The Sea Thy Mistress (3 page)

37 A.R.
Spring

A goddess led a red mare down a rainbow toward the sand, pausing halfway to shake out her hair. It was winter where Heythe had come from, and melting snow scattered from her cold blond locks when she shook them out. It melted and fell like rain, stippling the beach below.

She shed her coat, too, and dropped it carelessly, already walking again before it thumped softly at the edge of the surf. Her revealed throat glistened beneath a network of jewels threaded on golden wire—spinel, beryl, tourmaline, topaz, peridot, aquamarine, sapphire, diamond: everything that might shatter light in all the colors of the rainbow she walked down as if it were a swaying bridge of planks held taut in knotted rope.

The mare followed on a relaxed rein, head low on a soft neck as if she ambled across a pasture. There was nothing to indicate that she—or the goddess—had come fresh from battle, from tumult and massacre. When the mare’s hooves scuffed the sand with solid thuds, she snorted and shook the flaxen mane across her ears.

Heythe scratched behind them while the rainbow bridge unraveled itself into the sky. The day was perfect spring and glorious, the sky above deeper and more pure than any of the gemstones of her necklace. And yet the goddess frowned.

“Well,” she said, scuffing at luxuriant salt grass with the toe of a worn leather boot that was some two and a half millennia out of fashion. “
This
is not the apocalypse I was hoping for.”

37 A.R.
High Summer

This day of the solstice is endless, which suits the Grey Wolf’s purpose very well. No night falls in these latitudes for a long week each summer. Now, when the golden light of evening lies upon mountain and sea, the sun only touches the ocean, rolls along the rim of the world for an hour, and lifts again.

The wolf witnesses the spill of thick light from an elevation, as he had once before. But this time he sits cradled in the embrace of white wings, the width of a broad back beneath him. Kasimir, his mount—a baroque and extravagant creature, two-headed, plumed and antlered, hooved and taloned in the finest tradition of mythological chimeras—holds them deep in the cold sky above the flank of the green mountain, the breakers pounding its roots so far below they seem white lines of chalk smudged on a wrinkled gray paper sea.

The wolf tucks his cloak beneath his thighs, tight so it will not billow in the wind from the valraven’s wings. Kasimir waits-on like a hunting falcon, hovering steady and high—a feat no merely physical animal could muster. But Kasimir is the Grey Wolf’s half brother, and as much a being of wild magic and divine intent as the wolf himself. Though Kasimir has not said as much, the wolf knows the pause is not merely to reacquaint themselves with long-forgotten territory. It gives the wolf a chance to marshal his composure under pretense of surveying the landscape, something Kasimir doubtless wants as well.

It has been a long time since they were here. And the last time—

A hurting smile pulls the wolf’s lips against his teeth. It might be safest not to dwell on the events of so long ago. But then, it is those very events that have brought him back here, inexorably as the scent of a rotting corpse drawing scavengers. He must think on them.

Which means thinking on Heythe. Goddess, lover, monster, betrayer. The most terrible and subtle thing the wolf has met in a long and terrible life, and he has known a great many gods and monsters. Heythe the seeress, Heythe the world-killer.

Heythe, the returned.

Thinking on her is hard. It requires thinking on his own weakness, evil, and failure. But he tells himself that he is—at long last—prepared for that.

He’d better be.

He has no sense he’s made a decision or telegraphed it to Kasimir, but as abruptly as a broken wing, they fall. The sea air reeks like electricity and the wind rips the wolf breathless. They plunge toward a stand of lush conifers threaded by slender birch, the wood cracked wide where the rising bones of the mountain shove through soil. A pewter ribbon of snowmelt slides across jagged granite, tumbles from a cliff edge, and plummets to vanish through the canopy, raising its own evening-gilded veil.

Kasimir’s pinions snap wide, bent back like fingertips, and cupped wings clap air as they plunge between trees.

