The Sea Thy Mistress (6 page)

She frowned slowly, as if she had to think about each individual minute muscular contraction that made up the expression and choose consciously to allow it. Her hand dropped to the pistol again. She looked as if she could use it.

She gave him a chilly, motivated grin. “You’d better have a good excuse to know that name.”

“A young man told it to me. Dark skin, black hair. Striking eyes and a ponytail. Bad scar here—” Aethelred touched his cheek. “Missing some teeth from it. Name of Cahey. Sounded like he thought fondly of you.”

Her face relaxed a step, but her shooting hand didn’t shift. “Where’d you see him?”

“Last near Eiledon.” Aethelred rearranged his face in his best “you can tell me; I’m a bartender” smile.

She lifted an eyebrow. “You’re
that
Aethelred.” She nodded. “Come inside, then. He’s not coming back, is he?”

“Not right away,” Aethelred said, following her to the sagging gray farmhouse.

She gave him an odd sort of look over her shoulder as she held the scarred, salvaged storm door for him to catch. She produced a key, opened the inside door, and stepped up over the threshold into the shade of a clean, weary-looking kitchen. “I wasn’t expecting to hear from him. I imagined he’d be pretty busy with his son for a while.”

“I imagine he will,” Aethelred said. The storm door shut behind him with a click. He stepped out of the way so she could shut the interior door as well. She locked it, which seemed only good sense. “We’re old friends, though. I knew him when he was half your age, or a little older. So I thought I’d check up on you, as a friend of a friend.”

“Ah.” She might have let him into her house, but she wasn’t unstrapping the sidearm. “He didn’t exactly ask you to stop by, did he?”

Aethelred smiled with the corner of his mouth. “No, not exactly. But he did speak highly of you. And we are very old friends.”

“Mm.” A noncommittal noise, the way she made it. Her weight shifted to her heels, but she didn’t fold her arms. “So what the hell do you want from me, Aethelred who meddles uninvited in the affairs of friends? Everybody has a motive.”

“I came to help,” he said. “That’s all. Assuming you need any.”

The question must have cost her something, because she gave him her shoulder while she thought about it. Not the blind side—that would have been too much trust. But the turn of her profile was enough to hide her expression as she crossed to the sink. She dipped water from a pot beside the stove and primed the green cast-iron pump, then began to work the handle. Aethelred watched her biceps and triceps knot as she gave it three hard pulls, metal rattling against metal, before the water gushed forth.

He wondered where the blacksmith lived. Ailee, or closer? The pump and the stove hadn’t been cast and forged here, not unless she had a foundry out back behind the chicken coop. They looked like post-Rekindling manufacture, so they must have been carted out from town. That implied positive things about the local economy.

The smell of water—clean, a little metallic—filled the kitchen, following the sound of a flood ringing into metal. Aethelred hitched his elbows on the counter or what passed for it—a crudely knocked-together table painted yellow and blue—and leaned back to watch. Aithne dipped cold water into a kettle, hooked a stove lid aside with the other hand, and set the kettle on the hob to boil. When she turned back, her arms were folded over her chest.

“How do I know I can trust you?”

The crux of it. He knew why she’d let him in the house, and he knew the only words that would hold the key. He said, “Cahey does.”

Her nod was curt, her stare assessing. He felt her considering the scars, the walking stick, the creak of his exoskeleton when he shifted his weight back onto his feet. “Can you work?”

“I can chop wood and haul water.”

“You’d have to sleep on the floor.”

Aethelred patted his pack. “I have blankets,” he said. “I’ll sleep in the yard.”

38 A.R.
Early Summer

Borje the chapel-keeper knew he loomed. He thought of himself as capable, and not nearly as dumb as he looked, but he also knew his size and strength led others to mis-estimate him. Hauling a load of rags and polish up to the chapel was his idea of a pleasant afternoon, and the wind tickling the salt grass, the sunlight glittering off the ocean far below, consoled and energized him.

He didn’t run across pilgrims often, and most of the ones he did meet shied from his massive, scarred shoulders. His shaggy minotaur’s head and spreading horns tended to give others pause. If that was not enough to intimidate, there were the stone-hard cloven pincers that formed what passed for his hands.

Borje was moreau, a warrior servant created by the Technomancer from the body of a beast in the days when Eiledon was falling. But Borje had been kissed by an angel in a back stairwell forty years before, and so he was also a Believer, and free.

On a half-sunny day just before summer truly began, he met the pilgrim who did not seem afraid. She led her star-faced, evenly colored mare up the back side of the bluff as Borje crested the hill.

He stopped so that he would not startle the animal. She was the first horse that he had seen since he really
was
a bull, the four-legged sort, and his nostrils flared to collect her scent. The woman’s hair was pale and shining and her skin was as fair as that of the angel whose kiss had freed him from servitude so many years ago.

The mare smelled of barn and hay and fresh-turned earth. The woman smelled of herbs hung to dry. She led her snorting mount up the path toward Borje, stopping a few meters away. The mare tested her reins, scuffing the ground with her left forehoof, eyeing the bull uncertainly.

Borje tilted his horns at the woman cautiously. “Welcome to the chapel,” he said. “Have you come to pray?”

She ran her left hand through her long, smooth locks. Her cloak and trousers seemed gray to Borje, and her knotted blouse might have been white at the beginning of her road. She carried no weapons that he could see, although there might have been a pistol in her pocket.

“I’ve come to meditate,” she said. “What is the name of this place? I saw it from the Eiledon road.”

“It hasn’t a name,” Borje answered, stepping off the path so that she and her horse could continue. He fell into step on her right, watching the mare out of the corner of one wide-set eye to make sure she didn’t try anything foolish. “But some call it the Chapel of the Books.”

