All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (19 page)

The light behind his sister’s eyes flares until her irises seem transparent, window glass letting moonlight show. “So then why let me live?”

Comfortable in the snow, legs crossed and elbows on his knees, he chooses to answer. “Because thou art not precisely a child of the Light, anymore. Thou hast on thee a shadow, a touch of tarnish: I can see it in thy eyes, and I—” a hesitation, as of remembered luxury “—can taste it on thy breath. Thou art tainted, and thou dost ken, and thy Light has failed thee. Thou hast no reason to fight me, and many reasons to name me thy ally. And—” delicately “—I imagine we may have enemies in common.”

“You are my enemy.”

He still remembers how to smile. “And what of Heythe, of unkind memory? And what of Thjierry Thorvaldsdottir?”

M
uire heard the words, understood them, comprehended them—and somehow still managed to blink dumbly at the wolf, as if he had entirely confounded her. “The Technomancer? She was a—”

—friend.

No, not exactly. Gunther had been a friend. Thjierry had been a friend of a friend, a professional acquaintance, an ally of convenience. But as Muire opened her mouth to say so, the Grey Wolf rose, fluidly, to a crouch. He rested on the balls of his
feet, one knee, the fingers of one hand. He leaned in toward her, and widened his smile.

It was not his hunting smile. It was not terrible at all. That unsettled her more.

“And was it thee who taught her to work her abominations, then, little sister?”

“Abominations?”

“Her animal folk,” he said. “Those poor beasts she’s twisted into her service, given hands and made slaves. Was that thy magic, then?”

“As it was your magic that warped wolves into vile sdadown?”

He flinched, as she had meant him to, but dared not hope. When he raised his eyes again, his smile was gone. The snow in his clenched fist creaked; slow water dripped between his fingers. “So,” he said. “It was thee.”

“No.”

“Then how does she make them? She cannot sing life from a rock, as the waelcyrge can.”

Trying to make it look casual, Muire stripped off her gauntlets, one and then the other, opening the clasps so they unfolded like clamshells around her hands. The right one ached in the cold; she rubbed it, and saw the Grey Wolf noticing the pale new scars. Yes, he should think on that, if there was any conscience in him. If there ever had been. She found she changed her mind every instant, as to whether there had.

She had walked among the einherjar and waelcyrge like a ghost, as pale and as unnoticed. Muire the scholar-gypsy, Muire the tower maiden: she had known lifetimes, and all of them bittersweet.

And among all her brethren, the Grey Wolf was the eldest,
and had been foreign even then. He wore grey when his brothers wore white and indigo, when they drank together in a lofty-beamed hall. He sat beside Strifbjorn at the top of the trestle, beneath the chair that was left empty by tradition, a single dark head bent toward that palest among the golden ones.

They had welcomed him at table on those rare occasions when he graced it, but he stayed always strange with the wilderness he haunted by preference. And Muire remembered him saying:
When we sang Men from the stones, little knew we how bright and brief a thing we were crafting.

She closed her hands on rose stems, and pain drew her from that vivid memory. They were thorned, the frozen roses, and she clutched great handfuls and twisted them until the stems cracked and the petals shattered. Mingan reached out, catching at her wrists as if to prevent her from injuring herself, but he didn’t hold tightly and she snatched her arms across her chest and overbalanced backwards in the snow, striking the gnarled roots of the Tree as she toppled, sliding against that unfamiliar rune.

She got an elbow down and pushed against it, kicking like a dog will to protect its belly. But he was over her, hands clenching on her arms until the bones creaked and she gasped in terror, his skin hot to the touch even though he had buried his hands in the snow, his breath rank on her face. All she could smell was him, as if she were wrapped in the hide of an animal. He pinned her in the snow, her armor bruising her back, his braid snaking over his shoulder, and his cloak fell all around them.