For all the violence of the descent, they land like scattered petals. The wolf smooths escaping locks back into his queue and fills his lungs.

On this breath as the last, he expects the scent of the sea. But rising from seven thousand feet below, it has no chance of cutting the overripe perfume of blossoms coating mountain air. Cloying, rotten, the scent should come attended by the kind of thick silence cut only by the drone of insects.

A waiting silence, like the first morning of the world.

But the water rings down the cliff, filling the air in the alpine meadow with spray. Wet jewels speckle Kasimir’s necks, collect in the strands of his manes. He furls his wings.

Rustling feathers settled, he steps forward, lowering both porcelain-white heads to drink. Cloven forehooves splash into the waterfall-fed pool as the wolf slings one thin gray-clad leg over the stallion’s withers and slides down, boots thudding into the muddy bank. He crouches beside the stallion, watching Kasimir’s long white-velvet throats work with each swallow, the way his whiskers move with his lips.

The stallion does not look up, or acknowledge the wolf’s attention. The wolf, with an amused snort, stands. He unclips his sheathed sword from his belt and hangs Svanvitr on the stallion’s harness. He lays a hand on his mount’s shoulder. “I’ll be a moment, Kasimir.”

The stallion raises one head—the antlered one—and allows water to drip from his finely sculpted muzzle onto the wolf’s wool-cloaked shoulder and silver-brindled braid. But Kasimir says nothing, and so the wolf turns.

As he hesitates on the edge of the churning pool, the valraven speaks finally.

Mingan. Are you certain of the wisdom of unleashing this?

The wolf stops in his tracks, turning back to meet Kasimir’s gaze. “No. But I am certain of its necessity. And if anyone can control her, Cathoair can.”

Given his wyrd,
the wolf adds silently.
Given how much of Muire and me he bears within him. Given his history, he has as much to feed her on as anyone.

Kasimir tosses his antlered head.

The wolf glances at the sky, the blue transparent with altitude. A contrail crawls across it. He shakes his head with rueful admiration, his queue snaking against his shoulders.

Historian,
he thinks, feeling rich for a moment with gratitude.

The valraven snorts. His horned head finishes with the water and moves to crop the grass. The wolf watches for a moment, reluctant to go, but at last he turns aside to gather a fistful of deadfall from beneath the birches and poplars bordering the meadow. His queue bobs against his back as the wolf strides around the pond toward the cliff that backs it.

He glances over his shoulder at the placid valraven and sighs silently.
Like a dog.
His fingers curl at his belt groping after Svanvitr’s knotted brass pommel before he reminds himself that he’s left her with Kasimir.

Covering the sticks of wood with his cloak, he squares his shoulders and steps into the icy water.

The pool deepens quickly. In three strides, he’s hip-deep, glacial melt swirling and sucking about his thighs. Roiling water hides the deep-worn pit he knows lies before the waterfall, but he skirts it with well-placed footfalls until the edge of the torrent hammers his bowed head, stings his nape, trickles down his temples to blind squinted eyes.

He plunges through the waterfall and with his free hand heaves his body up onto the ledge behind. For a moment, he kneels behind the curtain of watery light, chest heaving, steam already rising from his skin. Then he stands, gloved palm gliding on sandy rock, and shakes the droplets from his lashes and his hair.

A rocky irregular gulf stretches back into utter darkness, the floor crossed by a trickle of water no broader than his palm. The mouth of the cavern is bathed in shattered light refracted through the cascade. What might lie deeper is hidden.

The wolf kneels on the sandy floor while the echoes astound his ears. With a finger he sketches a rune in the sand. He touches the driest stick from his bundle to the mark—
kenaz,
the torch—and blows across it, stirring the sand, so that it kindles. When thin flames flicker up, he tents the other wood over the fire so it will dry and catch.

While the blaze grows, the wolf strips off his gloves and pulls them through his belt. Soon the cave is bright to his dark-adapted eyes.

