The Snow Queen

14

Sparks lay spread-eagled across the bed in his private suite of rooms, his fingers tracing the tendrils of an alien vine across the elaborately carven headboard, and retracing them. Gone. She’s gone . repeating the words as he repeated the pattern, over and over. But he had no strength to believe — no strength to react, to move, to feel. No tears. How could she be gone — gone from his world as irretrievably as if she had died? Not Moon, who had been a part of his life from the day he was born. Not Moon, who had pledged herself to be a part of him forever…

Moon who had broken her pledge, and become a sibyl. Why? Why had she done that to him? Why had she done this to him now? Because shed believed he was never coming back? Then why hadn’t he gone back to Neith long ago! If he’d been there when she came home, this wouldn’t have happened.

But he hadn’t gone back. First because of all that had gone wrong, and then, after the Queen had come to find him, because of everything that had gone right. And always, because of Carbuncle. Neith and the whole of Summer’s world seemed as distant and gray as a bank of fog now; the only reality was the kaleidoscope of city images that had expanded his senses and his awareness until he would never be content in that narrow world of islands and sea again. The Sea… the sea was no more than a film of water on a ball of stone to the people of the city. They swore by a thousand gods, and prayed to them rarely — and the answers they really wanted they got from their machines.

He had an outlet for one of those machines here on a table in the next room. He had filled up the absurd amount of space the Queen had set aside for him with instruments that talked and sang and even listened, that took pictures and showed pictures, that told him the time or the distance to the nearest stars. Sometimes he had tried to take them apart, only to find that their workings crumbled to dust in his hand, or that they were empty, except for flakes of metal painted with insect tracks and furred with filaments. But the Queen had encouraged him to do it, let him explore the tech devices of the palace; even sent him out into the labyrinth of shops in the Maze to choose more.

He still wondered why she had chosen him, and why she had rewarded him so greatly for the little he had to offer. Although he no longer wondered about it as much as he had in the beginning. He had first grown aware of the way the Queen watched him while he played for her — the intensity that had nothing to do with his music, that made his fingers begin to stumble, and left him feeling as though he stood before her naked. And later there had been a touch, a whispered word, a kiss, a chance encounter in a private place… And she was so like Moon that he had found it hard to keep his own eyes off her, hard not to meet her gaze, hard not to match the emotion and answer the demand he found there.

But she was not Moon, she was the ageless Queen of Winter, and as he watched her deal with the off worlders and nobles who came before her at court that truth was made plain to him over and over. There were things she was that Moon lacked the years for — the wisdom, the calculating judgment, the depths of experience that lay behind her knowing smile. And there were things she was that Moon would never be, things he found harder to name… like the nameless things that were Moon which he never saw in her. And she could never become the memories, never be the one he had shared everything with.

Yet they were so alike, and it had been so long… until sometimes, like the city, Arienrhod became the reality, Moon only an afterimage. And that made him afraid; the fear of losing his own reality stopped his tongue when he would have taken her invitation.

But now the string had been cut that kept him bound to the Summer half of his life. Moon was gone. She was gone. There was no

Ill reason now for him ever to go home… they would never unravel the tangle they had made of their future now. He would never see her again; he would never lie beside her again, as he had lain beside her for the first time on the braided rug before the hearth, while the wind rattled and wailed through a midnight blackness beyond the walls and Gran slept peacefully in the next room… The tears came at last, he rolled onto his side and buried them in the soft darkness of his pillow.

He did not hear so much as feel someone enter the room, a chill draft as the door opened and closed again silently. He sat up, wiping at his face, started to rise as he recognized the Queen.

But Arienrhod put a hand on his shoulder, forced him gently back down onto the bed. “No. Tonight we aren’t subject and queen, but only two people who have both lost someone they loved.” She sat down beside him, the pleated fluidness of the robe she wore baring one shoulder. She was dressed almost plainly, with no jewels but a necklace of beaten metal leaves on a knotted silk cord.

He wiped his face again, wiping away his embarrassment but not his confusion. “I — I don’t understand… Your Majesty.” Seeing her beside him here, it occurred to him at last to wonder… “How did you know? About Moon. About Moon and me?”

“You’re still asking me how I know things, after all the time you’ve been here?” She smiled.

He looked down, pressed his hands over his knees. “But… why us? Out of everyone in the world — we were just Summers.”

“Haven’t you guessed even a little of it by now, Sparks ? Look at me.” He looked up again. “I reminded you of someone… I remind you of Moon, don’t I?” He nodded. “You thought I didn’t understand,” she touched his arm. “But I did; I know it — bothered you. She is my kin, my flesh and blood, closer to me than even you are to her.”

“Are you… ?” He tried to imagine what relation they could be, who were so alike in every feature. “Moon’s aunt? Her father’s—”

She shook her head; a creamy strand of hair came loose and uncoiled along her neck. “Moon has no father… any more. And we don’t have her any more, you and I. I never even had the chance to meet her, but she was as important, as precious to me as she was to you. Perhaps even more so. I had hoped, in time, that we could have her with us here in the city.” Her eyes left him, moving restlessly over the ornate, cluttered table along the wall.

“She wouldn’t have come.” His voice went flat. “Not after she was a sibyl.”

“You think not? Not even for you?” The hand still rested sympathetically on his arm.

He sighed. “I wasn’t ever as important to her as being a sibyl was. But why didn’t you tell me about — her, and you, and — and us?” Somehow he was no longer speaking to the Queen, but to the one person who understood his own loss.

