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

neither an ally nor an enemy any longer. She had fallen half wrapped in a tattered banner. Muire dragged the saddle over beside her, covering her with the bloodstained leather and the blanket, a crude sort of crypt.
    And then Muire sat down in the crimsoned snow beside the stallion. She leaned against his shoulder and laid her shining, naked blade across her knees. And he in return draped his unbroken neck over her shoulder, his muzzle pressed to her armored chest. She hooked her arm up and reached around, under his throttle, to scratch behind his opposite ear. Frozen blood flaked from his mane.
    “I’ve nowhere else to be,” she answered, and tilted her temple against his silken velvet cheek.
    Sometime in the night, the snow stopped falling.
     
    K asimir was not dead by morning, and neither was the waelcyrge. Her oozing wounds sealed, then stopped, the blood freezing or scabbing over them. She breathed against his cheek, her eyes closed, her heart slowing. Was this sleep? Kasimir knew mortals slept, but the children of the Light did not, not unless they were more gravely wounded than his new waelcyrge.
    He considered that thought. His.
    He did not
have
to take her. There was no law or rule that demanded he do so. He was valraven, and the choice was his.
    He knew this one. Her name was Muire. She was the littlest of all Light’s children, a poet and a historian and a metalworker rather than a warrior. She had loved Strifbjorn, the war-leader, and the war-leader had been gentle with her but he had notreturned her love. Strifbjorn’s heart—as Kasimir knew, as all the valraven knew, and never mentioned—had already been given.
    She had been very brave, his waelcyrge. He nudged her with his muzzle to wake her, and she blinked and raised her head. Kasimir , he whispered.
    At first she didn’t understand. She scrambled to her feet, limping a little less—not healing like a waelcyrge, but healing. Her sword in her hand, she scanned the brightening horizon for some threat.
    There was nothing. The sky arched enamel-blue, the edge of the cliff where the children of the Light had turned at bay visible as a ragged line of white against the steelier blue of the sea, far below. Kasimir , he said, again, insistently.
    Slowly, she turned, and stared at him. She panted, pain etching shadows under gray eyes that gleamed dimly with starlight for a moment before flickering dark. He stared back, until she lowered the blade and straightened, pressing the flat across her thighs. “You don’t have to do that. I will stay with you.”
    He let his muzzle drop into the snow. Live , he said. He felt the raw desire in her as well, chafing at her resignation, her cold certainty that she had betrayed the Light as surely as the tarnished and deserved nothing.
    “I cannot—” she said. And then she looked down at the sword in her hands, the sword that still blazed blue-white, dimmer now in daylight, but unmistakable. “Maybe I can.”
    The Dweller Within never came to our aid , Kasimir said, lifting his head as if he could see more of the ocean. The Serpent is not dead, but lies dying. That is why there is no Light for you to call on. No Light but your own.
    “Oh,” his waelcyrge said, without looking up from her sword. And then she stared at him, her irises transparent pewter,the glow of the rising sun refracted through them behind ash-pale lashes, and he saw her throat work above the collar of her mail. She rustled softly, rings chiming on iron rings as she squared her shoulders. “I could ask for a miracle. I don’t even know if it will work, if the Serpent is dying. But I could ask.”
    Kasimir paused. There was no promise such a call would be answered. No reason to believe that the outcome would be an improvement, if it was. Miracles happened, or they did not, and were wonderful or awful—or both—without logic or rhythm. He could find himself healed, remade, destroyed—or ignored, as they had been ignored as they fell to the