He reaches into the flame bare-fingered and pinches off a shard. Holding that fire high in his fist, a few more sticks in his other hand, he stands.

He dampens the blue-white glow from his own gray eyes as he starts down the passageway. He’ll risk no starlight where he is going, nothing to awaken his quarry prematurely. The cavern is narrow and braided, seeming to branch only to rejoin, but the wolf is sure of his path. Millennia cannot dim this memory. He picks his way over sandy floors and ducks crabwise through too-low passages; it is an unlovely cavern, in the granite stone, not one elegant with limestone cascades and battlements.

It is a weapon you awaken.

I know,
he answers.
Was it not I who sealed her away?

He descends for a long while before he reaches the ragged chamber marking the bottom of the climb. The cavern is bare, ledges and jumbled boulders making the floor and walls. He pauses for a breath of damp air before laying the sticks he carried down on a block of stone. He places his flame against the kindling. When it is lit, he stands again and picks his way to an object in the center of the room.

Firelight reveals a rectangular stone block as large as a dinner table.

The wolf circles, considering its rune-carved surface from behind a thin angle of frown. Cracks around the perimeter outline the lid of a rectangular granite box. The cracks, sealed with sap, are too narrow to admit a prybar. Lines of ancient writing run across them without a break. There is no obvious way to remove the lid.

The wolf tugs on his gloves, deliberately, one finger at a time. He stretches his hands into the leather, then lays one gloved palm on the block of stone, tracing the deep inscription gouged there in runes older than he. He reads them aloud, very softly, mouthing all their dreadful cautions.

Then he raises his left hand over his head, makes a fist, and brings it down on the center of the lid in a single blow.

A snap like a thunderclap echoes through the underground and the stones creak in protest, dusting the wolf’s head with grit. The lid cracks across and through, sagging at the center as it leans into the hollow space within. The upper edge projects some fraction of an inch above the surface of the table now, and the wolf walks back to its head. He stretches his left hand in its glove, face expressionless, hearing the crunch as broken bones settle. He pauses a moment so they will knit before grasping the now-protruding edge of the lid, pulling each piece aside and discarding it by turns. He winces more from the grinding of stone on stone than from the blow that pulped his hand.

He looks down into a bower that is also a coffin.

The figure within—uninjured by the violence he has done her sarcophagus—flutters in her darkness. She lies like a child tumbled in sleep, unbreathing, one arm pillowing an inhuman head, lightly shut eyes seeming half as wide as her face, owl-soft obsidian wings clutched tight around her like a blanket. The other hand is outflung, knotty spiderlike fingers tipped with razorblade claws that gleam in the dull reflected light.

She is a thing of sinew and bone, skin velveted by the growth of fine short fur so dense it has a nap. Scars and gouges mark the inside of the foot-thick pieces of the discarded lid. The air that rises from her confinement is warm, stale, and a breath of it makes the wolf’s head spin. She smells of the dust of old warm houses full of old worn things.

I do not approve.

Your complaint is registered.

“Imogen,” the wolf says. “Imogen. Sister. There will be starlight when the sun sets. It is time to awaken, beloved.”

A moment passes. The feathers of the wing furled near her mouth are still, until they stir with her first taken breath. There is a pause before she breathes out, and then they stir again. The warmth of her breath rises, stirs the fine hairs on his cheek above where the beard is shaven.

He bends down to whisper. “You will go from this place, sister, and find the einherjar known as Cathoair. He will be your keeper now; obey him as you would your brother.”

He kisses her cheek before he straightens away.

The Grey Wolf turns in the firelit darkness and leaves her.

*   *   *

Farther south, where the sun sets even in summer, the wolf watches from concealment. Despite distance, his vision is precise in every particular. What holds his attention is an adult and a child strolling along a beach at high tide. A thoughtful surf rolls alongside as they pick through strange runes and sentences written in lines of kelp and driftwood tossed on the sand.