The Sea Thy Mistress (8 page)

Selene did not eat fruit, her system being adapted to flesh and organ meat. Still, she enjoyed the aroma of winter citrus dewed with mist, which carried down the hills on warming currents of air as the rising sun began to burn the hilltops clean. It combined with the clean salt scent of the sea.

Someone had been collecting bones and shells from the beach, and all along the edge of the boardwalk they made a latticed wall—or more of a heap—stretching down to the sand below.

Selene paused, arms folded, to contemplate the beach and the rolling tide, until her ears swiveled at a shout. She turned away from the water, boardwalk not so much as creaking under her padded feet. Ahead, she saw a scuffle. Teenage gangsters and a middle-aged blond woman with a net marketing bag full of those very lemons and oranges. The fur on the back of Selene’s neck rose. Her gray-ringed tail lashed.

Banded ceramic and leather armor creaked as Selene grinned behind her whiskers and sprinted toward the fight, not bothering to draw her sword Solbiort or uncoil her whip.

The young men saw her coming. They didn’t stand their ground. Selene had something of a reputation in Freimarc by then; moreaux still weren’t common in this city, though they traveled to the limits of the Eiledain diaspora. Though the Technomancer who had created them was no more, Selene and her brethren were peacekeepers still.

She helped the woman to her feet. While Selene crouched to collect spilled blood oranges, the woman thanked her profusely. The snow leopard glanced up, looking into startlingly blue eyes framed by a twist of honey-colored hair shot through with ash.

“Thank you,” the woman said. She reached out to offer Selene her hand, and Selene refused politely, showing her glittering claws by way of explanation. It was one thing if she scratched one of her brother einherjar by accident: they would heal.

Humans were fragile.

Those eyes really were distressingly blue. Selene glanced away, found herself looking at a glittering necklace peeking out from behind the woman’s collar. “You should keep that covered,” Selene said, gesturing to it. “It’s probably why they bothered you.”

“Oh,” she said, and put her hand on her throat. “You’re right. I’ll be more careful from now on.”

There was something in the woman’s tone that continued to haunt Selene long after she returned to the little flat she sometimes shared with a friend. It was a bright and simple space, tile-floored, the furniture simple wooden benches and chairs and a desk constructed of a salvaged door balanced across a cabinet and two stools. There was no bed, for Selene did not sleep, but she’d painted the walls warm shades of umber and red echoed by the blankets folded for comfort on the benches, and five of the seven walls of the crooked two-room space were lined with waist-height racks that held books—a few bound volumes, a few etched tablets, and far more traditional scrolls—salvaged from all over the ruins of the world. The curtains were red and gold wool that kept the sun back in the summer and the cold out in the winter, though the shutters beyond them were currently closed anyway because glass, even salvaged, was still dear.

Selene sat down in front of her viscreen to check the news and message Cahey and his son. Recollection distracted her while she typed a casual greeting and a brief, newsy mail.

Humans’ motivations were often mysterious to her. More mysterious than they knew, than—she suspected—they could ever be to one another. Her years in law enforcement, her experience as a Black Silk, one of the commanders of the Technomancer’s militia, had taught her that humans were complex and contradictory in ways no animal—and certainly no moreau—could predict. But the woman hadn’t seemed as frightened by her misadventure as Selene would expect, and she’d had an air about her when Selene refused her hand that could have been embarrassment over being rebuffed, or could have been something else. Thwarted malice, calculation carefully concealed.

Selene made a note to remember the woman’s face, and cursed herself for not getting a name. A failure of instinct and professionalism. But there weren’t that many people in the world. She’d keep an eye out, that was all, and chances were they’d meet again.

Her ’screen beeped, a message back from Cathmar, typed awkwardly with an eight-year-old’s spelling. Strange how an eight-year-old angel was still an eight-year-old first and only second an angel.

Selene’s ears pricked in pleasure. She began keying her reply, but her typing was interrupted by the swing of the garden door and a lean dark-clad shape silhouetted against the morning.

Adapted to the dim room, Selene’s pupils narrowed to pinpricks before she could see without pain. But she knew by scent and the sound of his breathing who came, and so she stood to greet him. And folded the ’screen closed over her unsent message so he would not see, and be distressed.

“Mingan.” She crossed the room to him on padded footsteps, and paused at arm’s length. “Were you lurking in the garden all this time?”

He shut the door behind him. “I came from the shadows,” he said, as if she would not have been able to tell by the dank cold rising from his cloak and the smell of ashes that complicated the everyday animal musk of him. But what he said next made her ears and whiskers twitch: “I followed thee. It is well thou didst touch not the woman with the necklace; she is not what she seems.”

“Cryptic,” Selene said. “But that’s what I’ve come to expect. Are you cold? Would you like tea?”

“I swelter,” Mingan snarled. One-handed, he grasped his cloak by the collar, flicked the catch, and cast the heavy fabric aside. It was his fourth or fifth since she’d known him. This one had a collar lined in squirrel fur, silver-gray against the char-gray of the wool where it puddled on the floor. “That woman—”

“Something seemed off about her,” Selene admitted, giving way before him so he could advance into the room. She touched the handle of her whip, reflexively, and the hilt of her sword as well. “You
followed
me?”

He shrugged. “Or her. She is an old and dangerous enemy. Forgive me if I say not too much more on the topic: it is a painful one. But best if thou avoidst her in future, for she would not scruple to use thee against me, if ever she knew our association. Now, thou art her target for thou art waelcyrge, which is a small and idle thing. If she knew more, though, her interest might be … personal. And I do not know that I could protect thee from that.”

