The Sea Thy Mistress (16 page)

She closed her eyes, turning her ears to listen more closely, but all he did was breathe. There was a right answer here, and a wrong one, and she knew she had to find the one that would make things better, at least a little.

“You’re right,” she said. “We were lucky. And I am sorry for your loss.”

When she blinked open again, he was looking directly at the side of her face, examining her profile.

She turned around and met his eyes. Feeling as if she dared greatly, she reached out and ran her fingers through his plush short cap of curls, careful not to brush the skin with razory claws.

“Your dad will be all right,” she said. “Someday he’ll grieve. It might not be a long time yet, but it’ll happen eventually.”

“Him,” Cathmar said. “What about me?”

“You’re already grieving,” Selene said. She let her whiskers stroke his cheek.

50 A.R.
Spring and Summer

Ice.

Silence.

The rising sun reflects off the glaciers and the time-riven mountainsides, stark and holy: a world writ with a palette knife.

Darkness and the dawn.

It’s better here.

Sun rises. Light touches the Imogen’s wing tips, forehead, chin: is absolved by starless blackness. Curve of her throat, curve of her breasts, line of her belly, hips, sex, thighs, toes … rolling down the mountain to the valley, rolling up the shadow.

Every day she watches this, her only motion the slow blink of her eyes, the incremental rotation of her head to follow the sun setting behind.

She sees a world. It looks like the whole world. Empty. Voiceless. Shining.

And she is. Nearly. Comfortable. Nearly free. Of the clamor. The needs and the desires. Shaping her, bending her, making her anew.

Distant, but from here she can almost hear it:

Silence.

The wind wants nothing of her. It curls through her wings, ruffles her fur and feathers. The snowpack creaks under her talons. She raises her arms to the wind.

There is a moment—a shadow of a moment—when she
is
something. Something other than the trickster’s daughter. Something other than the Imogen. Something discrete.

That existence, or the dream of it, brushes her mind, flutters past her heart in the darkness, tracing phosphorescence across the shadow.

I could stay here forever. I would like to stay here forever. I, I, I.

If not for the hunger that drives her forth.

50 A.R.
On the Fortieth Day of Spring

Sweat blurring his eyes, Cathmar sank into a fighting crouch and tried to feel his elusive center. Nathr rested in his slick right hand, left hand extended with fingers flexed, ready to grab. He turned slowly, boots scraping on pavement as he watched his opponent pace back and forth along a segment of arc, just a blade’s length away.

The Grey Wolf placed each narrow foot among the litter as a cat might, thoughtful but not hesitant, Svanvitr held in a low and deceptively casual guard across his abdomen. He stopped, suddenly, watching Cathmar from the edge of his eyes, and then ducked his head and
smiled
.

Cathmar, trying to keep the soot-stained brick wall on Mingan’s swordhand, nevertheless almost took a half step back under the weight of that wicked grin. The reflex unbalanced him, and Mingan moved in that half-moment, a smudge of cloak obscuring his outline as he slipped forward and then back without ever seeming to shift a foot. Cathmar recoiled, too late, a thin red line swelling blood down his cheek.

His left shoulder bounced off the bounding wall. “Damn, Uncle!”

Mingan stepped back, the smile falling from his face. “It’s all of a part,” he said. “Every gesture, every glance. Part of the dance. Show no pain, show no fear in combat. No doubt. The enemy’s concern is your most powerful weapon.”

Cathmar wiped blood from his face and healed the cut with a thought. “People who are scared make mistakes.”

Mingan nodded. “As do the ones who are overcertain of victory. Never forget it. Choose your ground always. Prefer an unready enemy over an entrenched one, and never fear to strike the first blow. If that option is not open, then stay your hand until the enemy falters. The strongest warriors are like smoke—they stifle; they baffle; they choke and confuse. Often the flames are not even needed.”

