The Sea Thy Mistress (2 page)

Year Zero and After

Over three and a half decades, Cathoair had found his rhythm. In the beginning, after Muire sacrificed herself, he and the humanoid snow-leopard moreau Selene had tried to use ancient swords salvaged from the Technomancer’s Tower to make more waelcyrge and einherjar. It hadn’t worked, and though he and Selene were fond of each other, the association eventually wore thin.

After they parted company, he had mostly just walked. Walked and found things to do, at first in the lonely places and then, as the vanguard of human resettlement caught up with him, along the frontier. The resettlers found resources, long abandoned—the Desolation had been so complete as to leave sturdier structures standing as untouched by organic decay as if they had been preserved in a nitrogen environment—and found also the fruits of Muire’s miracle, paid for with her life and independence.

Fire could not burn Cahey now, nor cold freeze him, nor the long night weary his bones—and so he fought fires and sat late on lambing watches, and carried out all the small possible tasks of making the world less hurtful to those he encountered.

Angels walked the world again, he said, though they were few in number. And you never knew where you might find one.

The lambs didn’t surprise him—if Muire’s self-immolation had brought them birds and trees and flowers, it only seemed natural that she, being Muire, would make certain the practicalities were handled. Nor did it surprise him that the humans he met behaved just as he expected humans to behave, from the very start. Some few impressed him with their common decency, their loyalty, their sense of purpose.

But the majority were no better than they should be, and Cathoair found that comforting. They were human, after all. Just people, and people were fragile.

He found he missed the permission to be fragile most of all.

He visited Freimarc with the first wave of immigrants, amazed by how different it was from Eiledon—a warm seaside town, its pastel adobe houses mostly empty under tile roofs—and helped to find a killer in a little farming village that grew up under the branches of an olive grove not far away. Selene came down to assist, and he found her presence comforting and disquieting in equal measure. She told him that she, Mingan and Aethelred were planning a shrine on the beach near Eiledon, but Cahey could not bring himself to participate. It was too much like forgiving Muire’s choice, and though he would fight for her legacy, absolving her of abandoning him was more selflessness than he could manage.

And that was without even considering Mingan, Muire’s brother, the ancient immortal who styled himself the Grey Wolf. And to whom Cathoair owed a debt of hatred that left his mouth sticky with fear and rage to so much as hear his enemy’s name.

Cathoair had words with Selene over it, that she would even speak to Mingan. She simply gazed at him, impassive, luxuriant smoke and silver tail twitching at the tip, whiskers forward in a sort of mocking unspoken question, and shrugged and turned away. So he left her to the palm-stuck cobble streets of Freimarc on a balmy sun-soaked afternoon, and headed north again, walking over fields where the plows still turned up a new crop of bones after every winter.

Not to Eiledon, though. He hadn’t returned to the city on the banks of the river Naglfar since he left Muire there for the last time, and that, too, was an oversight he had no intention of correcting. But there was a lot to do in the world, and he was well-suited to doing it.

36 A.R.
Autumn into Winter

Thirty-six years after Muire went into the sea, in one such fallow autumn field, Cahey found a girl who reminded him a little too much of who he’d been, once upon a time.

When they’d gotten tired of raping her, or maybe when she quit fighting enough to be interesting, they’d started in with the knives. They were still at it when Cahey—following a
swanning,
a kind of imposed intention he’d become familiar with since he became immortal—heard the screaming, and came from the road down an untended track at a run. He saw, through the dusk, the silhouettes, the moving shadows he could have seen as men and instead recognized only as the demons of his own memory.

Cathoair drew the sword Muire had given him, the blade he’d never drawn in anger. He slaughtered all five of them in about ten seconds, and only realized afterwards that he’d killed.

Against the purple dusk, three-hundred-year-old oaks with no business existing loomed in indigo silhouette. Alvitr burned in Cahey’s hand, stark behind the strings of blood that flew from her when he snapped his wrist. He licked his lips, frowning at the blue-silver light that cast razor-real shadows behind the bodies at his feet. A shudder rattled him, clattered his teeth, heavy as his breathing.

With panicked concentration, he put the blade away.

His first murders in thirty-six years. He guessed he was out of practice.

Shaking, he went to the girl who lay on the wet earth beyond them, curled around a broken arm that could not by any imagining have been the worst pain in her body.

She was a redhead, although you almost couldn’t tell under the blood and in the dark, and she had freckles and the stubbornest chin and nose he’d ever seen. She tried to fight him when he picked her up, and then passed out, which he figured was a blessing.

Well then, where to?
he asked the knowledge in his head.

East,
it
swanned
him. So east he went, and found there—hearth-cold, hours abandoned—a shaggy-turfed gray farmhouse with an unmilked goat bleating on her tether in the yard. A gray cat hissed in the dooryard and fled in the kitchen window when he approached.

Inside, he kindled a light, and a fire in the cold stove, and ladled water into a bucket from the barrel by the door to wash the blood from his damsel in distress and begin to assess her injuries.

Her eyes had been green. She still had one of them.

She wasn’t dead, and she wasn’t ready to die, either.

*   *   *

Three days later, she woke lucid and free of fever in her own homestead’s bedroom, in a pretty wrought-iron bed she must have salvaged from Ailee. She was a patchwork of the neat black stitches with which Cathoair had sewn her up, her arms and face matching her own patchwork quilt, which Cahey had tucked her under.

She pushed herself up on her elbows, fell back against the pillows, and said, “Who the Hel are you?” Her voice cracked a little, coming out girlish and fragile as a thread.

He’d been watching her from a chair across the room. Even when she was delirious, she’d start to scream if he got too close, so he stayed away unless he was changing the dressings. Funny thing, that: Cahey didn’t have any medical training, though he had some experience both with nursing the dying and with rough-and-ready fighter’s first aid.

