16

Berkano (family)

After another long flight, Kasimir returned Muire to Eiledon in the middle of the night. The trickiest part of the journey was passing through the Defile unnoticed. Muire was certain, given what she now understood, that she did not wish to come to Thjierry’s notice any more than she already had. But Muire, along with the Technomancer and a handful of other magicians, had raised the thing; if she could not pass through it undetected, no one could. And so they came in under cover of darkness, Muire whistling a spell of concealment until they were down.

She went home first, leading Kasimir in to her foundry through the glass courtyard doors, wondering if they had managed to sneak past Sig or if she would have some explaining to do. The stallion settled down in the corner by the forge like a giant dog, wings furled tightly and one chin resting beside his hooves. The far neck craned over the crest of the near one, head propped on his own mane, as he observed her sleepily. She wondered for a moment how his brain worked; was his consciousness divided, or a gestalt? Was one head dominant, or did they serve different functions? It was obvious at least that one could keep watch while the other slept . . . but how did it work?

Magic, he said.

Which was, she supposed, a good enough answer. She stumped upstairs to shower, change, and charge her vii so she could check messages. The poor thing had gone dead seeking signal in the otherworld, and she owed Cathoair an explanation. In his place, she would be frantic.

She placed it in the induction field and powered it on. As she had expected, once the happy birthday was over with, the message chime dinged fast and frequently enough that she lost count. She scrolled through the list once while she was stripping for the shower and did not find Cathoair’s code tag. Astrid’s and Aethelred’s, however, each appeared more than a dozen times.

“Shadows,” she said, and checked the first and last couple of messages in the queue.

And then she was flying down the stairs, pulling a clean shirt over her head so fast she tore it along a seam, hopping on one flour-white leg after the other to pull her trousers on. Kasimir did not need to ask what the problem was; she showed him, and he started to heave himself to his feet.

“No,” she said. “Stay here. You’re conspicuous—” an understatement “—and I can call you if I need you.”

What shall I do if someone enters?

No one was likely to, except Sig.

Muire found socks and boots and slung Nathr’s baldric over her shoulder. “Pretend you’re a work in progress,” she answered, and ran still-barefoot for the door.

Perhaps it would have been wise to have called ahead, but Muire had left her vii sitting in the charger, and even if its battery were not flat, by the time she remembered it was too late by far to go home and fetch it. She actually considered calling a cab, but thought she could run the distance in less time than it would take for transportation to arrive.

And so she ran.

Flat out, dodging the street traffic, her feet slapping a rhythm for her breathing. Running now, as if it made a difference. Running as if the time for haste were not already irretrievably lost.

Nathr banged her spine, her shirt flapping in the wind of her passage, one sock twisted inside a hurried boot. And people cleared a path for her, as if her haste obliged passage. They stepped aside, or she sidestepped, and once someone who saw her coming across the bridge shouted Make a hole and miraculously, the hole appeared.

She cleared the descent into the Well in a controlled avalanche, down the steps in two bounds, and plunged into the crowds of streetlit merrymakers, cutpurses, and whores. A Mongrel might have detained her, curious where she was bound with such dispatch, but he never so much as brushed her sleeve.

She hit the doorway of the Ash & Thorn still trotting, and almost got clotheslined by the bouncer. But she managed to stop before tumbling into his embrace, which she had to assume was good luck, given his expression.

“You have some nerve,” he said, and latched onto her wrist with a grip she could have broken without effort.

Instead, she let him hold her, though he squeezed hard enough to creak a mortal woman’s bones. “Has Cathoair come back?”

“They’ve been calling you, trying to find him,” the man answered, taken aback enough by her directness to slip a little. Hrothgar, that was his name. The one with the blue hair, whom Cathoair had kissed in the ring.

Just Muire’s luck.

Yrenbend’s remembered voice mocked: There are seen hands and unseen hands, little sister. Angels do not believe in coincidence.

“I’m not the one who ended up a rat,” she muttered.

“Excuse me?”

Oh, shadows, she’d said it out loud. The wolf-sherd laughed in her heart. She shook her head, wondering if the jangle of voices was already driving her mad.

In any case, the hand on her wrist was plain enough for all to see.

“That’s why I’m here,” she said. “I hadn’t been home to check messages. I came as soon as I heard—” She stepped back a pace, so her arm leashed between them.

Hrothgar gave a small tug. Not hard. “Come on. I think we’d better talk to Astrid.”

