The Snow Queen

1

Here on Tiamat, where there is more water than land, the sharp edge between ocean and sky is blurred; the two merge into one. Water is drawn up from the shining plate of the sea and showers down again in petulant squalls. Clouds pass like emotion across the fiery red faces of the Twins, and are shaken off, splintering into rainbows: dozens of rainbows every day, until the people cease to be amazed by them. Until no one stops to wonder, no one looks up…

“It’s a shame,” Moon said suddenly, pulling hard on the steering oar.

“What is?” Sparks ducked down as the flapping sail filled and the boom swept across over his head. The outrigger canoe plunged like a wing fish “It’s a shame you aren’t paying attention. What do you want to do, sink us?”

Moon frowned, the moment’s mood broken. “Oh, drown yourself.”

“I’m half-drowned already; that’s the trouble.” He grimaced at the water lapping the ankles of their waterproof kleeskin over boots and picked up the bailer again. The last squall had drowned his good nature, anyway, she thought, along with the sodden supply baskets. Or maybe it was only fatigue. They had been at sea on this journey for nearly a month, creeping from island to island along the Windward chain. And for the last day they had been beyond the Windwards, beyond the charts they knew, striking out across the expanse of open ocean toward three islands that kept to themselves, a sanctuary of the Sea Mother. Their boat was tiny for such far ranging, and they had only the stars and a rough current-chart of crisscrossed sticks to guide them. But they were children of the Sea as truly as they were the children of their birth-mothers; and because they were on a sacred quest, Moon knew that She would be kind.

Moon watched Spark’s bobbing head catch fire as the pinwheeled binary of Tiamat’s double sun broke the clouds, to kindle flame in the red of his hair and his sparse, newly starting beard; throw the soft-edged shadow of his slim, muscular body down into the bottom of the boat. She sighed, unable to keep hold of her irritation when she looked at him, and reached out tenderly to finger a red, shining braid.

“Rainbows… I was talking about rainbows. Nobody appreciates them. What if there was never another rainbow?” She brushed back the hood of her mottled slicker and tugged loose the laces at her throat. Braids as white as cream spilled out and down over her back. Her eyes were the color of mist and moss agate. She looked up through the crab-claw sail, squinting as she sorted tumbled cloud from sky to find vaulting ribbons of fractured light, dimmed here to nothingness, brightening there until their banners doubled and redoubled.

Sparks dumped another shellful of water overboard, sending it home, before he lifted his head to follow her gaze. Even without its sun-browning, his skin was dark for an islander’s. But lashes and eyebrows as pale as her own tightened against the glare, above eyes that changed color like the sea. “Come on. We’ll always have rainbows, Cuz. As long as we have the Twins and the rain. A simple case of diffraction; I showed you—”

She hated it when he talked tech — the unthinking arrogance that came into his voice. “I know that. I’m not stupid.” She jerked the coppery braid sharply.

“Ow!”

“But I’d still rather hear Gran tell us that it was the Lady’s promise of plenty, instead of hearing that trader turn it into something without any point at all. And so would you. Wouldn’t you, my star child. Admit it!”

“No!” He beat her hand away; anger blazed. “Don’t make fun of that, damn it!” He turned his back on her, splashing. She pictured his knuckles whitening over the corroded crosses-inside-a-circle: the token his off worlder father had given to his mother at the last Festival. “Mother of Us All!”

It was the one thing that drove between them like a blade — their awareness of a heritage that he did not share with her, or with anyone they knew. They were Summers, and their people rarely had contact with the tech-loving Winters who consorted with the off worlders except at the Festivals, when the adventurous and joyful from all over this world gathered in Carbuncle; when they put on masks and put off their differences, to celebrate the Prime Minister’s cyclical visit and a tradition that was far older.

Their two mothers, who were sisters, had gone to Carbuncle to the last Festival, and returned to Neith carrying, as her mother had told her, “the living memory of a magic night.” She and Sparks had been born on the same day; his mother had died in childbirth. Their grandmother had raised them both while Moon’s mother was at sea with the fishing fleet. They had grown up together like twins, she often thought: strange, changeling twins growing up under the vaguely uneasy gaze of the stolid, provincial islanders. But there had always been a part of Sparks that she was shut off from, that she could not share: the part of him that heard the stars whisper. He bartered surreptitiously with passing traders for mechanical trinkets from other worlds, wasted days taking them apart and putting them back together, finally throwing them into the sea in a fit of self disgust along with propitiating effigies made of leaves.