Tapping the tip of Nathr’s blade on the pavement of the narrow courtyard, Cathmar frowned. “That sounds more like strategy than sword fighting.”

“There is a difference?” Mingan moved as if he had never disengaged. Svanvitr lanced forward, would have pricked Cathmar over the heart, but Cathmar slid aside and brought Nathr up. Forte clashed on forte with a chime like flicked crystal, and Cathmar beat the blade aside, almost nicking the Grey Wolf’s arm on the return stroke.

“Better!” Mingan crowed, throwing his head back in delight. “You lay in wait. Most excellent.”

Cathmar grinned. “I can learn!”

“Indeed.” Mingan watched him for a moment, then renewed the assault. For long moments there was silence and the ring of blade on blade, until Cathmar risked a foolish lunge and Mingan laid his shoulder open and stopped with Svanvitr’s blade a centimeter from Cathmar’s throat.

“Damn!” Cathmar lowered his blade, wincing.

Mingan stepped back and saluted. “More care when you commit,” he said. “Enough for today?”

“Enough.” Cathmar shook his head in frustration. “I’ll never be as good as you are.”

“In three thousand years, you shall be better,” Mingan answered, wolf-grin widening on his lips. “You have your father’s reach and quickness, his strength of arm. It will serve you. Now heal yourself, and think what you will do when we meet again.”

Cathmar glanced up from wiping Nathr’s blade on the hem of his shirt, although it was not blooded. He bit back the urge to deny the comparison to his father, and said instead, “Mingan. Why are you so kind to me, when you and he hate each other so?”

The Wolf, attending to his own blade, did not at first answer. When he looked up, he looked away from Cathmar, so Cathmar wondered.

“I hate him not,” Mingan answered. “But there is history too complex to tell, and your father knows not the half of it.” Sheathing his sword, he fell silent.

Cathmar took a step toward the old warrior, startled pain bright in his chest. “Uncle. I didn’t mean to make you sad.” He raised his left hand as if to lay it on Mingan’s shoulder, hesitated before his fingers touched the cloth of his cloak. “I’m sorry.”

“There is no reason for sorrow,” Mingan said, unmoving. “One incurs debts in life, Cathmar—sometimes by choice, sometimes all unknowing. Your father. I owe him for something, for several things. That is all.”

“Oh.” The silence stretched thin and taut, and Cathmar couldn’t bear it. He laid his hovering hand on Mingan’s arm. “What sort of a debt?”

The Grey Wolf made a soft sound, a sound that might have been a snarl or might have been a whimper, and turned on his heel, meeting Cathmar’s eyes. Cathmar almost flinched before Mingan’s stony regard, but—mindful of lessons learned and the ache in his arm—held himself steady.

He had to strain to hear Mingan’s voice when the Grey Wolf finally spoke. The Grey Wolf’s tone was strange, his words archaic and the rhythms formal. “There is no debt I do not owe him. And no price I would begrudge, an it be needed. Ask no more, Cathmar. I would as lief not burden thee with the details of my sorrow. Suffice to say, whatever wrath he bears me, I have earned it, I ween.”

50 A.R.
On the Twentieth Day of Summer

Cathmar reached up, tracing Mardoll’s pale jaw. She curled in her sleep, burrowing against his shoulder. He brushed tawny-bright waves of hair away from her face, outlined the seashell curve of her ear with his fingertips.

She stretched, yawned, catlike smiled. “Hi.”

“Hey. I should be going soon. Dad’s still not overly keen on me staying out all night.”

“I’ll bring you home on my mare. So you can stay longer.”

“You have a horse?” He smiled. “Where do you keep her? I’ve never seen a horse.”

Long white arm across his bare chest, pulling him closer. Her bed smelled of rose petals and poisonberry. She said she was eighteen, living alone. “Her name is Elder. Maybe you should come stay here with me.”

He rolled toward her, buried his hands in the abundance of her hair. Out of its braid, it was coarse and heavy, not silken. “Do you mean that?” Brushing the hair aside, kissed her throat. “What do you need me for?”

