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

shoulders and twisting his neck. The old pain was gone with his transformation, but the habits of easing it remained. He leaned forward in his bentwood chair.
    Cathmar took a deep breath and spoke very fast. “Why did my mother leave us?”
    Cahey rocked back in his chair. “She had…” He paused and bit back his bitterness, waited until it would not color his voice. Cathmar deserved to think well of his mother. “She had something she had to do. You know that. You know why she had to go.”
    The boy shrugged, rolling over on his back like a puppy, propped up on gangling elbows. “Yeah, but … couldn’t she have waited? Until I was grown-up? Did she have to go right away?”
    Cahey rubbed a thumbnail against an eyebrow, thinking. “I don’t know.”
    That’s not an honest answer, is it? Angels don’t lie, remember? It was the voice of his own conscience, but for a moment he pretended it had a woman’s tone.
    He cleared his throat and added, “Well, no, I guess I do know. I think she felt she had to make her decision fast, before more people died. And I…”
    She didn’t tell me about you. She must have known. She must have hidden it on purpose.
    Cathmar pushed himself up farther. Cahey looked at the boy’s unmarked face, and his fingers worried at his own scar. When I was his age …
    Cathmar would never have to know about those things, though. “I suspect … I know … I chased her away.”
    The boy sat up completely, crossing long legs on the red and blue rug. He was—oddly—both tall for his age and young-seeming. His brow furrowed, then smoothed. A moment later, and he came back with a childish non sequitur. “Hey, I want to go over to Kailley’s house in the village later. Is that okay?”
    He so badly wants to be a normal boy, Cahey thought. And I so badly want him to be something else. I wonder if it were kinder if he weren’t? Cahey nodded, relieved that his son had dropped the other line of questioning. “Sure.”
    Cathmar nodded and went back to his game with the fire. But a little while later, when Cahey had raised the book again and was winding slowly through the chapters, pretending to read while he watched his son over the rod, Cathmar looked up again.
    “Why?”
    “Why can you go to Kailley’s?”
    “No,” he said. “Why did you chase Mom away?”
    Cahey fell silent for a long time, and then shrugged. He spoke in a level tone to get the words around the pain in his throat. “It wasn’t on purpose. I was young. I had no idea what she wanted from me. I’m not sure I could have given it to her then if I tried. I hurt her, by accident, and she left me. It wasn’t long after that that she changed. Became what she is now, because she had to. Because she didn’t think she had a choice. We were desperate, Cath”—and maybe you weren’t supposed to admit things like that to a kid. Maybe you were supposed to let them believe in adult omnipotence, but that really wasn’t Cahey’s style—“and then there was no going back. Or maybe she left me because she knew she had to go into the sea.”
    He thought back to his first day with his son. The memory took Cahey away completely for a moment, and when the einherjar leaned forward in his chair again he realized he’d lost the thread of the conversation. “I’m sorry; I was thinking. What did you say?”
    Cathmar pursed his lips in a gesture his mother would have found familiar. “I asked … how you hurt her.”
    Oh, Hel. Not what I want to be talking to a ten-year-old about.
    Cahey pinched the bridge of his nose. “She came from a different world than I did. She … when she was young, her people paired up in a way that I didn’t understand. Husband and wife, will and action. Almost as if they became one person. She had grown beyond that, over the centuries, become something bigger, something complete. But she still expected to be … one half of a whole. And I—well—I had seen the other side of that, growing