Moon kept his tech secrets from Gran and the world, grateful that he at least shared them with her, but nursing a secret resentment. For all she knew her own father could have been a Winter or even an off worlder, but she was content with building a future that fit under her own sky. Because of that it was hard for her to be patient with Sparks , who was not, who was caught in the space between the heritage he lived and the one he saw in starlight.

“Oh, Sparks.” She leaned forward, rested a chilly hand on his shoulder, massaging the knotted muscles through the thickness of cloth and oilskins. “I’m not teasing. I didn’t mean to; I’m sorry,” thinking, I’d rather have no father at all than live with a shadow all my life. “Don’t be sad. Look there!” Blue sparks danced on the ocean beyond red sparks gleaming in his hair. Wingfish flashed and soared above the swells of the Mother Sea , and she saw the island clearly now, leeward, the highest of three. Serpentine lace marked the distant meeting of sea and shore. “The choosing-place! And look, mers!” She blew a kiss in awed reverence.

Long, sinuous, brindle-colored necks were breaking the water surface around and ahead of them; ebony eyes studied them with inscrutable knowledge. The mers were the Sea’s children, and a sailor’s luck. Their presence could only mean that the Lady was smiling.

Sparks looked back at her, suddenly smiling too, and caught her hand. “They’re leading us in — She knows why we’ve come. We’ve really come, we’re going to be chosen at last.” He pulled the coiled shell flute out of the pouch at his hip and set free a joyous run of notes. The mers’ heads began to weave with the music, and their own eerie whistles and cries sang counterpoint. The old tales said that they lamented a terrible loss, and a terrible wrong; but no two tales agreed on what the loss or the wrong had been.

Moon listened to their music, not finding it sad at all. Her own throat was suddenly too tight for song: She saw in her mind another shore, half their lifetime ago, where two children had picked up a dream lying like a rare coiled shell in the sand at the feet of a stranger. She followed the memory back through time…

Moon and Sparks ran barefoot along the rough walls between the shallow harbor pens, a net slung swaying like a hammock from shoulder to slim shoulder between them. Their deft, callused feet slapped and splashed along the piled-stone pathways, immune to bruises and the lapping icy water. The klee in the pens, usually as sluggish as stones on the weedy bottom, surfaced with ungainly haste to watch the children pass. They blew spray and grunted with hunger; but the net was empty, its burden of dried sea hair already dumped into the family stock-pens for the midday feeding.

“Hurry up, Sparkie!” Moon, in the lead as usual, pulled the netting taut between them, hauling her shorter cousin along like a reluctant load of fish. She swept the white fall of her bangs back from her face, eyes on the deep-water channel that drove straight in to shore beyond the fish yards Already the tall tops of the cloven sails — all she could see of the fishing fleet from here — were sweeping ahead. “We’ll never get to the docks first!” She pulled harder, in frustration.

“I’m hurrying, Moon. It’s almost like my mother coming home, too!” Sparks found an extra burst of speed; she felt him catch up behind her, heard him panting. “Do you think Gran will make honey cake

“For sure!” Leaping, she almost stumbled. “I saw her getting out the pot.”

They ran on, dancing over the stones toward the gleaming noonday beach and the village beyond. Moon pictured the brown, smiling face of her mother as they had last seen her, three months ago: thick sand-colored braids piled on her head, hidden under a dark knit cap; the thick high-necked sweater, slicker, and heavy boots that made her indistinguishable from her crew as she tossed them a last kiss, while the double-hulled fishing boat leaned into the winds of sunrise.

But today she was home again. They would all go down to the village hall with the other fishing families, to celebrate and dance. And then, very late at night, she would curl up in her mother’s lap (although she was getting too big to curl up in her mother’s lap), held close in the sturdy arms; watching Sparks through heavy lids to see if he fell asleep first, in Gran’s arms. There would be the warm snap and whisper of flames on the hearth, the smell of sea and ships that clung to her mother’s hair, the hypnotic flow of voices as Gran reclaimed her own daughter from the Sea, who was Mother to them all.

