The Sea Thy Mistress by Elizabeth Bear Read Free Book Online Page A

woman’s shoulder, then lowered her head to nose among the salt grass for anything that might be good.
    The blond woman squared her shoulders and threw her head back, allowing her eyes to drift half-closed as she tested the scent of the sea breeze. The collar of her blouse gapped a little, and the bull saw something like a run of tears sparkle against the white skin of her throat.
    She turned abruptly back to Borje and thrust out her right hand. He juggled rags and polish, reaching out hesitantly to touch his bifurcated hoof to her palm. “You’re the chapel-keeper? Is there a priest?”
    The bull shook his head. “I’m Borje. We don’t preach here. But people come to look at the statues, and the sea. I can tell you the story if you’d like that.” He hesitated. “Although you said you’d heard it.”
    “I’d like to hear it again,” she said, turning her face away from him to watch the seabirds wheel overhead. Nearby, from the edge of the bluff, a raven fell into the wind. “I’m called Heythe these days, when I’m called anything at all. I’ve come from a long way off, you see.”
    “Then welcome to my door, Heythe. What’s brought you this far?”
    She smiled a smile that filled him with warmth and the will to please. “I travel,” she said. “I trade in stories. And in other things.”

38 A.R.
Summer
    Aethelred hefted the knife in his hand, flexing his fingers around its worn black handle as if that could ease their ache. The blade was old, pre-Desolation, and held an edge like glass, but even so it had been sharpened so many times that the remaining width was thinner than his pinkie finger. Piles of strawberries loomed on the blue and yellow table before him, hulled on the right, not-yet-hulled on the left. The cutting board between his hands was gory with their juices.
    All that, and he couldn’t smell them over the reek of boiling vinegar. Flushed and dripping cloudy sweat from the draggled ends of escaping locks, Aithne bent down by the stove, poking up the fire so it would leap through the stove-holes. She’d laid a board over the sink, and on it were arrayed two dozen mismatched pieces of glassware, each containing a ration of sliced green tomatoes, peppercorns, sugar, salt, cloves, and coriander.
    Aethelred picked up another strawberry, thinking about putting up food for winter and for trade. And thinking of the far-flung trade that had sprung up with such urgent immediacy, once people were free to move about the world again.
    When he was a younger man, he would have been unable to imagine a world in which such a thing was possible, never mind needful. Now he performed the functions of survival without thinking, with the skill of long practice. And with a certain contentment. Useful work was a blessing.
    “Aithne,” he said, when she stood up and hooked the stove door shut with her poker. She reached for her pot holders, glancing over her shoulder on her good side to let Aethelred know she’d heard him.
    He weighed a strawberry in his hand, laid the forefinger of the other hand along the knifeblade, and hulled the berry with a practiced twist. “Have you thought about getting out in the world for a while?”
    “Come over here and handle the funnel, would you?”
    Aethelred put down his knife and came around the table, gathering equipment along the way. He set the sterilized funnel in the first jar, careful to touch it only with the sterilized pliers, and stepped out of the way. Aithne wore a sweat-and-food-stained blouse with the sleeves ripped out. When she gripped the stockpot and hefted it, long muscles cabled along her arms.
    She poured, and Aethelred moved the funnel, and each jar filled in turn. From the side, he could see her lower lip sucked between her teeth in concentration, the way her eye watered from the vinegar steam, the way she measured the distances with her body because she couldn’t accurately judge them by perspective.
    “Getting out in the world?” she said, as