All the Windwracked Stars (The Edda of Burdens) Read Online Free PDF

anything Muire could have done to save him.
    It spoke of something she had thought left behind on a cold battlefield, more than two thousand years before.
    Muire took his hand in her gauntleted one, and murmured, “Don’t be afraid.”
    When his last breath rattled from his throat, rather than pulling away—as prudence suggested—she permitted it to expire into her mouth and breathed it deep.
    So he died there, on the Broken Stair, and the last waelcyrge Chose him. And in the choosing she accepted his death and accepted as well the burden of vengeance that death brought.
    Our name was Ingraham Fasoltsen. We were walking
—
we had been walking
—
and we had made a delivery for our employer, and the moreau
—
a cat, an unman female, her fur smoky gray in rosettes
—
had been there as arranged. We had been walking
—
home, home to our daughter (precious child, little girl, eight years old), home to our wife (we are fortunate)
—
and we had heard our name.
    Softly spoken, and we had turned to it, and He was there, burning beautiful in all his darkness, eyes alight with the starfire that cannot shine through the Defile, that we know only from old songs old memories old dreams old long-lost dreams. . . .
    Oh, he was beautiful, there in the shadows beside the descending stair. The new stair, the stair that leads down where the Broken Stair once led upward, the stair that leads into the Well, the dark neighborhoods under the Tower. Beautiful and ragged, broken as an ancient statue, his braid grizzled over his shoulder and his eyes dark as ice.
    And we had gone to him, and he had guided us to our knees, and with the folds of his cloak falling all around us
—
heavy softstrange and faintly greasy-smelling, like real wool, perhaps, if wool could still be had
—
within the folds of his cloak he had kissed us.
    Kissed us and breathed us in, within.
    Kissed us and drank us down.
    Ingraham’s hands slid from Muire’s armored shoulders to fall slack on the riven stone. She tilted her head back reflexively, drinking deep of night air tainted by the unwholesome sweetness of the Well, looking upward as if the stars were there to help her bear the pain.
    There were no stars. Through the glassy brilliance of the Defile and the shadows of the rain clouds, she could not even make out the glow of the moon.
    It hurt. The death hurt. Even a little death, a mortal death such as this, brought its own measure of pain. It settled into her flesh—mere meat and bone now, no longer the numinous stuff of Light—and sank deep talons in her, demanding
justice,
demanding
vengeance.
    She didn’t care about the pain. She welcomed the wrath the dead man brought. She would need his strength as surely as he would need her sword, to see this matter through.
    Yrenbend, her favorite brother, had said it to her once: “There are seen hands and unseen hands. I am an angel. We do not believe in coincidences.”
    This was a seen and an unseen hand at once; the one that had wreaked the deed, and the one that had directed her in its discovery.
    The tarnished had returned.

3
Hagalaz (hail)

    T he walls of Her office were cinder block and limpid shatterproof, offering a panoramic view of Eiledon’s rooftops and towers. Not the loft of the Arcology, strangely, but the jeweled teeth of the old city and the thick bend of river southwest of the Tower. The enormous room—almost the entire top floor of the library—was dominated by a giant orrery encased within moving crystal spheres; the furniture, while comfortable, was relegated to the edges.
    Selene, waiting upon Her attention, stared through the tall glass plates, tail lashing, ears still laid flat, and willed herself to calm. Fear-and-fight were not her friends. They were the animal, the instinct that made her a superlative warrior. But the threat had been left behind on the ground, and Selene was in the Tower, in Her presence. Safe.
    The broad windows were new, since the Desolation, giving Eiledon’s