He glanced aside, at her closed ’screen, and neither asked nor made a gesture toward it. Nevertheless, Selene felt a chill raise her hackles. Mingan was not a fearful creature, but his caution carried more behind it than the words implied. He was frightened, and Selene was not sure she’d ever seen him frightened before.

He continued, “Best also if thou should not speak my name or offer word of my existence for a time. To anyone.”

“You could,” she offered gently, “just tell me what’s going on.”

He cocked his head at her. “Thee before any other,” he said. “But no. Not yet.”

44 A.R.
Autumn

Ten-year-old Cathmar sprawled on the blue and red rug beside the fire, idly scratching at his slate with a stylus. He tapped the butt of the implement against his color pad, changing it to burgundy, and started sketching rows of little roundheaded stick people holding hands.

He didn’t feel the cold any more than other einherjar, which his father found reassuring, but both of them enjoyed playing with fire. Cahey watched Cathmar idly over the top rod of the book the einherjar was supposed to be studying. Teaching his son to read had given Cahey the excuse to learn as well.

He set his book aside.

The boy looked away from his slate, staring into the fire pensively. Flickers of light reflected in his dark gray eyes, painted his mahogany skin with traces of orange and gold. The boy reached into the granite fireplace and poked his fingers into the flames, playing at pinching bits off and then putting them back.

He’s a beautiful boy,
Cahey thought.
He takes after his mother.

She would have seen it differently, of course.

Cathmar turned his head to regard his father. “Dad?” The edge of a frown crossed the boy’s face, a world shadow eclipsing the moon.

Cahey nodded, rolling his shoulders and twisting his neck. The old pain was gone with his transformation, but the habits of easing it remained. He leaned forward in his bentwood chair.

Cathmar took a deep breath and spoke very fast. “Why did my mother leave us?”

Cahey rocked back in his chair. “She had…” He paused and bit back his bitterness, waited until it would not color his voice. Cathmar deserved to think well of his mother. “She had something she had to do. You know that. You know why she had to go.”

The boy shrugged, rolling over on his back like a puppy, propped up on gangling elbows. “Yeah, but … couldn’t she have waited? Until I was grown-up? Did she have to go right away?”

Cahey rubbed a thumbnail against an eyebrow, thinking. “I don’t know.”

That’s not an honest answer, is it? Angels don’t lie, remember?
It was the voice of his own conscience, but for a moment he pretended it had a woman’s tone.

He cleared his throat and added, “Well, no, I guess I do know. I think she felt she had to make her decision fast, before more people died. And I…”

She didn’t tell me about you. She must have known. She must have hidden it on purpose.

Cathmar pushed himself up farther. Cahey looked at the boy’s unmarked face, and his fingers worried at his own scar.
When I was his age …

Cathmar would never have to know about those things, though. “I suspect … I know … I chased her away.”

The boy sat up completely, crossing long legs on the red and blue rug. He was—oddly—both tall for his age and young-seeming. His brow furrowed, then smoothed. A moment later, and he came back with a childish non sequitur. “Hey, I want to go over to Kailley’s house in the village later. Is that okay?”

He so badly wants to be a normal boy,
Cahey thought.
And I so badly want him to be something else. I wonder if it were kinder if he weren’t?
Cahey nodded, relieved that his son had dropped the other line of questioning. “Sure.”

Cathmar nodded and went back to his game with the fire. But a little while later, when Cahey had raised the book again and was winding slowly through the chapters, pretending to read while he watched his son over the rod, Cathmar looked up again.

“Why?”

“Why can you go to Kailley’s?”

“No,” he said. “Why did you chase Mom away?”

Cahey fell silent for a long time, and then shrugged. He spoke in a level tone to get the words around the pain in his throat. “It wasn’t on purpose. I was young. I had no idea what she wanted from me. I’m not sure I could have given it to her then if I tried. I hurt her, by accident, and she left me. It wasn’t long after that that she changed. Became what she is now, because she had to. Because she didn’t think she had a choice. We were desperate, Cath”—and maybe you weren’t supposed to admit things like that to a kid. Maybe you were supposed to let them believe in adult omnipotence, but that really wasn’t Cahey’s style—“and then there was no going back. Or maybe she left me because she knew she had to go into the sea.”

He thought back to his first day with his son. The memory took Cahey away completely for a moment, and when the einherjar leaned forward in his chair again he realized he’d lost the thread of the conversation. “I’m sorry; I was thinking. What did you say?”

Cathmar pursed his lips in a gesture his mother would have found familiar. “I asked … how you hurt her.”

Oh, Hel. Not what I want to be talking to a ten-year-old about.

Cahey pinched the bridge of his nose. “She came from a different world than I did. She … when she was young, her people paired up in a way that I didn’t understand. Husband and wife, will and action. Almost as if they became one person. She had grown beyond that, over the centuries, become something bigger, something complete. But she still expected to be … one half of a whole. And I—well—I had seen the other side of that, growing up.”

The angel took a breath. “I wasn’t einherjar yet, then. I’d seen how marriage could be a trap, and how it could destroy both sides. So I never chose just one person. I had a partner, Astrid, my best friend, but we weren’t tied to each other that way. And then there was your mother. And then there was Selene.”

“Aunt Selene?”

Cahey blew air out through his nose. “Yes.”

The boy bit his finger, rolled back over, and poked at his slate a few more times.

“And your mother—I think she thought I was somebody she used to care about once, reborn, and it bothered her.”

The boy—lean, growing tall, wearing his hair cropped close to the scalp, in contrast to his father’s—looked suddenly curious. “Are you?”

Cahey shrugged. “I don’t suppose it matters.”

“What happened to Astrid?”

I knew he was going to ask that.

“She was mortal,” the angel said quietly. “I killed her. By accident. There were a lot of people dying, then.”

48 A.R.
Winter