All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (23 page)

I think . . . I must take you to see Cristokos.

M
uire had never flown very much. She’d preferred to avoid mechanical transportation when she could. There had been the brief jaunt astride Kasimir when she was shock-sickly and out of her mind with pain, but that was both transient and delimited within the walls of the nighttime city. Other than that—aircars, rarely, a few short plane flights, twice a semi-ballistic. Oh, and she’d stood on the moon, once, when there were still tourist flights. It was only money, and she hadn’t been able to resist that.

This was different. Kasimir’s wings rowed the air with long, indefatigable strokes—like a heron’s or a raven’s, rather than a raptor’s hover—and to Muire, crouched along his neck, it seemed as if his body rose and fell between them, rather than the other way around. He took them into the air while they were still by the roots of the tree, spiraling up through branches that made a seeming two-dimensional composition in matte-black against the bottomless indigo of the starlit night.

Does the sun ever rise here?

There is no sun here,
said Kasimir.
It was destroyed.

Muire’s eyesight was better in the dark than any human’s, and now, though it was restored to what it had been before the Last Day, she still found herself hoping Kasimir’s was much better than her own.

The branches they swung between were enormous.
This is what a tree is to a sparrow,
she thought, though there were neither trees nor sparrows anymore.
Is the tree alive?

Without light, there is no need for leaves.
Kasimir couldn’t shrug in flight.
But can such a thing die, I wonder?

We did,
she answered. Which was true, and useless, and she closed her gloved hands in his mane and let his furnace heart warm her, though the frigid wind of his ascent stung her eyes. She cast her head back, and for a moment allowed herself the illusion that they could climb as far as the stars, that there was escape and the chance of homecoming.

Foolish, of course. You could never go back. Only forward. And sometimes, there was nothing to go forward into except the ice.

This old world had ended in war and famine and chill. What arrogance was it, for her to imagine that she could save the new one? Wounded as it was, burned to the heart and scarred irretrievably, wasn’t it better to let it die and hope something clean rose from the ashes? To tear it down, and start over again?

Wolf,
she told the voice in her head,
I do not heed you.

But neither could she silence him, and all his insinuations.

Niflheim was as it had been, season of mist and shadows and painful memories. She knew when they shifted home, because the transition from darkness to predawn was as abrupt as
if someone had lifted the shade from a cage. The rich translucent silk of the dead world’s firmament vanished into mist and was then replaced by a thinner sky, pewter with morning light and sere. Air that had been thin and cold choked Muire with the next breath, and she tugged the faceplate of her helm down. The filtered air was better.

Below, she saw the glow of the Defile and the lights of Eiledon flickering fitfully, no more bright than the stars. She thought they would descend, but instead Kasimir spiraled higher and began beating East, toward morning.

The sun’s rays struck Kasimir, at his height, before they reached the ground below. Without her polarizing faceplate, Muire would have been dazzled; as it was, she trained her eyes on the ground and watched its slow unveiling until the moment when shadows appeared, cast by the direct rays of the sun. They were not high enough to really see the terminator, but just knowing night still gave way to day was a relief. She had not realized, until it slipped away, what a pall Mingan’s graveyard world had cast over her.

Valdyrgard stretched below, and she watched it skim beneath the racing shadow of Kasimir’s wings. So much devastation: everything might have been a desert, that was not ruins. She could tell hill from valley, but the slopes were eroded in deep badland runnels, and farm from forest was beyond her. Even the soil was dead; bones—white, or stained ocher—should have long crumbled, but where there was nothing to decompose them they lay heaped or peeking through the cuts of dry washes, glinting here and there like mica chips in granite.

They passed over a silent ocean, where no gulls wheeled, and its beaches were heaped with bones. All the life the sea had
cast up to molder, worn by the water and buried in the sand, but still piled high.

Which is better, a world of ice, or a world of bones?

Kasimir did not answer. Instead, he asked,
How is it that you have not flown over this land before?

“I didn’t like flying.” With the helm closed, she could speak and hope to hear herself.

Kasimir interrogated her statement, although not really in words. She seemed to him to adapt to flying very well.

“You are not an aircraft,” she said. “It’s different.”

Aircraft? Helicopters? How did you travel?

“I walked,” she answered. “There almost always seemed to be plenty of time.”

I
t was rising noon by the time Kasimir turned sharply toward the mountains on the left, and Muire—who had been lost in her own bitter reflections—whooped and grabbed at the pommel. He wouldn’t throw her. She never doubted him. But intellectual surety did little to silence the thunder of her blood.

The valraven climbed hard, straining, the rattle of his wings deafening as he pumped for altitude. Clouds obscured Muire’s sight for a time, and when Kasimir broke clear she saw a pass, a stark saddleback ridge between two peaks. The air thinned and cleared again as they rose, and she opened her faceplate to feel its sting.

When Kasimir crested the ridge, his hooves so low over the stone she thought they might strike sparks—she shouted.

She had been wrong about the trees and the sparrows, and that at last—after all the long weary hours—silenced the Grey Wolf’s nihilistic cynicism. Because below Kasimir’s wings, a long steep valley—practically a canyon—bounded in pink granite cliffs stretched into the distance. The base of every slope was thick with pines, and where the pines gave way, wildflowers grew in rank profusion. At the far end of the gorge, a stream tumbled rock to rock, bouncing down natural terraces from its
source on the shoulder of that peak, splashing rainbows up the face of each escarpment.

