All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) Read Free

sword. No blade for a mighty-thewed warrior, Nathr, but a light, quick sword, still long enough that little Muire had to wear it slung between her shoulders rather than at her hip. She was the least of her sisters, small and quiet, a sparrow among falcons.
    She still could wield her sword.
    Her fingers tightened, the blade’s weight pushing her arm down. The sdada scrabbled against her, smelling faintly of loam and rotten meat, dead green eyes glowing behind clouded corneas like a sun behind mist. Its silence offended her.
    She grunted as its skull slammed into her face, and hammered its head with her pommel. The teeth loosened incrementally.
    A dam burst. Muire shouted, slammed the beast again, let the stallion support her weight as she leaned back and kicked the vile-wolf in the ribs. Her flesh tore under its teeth, nauseating bursts of agony with every blow she delivered. She hit it again, gasping names, prayers—
All-Father, Bright Mother
—and knocked it back, struck it free. She found a breath as it rolled in the snow, tumbled to its feet, crouched and snarled silently.
    Fine
, she thought.
Die in silence.
    Not me.
    She found another breath, and her defiance, and she sang.
    Let it bring down every sdada left on the battlefield. Let them come. She had the stallion at her back, and blood trickling from her split lip and broken nose, blood flowing from her savaged forearm. She had death in her right hand and death in her heart. Let them come.
    She would welcome them.
    She waded forward, the snow numbing her wounded thigh, and swung her ink-black blade, singing between ragged breaths, gasping the words over a broken melody. And Nathr flared blue-white in her hand, bright as a full moon on snow, streaking the drifts with hard-edged deceptive shadows you could fall into, you could cut yourself on.
    Muire flinched from the light.
    She raised her right hand as if to shield her eyes, angling the blade down. The sdada leaped, thinking her dazzled, and she cut it from the air. Nathr went through it, scattering flesh and shadows and bits of bone, leaving Muire staring at her hand and the undimmed blade as if they were a stranger’s.
    Muire heard the stallion grunt, felt him lunge forward, uncoiling off powerful haunches. She turned in time to see him catch the fourth vile-wolf by the throat and shake it like a ratting dog shakes vermin. Bones snapped but it still moved, sickly, brokenly. He dropped it to the ground and began tearing out chunks with his teeth.
    She stepped forward, around the dragging wing, and finished it with a thrust.
    Like a clockwork unwound, she paused there, her blade still transfixing the sdada, her head bowed, plaits and cloak whipping forward as the wind veered behind her. Something stroked her cheek—a tear, already freezing. Her cold fingers numbed on Nathr’s hilt.
    The stallion nudged her hard with his muzzle and fell back into the snow with a thump. Muire turned, startled, but there was nothing behind her but the wind. She stood for a moment, tottering, her blade gleaming as bright in her hand as if all her brothers and sisters stood beside her. For a brief, cleansing moment she felt the snow in her hair, the presence of the children beside her.
    And then there was nothing. She opened her eyes on emptiness, on blowing snow, on the already drifted corpses of the sdadown that she and the dying stallion had killed—two for her, one for him, that last one together—and shook her head.
    Wait with me , the stallion said.
    It was not so much words as a terrible ache in her breast. She turned, plowed three steps toward him, and propped her sword against her hip while she fought with the bosses of his harness. The cold of the metal went right to the bone, aching, but she struggled frozen leather through stiff buckles and shoved the ruined saddle off his back. There was a corpse in the snow afew steps away—Olrun, tarnished, who had loved swans and the Hall’s lean brindled wolfhounds, dead, and