The Snow Queen

37

“Starbuck!” Arienrhod called his name again, when he did not look up from his work table.

He raised his head slowly, his face elusive and shadowed as he acknowledged her at last. He pushed aside contraband tools, the half disassembled piece of hardware he had been peeling down layer upon fragile layer; his workroom was choked with technological storm wrack some of which he actually claimed to understand. His native technical ability had always pleased her, until now. Since he had returned from the final, fateful Hunt, he had lost himself in this sterile fantasy of machinery, to hide from himself and from her. “What do you want?” His voice was neither curious nor hostile; it was nothing at all, and nothing showed on his face as he spoke.

She tried to curb her irritation, knowing that only patience and time would bring him out of his despondent brooding. But it had been weeks since he had acted like a man; since he had tried to make love to her, touched her, even smiled at her. Her resentment smouldered, leaving her with no stomach for coddling his sullen bad temper. “I want to know when you’ll be finishing your duty as Hunter.”

“My duty?” He shifted in the swivel seat, his eyes leaping like a hart, searching for cover in the wilderness of electronics gear. “I’ve done it all,” bitterly.

“You haven’t made the payment. The Source is waiting for the water of life. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that unless he gets it Winter will end — and so will our lives.”

“And half of Summer will die… Summer will end forever.” His green eyes met hers again, dull with anguish.

“So I hope.” She forced her gaze past the barriers and into his unwilling mind. “You aren’t pretending this is the first time that’s occurred to you, are you?”

“No.” He shook his head; his red hair brushed the links of silvered chain that caught the shoulders of his loose-hanging shirt. “I’ve thought about it every day, and dreamed it—”

“Pleasant dreams,” she said sardonically.

“No!” She remembered the nightmares, the ones that he had refused to discuss with her. “Get someone else to make the delivery. I’ve done my duty, I’m choking on Winter’s dirty work. I draw the line at giving that rotting off worlder slug eternal life for destroying my own people.”

“You’re no Summer! And you’re paying for your own life, and mine.” Arienrhod leaned across the work table, reaching out. “You can’t crawl back into a Summer shell; you outgrew that long ago. You’ve killed your sacred mers, you’ve left your Summer love dead with their corpses. You abandoned your people and your goddess years ago — for something better! Remember that! You are an off worlder now, and my lover. And like it or not, you will be until you die.”

Starbuck pushed to his feet, sweeping the clatter and blink off of the table with his fist. Arienrhod stepped back as she realized he had only just kept that rage from striking out at her.

“Then I’d just as soon die now.” He clenched his hands on the table edge, leaning forward with his head down. “And finish what I’ve started.”

“Sparks.” His name rose out of her deepest heart, where the hot pain of his suffering reached her dimly. But he did not respond. She could not reach him any more; he had shut her out. “Starbuck!” The suffering became her own, and the pain became her anger. He did look up this time, with his face hard and clenched. There was nothing of Sparks in the look; only a ghost lying behind it: the ghost of lost Moon, her own lost other ness Moon, whose death was his fault, and who had taken his love for the both of them with her into the grave. Arienrhod felt his reality, shrouded by the ghost of Moon, become the focus for failure’s burning glass: jail ure The word left a smoking track across her inner sight. “You will deliver the water of life, and I want it done soon. Your Queen commands it.”

His mouth thinned. It was the first time she had ever commanded him; the first time he had ever forced her to. “And if I refuse?”

“Then I’ll give you to the off worlders Refusing to let him defy her, she pulled at the sliding reins of her control. “And you’ll spend the rest of your life in a penal colony wishing that you had died at the Change.”

Starbuck’s mouth dropped open. His eyes felt her face like a blind man’s hands, until at last he knew that she meant every word. He bowed his head in surrender, helpless under the weight of his own self-hatred.

She knew then that she could make him do anything… and that in winning this victory she had lost him forever.