grey cloak, revealing a belt naked of weapons, black leather boots and trousers and a charcoal shirt. His hands were gloved. He had not replaced his crystal blade.

A twisted silver ring held his grizzled hair back, and he still wore a ring in his ear of clean white metal. Though she was not close enough to see the detail, she remembered the wolf’s heads that clasped the metal tongue locked through his ear, remembered the girl who had crafted them with such care and hope, and she hated him a little more.

It was almost a clean hate, for a moment, untainted by her own failures. She went to meet him. His eyes shone as hungry and dead as a shark’s. Tarnished silver—scratch it and it still gleams. Nathr felt light and useless in her hand.

“Little Immortal.” He smiled a cruel and beckoning smile. “Hast a long life before thee. Wouldst cast it away?”

Thee
her, indeed. The world had moved on without them. She would not play his game of memory. Brilliance flared, radiance spilling from her eyes, her open mouth, drawn as if dragged on wires.

“Candle-flicker. Come into the darkness, and be no more alone.” His smile grew tender. “Thou art an avenger, sister. Thy Light has abandoned thee. Avenge thyself.”

Her foot lifted and stepped waveringly forward. That craving for vengeance let her understand, for a moment too well, why this her brother might have fallen. The desire was in her. The heat of her sword scorched her hand. She came to him. . . .

She lunged.

And failed again.

Light blazed Nathr’s length, filling the alley with a stellar incandescence, so bright it washed everything to stark blue and to shadows, making knife-edged the crags of his face. The Grey Wolf sidestepped, weaponless, sweeping aside the swirl of her weighted cloak and catching her right hand with arrogant ease. He twisted, and her bright blade doused upon the stones as the bones in her wrist and hand cracked and slipped.

Muire choked on a cry. Her knees folded. She fumbled left-handed for the flechette pistol, but the Grey Wolf caught her arm and hauled her up again, drawing her into the shadow of the wall. A fragile halo of numbness wrapped her hand, which she knew would shred into agony the instant she tried to move. Ironically, the pressure of the Grey Wolf’s hand was a comfort, stabilizing broken bone.

“Not bad.” His voice all seduction, he bent over her. His breath ran hot along her throat, against her ear as he whispered. She had expected his flesh to be cold, cold as a shark’s, cold as the grave. But it was wolves’ breath: hungry, murderous. A bitter scent clung about him. His body within the clothing was hard as sculpture; his heart beat passionlessly while hers hammered in her chest. His fingers left her shattered wrist and tangled her hair, pinioning her head to bend it back. “Fear not. Thou wilt find pleasure in it.”

Desperation flared, overwhelming panic. She knew what he intended. She remembered the tarnished, their perverted kiss, and how their victims, even spared, would return to be taken again. She shook her head against the iron of his grip and found her voice somewhere. “No.”

He paused. She stared up into his eyes, unwilling to close her own, as if she could force him to see her. As if she could somehow push back through the years and the savagery and the betrayals and
make him see
—

“Strifbjorn,” she said, though the name came up as if on fishhooks. “That’s why you came, isn’t it? You see it. You
see
it. As you loved him, Mingan, listen to me now. . . .”

“And what wouldst thou know of love, candle-flicker?” His hesitation bent to mockery. “This is as close to an act of love as thou wilt ever taste.”

He settled his open mouth on hers.

I do not wish it!
She braced herself against the pleasure that must follow, the aching gorgeousness of the tarnished kiss.

But—
As thou wish’t,
he whispered in her head, and he let her keep the pain. Past the rush and the roaring of the Light, past the terrible intimacy of that murderous kiss as he swallowed her breath and drank deep . . . there was the pain. He honored her request and did not hold away the pain, and she clung to it, and remained herself to the end.

Surely the soul of an immortal must fill his hunger. Surely it must.
Take my life and make it the last life that you take
.

With that in her heart, she gave herself up to him willingly. A fierce joy grew in her breast; this was why she had been spared so long ago, spared for this sacrifice, this expiation. This redemption.

His hunger made a grave for ten thousand souls. In her arrogance, she fancied hers could fill it. And maybe she could come back, too, and be reborn, as innocent as Strifbjorn.

And then the darkness drew her down, into silence, into warmth, into forgiveness. . . .

No.

S
he came awake on the stones, aching and numb with immobility and chill. Knees, booted feet, a cloaked figure crouched beside her. Starlight shone from his eyes, the light of hungry, distant suns.

“Live, then,” he said, and brushed her cheek with the back of a glove, “and be in the future less innocent.”

“You have no problem preying on innocents,” she answered, jerking her chin at the corpse of the Mongrel boy. In her ear, Fasoltsen whimpered.

Mingan sighed, stood, turned away, straight-backed under the heavy gray cloak. He still wore his hair in the einherjar style, a shot-silver queue hanging long between his shoulders.

He turned back and smiled. “When has the Light ever been gentle to innocence?”

She realized, for she had forgotten, that he was beautiful. Not lovely to look at; he was not that, with his craggy features and his ridged nose. But full of awful grace and wilderness.

She could not answer. She pushed herself up left-handed, moving with exaggerated caution around the waking agony of her right wrist and hand. The numbness had faded, replaced with a pain that made her want to vomit, or curl around her arm and hide in deepest shadow until the hurting softened.

He came back to her, crouched again and lifted her to her
feet with ease, and brushed her hair back although she flinched away. “Mine ancient enemy,” he said, as if it were a benediction.

She winced and looked down, and though her geas hammered at her like the wings of a caged bird at the bars, she did not move to strike at him.
Coward, caitiff, craven.

I am sorry, Ingraham
.

“I will hunt you,” she said softly. She made herself lift her chin and meet his gaze though she wobbled with weakness and pain. “I will hunt you. For Herfjotur. For Strifbjorn.”

“I will await thee,” he answered, and slipped into the dark as if he had never been.