The Summer Queen

TIAMAT: Clearwater Plantation

“I can’t believe it.” Moon shook her head, standing knee-deep in water beside the canted hull of the abandoned boat. “I can’t.” Her mind refused to accept the obvious truth: that her grandmother was dead, as suddenly and as irrevocably as a wave broken against the shore. She ran her hand along the totem-creature on the boat’s prow, touching the third eye carved on its forehead above the other two in the Summer fashion. The Weather Eye, they always called it. Selen, her grandmother’s name, was painted on the stern; a boat was always called after a woman, because it pleased the Sea Mother…. But this time the Sea Mother had not been pleased, and the name on the stern of the abandoned craft left no doubt who had been taken away by the sudden, elemental sweep of Her hand.

Moon turned back again to Sparks, who stood between her and the small cluster of plantation hands. The workers had been led to the boat by mers from the colony that sheltered along the plantation’s shore. There had been no sign of any bodies.

Mers hovered near them in the water even now, or squatted on the beach a short distance away. Sparks shook his head, meeting her gaze, before his own gaze moved out across the sea. He squinted into the sun’s light, mirrored by a million chips of brilliance and thrown back again into his eyes by the changeable water surface. “Elco Teel said something about there being a storm down the coast, when we were at the wedding.”

Moon saw the wedding feast suddenly in her mind’s eye; the happy faces, the happiness she had felt in her own heart— She looked back at the workers. “Was there a storm, after they set out?”

They glanced at each other, murmuring and shrugging. “No, Lady, there wasn’t a storm,” a woman said. “The weather’s been clear down this way, for most of a week now.”

Moon looked at Sparks again. “Elco Teel said that? Why would he say that?”

Sparks shook his head again, and she saw his mouth pull down. “To make trouble,” he said sourly, glancing away. “To spoil someone’s moment. It’s what he lives for; like his father.”

“It’s as if he knew something was going to happen.”

“But there wasn’t a storm,” Sparks said.

“No,” she murmured, and fell silent; feeling suspicion like a sudden spear of , puncturing the stupefaction of her loss. “There wasn’t a storm.” She looked ay at the mers, their long necks pushed out of the water, their obsidian eyes fixed i her as she waded deeper, running her hand along the boat’s rail. There was no sign of damage to the craft, no evidence of anything at all. It was as if her grandmother .and Borah had simply vanished. She looked at the mers again. “You saw, didn’t lyou?” she said. “If you could only tell me what you saw—”

Sparks hesitated. He pulled the flute out of his belt pouch and put it to his lips. The workers looked at him, as she did, nonplussed. But as the odd run of notes he began to play registered on her ears, she realized that he was mimicking mer speech. The mers swiveled their heads to listen, obviously realizing the same thing. The workers murmured in surprise. The mers looked at each other once more as he finished, and trilling runs of sound passed between them.

After a moment, something landed with a sodden thump near Sparks’s feet. It had come so quickly that Moon had not been able to track its course; but it had come from among the mers.

Sparks picked it up, frowning in concentration, as Moon waded ashore. It was La wad of monofilament netting, the kind of Winters had taken to using to trawl for |fish. He shook it out, tossing it to the workers.

“Did this come off the Selen?” Moon asked; suddenly, presciently sure that it had not.

The Winters passed the piece of net among themselves, fingering it, tugging on it. “No, Lady,” a man said. “Borah Clearwater wouldn’t let a piece of this stuff on his property.” He shook his head, with a rueful grimace. “The old man was stuck in his ways, gods rest him. He always says—said, he’d hang himself with monofilament before he’d use it on fish.”

Moon felt her own mouth twitch with wry acknowledgment. “Yes,” she murmured, “that sounds like what he would always say.…” Her smile fell away. “Then it means there was another boat—probably crewed by other Winters.”

Sparks shrugged, coming back to her side. He put his hand on her arm. “Maybe. Maybe it’s only something the mers found drifting. I asked them where the people in the boat are… but only the Sea knows if that’s what they heard.”

“It could mean that someone used nets to drown them, too,” she said, her voice thickening. “You know that Kirard Set Wayaways has been after the Clearwater holdings since before Gran came to the city. Borah Clearwater would never sell them to him while he was alive—”

“Moon,” he said gently. “You have no proof. I know what you think of Kirard Set. It’s no better than what I think. But murder—?”

She looked toward the boat. “I never had a chance to say goodbye. I never even told Gran how much I…” Her voice broke. She shrugged his hand away, feeling her helpless grief hardening into anger, feeling its focus crystallize, as the memory of her grandmother’s face was overlain by the image of Kirard Set Wayaways. “No, I can’t prove that he bears the blame for anything, except the ill will to wish it would happen. But simply for that, I’ll keep my promise to Borah Clearwater, to protect his lands for as long as I live.” She turned away, starting back along the beach to the place where their own craft waited to carry them north to the city.