He led her downstairs without releasing her, and that he left the front door unguarded reinforced Muire’s deductions about how seriously Cathoair’s friends took his disappearance. Hrothgar brought her through the crowd—thinned, now that the fighting was done for the evening—and into a back room she should have suspected the existence of if she had ever taken a moment to wonder.

And there he left her. The latch clicked as he pulled the door shut.

Astrid would doubtless be along in a moment, so Muire took advantage of that moment to straighten her blouse and appraise her situation. Hrothgar hadn’t tried to relieve her of her blade, which was for the best—both for his own safety and for what it revealed about the circumstances of her custody. Also, the room in which she had been left was a failure as a prison cell. Most mortals would have been able to break the door or the lock, and the hinges were on the inside. Even if they had taken her sword, this place was full of potential weapons: the weights on the exercise bench; the chain from which a kick bag depended; the bottles of alcohol; the table and the chairs.

Muire slipped out of her baldric, hung Nathr over one post of a ladder-back chair, and sat to wait.

No more than five minutes later, the door swung open again and Astrid and Aethelred entered. The chrome-skulled bartender breathed like a bellows in the dim room, which made Muire suspect he must have been hauling his metal armature up and down stairs at speed, and Astrid’s hair was unbraided and had left a long wet semi-transparency down the shoulder and front of her misbuttoned blouse. She had a bowl of water in her hand, and reached out gingerly to set it on the table-edge within Muire’s reach. “Hrothgar said you had been running.”

“Thank you,” Muire said. She cupped it in one hand and let the water touch her lips, as much to hide her face for a moment as to quench her thirst, and waited for Astrid to play her next card while Aethelred leaned against the wall beside the door.

Astrid, no disappointment, cleared her throat. “What exactly is it you’ve gotten Cahey into?”

“I don’t know where he is,” Muire answered. “I haven’t spoken with him in over a day. Tell me what I can do to help.”

She put all her conviction into it, sitting back in the chair, doing her absolute best to appear relaxed. Astrid just eyed her, fingers tapping on the opposite forearm. “So you don’t have any idea why the Technomancer has arrested him?”

There was someone in Astrid too. The intensity in her expression bordered on a flash of light, and Muire, full of the Grey Wolf’s strength, could no more have missed it than she could have missed her fingers on the end of her own arm. As if her name wasn’t enough of a clue, you idiot?

The folded arms, the arch expression, were such that Muire could almost see the outline of her long-lost sister, as if Astrid wore a waelcyrge’s ghost as a cloak. And Muire wasn’t sure if it was herself or the wolf-sherd that quailed most when she realized who it was that stood before her, wrapped in mortal flesh and innocent of her own existence.

Sigrdrifa.

For a moment, Muire feared she’d said the name aloud.

Was it a doom then, that they would be betrayed from within by the same hands as before? The wolf-sherd bristled in her bosom, all bared teeth and lust after blood. Muire, with effort, gentled it, though it cost her. It was not yet time to make such judgments. If it would ever be her place to do so.

If not yours, then whose?

Muire could not answer him. Nor Astrid, neither. But it was a relief to bare her teeth, and so she did, and said, “I can’t be certain. But I know how to win him back.”

The threat of death is not what baffles the wolf. Death cannot dismay him. But the possibility that his death could thwart his purpose—that binds him in the shadows, keeps him from stepping through the Technomancer’s wards into her Tower.

It would be easy to enter. A single short step out of shadows, and he would be among her creatures like a fox among chickens. Like a wolf among sheep.

Once, he would have taken that single, short step. Out of the half-world and into the fire. Strange to think on it now, when he is old and moth-eaten, but he had been impulsive once. Quick to love, quick to lunge.

He has learned a great deal about trickery since. The Technomancer has survived her enemies in this fortress for more than three hundred years. None of those enemies are—were—the Grey Wolf, it is true. But Mingan is not fool enough to think that makes them unformidable.

There was a time when he knew himself unbreakable, unrivalled. Unmatched in hunger and strength. There was a time when he knew a great many things. And he has learned that he had been wrong about most of them.

Now, he has the rage of the sun-eater and the sorrow he drank down with Muire’s breath, and he is certain of nothing. So he lingers between spaces, liminal, indeterminate, watching for a glimpse of his enemy’s face or the face that never was his lover’s, and waiting.

He has also learned to wait.