Moon leaped down into the soft, golden-brown beach sand. Sparks thumped down from the wall behind her, their shadows tangling in the noonday glare. With her eyes fixed on the cluttered stone houses of the village and the boats dropping sail in the bay, she almost darted past the stranger who stood waiting, watching, as they came. Almost Sparks collided with Moon as she slid to a stop. “Look out, fish brain!” A cloud of sand exploded around their ankles.

She threw her arms around him for balance, squeezed the indignation out of him as her own amazement tightened her hold. Sparks pulled free, subsiding; the net dropped, forgotten, like the village, the bay, their reunion. Moon tugged at the hem of her hand-me down sweater, knitting her fingers into the heavy rust-red yarn.

The woman smiled down at them, the radiant oval of her face touched with windburn above her ancient gray parka, the thick pants and clumsy boots worn by any islander. But she was not from Neith, not simply from any island…

“Did — did you come out of the Sea?” Moon gasped. Sparks gaped beside her.

The woman laughed; her laughter broke the spell of otherworldliness like window glass. “No… only across it, on a ship.”

“Why?”

“Who are you?” Their questions ran together.

And in answer to both, the woman held out the medallion she wore on a chain: a barbed trefoil like a bouquet of fish hooks, glittering with the darkly sinister beauty of a reptile’s eye. “Do you know what this is?” She went down on one knee in the sand, her black braids dropping forward. They shuffled closer, blinking.

“Sibyl… ?” Moon whispered timidly, seeing Sparks clutch his own medal out of the corner of her eye. But then her gaze was wholly the woman’s, and she knew why the dark, compelling eyes seemed to open on infinity. A sibyl was the earthly channel for supernatural wisdom, chosen through the Lady’s Own judgment, who by temperament and training had the strength to withstand a holy visitation.

The woman nodded. “I am Clavally Bluestone Summer.” She set her hands against her forehead. “Ask, and I will answer.”

They did not ask, dazed by the knowledge that she would — could — answer any question they could imagine; or that the Lady Herself would answer them with Clavally’s lips, while the sibyl was swept away in a trance.

“No questions?” Formality fell away again, held at bay by her good humor. “Then tell me who you are, who already know everything you need to know?”

“I’m Moon,” Moon said, pushing at her bangs. “Moon Dawntreader Summer. This’s my cousin, Sparks Dawntreader Summer, and I don’t know enough to ask about anything!” she finished miserably.

“I do.” Sparks pushed forward, holding out his medal. “What did this used to be?”

“Input…” Clavally took it between her fingers, frowned faintly, murmuring. Her eyes turned to smoky quartz, moved wildly, like a dreamer’s; her hand fisted over the disc. “Sign of the Hegemony — two crosses bound within a circle symbolize the unity of Kharemough and its seven subordinate worlds… medal awarded for valorous service, Kispah uprising: “What all may strive for, this one has found. To our beloved son Temmon Ashwini Sirus, this day, 9:113:07.” Sandhi, official language of Kharemough and the Hegemony. No further analysis.” Her head dropped forward, let go by an unseen force. She swayed gently on her knees, sighed, sat back. “Well.”

“But what does it mean?” Sparks looked down at the disc which still danced against his parka front, and his mouth formed an uncertain line.

Clavally shook her head. “I don’t know. The Lady only speaks through me, not to me. That’s the Transfer — the way it is.”

Sparks ’s mouth quivered.

“The Hegemony,” Moon said quickly. “What’s the Hegemony, Clavally?”

“The off worlders.” Clavally’s eyes widened slightly. “The Hegemony is what they call themselves. So it’s an off world thing, then… I’ve never been to Carbuncle.” Her glance went to it again. “How did this get here, so far from the star port and the Winters?” And back to their faces, “You’re merrybegots, aren’t you? Your mothers went to the last Festival together, and were lucky enough to come back with you… and also this keepsake?”

Sparks nodded, as much in awe of adult logic as he was of the Lady’s trances, “Then… my father isn’t a Summer; he isn’t even on Tiamat?”

“That I can’t tell you.” Clavally stood up. Moon saw a strange concern cross her face as she looked back at Sparks . “But I do know that merrybegots are specially blessed. Do you know why I’m here?”

They shook their heads.

“Do you know what you want to be when you grow up?”

“Together,” Moon answered without thinking.

