13

Raidho (the wagon)

Muire brushed at the spots of scarlet on her armor, expecting them to smear—but they were only rose-petals, adhered by melting snow. Her lacerated hands didn’t sting. She supported herself against the trunk of the enormous tree with the other hand, panting, and expected when she stood on her own her palm would leave smears of blood to freeze upon the bark. But the only dark wetness, illuminated to her preternatural eyesight by the starshine, was the melted snow.

Her hands were healed. And more—the scars on the one Mingan had crushed remained, but they were old and white, and the bone-deep ache had faded.

“You healed me.” Her hair fell across her eyes when she lifted her head. She did not trouble herself to shake it back. Her grimace—she couldn’t call it a smile—felt on her mouth like an animal’s snarl. Light surged from her mouth and from her eyes, dazzling beams that cast Mingan in stark brilliance so his shadow stretched long on the trammeled snow behind him.

“You healed yourself,” he said. “As in the old days. How does it feel to be strong again, angel?”

“I hate thee,” she said, and then her perfect, unblemished hand flew to her mouth.

He was not touching her. He could not actually speak into her mind. But she heard him, close and tender as if his breath warmed her ear. Then in this we are united.

Of course it wasn’t really Mingan. It was merely the splinter of him she carried—would always carry—a shadowy, complex, and twisted thing she did not begin to apprehend. She wondered, if she had married, if she would be better prepared to confront the soul-shard of an immortal. Or if what Mingan had given her—what Mingan was—was as unlike the breath of a child of the Light as it was unlike the clear pale mortal simplicity of Ingraham Fasoltsen’s memory.

But whatever, he was in her; she could taste him on her lips as plainly as vomit. Such a small word. So inoffensive.

Thee.

She pawed at her lips as if she could stuff it back down her throat. The Light that seared from her—the Light that he, tarnished, had returned to her with all her lost strength—flickered and paled.

“Carry me under thy heart, sister,” he whispered. And the Grey Wolf smiled upon her, and vanished.

Judge me again.

Oh, but she did not care to understand him. He was an enemy. It should be enough.

One of his side steps into shadow, the faint rill of Light along his tangled hair, and then where he had stood, nothing. The moment after he was gone, there was Kasimir, ankle-deep in the snow, wings fanned, necks arched as he surveyed the battlefield. Yes, she thought, battlefield, selecting the word with a poet’s care. “Nathr,” she said. “Is she there by you?”

You are well?

“Not exactly. Do you see my sword?”

She is here. Muire—

This time, the note of repressed panic in his not-voice pierced her own fear and disorientation. She waded through the snow to him, knowing he watched her, that he noted her tangled hair and the light shifting through her irises as if through water, her ungloved hands and bitten mouth—no, that was healed as well—knowing that he knew.

And somehow she endured, stumbling through drifts until she could retrieve her blade. The sword blazed in her hand as it had in the dawn of the world, bright as a battle cry, wild as a shout. And Kasimir watched her, and did not judge. There was no need—this sin, she could judge on her own. Was duress an excuse?

Surely not for an angel.

Muire dried the sword with care, blade and hilt, but did not sheathe her. She couldn’t bear, just yet, to be parted from the Light, even though it flowed from a polluted spring, sourced in all the lives the wolf had stolen.

Oh, yes. She knew now why silver might tarnish. And Kasimir, watching her, resting softly in her mind, knew also.

She thought of sending him away again, and going after the wolf alone, a tainted hunter in pursuit of tainted prey. She thought of remonstrating with Kasimir, of showing him what she had fallen to. Each time she thought there was no more bottom, somehow she wound up demonstrating the descent.

He snorted his answer. And she looked at him, her sword burning in her hand with an unclean light, and said, “I don’t understand this.”

You are not tarnished.

“How do you know?”

Your blade knows.

Against that, she had no argument. But she weighed it in her hand a moment, and looked at the way the light fell, the stark blue light and the black tree-trunk and the snow-white snow and the red roses crushed like blood in the pattern of the their struggle. And then she went to him anyway.

She held her hand to his fire, pressed naked flesh tight to withering metal, and felt only warm strength. And then the weight of his head as he reached over her, and pressed his cheek to hers.

I shall not lose you.

Another time, Muire might have waited until they were out of the snow to interrogate Ingraham on his silence. But not today—if days could be said to have any meaning here. Nor was she in a mood to argue with this mortal scrap, not here, calf-deep in the drifts of a dead world. She was healed now, fatted on poisoned strength, and she had Mingan. Though the memories he had left her were fragmentary and confusing, she was determined that they would be enough. One hand on Kasimir for support, Nathr an anchor in her hand, Muire turned herself within.

It was unlike meditation, and also unlike searching one’s own memories. More like searching the fragments of a dozen mirrors heaped in a pile. She had fragments, unreconstructed glimpses and imaginings. Too much of it was random, unreadable. Sheer chaos. But there were things both ghosts had found important, which were recent to each memory.