The cold wind brought Muire the smell of pine trees. Her hands knotted in Kasimir’s manes, she fought for calm, but her composure cracked, and tears streaked her cheeks until they froze there.
It’s real?

Kasimir, descending on taut wings, answered,
Yes.

He touched down lightly on a rocky part of the streambed, hooves sizzling in the water, feathertips flicking a spray of crystals into the sun before he settled them. He edged to the bank, careful of the tree branches, and paused beside a ragged boulder of convenient height. Muire swung her leg over his necks—easier than the wings—and slid down his shoulder, aiming her feet to avoid the protruding bits of a logjam. When she was grounded, she patted Kasimir’s shoulder and hopped down the rock to the mossy bank below. Kasimir, meanwhile, splashed away into the deepest part of the stream and lowered his heads to drink.

Muire turned back, under the feather-needled bower of the pines, damselflies dancing sequined by the water, and called out, “Where do I find Cristokos?”

Follow the path. He awaits.

And that would be the only answer she would get. He’d been playing coy with her for the entire journey, neither willing to identify Cristokos, nor tell her much about him—except that he was a mage, and a friend. The wolf in her might have been suspicious, but then the real wolf had tried to lead her to be suspicious of her mount. And unlike einherjar, the tarnished were perfectly capable liars.

So Muire, choosing to trust the stallion, allowed herself to be led. If he wanted to play surprise-games, so be it. She could give him that pleasure.

In the back of her head, she felt him snort.

There was indeed a trail, a quite clear one that led diagonally down and away from the streambed. It had been worn by many feet, she thought, or a few feet over a long time, the roots that crisscrossed between the sponge of needles polished like the bones she’d flown over. The understory was clear of deadfall for a long way on either side, and she could see places, gaps in the canopy and divots in the earth, where big trees had come down and must have been sawn up and dragged away. Small trees sprouted in those sunny intervals, racing toward the light, and Muire knew that in each case either two or three would grow together, or the one to climb highest would soon shade the others out. In each sunny patch the saplings had been weeded thin, only the strongest contenders left to make their own fate.

All the evidence confirmed that someone lived here, and managed this wood.

She found herself stopping at random intervals to stare at flickering birds—chickadees, a cardinal—and once crouching to exclaim over a clutch of small toadstools. They grew up among the pine needles, ocher at their tips and jade-colored around the rims, with cream-orange gills and stems shading to peridot at the top. The caps and stems were sticky with some excretion, and as glossy as if they had been glazed and fired in a kiln. They smelled faintly sweet, faintly earthy, and she bent close to detect the aroma but did not touch.

They were so lovely, growing undisturbed and unhus-banded in the shade of those carefully tended trees, that Muire found herself undone. Unmade completely, by a little plant a couple of centimeters across.

She dropped a knee to the path to steady herself against the nausea of grief. It was too much, barbed and bitter under her rib
cage and up her throat, so she hung her head between her shoulders and curled her armored hands into the loam while tears and mucus dripped from her eyes and nose. She wished she dared howl, throw back her head and wail, for that might chase the knives from her breast. But she was caged in her heart, as if a bruising collar twisted off her air, and all she gave voice was an ashen whimper squeezed between her lips and the back of the gauntlet she stuffed against her mouth.

So much nothing. It was bottomless, and when she rose each day and did what she found before her to do, she coped simply by not thinking of it. But there was the wolf, as if he stood before her, all that void and emptiness given tongue and eyes.

This time tomorrow,
she repeated,
judge me again.

She could not. No longer. There could be no judgment.

But as she stood, and wiped her mouth and nose on the corner of her much-abused cloak, she determined: there
could
be a reckoning.

She pulled her helm off so the wind could stir her sweat-lank hair. Then she turned, moved through the trees, let the light fall upon her, around her. Songbirds flickered through that same light; she paused to hear the drum of a woodpecker. That could have brought fresh tears, but this time she was ready; set them aside. Bundled and labeled for later.

The path crossed a rill, a tributary to the stream Kasimir had shown her, at which Muire ducked to rinse her face. When she stood, water trickling under her armor to dampen her shirt, she cast her head back and breathed deep, through her nose, as if to clear the lingering stuffiness of her moment of hysterics. This air rode down from mountain heights. It carried the scent of snow laced with alpine flowers, herbs and sunwarmed grasses, the creosote of pines. And no trace of the one she sought.

Downwind,
she thought, and only then realized that she was scenting the air like a wolf.

M
ore down, a long walk alone, and she began to appreciate Kasimir’s wisdom. She had needed this, the peace, the time in isolation during which to detach, examine, and collect herself. There was a great deal to fathom: the wolf and what he had done; this place; the appalling truth of hope.

There was no chance of coping with any of it. The most she could manage was to put it away for a time.

Which was, after all, what she had been doing since before the Last Day. Fold it up, fold up the lavender within it, and seal it neatly away. No matter what it was; no matter how terrible. That had kept her alive. After a fashion.

The trees began to thin, the pines giving way to mixed growth, and more sun and warmth filtered through. Muire thought she must be reaching the valley floor. She came to another brook, the slope slight enough here that it pooled among the roots of beech and oak and she must follow the trail around. It led her to a bridge of peeled lashed logs over the outflow. By the scorch marks on the wood, she deduced who might have dragged them there. When she crossed, her footsteps made a hollow sound, reflecting off water. At some point in her descent she had stopped limping.

Below the confluence, she caught a glimpse of something black and massive, the whiff of machine oil and char. “Oh, if he made me walk this and then beat me down here—”