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

her. Is it yours to judge, sister, or yours to carry out judgments?
    “It’s my failing that no one’s left to make judgment.” She pressed her hand to her chest and cradled it there. The tears that streaked her face dripped with light; the stallion hovered closeand his heat shocked them to crusts of salt, but he only breathed on her.
    “He let me live,” she said. “He called me sister.”
    It implied more than she could bear. A coward—she would accept that judgment. But she was not a monster.
    The stallion’s exasperation prickled as if it were her own. Ride .
    His hide would burn her. She could no longer thrust her hand into living flame and cup it like water from palm to palm.
    “How, Bright one?” The old epithet no longer suited him.
    I am the Light , he said, and gently he opened his shadowy wings. Feathers clattered, each perfect, each cast in something harder than steel. Brightness coalesced about him. It wrapped his chest and withers, and when it faded it left behind a saddle of white leather and a saddle blanket, also white, with a thin, scrolled border of gold. This will shield you.
    No stirrups. No safety straps.
    The valraven’s laughter sounded in her heart. I will not let you fall.
    And so what if she did? He half knelt and she vaulted into the saddle, as best she could; her hand hurt so much it made the bridge of her nose feel pinched. But Kasimir’s searing hide was only pleasantly warm through the tack.
    He fanned those incredible wings. It seemed impossible that their tips could clear the ground, the walls on either side. And then he leaped into the air as if hurtled from a crossbow, sailing over the river before his wings completed their stroke.
    Higher, higher, the rush of air, her gasp blown back in her face. The city gyring below, the lights and the dark patches, the cold breath out of the Well. The twin waterfalls of the northbranch of the Naglfar shimmered with the city light reflected through them; the river still flowed through the Tower, as it had when it was only a campus, but now it had to fall forty stories in defiance of gravity to cling to its accustomed bed.
    Kasimir burst through the up-fall in a joyous flare of wings and a mad hiss of steam. Carbon flaked from his hide, temperature-shocked, leaving him blue in places. The water evaporated before it could fling like hurled beads from his feathertips.
    No water touched Muire; his body sheltered her from the upward fall. She leaned forward and called into Kasimir’s ear, forgetting he could hear her across half a world if he chose. “Where are we going?”
    Your hand must be seen to, he answered. And then there is the matter of the widow.
    “Widow?” She flinched. “Oh. How did you know that?”
    I have chosen you. You may as well learn to like it.
    “It’s not—”
    — as if there were a lot of choices, he interrupted. If it soothes your guilt, you may forget that you saved me. And you may assume that I have chosen you only because you were the last one left untarnished.
    If it makes you feel better.
    He furled his wings among the gargoyles on the rooftop of a granite building just a few blocks from the place where Muire had stayed for the last hundred-odd years. “A cash clinic?”
    Assent from Kasimir. She turned to dismount. But as she lifted her leg over the cantle, the world went edgy and dark and she slid bonelessly down.
    Kasimir lifted his hoof out of the way adroitly. Muire’s head struck wet tarpaper instead of hot metal. Gasping, she lay onher back and looked up at him, the silhouette of his dark heads.
    “You said I wouldn’t fall.”
    You didn’t, when it mattered.
     
    W as it bad? He looked . . . hard. Your last one. You were gone a long time.”
    Cahey turned in the darkness, slid his shoulder under Astrid’s lifted head, tucked his arm into the indentation of her waist. “No,” he said, shaping his mouth around the word before he said it. “He was gentle. He . . . wanted me to make it