The Summer Queen (120 page)

“What if they can’t—?”

There was only silence to answer him, and the sound of
labored breathing

“What if I won’t?”

Only silence.

“Jaakola—!”

Only silence, and his own heart beating

“Ariele,” he whispered, leaning over her bed in the darkness
like a shadow, covering her mouth with his lips, waking her with a kiss.

Her eyes opened, blinking in wild incomprehension, and she
struggled against him, for the moment it took her to wake fully. “Ariele,” he
said again, and she went limp beneath him.

“Reede?” she whispered, in amazement, because he had never
been inside her apartment before, always refused to come anywhere near it.

He did not speak again, but used his mouth to go on kissing
her—her face, her throat, while his hands fumbled with the fastenings of her
sleepshirt. Finally he jerked it open, hearing cloth rip with his impatience,
beyond caring. He pulled it down her body, hearing her sound of half-protest,
half-surprise as he bared her. But she clung to him as he covered her nakedness
with his kisses, stripped off his own clothes in a frenzy of desperate need and
laid his body down on hers. She wrapped herself around him, welcoming him,
eager for him, taking him inside her; sheltering him as he possessed her,
giving her the only gift he knew how to give, until she cried out in astonished
pleasure and release, setting his own need free inside her.

They lay together, their legs tangled, their bodies still
joined, their hearts beating each to each, for a long time before he spoke her
name again.

“I’m leaving,” he said, and he pressed his lips to her warm,
shining skin, with infinite gentleness this time, before he slid off of her and
sat up. “I want you to come with me.” His hand slipped down along her arm until
he was holding her fingers closed inside his own.

She sat up too, suddenly wide awake in the darkness. “Tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you going? Offworld?”

“No, I’d never get away with that .... Into the outback. You
have to come with me.”

“Why?” she asked softly.

“Because I’m tired of living, and because you’re not.”

“I don’t understand ....”

“You don’t have to. You just have to trust me. Do you trust
me, Ariele?”

Slowly she nodded.

He took her hand, drawing her up. “Then let’s go.”

They headed south along the coast hi the Queen’s hovercraft,
into the sheltering darkness. Dawn found them still traveling southward above
the infinite fields of the sea. Ariele had not spoken more than two words to
him all the while as they flew, only huddling against him in the seat, with her
head on his shoulder, drifting in and out of sleep. The pressure of her weight
against him began to hurt him as his nerve endings grew hypersensitive. His
mind magnified every symptom of his systemic deterioration through the long,
silent hours, making his awareness of his growing discomfort infinitely more
unpleasant; but he did not wake her.

The night seemed to go on forever; and yet the new day’s
dawn peered over his shoulder too soon, telling him that their time of stolen
peace together was running out.

Ariele stirred at last, as the hot light of the steadily
rising suns beat in through the side window, falling on her face. She sat up
again, rubbing her eyes, and looked out at the bleak unfamiliarity of the
distant coastline. They were turning away from it now, heading out across the
open sea. “Where are we?”

“Far away,” he said. “Down the coast about as far as there’s
still any habitation. I’m going to drop you off at the last Summer village I
can find, and then I’m ditching the hovercraft.”

She looked at him as if he had gone insane. “Why, Reede? Why
are we out here? Is it about the mers?”

“No,” he said grimly. “Not directly. I want you to listen to
me, really listen. I don’t work for your mother—”

“I know,” she said softly.

He looked at her, half frowning. But he only said, “Don’t
interrupt. I work for somebody called the Source. I do research for him, he
brought me here to study the mers so I could make him a supply of the water of life.”
She stared at him, silent now. “He—owns me.” He held up his palm, showing her
the scar. He had seen her looking at it from time to time, but she had never
dared to ask him what it was. “He tells me to do things, and I do them, or he
cuts off my drugs. If I can’t get my fix, I’ll die.”

“He—he addicted you?”

“No,” he said harshly. “I did it to myself. But he controls
my supply—” pushing on before she could ask more. “I brought you out here
because now he wants me to give the drug to you.”

