The Summer Queen (30 page)

Reede twitched with annoyance. “I know more about smartmatter
than anybody living. Everybody knows it.”

“And you’re crazy, and everybody knows that too,” Sarkh muttered.

Reede held his gaze. “Only when it suits my needs, Sarkh.”

“Yes,” Jaakola muttered, beside him. Reede turned toward him
in surprise. “He should be the one to go. Let the New Vanamoinen unravel the
secrets of the Old Vanamoinen. His very unpredictability gives him an edge,
wouldn’t you say? He makes a perfect thief. And let him take his leman, if he
wishes.”

Reede stiffened, sensing more than seeing Mundilfoere
tighten with anger beside him. He frowned, suddenly uncertain, and glanced back
at her. He thought doubt flickered like heat lightning across her face; or
maybe it was just his own paranoia he read there. But she met his stare with a
gaze that seemed to him suddenly to hold all of history in it, and he felt her
trust, her confidence, her love fill him, like waters rising out of a
bottomless well.

“Yes,” she murmured, “you are the one who should go, Reede.
This is what you were made for, by the higher power that binds us all.” Reede
opened his mouth to speak, but she shook her head. “But by the same power, I cannot
leave certain boundaries unwatched, or projects untended for so long. You will
go alone this time.” Her eyes forbade any protest. He sat paralyzed, staring at
her, while on around the table the others voted agreement, one by one.

Moon stood up to her knees in the bright grass on the hill below
the plantation house, looking out to sea. She tasted the fresh breath of
spring, felt the breeze run cool fingers through her hair, lifting it like
wings. For a moment she felt as ephemeral as if she were a cloud-child, about
to be swept up to ride on the wind’s back, the way Tammis rode now on his
father’s shoulders on the beach below. Delighted laughter and shrill shrieking
reached her ears, as Ariele and Merovy danced around them, grabbing at Sparks’s
hands and Tammis’s flailing feet, begging for rides of their own. She smiled,
breathing deeply, imprinting their beauty on her eyes.

Beyond them the sea crashed onto the beach, wave upon wave,
reaching northward and southward to the limits of her sight: heavy, silver
gray, white-haired with spume, restless with the massive runoff from the
melting snows. The sea here still seemed cold and relentless, its enormous
breakers battering the steep, rugged foothills that marched down to the shore
for miles along the northern coast. No longer snowglazed, catching and
reflecting light like a mirror, their new silhouette was a jagged knife-edge
against the colorless, fog-burnished sky. But today their massive permanence
was suffused with fog until they were only a smoke stain in the lustrous air, a
surreal, unreachable dream ....

She looked down again at the children and her husband laughing,
running, whirling on the beach; all of them suddenly dancing with their
shadows, shouting their delight as the suns broke through the haze into full
day at last, haloed by sundogs of rainbow. She remembered her own days of
laughing on the beach with Sparks, far away, long ago, with a sudden,
bittersweet vividness. She stood motionless, caught in a tesseract, watching
them, watching the sea brighten and take on color behind them. The turbid
northern ocean never showed the limpid greens and blues that she had seen in
Summer seas; although perhaps that was only because memory made all skies
clearer, dazzled with rainbows, all waters purer, all colors more brilliant and
sense-stunning in those perfect sunlit moments .... Even if there was no Lady
whose spirit brightened the waters, every day the sea was wanning here, every
day the land was greening, becoming reborn; every day this world and her people
took one more step toward a better life. She inhaled another deep breath of the
free, restless air, held it, savoring the taste of salt and damp and new things
growing.

“Moon,” a voice said softly, as if the speaker was reluctant
to intrude on her solitude.

She turned, grateful for the thought behind that reticence,
even as she was suddenly grateful to have Jerusha PalaThion standing beside
her. She had grown as used to Jerusha’s presence as she had to her own shadow;
to be without it was to be incomplete. “Look at them,” she said, pointing
toward the beach, where Jerusha was already looking, watching the horseplay
with smiling envy.

“I’m glad you came,” Jerusha said, glancing away up the hill
toward the house, rubbing her arms as if she were cold, even on a day like this
one.

