All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) (34 page)

Muire wondered if they were so fierce in bed together.

The door clicked behind her as she went back to Cristokos. She was shaking almost too hard to hand him his bowl. Gallantly, he pretended he didn’t notice.

He was trembling a little himself.

“How does that one plan to end Her without destroying the
city?” Cristokos gestured with the bowl, chittering as wine slopped across his knuckles. He transferred the bowl to the other hand and tongued the fluid off.

Muire sat down. “That’s possible. I think . . . if problematic. Do you happen to know how she maintains the levitation on the Institute? I know there’s a stasis. But you were her lab assistant—”

“If She falls, does the Tower fall?”

“That’s how it works in novels,” Muire said, apologetic.

Cristokos sipped the wine. “A combination of effects—engineering, technomancy. Levitation, augmented by a motion-stasis that affects the foundation, as that one has surmised.”

“Nothing else? What about the orrery?”

“The orrery is discrete from the levitation spell. But the levitation does rely on gyroscopic stabilizers,” he said. “It resets against them. Technomancy, but as far as this one is aware they are fail-safe.”

“So if we were to
stop
the orrery . . .”

Muire had never before seen a rat smirk. “This one thinks it
might
work.”

The sounds from the bar filtered through the door, and Muire had been tuning them out without realizing it. But another roar—the loudest yet—was followed by silence. And her head came up. And she rose.

Selene had turned too, hand on her whip, when Muire glanced aside to see if she was imagining the oppressive quality of the quiet. She nodded, and Muire moved past her, toward the door, leaving the unmans in the room. Protected.

She was not thinking enough to pray. Just moving. Into a silent room that smelled of blood and strong drink.

Aethelred was not at his post. He had crossed to the corner,
near the ring but not in it, hunkered over someone on the floor. Muire thought she should be moving faster, shoving bystanders aside—she was a doctor, for all the good it had ever done her, for all the good it would do her now—but she just kept pacing, slowly, methodically, unable to get a clear look through the crowd.
Well,
she thought with terrible lucidity,
that makes everything much simpler, doesn’t it?

Until she saw Cathoair squatting inside the ring, back against a padded cornerpost, arms draped over his knees and long fingers dangling. And
then
she began to run.

Aethelred was trying to breathe for Astrid. He was doing everything he could, but from the loose way her head rolled on her neck when he started the chest compressions, Muire knew. Astrid’s eyes were glistening slits, whites purpling with the leakage from burst capillaries, and Muire stopped beside her body for longer than she should have, to nerve herself before she stepped into the ring.

Coward.

She expected Kasimir to contradict her, but he was silent inside her, a deep and audient void. Muire stepped forward, touched the rope, closed her hand around it, swung into the ring. Cathoair lifted his face, blood and sweat streaked across his cheeks, an awful hope bright in its corners.

Muire shook her head.

The only reaction was a stilling. If she had not known him, she would have seen nothing but an impassive face remain impassive. But her hand went to her throat, for a brief second before she made it extend toward him.

Silently, he took it.

She pulled his slack weight up, helping him balance on his bare feet. He was limping on the right, and left bloody foot-prints.
The sole was split. He wasn’t feeling the pain yet. When she released his hand to put her arm around him, it hung like a withered leaf on his arm.

Muire turned him from the body, but his head kept swiveling, craning on the long, elegant neck. “Come on, Cahey. Come on. Upstairs.”

He let her lead him. “She stepped into it,” he said.

M
uire sat beside him, close but not quite touching, in his plain little room with the mattress on the wooden floor. They leaned shoulder to shoulder against the wall, while hours straggled by and Cathoair did not speak.

The mirrors reflected enough light to gray the world under the Tower by the time the rhythm of his breathing changed. “I can’t do this anymore.”

“Do you need to?”

“I have responsibilities.” His voice was cracked and dry.

Quietly, with all the assurance that had never worked to convince her, either, Muire said, “You do not have to carry the world alone.”

He drew and held a shallow breath. “I think I hate you right now.”