“Silly boy,” she purred, arching her elegant body against him, “don’t you know when a woman’s in love with you?”

Her fingernails marked his back in bittersweet counterpoint. She drew him closer.

A little time passed. “I’d like to,” he said. “But … Dad. He’ll pitch a fit.”

“About you leaving?”

“Yeah.” He felt himself frowning. Conflicting emotions tangled in his breast.
Dad won’t think I’m ready.
And a moment of honesty.
I don’t think I’m ready. But how can I disappoint her?

“Sun’s not down yet?”

He shook his head.

“Does he know about me?”

Cathmar felt himself flush.
… in love with me?
“He’s heard your name,” he admitted.

Her lips curved against his face. He shook his head, her hair shifting on his cheek. He pulled her hair across his face and said, “I don’t know. He’s been acting … strange. He might not mind so much.”

*   *   *

Cahey glanced out the six-paned window at the setting sun. Alone in the house, he was beginning to wonder where Cathmar had gotten off to.
He would have told me if he was going up to the city.

Wouldn’t he?
Cahey shook his head, remembering sixteen going on seventeen. Leaning against the windowsill, he smiled and then frowned, touching his scar. Remembering a black-haired girl two years older than he had been, remembering leaving home.
Don’t be so certain of that.

Unlike Cathmar, he hadn’t had a safe home to go to. He wondered if that mattered so much, when you were sixteen going on seventeen. Sometimes he ached to tell Cathmar the truth, that he had lost a parent, too, that he understood. But he didn’t, really. Cahey had lost a parent—both parents—because he killed them, not because they left him. He imagined it was a whole different kind of pain.

He’d tried to help Cathmar heal, but in the long run Cahey had to admit that he didn’t know how. He pulled his fingers away from the roughness of his scar. Maybe there wasn’t any healing. Maybe there was just getting used to the hurt.

He didn’t turn when he sensed the presence behind him. “I wish,” he said softly, “that you would use the door like normal people.”

The Imogen came toward him, across the small, spare living room. “Your wish is my duty,” she said in a voice furred like the velvet of her hide. “In the future, I shall.”

Then he did face her. She came to him sometimes as woman, sometimes as demoness. Only when he was alone, more often as Cathmar’s explorations grew wider.
I wonder how she knows? Does she watch?

Through the spring and into the summer, something—compassion, loneliness, need, when he could admit it to himself—moved him to entertain her presence.

When she came.

Her owl-soft wings brushed the ceiling, primaries bending slightly as they touched the rug and the tile behind her heels.

“Hungry?” he asked, frowning.

She nodded, eyes shining like agates set before candleflames. “May I?”

He let his gaze slide up and down her greyhound-lean frame. Inhuman. Demonic, even. “What are you, Imogen?”

She came a step closer. “Hungry,” she said.

“Who are you?”

“Whoever you want me to be.” She flickered, shifted, seemed to shrink and expand at once. He had a brief sensation of heat on his skin, like sunlight, and watched in fascination as she stretched and shrank like a melting candle.

She cocked her head to the side, tossing curls over her shoulder. Her skin still gave the appearance of velvet, although it was dull gold now, and the fur had vanished. The face she adopted was interesting—pixielike, strong-chinned, it reminded him of someone. He wasn’t sure who.

“What do
you
want?”

“To fulfill your wishes.”

He froze in place. “I asked what
you
want.”

She did not answer for a moment, and then she said, “I am a trickster’s daughter, Lord. I am permitted no desires of my own, beyond: to feed, to serve, to persist. Those are my purposes.”

He swallowed, watching her. “Slavery.”

She shook her head, hair like a moonlit river tossing around her ears. “Slavery is for people. I have no soul of my own.”

“So you don’t think you’re a person?”
I remember hearing that before, if not in those words. Selene, once upon a time.
His mood descended to pity.