“Books?” She glanced over at him, looking interested. Her eyes sparkled. He thought she might be pretty, as human women went. His heavy ears flickered to scoop up more of her soothing tone.

“Many books. They belonged to the Angel-who-went-into-the-Sea. Have you heard the story?”

She nodded. “Several times.” She stroked the nose of her mare as they came up to the little chapel. “I’ve heard rumors another angel dwells here still. Is that so?”

Borje angled his head to regard her directly with his left eye. Just because you knew things didn’t mean you had to share them with every passing stranger.

“Oh,” he said, “there are a lot of little cottages and villages hereabouts. Hermits and fishers and farmers and other resettlers. But angels? I couldn’t tell you anything about that.”

She dropped the reins on the damp sandy ground. “Stay here, Elder,” she said, patting the horse on the shoulder. The mare whickered and lipped the woman’s shoulder, then lowered her head to nose among the salt grass for anything that might be good.

The blond woman squared her shoulders and threw her head back, allowing her eyes to drift half-closed as she tested the scent of the sea breeze. The collar of her blouse gapped a little, and the bull saw something like a run of tears sparkle against the white skin of her throat.

She turned abruptly back to Borje and thrust out her right hand. He juggled rags and polish, reaching out hesitantly to touch his bifurcated hoof to her palm. “You’re the chapel-keeper? Is there a priest?”

The bull shook his head. “I’m Borje. We don’t preach here. But people come to look at the statues, and the sea. I can tell you the story if you’d like that.” He hesitated. “Although you said you’d heard it.”

“I’d like to hear it again,” she said, turning her face away from him to watch the seabirds wheel overhead. Nearby, from the edge of the bluff, a raven fell into the wind. “I’m called Heythe these days, when I’m called anything at all. I’ve come from a long way off, you see.”

“Then welcome to my door, Heythe. What’s brought you this far?”

She smiled a smile that filled him with warmth and the will to please. “I travel,” she said. “I trade in stories. And in other things.”

38 A.R.
Summer

Aethelred hefted the knife in his hand, flexing his fingers around its worn black handle as if that could ease their ache. The blade was old, pre-Desolation, and held an edge like glass, but even so it had been sharpened so many times that the remaining width was thinner than his pinkie finger. Piles of strawberries loomed on the blue and yellow table before him, hulled on the right, not-yet-hulled on the left. The cutting board between his hands was gory with their juices.

All that, and he couldn’t smell them over the reek of boiling vinegar. Flushed and dripping cloudy sweat from the draggled ends of escaping locks, Aithne bent down by the stove, poking up the fire so it would leap through the stove-holes. She’d laid a board over the sink, and on it were arrayed two dozen mismatched pieces of glassware, each containing a ration of sliced green tomatoes, peppercorns, sugar, salt, cloves, and coriander.

Aethelred picked up another strawberry, thinking about putting up food for winter and for trade. And thinking of the far-flung trade that had sprung up with such urgent immediacy, once people were free to move about the world again.

When he was a younger man, he would have been unable to imagine a world in which such a thing was possible, never mind needful. Now he performed the functions of survival without thinking, with the skill of long practice. And with a certain contentment. Useful work was a blessing.

“Aithne,” he said, when she stood up and hooked the stove door shut with her poker. She reached for her pot holders, glancing over her shoulder on her good side to let Aethelred know she’d heard him.

He weighed a strawberry in his hand, laid the forefinger of the other hand along the knifeblade, and hulled the berry with a practiced twist. “Have you thought about getting out in the world for a while?”

“Come over here and handle the funnel, would you?”

Aethelred put down his knife and came around the table, gathering equipment along the way. He set the sterilized funnel in the first jar, careful to touch it only with the sterilized pliers, and stepped out of the way. Aithne wore a sweat-and-food-stained blouse with the sleeves ripped out. When she gripped the stockpot and hefted it, long muscles cabled along her arms.

She poured, and Aethelred moved the funnel, and each jar filled in turn. From the side, he could see her lower lip sucked between her teeth in concentration, the way her eye watered from the vinegar steam, the way she measured the distances with her body because she couldn’t accurately judge them by perspective.

“Getting out in the world?” she said, as she set the almost-empty pot down and tossed the pot holders aside. Sterilized lids rattled and slid as she snagged the container holding them, and began to sort through with tongs. “I think running this house is enough work for anyone.”

“Stagnant work,” Aethelred said. “Churning water. Have you thought about going somewhere?”

She shrugged. “Pull that other pot over the heat, will you? It needs a rolling boil. Where is there to go?”

He picked up her discarded pot holders and did as she had asked. When the second pot was squarely on the fire, he dropped the pliers and the funnel back inside. “Forward,” he said. “You know, there are other people out there who need help the way you needed help when Cahey came to you.”

She set the last mismatched lid on the last mismatched jar and frowned at her work, tilting her head to make sure she’d dealt the
right
mates together. Still using the tongs, she swapped two, and then sorted out the rings. “You think I owe the world something, preacher-man?”

“No,” he said, stepping back to give her room. “I think you owe yourself something. Something beyond staying alive.”

“Sometimes staying alive is all you can manage.” She didn’t look up from her work.

“Sometimes it is,” he agreed. “And when it’s not, anymore?”

She didn’t answer. She just bent down behind her escaping hair and started tightening rings.

38 A.R.
Summer

Heythe bends at the waist beside a clear stream, up to her knees in water, sunlight caught golden along the pale curve of her muscled flank. She washes her hair, not knowing a wolf stalks her. He has been watching for years now, not always but often, finding and following as she moves from place to place and small, seemingly innocuous task to task. Somehow, though, her path brings her among the moreaux more often than not, and when she shares stories and conversation with them her questions always seem to—sooner or later—touch on what they know of the Angel-who-went-into-the-Sea.