But when she reached for his hand, he let her take it. “I wouldn’t blame you. Was this my fault?”

“The wolf was. What he—” And then he stopped, swallowed, and did tug his hand free, so he could knuckle at his eyes.

Muire stood, fetched a bowl of water. He had not moved when she returned. She helped him hold it while he drank, as his hands still didn’t seem to work properly. He didn’t protest
when she dampened a handkerchief and wiped the blood from his face, washed his foot, improvised a bandage—but he also didn’t help. When she sat back, he said, “I’m kidding myself. You’re not the reason he came looking for me.”

“No,” she said. “You are.”

“Why?”

A hell of a question to answer, but he had asked, and now she had to find a way. “You used to be somebody we both knew,” she said. “Back when the world was beginning.”

“You’re talking about reincarnation.”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” He stretched against the wall.

He was still naked, except for his fighting silks, and the sweat had dried on his skin. Muire couldn’t understand how he wasn’t freezing. She anticipated the next questions with dread—who was he, what was he to you—but he surprised her.

“Is that why
you
found me?”

“No. I found you because I was looking for him.”

He breathed out, shuddering, and put the bowl down between his knees so he could lay his forehead on crossed arms. “Well, that’s something, then. I can still hear him in my head.”

“I know,” she said.

“Is that what you did to Selene?”

“Yes.”

It was strange, sitting there in the cold dark with him, both silhouetted by the faint light filtering through the window. Strange, and very quiet.

He said, “This is—really hard.”

“She saved your life,” Muire prompted.

Passionless: “So I could kill her.”

Kasimir, what do I do?

If I knew that
, he answered,
I would have done it for you centuries ago.

“Cathoair,” she said, “I’m sorry.”

She shouldn’t have been startled when he turned and bit. But as Aethelred had observed, she wasn’t very good at people. Still, the venom lacing his voice took her aback. “What do
you
know about it?”

“Why? Because I could never have done something so terrible that I knew I could never make amends for it? No matter how long I try, or how desperately I wish I had done something different?”

“You’re an
angel
.”

“I have had,” she said, pulling away, turning to face him, “a great deal of time to make mistakes.”

He stared up at her. She crouched before him, resting on one knee. She said, “That girl was your friend.”

“Astrid,” he corrected, tonelessly.

“You screwed up, kid.”

He had not expected her to say that. His eyes focused, and he looked at Muire as if trying to remember who she was. And she grabbed him by the biceps and the chin and hauled him up. He flinched when the weight came down on his split foot.
Good.
A reaction. Something was getting through.

He leaned over her, tottering, and she held him up by main strength. “You did something terrible. You were distracted, and you went into the ring, and you got your friend killed.”

He cringed as if struck, and shook his head,
no.

There’s a ruthless utility in self-loathing. Hatred can keep you alive, keep you bound until time has a chance to turn weeping wounds to puckered scars.

He strained against her grip, but she held him. She spat the
words in his face, every one a jagged knife to cut them both. “You killed her. You have to carry that. It was your fault.”

“No,” he said, and then, very quietly: “Yes. Oh, Light. I’ll do anything. Just—”

But you can’t bargain, and you can’t trade, and he knew it even as he said it. He wanted to go limp, and she hit him. She cursed him. She slapped him as hard as she dared, and she called him a coward and a fool and a hundred other things she had called herself over the long, long weary years.

He took it all, as if he were one of her statues, and she shook him harder and pushed him up against the wall. “No,” she said. “You don’t get to give up. You don’t deserve self-pity. You don’t deserve to rest. You have something to atone for now, and you’re going to live up to everything she wanted you to be.”

The silence was broken only by the unsteady rasp of his breathing. Muire grabbed him around the back of his neck, knotted the fingers of her other hand in his hair. “You are going to live long enough to make it up to her, you son of a bitch.”

He grabbed her by the shoulders and tried to throw her across the room. She held on. They both went down, scrambling, pulling hair, gouging. She tried to pin his wrists and he got in a good backhanded smack that split the inside of her cheek against her teeth. She swore again, grabbed his hand, tore at his hair, pulled his face around and kissed him as hard as she could.