“I’m glad you came with us.” Moon put her hand on Jerusha’s
arm, touching her gently through the heavy layers of kleeskin and sweater. She
studied Jerusha’s face as the other woman looked back at her, witnessing the
changed woman that her Chief of Constables became—allowed herself to become—when
they were away from the city; an easier, more peaceful woman. Jerusha looked as
if she belonged to these lands, this world, in her rugged native clothing, with
her dark hair falling unbound down her back or braided in a heavy plait like an
islander; just as she herself ceased to be the Summer Queen and became only
human, free for a time to breathe and think and move through patterns that had
meaning only for her. “Being here heals me, somehow,” she said, looking back
toward the beach, the sea.

Jerusha turned to watch with her. “Yes,” she said. “It
always used to make me feel that way, when I was Commander of Police.” She
sighed, glancing up the hill again. “I knew Miroe was involved with contraband
goods. But the best moments of my life for over five years were always here,
visiting him.” Moon heard sudden longing and disillusionment in the words,

“Not anymore—?” she asked softly.

Jerusha looked back at her; shook her head, looking away
again. Moon had wondered why Jerusha did not spend more time here. Jerusha’s
work in the city, her hours spent administering and consulting, were endlessly
demanding; they kept her away from this place, and her husband, far too much of
the time. Moon had often told her to take more time for herself. Jerusha had
always refused.

She glanced again at Jerusha’s face, the deepening lines of
its strong profile eased by her smile as she watched the children. Living on a
world that was not her own, and living through four miscarriages, had taken
their toll on her. Moon felt her heart squeezed, a coldness in her soul, as she
watched her own children run and play, and imagined losing even one of them.
She looked back at Jerusha, seeing the depths of sorrow below the surface of
her smile; realizing suddenly, fully and frighteningly. the toll that Jerusha’s
losses had taken on her relationship with her husband.

Neither Jerusha nor Miroe shared their emotions easily—not
their pain, not even their joy. And the only way for two people to survive a
lifetime together was by sharing those things—no matter how painful, how
secret, how strange. The more things each one hid, the more a family became
only solitary strangers leading parallel lives, blind to any needs but their
own. , ..

She did not realize that she had moved, turning away from
the sea and the sight of her husband and children, far down the beach now,
until Jerusha touched her shoulder. She blinked, startled, found herself gazing
inland toward the mountains ... the remote, fanged peaks still covered with
snow, wreathed in wisps of slowly drifting cloud. As she watched, the clouds
seemed to take the form of a woman’s face and hands, of her blowing hair
cloud-white against the blue ocean of sky—and through her hair, scattered by
her hands, Moon saw, as she sometimes could on rare, perfectly clear days, a
handful of stars, so bright that they were visible even in the daytime sky. She
watched the vision of clouds scatter stars ... remembering how she had watched
other stars falling like a vision, above those distant snowfields on a distant
night: the ships of the Hegemony arriving on Tiamat for the final visit of the
Assembly, the final Festival of Winter. Remembering BZ Gundhalinu, there beside
her ...

“Moon—?” Jerusha’s voice pulled at her; she felt the other
woman’s arms catch her, holding her steady as sudden vertigo overwhelmed her.

“Did you see it?” she whispered, her eyes still on the mountains,
the sky. “The Lady ...”

“What?” Jerusha squinted, following her gaze. But the cloudforms
had flowed on, mutating, hiding the ragged scatter of stars, and she saw
nothing.

“Nothing,” she murmured. “The clouds ... the clouds were
beautiful. It made me think of ... other skies.” She shook her head, avoiding
the look on Jerusha’s face as she began to turn away. But she turned back,
suddenly. “Jerusha—I heard from BZ.”

“What?” Jerusha said again, more in disbelief than incomprehension.
“Gundhalinu?” He had been one of her inspectors; she had seen him turn renegade
out of love, defying her and breaking the Hegemony’s laws for Moon’s sake. But
she had let him go, torn by his divided loyalties, and her own .... “That’s
impossible,” she murmured, her eyes asking Moon to prove it was not. “How?” she
said finally.

“In sibyl Transfer. He’s become a sibyl—” She explained, describing
for Jerusha all that she could remember of what she had seen and heard.

