Free The Sea Thy Mistress by Elizabeth Bear

up.”
    The angel took a breath. “I wasn’t einherjar yet, then. I’d seen how marriage could be a trap, and how it could destroy both sides. So I never chose just one person. I had a partner, Astrid, my best friend, but we weren’t tied to each other that way. And then there was your mother. And then there was Selene.”
    “Aunt Selene?”
    Cahey blew air out through his nose. “Yes.”
    The boy bit his finger, rolled back over, and poked at his slate a few more times.
    “And your mother—I think she thought I was somebody she used to care about once, reborn, and it bothered her.”
    The boy—lean, growing tall, wearing his hair cropped close to the scalp, in contrast to his father’s—looked suddenly curious. “Are you?”
    Cahey shrugged. “I don’t suppose it matters.”
    “What happened to Astrid?”
    I knew he was going to ask that.
    “She was mortal,” the angel said quietly. “I killed her. By accident. There were a lot of people dying, then.”

48 A.R.
Winter
    The night before he and Cathmar were to go into Eiledon, Cahey sat before the fire sewing shoes. He wasn’t yet as much of a cobbler as he’d like, but he was improving over last year. Soon, he thought, he’d be better than passable.
    This, however, would do for now.
    By the time dawn had begun graying the horizon behind the dunes, several small pairs of shoes joined food, coats and other things on a handcart in the cobbled yard. Cathmar, tugging a hat over oiled curls, appeared in the doorway. A pack dragged his shoulders back, the belt cinched above his hips. The hat and coat were camouflage, nothing more, but Cahey was glad to see Cathmar wore them. Early on, after he’d changed but before Muire bought a Rekindling, he’d flaunted his difference, walked barefoot in snow and made a spectacle of himself. But now that she was gone it seemed right to obscure himself.
    He was not, after all, so special.
    Cathmar tugged the door closed and locked it, pocketing the key with concealed pride. In his turn, Cahey concealed amusement. Cathmar was thirteen, and Cahey had only just turned the key-ring over to him. A sign of incipient adulthood, which the boy gloried in. That made Cahey’s anticipation of what came next all the more enjoyable.
    Cahey tugged a long bundle out of the handcart and handed it to Cathmar as Cathmar came up beside him. Cathmar took it, unquestioning, and weighed it across his palm. His hand stroked blue silk and silver silk cordage, and when he looked up again he frowned. “This is elaborate.”
    Something rare, in the simplicity of their lives. “It’s a gift,” Cahey said. “Open it.”
    Cathmar slipped the knot with his teeth, unwinding the tasseled cord. He slung it over his shoulder while he worked on the silk, which was fine enough that Cahey could see the gray pale brightness of morning twilight through each draped layer. He knew the moment when, the wrappings still half-on, Cathmar knew what the present was, because he glanced up at Cahey through his eyelashes, tilting his head incredulously.
    “It was your mother’s,” Cahey said. “Draw it out.”
    Now silk fell in indigo coils. Cathmar stood among them, sheath clutched in one hand, the other closed on the wire-wrapped hilt of a sword. He tugged, gently, and the sword slid into his hand with a sound like flicked crystal.
    He held it, weighing it on his palm, and Cahey heard him take a deep breath and keep it in. Deep in the obsidian blade, a pale blue spark ignited, raced the length of the fuller, and filled the sword with Light.
    That held breath hissed out again. Cathmar asked, “What’s her name?”
    “Nathr,” Cahey said. “It means—”
    “ ‘Adder.’ ” Cathmar nodded. “Why now?”
    “It’s time,” Cahey answered, uncertain how to tell his son that he just knew, with a swanning certainty set bone-deep. “She was always meant for you. See? She knows your hand.”
    Cathmar stared at the sword. Then, as if he’d been doing it all