“I would have told you. I am telling you now. But I wanted to know what sort of lover my… kinswoman would choose over all the rest. 1 wanted to know you for myself first. And I approve of her choice, very much.” The hand squeezed lightly, left his arm again; she brushed irritably at the loose strand of her hair, only setting more free. He had never seen her like this, weary and distraught and disappointed. So very human, so much like he was… so much like Moon.

“I’ll never know Moon now, Sparks . I only have you to tell me about her, to remind me of her. Tell me what you remember most clearly, and feel the most deeply about her. What things did she love — what things about her did you love more than all the rest? Tell me how much you loved her…”

The night of firelight and wind came back to him, overlaid by a thousand more images of Moon: the child whirling with arms outflung on the shining beach; the muffled girl hauling in a netful of coppery fish beside him on an icy deck; and again the lover, whispering soft words, warm against his heart. “I can’t. I can’t tell you about her…” His voice fell apart. “Not if she’s gone.”

“She is gone, Sparks.” Arienrhod pulled the diadem from her hair, shook it free like a fall of water, down over her shoulders and her back, over the muted cloud-colors of her simple robe. “But you haven’t lost her. Not if you don’t want to.” She leaned forward. “We are very alike, aren’t we — she and I?”

He stared at her, at the fall of ivory hair, the slender girlish body and the soft stuff of the robe drawn tight across her small, high breasts… the lips, the moss-agate eyes that asked the question, her face that was the answer: “Yes.”

“Then let me be Moon for you.” Her fingertips lifted a strand of his own hair in a hauntingly familiar gesture; he felt the pulse begin to beat in his temple. Inside his head he heard the voice of the Sea; but whether it blessed him or cursed him he did not know, or care, any more. He was on fire, and not even the Sea could quench the flame of his need. He reached out, touching her for the first time, let his hand fall along her bared shoulder down the cool, curving surfaces of her arm.

She leaned eagerly into his caress, drew him down onto the bed beside her, guiding his hands. “Show me how much you loved her…”

Sparks lay with his eyes closed, absorbing the messages that reached him through his other senses — senses heightened by the grateful heaviness of his weary body. He inhaled the warm, musky scent of Arienrhod’s presence beside him, felt the soft pressure of her body contoured against his own. There was no smell of the sea about her, but instead a fragrance of imported perfumes. And yet he felt the Sea’s presence in her: she who was the Lady incarnate, robed in foam, seabirds flying from her hair, with lips like sunrise, like blood… who had lain waiting for him for centuries. He listened to the rhythm of her quiet breathing, opened his eyes to look over at her face. Her own eyes were closed; smiling in half-sleep as she lay beside him, she could even be the one he had named her at the moment when he lost control…

Amazement touched him with a tingling hand as he realized again that he lay beside the Queen of Winter. But a profound tenderness filled him, he ached to give her the love, the loyalty, the life that he had pledged to her lost other ness “Arienhrod…” He breathed the unfamiliar name against her ear. “Arienrhod. I want to be the only one with you.”

She opened her eyes then, regarded him with gentle censure. “No. No, my love.”

“Why not?” His arms closed her in, possessively. “I was the only one for Moon. Let me be the only one with you. I’m not just another fish in the net; I don’t want to share you with a hundred others.”

“But you must share me, Sparks. I am the Queen, the power. No one puts limits on me, no one commands me — I won’t allow it, because it weakens my control. There will never be an only one, man or woman.

Because I am the Only One. But there will never be an other one like you…” She kissed him softly on the forehead, her fingers closing over the off world medal resting on his chest. “My star child.”

He shivered.

“What’s wrong?”

“She used to call me that.” He pushed up onto an elbow, looking down at her as she lay back smiling, caught outside of time. “If I can’t be the only one, then I want to be the only one who counts.” He saw in his mind the mocking figure dressed in black who stood always at the Queen’s right hand, who baited him and bullied him at every private opportunity, with an evil enjoyment rooted in bitter jealousy. “I want to challenge Starbuck.”

“Starbuck?” Arienrhod blinked at him with honest surprise, before she began to laugh. “My love, you’re too new here to realize what you’re saying — and you’re far too young and alive to throw away everything. Because that is what you’d be doing, if you challenged Starbuck. I’m flattered by the gesture, but I forbid it. Believe me when I tell you that he counts for nothing in my heart. Since the first Festival night, when I put on the mask of the Winter Queen so long ago…” her eyes changed, and she was no longer seeing him, “there has been no one in my bed, or in my life, who made me long for the time when I was only Arienrhod, and lived in a world that was ignorant but free; when wishes and dreams meant something, because they weren’t always realized. You make me dream of lost innocence… you make me dream. There is no need for you to do, or be, anything more to make me love you-and want to keep you from harm. Starbuck could kill you with any weapon you could choose, including bare hands. And besides, Starbuck must be an off worlder he must have have the knowledge and the contacts among his own kind to help me keep them at bay.”

“I’m enough of an off worlder. He held out the medal, let it spin on its chain in the air above her. “And enough a part of this world to hate them like you do. I’ve listened and watched; I’ve learned a lot about the court, and the city too, how the off worlders use it. Anything I didn’t know you could teach me…” He smiled, a smile that Moon would not have understood. “And I know the one thing I really need to know, even if you don’t believe it — how I can challenge Starbuck and win.” He stopped smiling.

Arienrhod studied him silently; he felt her measure and weigh with her eyes. He thought a shadow passed across her face, before she nodded. “Challenge him, then. But if you do, and fail, I’ll call you a vain little braggart and make love to him on your grave.” She caught the winking pendant and drew him down on top of her.

“I won’t fail.” He found her lips again, hungrily. “And if I can’t be your only lover, I’ll be the best.”