But Muire knew how to splint an arm and sew a wound, and after she gave him her soul-kiss, he knew how, too. She left a bit of herself inside him. Just as the Wolf had.

Except it wasn’t the same thing at all.

“My name is Cathoair,” he said, in his most placating tones. “Don’t be scared: I rescued you.”

She tried to sit up in the bed, and then she rolled to the side and puked all over the floor. Tried, anyway—she hadn’t much in her but the broth he’d been feeding her, so what came up was frothy yellow bile.

He came over to hold her hair back, and she shied away so violently that he retreated across the room instead. She curled away from him, huddled under the blanket, and for a minute or two he wondered if he should withdraw. But if it had been him, he’d have wanted someone to stay there, even if he wasn’t strong enough to face them yet.

After a little while, without poking her head out, she said, “Why?”

“I don’t know why,” he answered. “It’s crazy shit, is what it is, and it isn’t because of anything you did.”

“No,” she said. She sat up, the blankets still pulled to her chin. “Why didn’t you let them kill me?” She touched the bandages over the socket of her right eye gingerly, wincing.

Cahey felt the sting behind his eyes, and had to keep his hands down when they wanted to creep up and press the ugly furrowed scar across his own cheek. She looked like she’d been pretty, not that it made any difference. Well, maybe it made things worse for her.

She said, “Why make me live like this?”

Cahey shook his head. “That’s your choice to make, not mine. In the meantime, now that you’re awake, I’ll be in the other room if you want me.” He stood and walked toward the door. “Just yell if you’re hungry or need a lift to the toilet. I’ve played nurse before.”

She didn’t say a word. He had walked halfway out before he remembered and turned around.

“Hey, what’s your name?”

She picked her head up off the pillow with a grimace of pain. “Aithne,” she said. “Now leave me the Hel alone.”

*   *   *

Aithne screamed in the night a lot, and then screamed at Cahey when he went in to her. Finally, he got so he’d just go in and let her hit him for a while. Or he’d open her bedroom door to let her know he’d heard her, and then go back and make believe he was sleeping on the couch. The bandages came off, and except for the eyepatch, he had to say he thought she was really better off than Aethelred. Her face was messed up, but at least half of it wasn’t
metal
.

Six months or so later when, instead of waking up screaming, she quietly came out and took his hand and led him back to her bed, she never said a word. All she did that night was cry, and all he did was hold her, and wish he could manage to cry a little himself.

Not for her. She didn’t need it. But for Muire, and for him. Except he was all cried out, by then, so Aithne had to do the crying for both of them.

Still, it felt nice to be close to somebody.

He didn’t sleep, but after that, he stayed in her bed at night and pretended. It was no surprise when, at last, in the cold of winter, she seduced him. He’d been ready for it for weeks, and ready to give whatever she asked and be glad to offer it. The surprise, when it happened, was how badly
he
needed it.

She was the first woman he’d touched since he killed Astrid and Muire left him, and everything about Aithne’s body was different from either of them, from the way she met his kisses to the sound of her breath caught in her throat.

37 A.R.
High Summer

Cahey was out in Aithne’s yard digging a well, of all things, when Selene poked her whiskered face over the edge and stuck down her hand. “I have something to tell you.” She never was much on polite small talk.

Cahey looked up at her and read the squint of her eyes, the worried creases along the bridge of her nose. He grabbed her wrist and let her haul him up, holding on to the shovel with the other hand. He wasn’t a small man, and she managed it one-handed, her engineered claws that could slice stone only grazing his wrist like burrs.

Behind her head, he saw Aithne watching out of the kitchen window of her little house. From the way Selene’s ears twitched, he could tell that she knew someone was looking.

She was lean and elegant, inhumanly proportioned in her black leather and chrome harness, the cloud-soft, cloud-colored pelt that covered her dotted with storm-gray rosettes. She purred low in her throat when she looked at him, an evidence of unfeigned affection that left a complicated pain in his breast.

“Lover?” she asked, as he shook the worst of the mud off.

He sucked his lip in and tried to meet her eye, but his gaze kept fastening on her toe-tips. “Occasionally.”

“Inconvenient,” she replied, her tail lashing. She crouched next to the heap of moist earth he’d spaded out of the ground. The layer with all the bones lay near the surface, and a few clay-stained reminders of the Desolation peeked from under the crumbling pile of deeper sediments. “There’s something you need to see to over near Eiledon.”

Cahey raised an eyebrow. He’d grown up in Eiledon, when Eiledon was all the world. He’d planned never to go back there. “What sort of something?”

“How does your girlfriend feel about children?”

“Excuse me?”

“Aethelred,” she said, her face going strange, “seems to have custody of your son.”

Cahey was never quite sure how he wound up doubled over the shovel, using the handle as a prop while the world heaved and swayed around him. He would have sat down hard without it, he thought, and melodrama be damned.

“My son?”

Selene let herself smile, a lip-curling mockery of the human gesture that revealed teeth like needle-sharp pegs, and cuffed Cahey gently alongside the head, suddenly all affectionate cat. “Your son. Muire’s son. I’ve been tracking you for the last two years to tell you about it. You haven’t been easy to find.”

She hesitated, but Cahey didn’t fill the silence, so she continued. “Apparently Serpents have long gestational periods. He’s about three now. Aethelred is raising him. I suspected you might want to know.”

“I have a son.” Cahey looked down at his boots, his feet encrusted with the bright mud of the well. He had learned he was sterile when he was a teenager. If anything, he had figured he’d be like Aethelred, eventually, and take in strays. “What’s his name?”