Again the bright laughter. “Good! I’m making this journey through the Windwards to urge all the young Summers, before they settle into life, to remember that they can dedicate themselves to the Sea in another way than as fishers or farmers. They can serve the Lady by serving their fellow human beings as sibyls, as I do. Some of us are born with a special seed inside us, and it only waits for the Lady to touch us and make it grow. When you’re old enough, maybe you two will hear Her call, and go to a choosing place.”

“Oh.” Moon shivered slightly. “I think I hear Her now!” She pressed cold hands against her leaping heart, where a dream seed sprouted.

“Me too, me too!” Sparks cried eagerly. “Can we go now, can we go with you, Clavally?”

Clavally pulled up the hood of her parka against a sudden buffet of wind. “No, not yet. Wait a little longer; until you’re certain of what you hear.”

“How long?”

“A month?”

She rested her hands on the two small shoulders. “More like years, I think.”

“Years!” Moon protested.

“By then you’ll be sure it isn’t just the crying of sea birds you hear. But always remember, in the end it won’t be you who will choose the Lady, but the Lady Who will choose you.” She looked again, almost pointedly, at Sparks .

“All right.” Moon wondered at the look, and straightened her shoulders resolutely under the hand. “We’ll wait. And we’ll remember.”

“And now—” the sibyl dropped her hands — “I think someone is waiting for you.”

Time began to flow forward again, and they fled, running — with many backward glances — toward town.

“Moon, remember the last thing she said to us?” The silver play of notes dissolved as Sparks lowered his flute and looked back, breaking in on Moon’s memory. The mers stopped their own song, looking toward the boat.

“Clavally?” Moon guided the outrigger around the point of land that jagged inward at the mouth of the bay. The shoreline of the Choosing Island was as spiny as the trefoil the sibyls wore. “You mean, that my mother was waiting for us?”

“No. That the Lady chooses us, not the other way around.” Sparks glanced toward the surf line, made his eyes come back to her face. “I mean… what if She only chooses one of us? What will we do?”

“She’ll choose us both!” Moon grinned. “How could She do anything else? We’re merrybegots — we’re lucky.”

“But what if She doesn’t?” He fingered the packing of moss where the halves of the wooden hull had been lashed together. Inseparable… he frowned slightly. “Nobody makes you become a sibyl, do they, just because you pass the test? We can swear to each other now, that if only one of us is chosen, that one will turn it down. For the sake of the other.”

“For the sake of us both.” Moon nodded. But She will choose us both. She had never doubted, since that moment years ago, that she would come to this place and hear the Lady call her. It had been her heart’s desire for half a lifetime; and she had made certain Sparks always shared it, not letting his hopeless star dreams lead him away from their common goal.

She put out her arm and Sparks took it somberly; they shook, hands clasping wrists. The clasp became a hug before she knew it, and the doubts in her heart burned away like morning fog. “Sparkie, I love you… more than anything under the sky.” She kissed him, tasting salt on his lips. “Let the Sea Mother witness that you hold my willing heart, only you, now and forever.”

He repeated the words, clearly and proudly, and together they sipped sea water from their cupped hands to complete the vow. “Nobody can say we’re still too young to pledge after this journey!” They had pledged their love for the first time when they were barely old enough to recite the words, and everyone had laughed. But they had been true to each other ever since; and through the years they had shared everything, including the hesitant, yearning inevitability of lips touching, and hands, and flesh…

Moon remembered a hidden cranny among the rocks on a leeward bay; warm callused hands of stone cupping their shivering bodies as they lay together in love under the bright noon, while the tide whispered far away down the beach. Now, as then, she could feel the strength of the need that bound them together: the heat they made between them that held the cold loneliness of their world at bay. The union of souls that overcame them in the final moment — the height, the wholeness, that nothing else in their world could ever give her. Together they would enter this new life, and at last they would belong to their world as completely as they belonged to each other… Sparks’s lips brushed her ear; she leaned forward, her arms going around him again. The boat nosed toward shore, untended.

“Do you see anything?”

Sparks checked the boat a last time where it lay beached firmly in shells and storm wrack, beyond the high-tide line. The family totem carved at its prow regarded him with three staring painted eyes. The tide was still going out, but it had already exposed enough wet-mirrored sand so that dragging the canoe up the beach had taken away their breath. One of the mers had actually come out onto the shore with them, let them stroke its wet, slick, brindle fur with timid hands. He had never been close enough to touch one before; they were as large as he was, and twice as heavy.