There was blood on her fingers, the blood she had sacrificed her gloves to put there, and she pulled the salty-slippery-sharp words of sorcery into her mouth and shaped them, worked
them deep. One chance, she thought. He would not give her another.

The word for pain almost got away from her; it could have turned in her hand and cut her hard. But she juggled it, twisted it back, and formed her mouth around it.
Pain, lightning, freedom
—Her blood for an anchor.

He lowered his head, and though she arched back into the snow as much as possible, he bit her hard, diagonally across the mouth. Around the pressure of his lips and teeth, she only managed a yelp. The sorcery thrashed, all teeth and lashing tail, uncontrolled, and Muire braced herself for the agony of the backlash. But Mingan was there, beside her, delimiting, diffusing, pulling half the uncontrolled forces he’d unleashed off and filtering them through his own body.

The bite became a kiss.

Muire shoved hard against his pinioning hands, and bucked against him. Not enough, but enough to get his mouth off hers. He panted into the corner of her jaw.

And she heard him, as if his voice whispered into her heart.
Oh, so, candle-flicker?

He brought his knee up sharply between her legs, driving her armor into her groin.

She tried to scream, but he was ready for her, his open mouth covering hers again in that obscene parody of a kiss. His thumbs drove between the tendons of her wrists. His chest swelled as he drew her breath in deep.

No,
she thought, her mouth sealed under his.
No. No. I defy you.

He pushed both her wrists into one hand and pinned them over her head, then covered her nose and eyes with the other palm.
Defy me as thou likest. I have more to show.

She hung in time with him, attenuated, anchored by the pain in her wrists, her hands, her mouth, her groin. She waited for the rush, the pulse, the dizziness of her life flowing into him, of her soul feeding his strength. The snow under her back chilled the armor against her skin; the heat of his body made her chest prickle sweat. But this was not like the first time: she felt no confusion, no blurring of identities and lights and colors and pain. There was only the insupportable craving, the agony of a body near collapse from want of breath as she choked through an age.

And then, when she could wait no more, when the world spun black-edged around her and tears stung the corners of her covered eyes:
Thou wilt
like
this, little sister
.

And then he gave her back her breath, and all his merciless strength with it. It seared her throat and rolled into her lungs with all the wolf-heat of his immortal body, full of everything she had begged him to withhold the first time. Euphoria, rapture drowned her will, until she arched against him, pressing into the embrace. His palms slipped from her wrists and eyes, cradled her face and caressed her wet hair. She clutched at his shirt, tore the collar, flailed weakly at his head with fists that would not clench. Her blood streaked his hair, his face as he bent her head back between his palms and poured himself down her throat.

Thou shalt. Understand me.

And not only himself. She felt the other in him, the hunger that moved like a shark through calm water. The thing in his belly that pricked up its ears and laughed with bloody teeth, a furnace light glaring between its teeth.
Suneater
. It would burn her, she thought, as surely as Kasimir. Scorch her to cinders, until she flared and crisped from within.

All these years, all these lifetimes, she had saved this, unwilling to have anyone if she could not have Strifbjorn. And now the Grey Wolf broke the kiss, lying on his elbows over her, and drew back—and she groped after his mouth with her own.

His breath on her face smelled of sunlight. His voice, all sand and sea-salt and velvet, brushed the side of her throat. “Oh, thy little whore,” he whispered. “Told he thee, I’ve had him? Spoke he of how he made sweet moan when I fucked his mouth, Muire the Historian? Sweetling, poet, scholar?”

“You loved him then,” she said, gasping, sliding her hand along the cabled heat of his neck. “Why debase him now?”

“Because I loved him,” the Grey Wolf answered, and pressed his face against her skin below the ear.

She’d ripped his shirt open. There was something about his throat; a slender band, flexible and tough as woven titanium, with a knot binding it together above a loose frayed end. It spilled light like the fire through a diamond in scattered droplets across his throat. Muire slipped a finger inside the necklace and heard him cry softly. A liquid sound, shattered, the sound that would seem to give voice to what heaved in her own heart. But he was the Grey Wolf, pitiless and immoral, hungry and aloof. She would not allow herself to believe he could mourn.