Her breath stopped; he saw sudden fear in her eyes.

“I brought you out here because I won’t do it!” he said
angrily. “He told me to get close to you; he told me to sleep with you, he made
me—made me do everything. Except this. By the Render—” His hands knotted over
the controls.

“Everything ... ?” Ariele said, her voice thin and
tremulous, her cheeks reddening with humiliation. “I don’t believe that. Not everything.”
Her fingers touched her lips, her breast. “Not last night—” She looked back at
him, her eyes burning his flesh.

He kept his own gaze fixed on the endless bluegreen of the
sea. At last, looking out, he found what he had been searching for. He pointed
ahead. “There. The Outermost islands. They’re as far south as anybody still
lives, from what I can tell. There’s a Summer village on one of the islands in
the chain. It’s so remote they’ve barely even heard of Carbuncle. It’s
habitable through Tiamat’s whole climate cycle, so they never have to leave it.
You can tell them your boat was swept off course by a storm, and you washed up
on their beach.”

“Alone—?” she asked faintly. He answered her with his silence.
She looked away from the sea, from the distant specks of purple-gray that
marred its perfect surface, into his eyes. She looked down again abruptly, with
her hands clenching in her lap. “And then what? You expect me to live with
them, like a—a doshtu in a stone hut?”

“It’s how the Dawntreaders lived for generations,” he
snapped. “Even Arien rhod lived like that before the Change. It’s in your
blood; you’ll get used to it.”

“How long do I have to do this?”

He took a deep breath. “Maybe for the rest of your life.”

She turned in her seat. “Forever—?”

“If you know what’s good for you. The Source wants to use
you against your mother and Gundhalinu. He thinks they have something that he
wants, and he’ll use you to get it. He’ll hook you on the water of death and
then he’ll let it work on you; he figures when the Queen and Gundhalinu see
their own child dying by inches, they’ll give it to him. But they can’t, even
if they want to. And I can’t stop him. Nobody can. Except you. You can
disappear, completely.”

“All this ... because I love you?” she said, her voice
falling apart. “That’s why all this is happening to me? I’ll never see Carbuncle
again? Never see my family, or ...” Her anguish and betrayal, her helpless
rage, filled him until he could not breathe, as he watched her realize all she
had lost in the space of a dozen heartbeats; all he had done to her, in the
space of a dozen words. She pressed her hands against her face, her fingers
whitening. Her eyes welled with tears of fury, of hatred ... of shame, and
unrelenting hunger, as she murmured, “Or you—?”

He took a deep, ragged breath, feeling the same desperate
rage against impossible fate fill him the way the air filled his lungs. He had
never wanted this, never wanted her—She had been forced on him, against his
will, used like an instrument of torture by the man who had made an exquisite
art of torturing him. He should hate her. And yet ... He looked away from her
blindly, before she could see the same unrelenting hunger in his eyes.

He began to check readouts and systems obsessively, things
whose preprogrammed functions needed no adjusting; trying to insulate himself
from her inescapable nearness. But his traitorous senses registered her
presence through every fiber of his body, as if her every breath and movement
was an extension of his own ... until he was not even sure how he had come to
be touching her, kissing her, holding her against him. He groaned softly as his
degenerating nerve synapses shocked him like live wires, the pain intensifying
his arousal with exquisite perversity. He held her closer, savoring every
sensation as if it were his last.

“Are you ... are you going back to him—?” she murmured, her
lips soft and warm against his throat. To the Source.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m letting the hovercraft
take me down. No more. Let him think we died together.” A wave of terror
inundated him, as he imagined the cold waters of the sea closing over his head,
filling his lungs, possessing him at last. He forced himself to remember that
it would be quick, it could be over in seconds if he canceled the emergency
safeguards and hit die water just right. He forced himself to remember the
alternative.

He felt her stiffen against him. “Take me with you, then,”
she murmured. “Let me go with you. I don’t care, I don’t want to live without
you—”

He pulled away from her, his hands tightening over her arms
until she winced in pain. “No. Then he’ll win, that fucking, diseased bastard!
You’ve got to live!” He shook her. “If you love me, it’s what you’ve got to do.”