“Why was he in World’s End?” Jerusha asked, shaking her
head. “Was it a lice case? He was assigned to Four—”

“He didn’t tell me.”

“When did this happen?”

“Months ago.” Moon looked away.

“And you didn’t tell anyone?”

“No.” She shook her head, brushing pale strands of hair back
from her face. “I couldn’t.” She turned, looking toward the beach again, where
Sparks and the children were slowly making their way back along the shore. “I
couldn’t tell him ....”

“Oh,” Jerusha said softly.

Moon watched Sparks stop on the sand, waving up at her, his
red hair catching fire in the sunlight. She felt the heavy pressure inside her
chest as she raised her own hand. “I can’t stop thinking about it. I gave him
all I could, Jerusha, all it would let me give him—” This time seeing not her
husband’s face but a stranger’s, as she had on that night as he took her in his
arms .... “But I don’t know if it was enough. I don’t even know if he was able
to save himself. There isn’t a day since then that I haven’t thought about him.”
She felt her face redden. And night after night the memory of his final words
had haunted her, kept her from sleep, when she needed sleep so desperately ....

“Then you haven’t heard anything more?”

“Nothing.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how to reach
him ... I don’t even know how he found me. It isn’t supposed to be possible.”

“I know.” Jerusha glanced at her feet, half frowning. “Damn.
I wish I had an answer.” She sighed. “But I’m glad you told me.” She met Moon’s
eyes again, and smiled, ruefully. “If anyone will survive, he will. You gave
him the gift of survival, before he ever left Tiamat.”

Moon looked away uncertainly.

“He was a good man, one of my best. But he was rigid. His
pride made him bottle. What happened to him when the nomads had him would have
killed him—it nearly did—if you hadn’t shown him something stronger in himself.
I gave him back his career. But you gave him back his life. You made him human.”
Her smile widened. “Gods, you should have heard how that man talked about you.
I couldn’t believe my ears.”

Moon turned back, opening her mouth.

“Moon!” Sparks was beside her, suddenly, pulling her close
against him as he kissed her. She felt his arms surround her, the warmth and
chill of his skin, the tang of sun and sweat. She looked up into his eyes, as
green as the new grass, his red hair moving like flame in the wind; his
handsome, peaceful face, as familiar to her as her own. She pressed against
him, into the solid reality of his embrace, seeing Jerusha’s expression turn
thoughtfully noncommittal as she watched them together. Moon looked out at the
wide water, letting it fill her eyes until it was all she could see; trying to
imagine that they had never left the islands, that there had been no lost time,
no separation, no bitter secrets between them.

“Mama! Mama!” The twins joined them, and little Merovy—not
so little, she reminded herself, looking down at the girl’s fair, freckled face
and windblown brown hair. None of them were so small anymore. The twins’ heads
butted her chest as they wrestled for hugging space. She put her arms around
them, anchored by their warmth and unquestioning love ... shaking off the unknowable,
the impossible, the past, that was no longer an option.

“Mama, look, I found a carbuncle—!” Tammis held up one of
the shining, blood-red stones that washed up along Tiamat’s shores: the
semiprecious gems that the Winters said had been named for the city, or the
city for them. “And look at our shells—!”

“I have one like Da’s, he’s going to make me a flute!”
Ariele waved a slender, pearly corkscrew shell in front of Moon’s face.

“No, that’s mine!” Tammis cried. “It’ll be my flute! I found
it!”

“I promised Ariele—” Sparks protested, with faint exasperation.
“You wait.”

“If he found it, it’s his,” Moon said, separating small,
struggling hands. “You’ll find another, and that will be yours, Ariele. You’ll
have to wait.”

“No!” Ariele shook her head fiercely. “I want mine now!”

“I’ll let you use mine,” Sparks murmured, lifting her chin. “You
can use mine.”

She gazed up at him, her smile coming out like the sun, as
Tammis’s smile fell away suddenly. Moon touched his shoulder, soothing and
distracting him. “Show me what you found.”

“Here, for you—”

She laughed and made expected ohhs of wonder, holding hands
and shells with sudden heartfelt pleasure; refusing to listen to the voice of
the past still calling her name, somewhere inside the joyful clamor of the
present.

“Well now, well now, what is all this—?”