Free All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) by Elizabeth Bear

and sniffed lightly. “The woman.”
    Selene did not nod, not unless talking to trumans. For Achilles, her ears pricked and her whiskers came forward. “Somebody saw something.”
    “It’s a hope. We could canvass.”
    If anyone in such a neighborhood as this would be willing to come forward. Selene glanced under her arm: the Mongrels were standing around in clumps, keeping the gawkers away from the moreaux while they worked. Nearmans, she guessed, in the ghetto. One or two cybered halfs. Some of them might be trus, like the Mongrels—pure-blood humans, unmutated—but you couldn’t tell them from the nears to look at them.
    It would be hopeless for moreaux to canvass here. Selene blew through her whiskers. “I’ll ask Her to put the Mongrels on it.”
    Trumans, even those who worked for Her, wouldn’t take orders from an un.
    Achilles held up the sealed envelope. “Make sure She knows we’re looking for a blonde.”
    “I’ll do better than that,” Selene said, uncoiling, stretching her spine out as her heels dropped to the cobblestones. “I’ll see if there’s enough material for Her to run a trace on it.”
    Achilles wagged, and handed her the envelope back. AndSelene did not finish her thought:
. . . if Her strength will support the effort.
     
    W hen Muire awoke, the sun was low through the windows, skipping eye-watering brilliance across the faceted river. She covered her eyes with the cast and groaned, but sat up easily. Sleep was an excrescence.
    And she needed to eat—already—again.
    It would wait.
    Over a life as long as Muire’s, objects accumulated. She owned a bed and a reading chair, lamps and end tables, a forge and an anvil. Clutter and memories. A viscreen and a hook to hang her fiddle from.
    The fiddle was upstairs, and she fetched it when she went up to change. It was old, pre-Desolation, resonant and red-varnished. It had been given her by a dying man in a railroad town, when there were railroads, when they needed towns. She was tired, she thought, of dying. Dying people, and things, and ways of life.
    Dead tired.
    The fiddle case was dusty. “Muire, really,” she said, and found a cloth to wipe it clean.
    Sleep had brought some healing. Her fingers would flex, and so she bent them around the bow. It scraped; painstakingly, she tuned the melody strings and the drones. Her wince was for the instrument, not for the pain in her hand.
    Once—that word again, and she wished it would fade back into dusty memory, where she’d meant to abandon it—once, the children of the Light forested a world with their song, voicesraised in concert for mighty wreakings. Once they had been the makers of miracles.
    Now, she might be able to speed the healing of a shattered bone.
    If she were lucky.
    The music cascaded through her, pulling energy with it, drawing light. In rivulets and streams, it crept out the tips of her fingers and whispered back into her ears. Her fingers softened, moved more surely, and the tone grew pure, and she closed her eyes and tilted her head back and leaned on the music hard—because, for a moment, she could. She put what she could into it, the wildness and frustration, the fury that scoured her when she remembered the Grey Wolf’s touch, his mockery, his grief. The ends of her cropped hair shook about her face as she bent forward.
    Oh, how dare he presume to be sorry?
    And then the song was done. She stood panting, head bowed, her broken and pinned hand aching. Itching, too, and that was a positive sign. She set the fiddle in its case and closed the latch. She wiped her forehead on the back of her uninjured wrist.
    “Vengeance,” she said.
    The cast had to come off before she could attempt a sculpture of her prey.
    Clay, first. And wire. The flea-colored mud—dense and slick under Muire’s fingers—marked her nails in purple-brown crescents. She knew his face, the narrow-bridged nose, the furrow to the corners of a thin mouth. She knew the earring and the fold at the