The Sea Thy Mistress Read Online Free PDF Page A

father’s chest, but didn’t wake.
    Cahey stood silently for a moment, allowing the quiet of the chapel to soothe him. He wondered if Aethelred had borrowed the design from somewhere, or if one of the refugees from Eiledon who had helped to build it had been an architect.
    The center of the chapel stood empty. Long benches were set back a meter or two from each of the walls, each one different, lovingly crafted of reused iron and stone. Panels made of salvaged metal and glass covered three of the four walls: some sheets that must once have been sliding doors or office windows, accented by fragments in a dozen colors, framed and decorated with wire and other bits of copper, brass and steel.
    The books hanging in their racks behind those glass doors numbered in the hundreds.
    Someday, Cahey thought, I really do have to learn to read. His son yawned and stretched in his arms.
    The fourth wall faced the ocean, and held the only window. Three statues stood on a dais in front of it: one pale; one dark; and the one in the center gleaming bronze, backlit by the afternoon.
    He avoided looking at that one. Rather, he stood in front of the one carved in pale alabaster with gray swirls running through it like lines of smoke. A woman with the face of a snow leopard, or perhaps a snow leopard with the body of a woman, she crouched as if ready to spring: one hand splayed on the warm rock before her, the other extended and holding up a sword.
    A real sword, not a carven one. A sword with a blade of dark crystal, and a hilt like the brass hilt of the blade that hung at Cahey’s hip.
    “Hey,” he said to his yawning son. “Look. It’s your auntie Selene. Do you see her?”
    Cathmar blinked storm-gray eyes. “Not Auntie Selene,” he said, lisping her name.
    Cahey laughed. “No, not really Selene. Just a statue.” He carried the child past the statue in the center again, and over to the one that stood on her right hand.
    The angel’s lips pressed together in a frown. The ocean rolled at the bottom of the bluff, hissing against the beach. A woman’s lighthearted voice spoke in his recollection, plain as if in his ear. I’d like you to model for me sometime.
    In the end, he hadn’t needed to. She’d done it from memory.
    Flawlessly.
    He closed his eyes for a moment, shutting out the gleam of afternoon sunlight on veined black marble. Then he opened them again and forced himself to regard his own image.
    She had captured him standing, but in motion. He balanced with more weight on the left foot than the right, head uplifted and cocked to one side as if a moment from whirling in place. The sword, in this case, was held low in one hand, continuing the incipient movement of the torso.
    The statue was impressionistic. He could not say it was idealized, and it was rough-hewn in places as if she had not been able to bear the polishing. But the movement and proportion were striking, and the face was unmistakable. Is that how she saw me? Is that what she loved?
    He saw a caress in every chisel mark, passion in every stroke of the mallet. Somehow, it was worse, not to be able to deny that she had loved him in return.
    He turned his face away.
    “Da,” said his son, one hand extended toward the statue.
    Cahey wiped his nose on the back of his hand and forced a smile. “Yep. That’s me, kiddo.” Aethelred showed it to him, of course, and he thinks the statue is his father.
    Idiot. Moron. Einherjar.
    He turned toward the final statue. “C’mon. I have a story to tell you.” He paused and then laughed a strange, choking little laugh. “I’ll tell you all the racy parts first, while you’re still too young to understand what I’m talking about.”
    *   *   *
    Cahey held his son up to the third and final statue. “That’s your mom,” he said. “Before she was the ocean, she looked like that.”
    The sculpture brought less painful memories than he’d expected. She’d been wearing her hair much shorter by the time they met,