The Summer Queen (49 page)

Tor looked back at the cluster of Summers, seeing their
guilt and embarrassment. “I’ve seen heart-and-breathing work on drowning
victims, too.”

The Summers looked back at her, then. Every one of them.

“Oh-oh-oh! Oh no! You win!” Ariele Dawntreader pressed one
hand over her mouth, smothering her ecstatic giggles as she watched the
sapphire stone clatter and sing down through the labyrinth of the gaming
sculpture and out one of its random openings into her brother’s lap. “You have
to give Elco heart-and-breathing!” She looked around the circle of their
laughing, pointing friends at Elco Teel Graymount, as he flopped back onto the
carpet with a bloodcurdling scream and began to twitch. He lay still, eyes
staring, arms spread, while the young Winters around him snickered and poked
each other, making noises in Tammis’s direction.

Ariele could see her brother blushing, Merovy’s eyes on him
as she sat beside him, clutching his hand. Even though she was some kind of
cousin of Elco Teel’s, Merovy always looked like a fish out of water when
Tammis brought her to one of these parties. Ariele couldn’t wait to see how she
reacted when the red stone landed in her lap, or the blue one.

“Come on, Tammis,” Ariele called, unable to resist goading
him. “Capella Goodventure’s dying. You saw Tor Starhiker give her
heart-and-breathing. Show us how it’s done!”

He pushed up from his place beside Merovy with a peculiar
grimace and stepped over legs and bodies until he reached Elco’s side. He
kneeled down, looking into

Elco Teel’s wide-eyed stare and expectant grin. He hesitated
fora long moment, with reluctance showing in his own eyes. Ariele wondered what
he was afraid of—or if it was only the memory of seeing the real thing that
stopped him. He leaned over, lowering his face toward Elco Teel’s.

“No, no!” voices sang out. “Not like that—!”

“Do it—!”

He sat back, looking at them over his shoulder. “That was
how she did it!” he said, annoyed, but knowing that wasn’t what they wanted.
Finally he swung a leg over Elco Teel and sat down on top of his stomach. The
act of leaning forward forced his own hips back until their bodies seemed to be
joined like two lovers. Whistles and clapping crescendoed around them as he put
his hands against the sides of Elco Teel’s face, and his mouth over Elco’s
mouth.

He tried to end it quickly, raising his head; the cheering
and laughter turned to mockery and protest. Ariele pushed to her feet. “Get
off, Tammis, I’ll show you how it’s done!” She started around the circle;
stopped as Elco Teel’s arms abruptly trapped Tammis in an embrace and dragged
him back down for a deep, wet kiss. She watched Tammis’s body quiver, but to
her surprise he didn’t fight it the way she’d thought he would. She glanced at
Merovy, saw the other girl staring at the two boys, her face confused and
half-frowning.

“Well, Tirady, look at this—I believe Elco Teel’s found true
love.”

Ariele glanced up, startled, to see Kirard Set Wayaways and
his wife Tirady Graymount standing together in the wide entrance to the room,
staring at them. Elco Teel let go of Tammis, who half fell off of him in his
desperate attempt to get away. But Elco Teel’s father only laughed, shaking his
head as he came down the three steps into the room, casually unsealing his
shining evening jacket. “Don’t stop on my account, children. You know I find it
delightful and amusing, when you play with my game set behind my back. And I’m
sure it was all quite innocent really ....”

“We were just practicing heart-and-breathing, Da.” Elco Teel
rolled onto his side, propping his chin on his hand with a smirk that attempted
to imitate his father’s languid smile. “Like at the Shop today ... I was being
the victim.”

Kirard Set raised his eyebrows. “You were being Capella
Goodventure? Ye gods—or should I say, Lady’s Tits—now that’s depraved. Can you
imagine, Tirady—having our child turn into a sanctimonious religious fanatic?”

Tirady Graymount murmured something Ariele couldn’t make
out, that sounded bored and annoyed. She moved past him without looking at any
of them, toward the angular cabinet that Ariele knew held their substantial
supply of alcoholic drinks. Elco Teel said they also had a dwindling hoard of
more exotic drugs left from before the Change; but even he didn’t know where
those were hidden. Tirady’s movements were not too steady, and Ariele suspected
she had had a lot to drink already. Maybe they’d argued, and that was why they’d
come back so unexpectedly early.

Ariele looked back at Kirard Set, glanced at Elco Teel,
trying to guess whether the father was really angry or only amused; whether the
son was actually as unconcerned about being caught in the act as he seemed to
be. Their family fascinated her. They were so different from her own that they
sometimes seemed more alien than the mers.

But Kirard Set’s attention was on his wife. He moved toward
her as she pulled a bottle of local wine out of the cabinet, and tried to take
it from her. She looked at “ini, with eyes as cold and pale as glacier ice, and
he let his hand drop, shrugging. She moved away from him again, heading toward
a doorway at the far end of the room. She stopped as she passed a mirror, and
peered into it as if she were seeing into another dimension. She put a pale,
slender hand up to her face, pressing her cheek, pulling the skin taut until
the deepening line along her mouth disappeared. She took her hand away,
frowned, and left the room without a backward glance, as if they had all ceased
to exist.

“Your mother is feeling old, tonight,” Kirard Set murmured.
He took out another bottle, and removed the stopper. He drank deeply, straight
from its mouth, and came back across the room toward the now-silent circle of
friends. He held the bottle out. Several of the wide-eyed witnesses shook their
heads, picking themselves up from where they sat in various stages of
embarrassment and awkwardness, saying that they had to go home. One by one the
others followed. He made no move to stop them, and neither did Elco Teel.
Merovy began to get up, and Tammis followed her.