“Not yet — here!” Moon’s voice reached him, along with the frantic waving of her hand. She had followed the mer’s floundering progress as it moved on up the beach. “Here by the stream, a path. It must be the one Gran told me about!”

He started across the littered beach slope toward the freshwater outlet, abandoned shells crunching under his feet. The stream had laid down a wide band of red silt in the ochre, cut into the red with channels of moss-green water flow. Where it left the shore, Moon stood waiting to start into the hills.

“We follow the stream up?”

She nodded, following the swift blue-green rise of the cloaked land with her eyes. Naked peaks of raw red stone soared even higher. Those islands were new on the measureless time scale of the Sea; their spines still clawed the sky, undulled by age.

“Looks like we climb.” He jammed his hands into his pockets, uncertain.

“Yeah.” Moon watched the mer start back down the beach. Her hand tingled with the feel of its heavy fur. “We’ll dance in the rigging today.” She looked back at him, suddenly very much aware of what their presence here meant. “Well, come on,” almost impatiently. “The first step is the hardest.” They took it together.

But it was a step that had been taken before, Moon thought as she climbed… how many times? She found the answer engraved in the hillsides, where the passage of feet had worn down the airy volcanic pumice until sometimes they walked in narrow tracks eaten away to the height of their knees. And how many have climbed it just to be refused? Moon thought a quick prayer, looking down as the trail became a narrow ledge running ankle deep above a canyon of evergreen fern and impenetrable bush. The day was utterly silent when the wind died; she had not seen a trace of any living thing larger than a click beetle. Once, perhaps, the distant cry of a bird… The stream winked at her from cover hundreds of feet below, and on her left the green-coated wall vaulted another hundred into the sky. Though she was used to the precarious footing of sailors and the narrow paths among fish pens, these contrasts made her giddy.

Sparks clutched at a protruding bush, scratching his face. “This isn’t for weak hearts,” not really meaning to say it out loud.

“Probably the point,” she mumbled, and wiped her own face on her sleeve.

“You mean maybe this is the test?” They pressed gingerly past a crumbling patch of eroded wall.

“Lady!” half curse, half prayer. “It’s enough for me!”

“How far does this go? What if it gets dark?”

“I don’t know… The valley’s closing, up there.”

“I thought you said Grandpa did this, when he was young? I thought you knew.”

Moon swallowed. “Gran told me he gave up and turned back. He never even found the cave.”

“Now you tell me!” But he began to laugh. “This isn’t what I thought it would be, somehow.”

The stream curved back on itself below, and beyond the next turn of the wall the ledge widened and the trail widened with it. Here in this inland valley cut off from the sea wind, the heat of the sun echoed and re-echoed from the heated rock. Moon pulled off her heavy parka as she walked; Sparks already wore his knotted around his shoulders. The breeze pressed her damp linen shirt against her chest. She unlaced the shirt down to her belt, scratched herself, sighing. “I’m hot, you know that? I’m really hot! What do people do when they get too hot? You can always put on more clothes, but you can only take off so many.” She loosened the waterskin from her belt and drank. Somewhere ahead she heard a rushing sound, but she only thought of fat sizzling in a kettle.

“We probably won’t have to worry about it.” Sparks shrugged with good-natured reasonableness. “High summer’s still a long way off. We’ll probably be dead before it gets that hot.” His foot slipped; he went down on one knee with a grunt. “Maybe sooner.”

“Funny.” She helped him up; her own feet were as clumsy as stones. “You can already see the Summer Star. I saw it through my fingers a few days… Oh—” whispered. She rubbed her stinging face with the back of her hand.

“Yes.” Sparks slumped against the out curving wall. Beyond the final turn of the trail the rushing became the roar of water flung over a precipice, battered by rocks, a silvered sacrifice falling eternally to its death. And there the trail ended.

They stood breathless and confused in the cacophony of sound and spray beside the falls. “It can’t end here!” Sparks struck at the falling water. “We know this is the right path. Where is it?”

“Here!” Moon crouched, peering over the edge beside the water curtain, loose strands of hair falling forward in dripping fingers. “Handholds in the rock.” She stood up again, wiping her hair back. “Suddenly this isn’t…” She shook her head, the words lost as she looked back at him and saw the anger on his face.

