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

she set the almost-empty pot down and tossed the pot holders aside. Sterilized lids rattled and slid as she snagged the container holding them, and began to sort through with tongs. “I think running this house is enough work for anyone.”
    “Stagnant work,” Aethelred said. “Churning water. Have you thought about going somewhere?”
    She shrugged. “Pull that other pot over the heat, will you? It needs a rolling boil. Where is there to go?”
    He picked up her discarded pot holders and did as she had asked. When the second pot was squarely on the fire, he dropped the pliers and the funnel back inside. “Forward,” he said. “You know, there are other people out there who need help the way you needed help when Cahey came to you.”
    She set the last mismatched lid on the last mismatched jar and frowned at her work, tilting her head to make sure she’d dealt the right mates together. Still using the tongs, she swapped two, and then sorted out the rings. “You think I owe the world something, preacher-man?”
    “No,” he said, stepping back to give her room. “I think you owe yourself something. Something beyond staying alive.”
    “Sometimes staying alive is all you can manage.” She didn’t look up from her work.
    “Sometimes it is,” he agreed. “And when it’s not, anymore?”
    She didn’t answer. She just bent down behind her escaping hair and started tightening rings.

38 A.R.
Summer
    Heythe bends at the waist beside a clear stream, up to her knees in water, sunlight caught golden along the pale curve of her muscled flank. She washes her hair, not knowing a wolf stalks her. He has been watching for years now, not always but often, finding and following as she moves from place to place and small, seemingly innocuous task to task. Somehow, though, her path brings her among the moreaux more often than not, and when she shares stories and conversation with them her questions always seem to—sooner or later—touch on what they know of the Angel-who-went-into-the-Sea.
    Muire, the Historian, who has become what Heythe sought so long to destroy.
    Lather floats from her as she plunges her hair to rinse it, white lashings on a brown surface borne away under the arching branches of trees. When she straightens, swinging yellow locks, sun glittering in the strands of the intricate necklace that is the only thing she wears, the water flies from her like a cascade of diamonds.
    She stretches, goosefleshed, hands on her hips and her shoulders already pinkening, while the wolf watches from the shadows halfway into another world, and hopes Heythe cannot see him.
    He’s never had any real sense of her capabilities except that they are greater than his own and constantly surprising. What he does know is that she defeated the assembled might of the children of the Light—or, more precisely, that she caused them to trick themselves into defeat. That she used his own weakness to help bring about that destruction. That nothing is beyond or beneath her. That it was a trivial exercise for her to step forward more than two thousand years in time, to when the Dweller Within should have been dead of the blow she dealt him with Mingan’s unwitting help—or that she had had the wherewithal to make it seem trivial, at least.
    He knows also that it must have been a shock to her to find her victim replaced by one strong and hale, without crippling injury. But she is Heythe, and she will take this setback in stride, and move forward in her extermination of everything the wolf finds bright and brave in the world.
    Most tellingly, he knows he cannot hope to defeat her if she knows he exists to oppose her. She is stronger and more subtle than he—his methods in his youth were never subtle, but over the centuries he has learned otherwise. If he is to lay her down for once and all, he must do so as the unseen hand in a velvet glove. He must apply her own techniques.
    The poetry of it pleases him.
    He’d kill her for vengeance, for