Hands shaking, disbelieving her own audacity—her own complicity—she reached up and knotted a hand around his silver-brindled plait, and pulled his mouth back to her own.

She did not lose consciousness, and she did not exactly lose control, for she knew every instant what it was she did. Her senses burned with unnatural lucidity: the animal scent of his skin, musky and bitter; the texture of callused fingers against her face; the copper-ocean flavor of blood; the fine wool of his
waistcoat and the slippery silk of his shirt and his collar—and the coarse softness of his braid—knotted in her hands.

The weakness of ecstasy left her and she sucked at his mouth with the abandon of a nestling. She clutched at the devil: she dragged at his head as if pulling a lover’s mouth to her own in the final spasm of passion. She tore his hair free and it tumbled around her face with the wild scent of a predatory beast.

She growled like a wolf as she lunged up off the snow against him, heard herself sobbing in fierceness as his hands lifted off her face and he tried to back away. She clung to him, and he had to take her wrists in his hands again and set her back against the trunk of the Tree until she stopped struggling.

He had no easy time of it. She was stronger than she had been, as strong as she was in her youth when she had built a cairn for all her brothers save this one, and she would not release her hold on his hair, or his collar. The rose-thorns cut her as they struggled, the frozen leaves and petals shattered through his hair. The Light that flared around them, pulsing with every pass back and forth of their breath, made the wet bark of the Tree gleam blackly, and cast in stark relief details that had blurred in dim starlight for millennia. He barely managed to hold her, and when she got her hand free once she grasped his head in clutching fingers and nearly brought his mouth back down.

Oh, brother, the hunger. . . . !

She expects him to laugh, in triumph and wrath, at her humiliation and desire. But she feels him through the places where their skin touches, and he is full of only sorrow and gratification and guilty, nauseated, satisfied need.

At last, he pins her against the Tree and holds her at arm’s length, elbows locked, until she stops fighting. It pleases her
savagely to make him struggle, to see effort clench his face. She curls her hand into a fist around the torn coarse strands of his hair and struggles to recollect her composure.

She cannot stop licking her lips, and all she can taste is blood. He bit her, and then she split her lips again upon his teeth, and his on hers. His hair, so sleek before, floats in a tangle like a halo around his face. It is smeared with blood from the small cuts on her hands.

She leans back against the Tree as he releases her, turning her face, unable to hold his gaze. Her fingers quiver; she could finish him in a few beats of their twinned hearts.

“In the old days,” she says, “that was a wedding.”

“Tomorrow,” he answers, licking the blood from his mouth, “tomorrow this time, judge me again.”

She sees it on his face, in the trembling of his hands, in the way he reaches to run a finger between that silken collar and the bruised welt she’s left on his skin with her twisting. She knows it in her blood, with the knowledge that comes with the breath she’s stolen from him. He apprehends how she feels.

She feels . . . strong.

T
here was no shimmer as Muire and the iron beast vanished. No rainbow light, no pulse of sound, no whisper, even, of disturbed air. Nothing. Just a flat plane of vanishment, as if they stepped forward through an invisible doorway, and then—nothing.

Cathoair reached forward instinctively, as if his hand could somehow snake across the yards between them and close on Muire’s arm.
A vengeance specialist,
he thought numbly.
Yeah, I’ll say. Cahey, there’s dumb, and there’s whatever you’ve caught.
His fingers closed on air, a futile pinching motion, and as he bounced on the balls of his feet to regain his balance, he let it fall to his side. A coil of twisted plastic that someone would soon salvage blew across the little courtyard, rattling on cobblestones. She was gone, every hair of her. Cathoair was alone and soaked-through-cold, bruises that would be black-and-blue by morning swelling on his cheek, his shin, his elbow.