It had gone beyond simply avenging the dead, and—no matter how she sought to deny it—into some deeper mystery.

Ingraham remembered how he had died. And Mingan remembered how he had done murder. And—though neither of them was happy to share with her—that was a place to start, while she sorted through shatterling histories.

She knew at once when she found the right moment in Ingraham’s memory. The scent and texture of the air, the echo of his footsteps, the cold patter of rain on his hair—all conspired to remind her of the night he died. She walked with him, felt the raw chill of the night and the long, soaked cloth package in his hand. That was the delivery. The important thing. The thing Ingraham Fasoltsen had died for touching.

An unman met him at the foot of the stair he had died upon, and Muire saw her with a shock. A shock that Kasimir echoed, because under the fur and armor, the inhuman proportions and the lanky outline, both he and Muire knew her as soon as Ingraham looked into her eyes.

In Ingraham’s memory, the Black Silk extended her hand to take the bundle, and Muire reached out with her own left hand as if to lay Nathr across her palm. Then she jerked back, staggering in the snow, slipping against Kasimir’s obdurate shoulder. She bruised herself falling, but she was beyond burning now, and it didn’t interrupt the memory. Inside her head, Ingraham extended his arm, and slid the bundle into the unman’s grasp.

As if it were a real dream, a nightmare, Muire hauled herself free only with effort. She leaned on her steed’s shoulder, thickheaded and disoriented, and tried to shake the rag-tatters of phantasm from her psyche but only made her own head spin. If she had stayed with the memory a few minutes longer, she would have lived Ingraham’s death with him again. And she could have lived it through the Grey Wolf also, but she did not care to experience that particular luxury again.

Instead, she considered the unman. Muire had seen her the first time and thought nothing of her. But now she had the wolf in her, and the wolf knew—

Selene. Her name was Selene, and Muire knew it because Ingraham knew it. But that had not always been her name.

Herfjotur.

Kasimir blew a massive breath, snow melting before both his noses. With great sweeps of his antlered head, he swept aside drifts, as if he meant to crop the grass beneath. But instead, he sighed more softly and said of the slave soldier who had, in another life, been his rider: Have we all returned?

Two is not all. “And if we have? What for?”

And what good does it serve if they know not what they were? If they do not recollect what was, they might have stayed dead, and saved us the pain of remembrance.

“Kasimir—”

He waited, alert to her following question.

“The wolf said you were half-siblings. That his sire was your dam. How is that possible?”

It is not, said Kasimir. I have no forebears. I was made as I am. And then a pause, while he shook the snow from his antlers. That is to say, only paler.

Whether he had meant her to or not, she laughed. From the smug expression he twisted over his shoulder, it was no accident, but his next question after she controlled herself was serious. And what sword was that, that Ingraham brought to the moreau?

If he would not call her Herfjotur, then neither would Muire. And if ever Muire had wondered if the Light was all an illusion, if there were in plain truth any world-girdling, world-guiding hand, she doubted no longer. Strifbjorn or

Herfjotur might have been a coincidence. But both of them, reborn and unknowing? No mere trick of fate could be so spectacularly cruel.

Taken in that light, the answer to his question was obvious. “I know what sword it is,” she said. “And if you think a moment, so will you.”

Svanvitr, he said.

“Of course,” she answered. “All you have to do is think about who showed up to claim it.”

And failed.

“Well, yes.” Muire stepped away from Kasimir’s shoulder, half confident she could stand on her own, at last. She slipped Nathr into its sheath across her back, using both hands to steady. “Failure is his habit, after all.”

Kasimir lifted both heads to stare at her, as if disbelieving she had said what she had said. She had never heard bitterness enter his tone, but she thought if she would have, it would have been now. They are, he opined, very dramatic failures. As a rule.

That made it her turn to snort and kick at the snow, so she obliged him. “Saddle, please.”

He made her one in a whirl of light, while she found her helm and gauntlets and pulled them on. As she stretched up to the stirrup, her left hand fisted in his near side mane, she said, “Oh, you know another thing?”

Perhaps.

And useless to point out that it was a rhetorical question. “The Wolf accused me of complicity with Thjierry. Of some blasphemous conspiracy. Now that we know what we know . . .”

It has to do with the swords.

“It must. But I don’t know what use they would be to anyone not waelcyrge or einherjar.”

Kasimir went silent and still, motionless as the statue he resembled. The only sign that we were not frozen in time all over again was the rhythmic drift of steam from his nostrils, a plume for every exhalation.

“Kasimir?”

His diction grew as ponderous as the timbre of his voice. She had never heard him speak this way, as if choosing his words with great care, and the emphasis made her fist her gauntleted hands together.

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

Muire 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.”