“Why can’t we both live, then?” she demanded. “The Chief
Justice will help us. Gundhalinu said he knew you, and he could help you. It
isn’t too late—”

“It is for me! He can’t get me what I need. And he can’t
protect you. I’m going to die, Ariele, don’t you fucking hear me? Unless I
crawl back to the Source on my belly and beg him like a dog to give me what I
need, I’m dead. And he won’t give it to me unless I give him you.”

“But if it’s only a drug—”

He gave a sharp laugh, the sound of disbelief a man being impaled
might make, at the moment of first penetration. He turned away from her in
bleak disgust. “The Summer village is the next island down the chain. You’re getting
off there.”

“No—” She moved suddenly, unexpectedly, reaching past him.
Her hands attacked the instruments, fighting him, fighting them, unlocking the
system and putting it under manual control. The craft bucked and plunged as he
shoved her away, hard, against the door. He struggled to get it back under his
control, but she flung herself on him again, wedging her body against the
panel. He felt the hovercraft drop precipitously out from under them. “Ariele!”
he shouted; he struck her openhanded across the face in desperate panic. She
fell back into her seat, held there by acceleration as they plummeted headlong
toward the bluegreen water that was suddenly all he could see.

He shouted frantic voice commands at the craft’s guidance system,
pulling back on the manual controls with all his strength, trying to stop their
fatal arc with his own strength. He was not an experienced pilot, he had always
had others to do the job for him. Now, when it was too late, he cursed himself
for it.

But abruptly he saw a line of pale ocher, a vision of
rust-red and green-gray filling his view: giving him just time to realize that
they had reached land, before they struck it.

The hovercraft hit with a grinding crunch and spun like a
plate, heaving and pitching, across the rock-strewn surface of the plateau. It
slammed to a halt inside a grove of tree-ferns. Greenery rained down on them,
covering the windshield with fronds.

Reede hung against the emergency restraints of his seat, gasping.
Ariele stirred beside him, shaking her head, making a thin whimpering protest.
The sound stopped abruptly, and she turned her face toward him, holding her
hand against her cheek.

Between her fingers he could see the print of his own hand
like a red brand on her pale skin. “Why didn’t you let us crash?” she cned
fiercely, her voice in rags.

He rested his gibbering, pain-filled body against the
solidness of the seatback, watching her out of the corner of his eye. He felt
bruises beginning to form, too easily, felt a telltale dribble of blood run out
of one nostril, sliding down his lip. He wiped his nose on his sleeve.

“You don’t want to die,” she said, “any more than I do! We
can radio for help—”

“Get out,” he said, and when she didn’t move, shouted, “I
said get out!” He waited for her to push aside the crash restraints and obey,
before he climbed out on his own side. Not trusting her, he ordered the doors
sealed when they were both outside, on opposite sides of the craft. He looked
at the hovercraft, seeing its battered undercarriage, the wake of debris its
slide along the ground had left behind. One look told him that its ruined
repeller grid would never lift them again.

He looked away, taking in the rest of their view. This was
not the island he had been heading for; he could see that one still in the
distance, looming out of the sea He could see the entirety of the island they
were on, turning where he stood; some miserable, nameless rock barely keeping
its head above water. Stranded. He felt his stomach cramp with sickness;
swallowed convulsively, barely able to stop himself from retching. At least the
hovercraft had ended up beneath the trees. The small stand of giant ferns was
the only shelter he could see; the trees were probably the only living things
on the island besides the two of them, and random flights of birds. The grove
would conceal the craft from an aerial search well enough; if all they were using
was visual, anyway. At least it might buy them a little more time.

He turned back to Ariele. “The village is on that next
island, the big one.” He pointed. “You’re a strong swimmer. Find something that
floats; you’ll reach it in a few hours.”

She stared at him for a long moment. “No,” she said

“Damn it, Ariele—!” He took a step toward her, his hands
tightening into fists.