“What is this, anyway?” Sparks shouted down the valley toward the sea. “What more proof do You want? Do we have to kill ourselves?”

“No!” Moon pulled at his arm, his temper grating like sand on her fatigue. “She wants us to be sure. And we are.” She crouched down again, pulling off her boots, and put a foot over the edge.

She began to climb down, letting the roar and the spray fill her senses, batter down her fear. She saw Sparks begin the climb above her; telling herself that countless people had gone down before her, through countless years… (foot fumbling over wet rock)… she would do it, too… (another step! her fingers clutched a lip of stone)… this wet climb was no more than the rigging of a ship, which she had climbed without thought countless times… (and once more)… always trusting in the Sea Mother to place her hands and feet surely… (fingers cramping; she bit her lip)… She concentrated on belief, in the Lady, in herself; because only if she doubted either one would she… (her foot beat against the wet-slimed wall, finding no crevice, no step, no — )

“Sparks!” Her voice scaled up. “It just ends!”

“…ledge!…” She heard the word, distorted by the roaring and her own terror; clung to it desperately, as she hugged the cliff face. “Go right!” She kicked right, opening her eyes as her foot found the ledge of stone. Blinking hard, she saw it disappear behind the falling water. She reached out, with a quick twist of her body pulled herself over and into the cleft. Sparks came after her; she put out her hand to help him across.

“Thanks.” He shook himself, shook his stiffened hands.

“Thank you.” She took a long breath. They moved deeper into the cleft together, realizing, as their eyes adjusted to the green dappling of light, that it pushed on into the side of the valley. “This is it — this must be it! We’re here, the choosing-place…”

They stopped again, their hands reaching out for each other instinctively. They stood breathless, waiting. Nothing called them but the voice of the falls. Nothing touched them but the random drift of spray. “Come on,” Sparks tugged at her, “let’s go deeper.”

The cleft peaked in shadows far overhead, making Moon think of praying hands, as they followed the serpentine shaft into the rock face. Sparks collided abruptly with a sharp turn. “I knew I should’ve brought a candle.”

“It’s not dark.” Moon looked at him in surprise. “It’s strange how the light keeps getting greener…”

“What are you talking about? It’s like being buried alive — I can’t even see you!”

“Come on.” Unease began to stir in her. “It’s not that dark — just open your eyes. Come on, Sparkie!” She pulled on his arm. “Can’t you feel it? Like music…”

“No. This place gives me the creeps.”

“Come on.” She pulled harder, straining now.

“No — wait…” He gave a few steps, and a few more.

The music filled her now, centered at her head and spreading through her body like the rhythm of her blood. It touched her like silk, with the taste of ambrosia and the green light of the sea. “Don’t you feel it?”

“Moon.” Sparks grunted as he came up against another wall in the darkness. “Moon, stop! It’s no good. I can’t see anything, I don’t hear anything… I’m — failing, Moon.” His voice wavered.

“No, you’re not! You can’t.” She turned distractedly to the truth in his eyes, unfocused like a blind man’s, the confusion on his face. “Oh, you can’t…”

“I can’t breathe, it’s like tar. We’ve got to turn back, before it’s too late.” His hand tightened over her wrist, pulling her back toward him, away from the music and the light.

“No.” Her free hand closed over his, tried to break his grip. “You go back without me.”

“Moon, you promised! We promised — you have to come.”

“I do not!” She jerked loose, saw him stumble back, surprised and hurt. “ Sparks , I’m sorry…”

“Moon…”

“I’m sorry…” She backed away, into the arms of the music. “I have to! I can’t stop now, I can’t help it — it’s too beautiful. Come with me! Try, please try!” getting farther and farther away from him.

“You promised. Come back, Moon!”

She turned and ran, his voice drowned by the song of her breaking heart’s desire.

She ran until the cleft widened again, spilling her out into an unnatural space lit by the perfectly ordinary flame of an oil lamp. She rubbed her eyes in the sudden gold, as if she had come out of darkness. When she could see again, when the shining song fell away and released her, she was not surprised to find Clavally waiting, and a stranger… Clavally, whose smile she could never forget, through years, or even a lifetime.

“You’re — Moon! So, you did come!”

“I remembered,” she nodded, radiant with the joy of the chosen, and wiping away tears.