He—convulsed. Shoved, both hands flat against her collarbones. And then he wrapped his arms around her and hauled, squeezed, face buried in her shoulder, wrenching out animal sobs.

She thought he would never stop weeping. She held him,
said his name, muttered nonsense. She told him she loved him, and he flinched, and she told him the truth: that the wound would never heal, but someday it would be just a bitter scar.

Eventually he collapsed against her, breathing like a rattling engine, and she held him down against her shoulder and stroked his hair, pushing the wet locks aside. She said, “I’m going to tell you something that might make sense to you in ten years, or never. You won’t want to hear it right now, but you need to remember.”

He backed away against the wall before he nodded, very carefully, as if he’d suddenly realized how much his head and neck hurt. Her eyes must have filled up with light, for she could see him clearly now. He smelled of tears and sweat, and his expression was too thoughtful, too measured; a look Muire associated with the worst of news.

It’s not a question of if you will lose him. It is only a question of when.

Not if he loses me first.
Oh, but how would that be better?

She had sent Kasimir away.

There are times when you just can’t stand to be loved.

He drew the tips of his long dark sweet-smelling fingers across her lips. She closed her eyes, the better to memorize his scent. It took him so long to frame the words that she did not at first understand. “I’ll understand if you can’t forgive me.”

Not a denial. Not sending her away. “
Forgive
you?”

“For . . .” He sounded as if his throat were closing around the words. He wrapped his arms around his knees, drawing them against his chest. “You shouldn’t—ever—forgive somebody who hits you. They don’t stop. You should go.”

“Oh.” She tried to smooth his hair, but his hair was not a smoothable sort. “I hit you first.”

He stared at her. His lips twitched. He started to laugh, brutally, and then he started to choke. Muire thought he was going to vomit, but he didn’t, quite.

When he had quieted and was breathing again, in tortured gasps, she stroked his cheek and said what she had to say with all the force of will she could put behind it. “It’s not my forgiveness you need. It’s your own.”

He rocked back and forth, slowly, shaking his head. Muire couldn’t tell if he was listening, but his eyes were on her.

“But in the meantime, Cathoair, you use whatever you have to. No matter how dark it is. No matter how it cuts you up, if it lets you feel
anything,
if it lets you keep fighting—use it. Live. Get through.”

He thought about it, and then he nodded.

“You’re right. I don’t want to hear that.” He reached for her, kissed her blindly. “I need—”

“Tell me.”

“He won’t leave me alone,” Cathoair said, softly. “He won’t get out of my head.”

“He won’t,” she said. “That’s one of the things we get to live with too.”

He closed his eyes. He averted his face, and covered hers with his spider-stretched fingers. “Will you . . . ?”

“Kiss you like that.” Cold understanding. Sharp and reckless. Ice on the edge of a knife.

“Do it.”

Muire looked between his fingers, felt his hand slide down her face. Drew a breath that couldn’t steady. “Take off your
silks,” she said, reaching to unbutton her own collar. “I want to feel your skin.”

C
athoair was trembling, this time, and Muire was the strong one. Strange how quickly roles can change. Fragile turquoise sparks flashed over and between them when they kissed; when she breathed him in and gave him back, over and over again; when she pushed him down on his back and took him inside of her. Glowing droplets beaded his skin like a dew of sweat, smearing against her hands and forearms when she hooked them under his shoulders and pulled him up, covering his open mouth with her own. Dark poetry surged her veins—branding, cauterizing. They were netted over, bound by viscous, slender strands of light that slid and stretched between their skins, their mouths, their loins, their fingertips. It tangled between like sweat, like saliva, like semen, like hope.

His eyes were so bruised in the glow of her own that the hazel seemed indigo. The healed marks on the backs of his fingers caught her lip when he brushed his hand across her mouth, and he wept again, hot against her throat.

When they were done, he did not sleep. And only the gray reflected radiance of morning washed the old wild sheen of starlight from his skin.