Ariele put out her hand, still standing where she had
stopped when Elco Teel’s parents arrived. Kirard Set handed her the bottle with
a measuring smile; his glance traveled down her body and back up it again in a
way that made her tingle with an odd pleasure—knowing that for once he had not
looked at her as if he saw a child. He was a very handsome man, and he still
looked young, even though she knew that he was actually very old, and like his
wife, was beginning to show signs of it. She took a drink of the wine, careful
not to take too much, knowing the burn of it would make her cough. She
swallowed it with passable grace, and handed the bottle back to him.

“Well done.” Kirard Set smiled again, approvingly. “Ah,” he
said, “you look lovely in those colors, Anele. It takes me back to the old
days, to see you standing there like that ... I even remember that outfit, how
she looked when she wore it You look so very much like her, you know ... more
so every day. More even than your mother, because you have more of Anenrhod’s
spirit.”

“Arienrhod?” Anele said, uncertainly. She glanced down at
her outfit. Among the endless possessions in the Snow Queen’s closets, she had
found things that she had made over to fit her. Her mother had never touched
any of those clothes, had never even looked at anything there, as far as she
knew. Her mother seemed to hate the thought of it, and frowned when Anele put
them on, even though she never forbade her to wear them. Sometimes, perversely,
Anele wished that they were forbidden, so that she could wear them anyway, and
defy her mother’s anger instead of her peculiar, distracted sorrow. All her
Winter friends wore offworlder clothes, handed down, saved from Before ... and
she had fallen in love with the blazing beauty of their colors, the wonderful
fineness and the exotic vaneties of the materials. She had wanted clothes like
that—and she had found them. But did they actually make her look like a queen?
She smiled, looking up again.

“Of course,” Kirard Set said softly. “As you should, since
she was your grandmother.”

“What?” Ariele said. “No, my grandmother was a Summer. She
died, I never met her ...”

Kirard Set’s eyes widened. “Gods,” he murmured. “You don’t
know? Is it possible you really don’t know?” He looked toward Tammis, who had
stopped moving and was staring at him in equal curiosity. “Have you ever seen a
picture of Arienrhod?”

Ariele shook her head; Tammis shook his.

“There was one in the bedroom on the third floor ... a
painting of her.”

“I remember that. I used to look at it when I was little.
But that was a picture of my mother,” Anele said. “She didn’t like it, she had
the servants put it away.”

Kirard Set laughed. “It wasn’t your mother. It was her
mother. Her real mother. It was Arienrhod ... That’s why she didn’t like it.”

“That’s not true,” Tammis said, frowning. “Our mother’s a
Summer. And Gran is a Summer too.”

Anele waved him quiet. She sat down on the long, narrow reclining
couch, pulling her feet up. “Are you making this up—?” she asked, meeting
Kirard Set’s inscrutable gaze, her eyes begging him to tell her that he was
not.

“Oh, no,” he said, smiling again as he moved to take a seat
beside her on the couch. “It’s quite true, Ariele. Would you like to hear the
whole, true story?”

She nodded eagerly, looked back at her brother. Tammis hesitated,
glancing toward the door. He still wore half a frown, as if he were afraid to
hear this. But he sat down again, cross-legged on the carpet beside Elco Teel,
who was stretched out with his chin on his palms. Merovy, who had been pulling
surreptitiously at Tammis’s hand, gave up and sat down beside him. Her habitual
look of unease deepened.

Kirard Set leaned back into the sloping corner of the couch,
taking another drink from the decanter. “Well, all of this began long ago, long
before either of you were even a gleam in your father’s eye ....” His smile
twitched. “Arienrhod had been the Snow Queen ever since the Hegemony arrived at
the last Change, and the Goodventures’ Summer reign ended with a splash. She’d
been Queen for nearly a century and a half, and she knew how the offworlders
exploited us, manipulated us, kept us from our rightful equality in the
Hegemony. She knew that when the offworlders left she’d be thrown into the sea,
and Summer would drag us all back down into the darkness for a century again. So
she decided to do something about it.”

Anele nodded, almost hypnotized by the lanquid flow of his
words. “What did she do?”

“She used the offworlders’ own technology to have herself
cloned—to have a perfect copy made of her, only her, with no one else’s genes
in the mix to weaken her resolve ... several copies, actually. She had them
secretly implanted in the bodies of Summer women who had come to the next to
last Festival, who would go home to the islands none the wiser, thinking the
child they bore was a merrybegot, the result of a Mask Night fling with a man
they would never see again. Out of all the clones she had implanted, only your
mother was perfect ... and grew up raised by Summers, as Arienrhod intended, so
that she would understand her people’s ways when she came to rule in Arienrhod’s
place. Arienrhod was willing to die—she told me many times that she didn’t want
to live on in this miserable, half-dead world—as long as she knew that she
would be reborn in the body of your mother.”

Ariele stared, her mouth open, unable to name the feelings inside
her, since disbelief was not permitted to be one of them. “But how could she
know my mother would become the new Summer Queen?”

He shrugged. “She had become Queen. How could your mother
not?”

“How do you know about this?” Ariele said. “Does everyone
know—?” Except me.

“Of course not, dear child. Most of the Summers don’t really
know what Arienrhod looked like. Capella Goodventure saw her up close before
she died, of course—saw them both together. It’s one small reason why she and
your mother don’t get along .... Most of the Winters still think your mother
actually is Arienrhod—in the flesh, that is—that somehow she cheated death and
the offworlders, and lived on and is still Queen. But a few—a very few—people
know the real truth. Arienrhod and I were old, old friends. I was ... an
intimate in all her most personal affairs.” He raised his eyebrows, and Elco
Teel sniggered, lying on the floor.

“Does ... does Da know about this?” Tammis asked, his voice
sounding odd.

Kirard Set chuckled and took another sip of wine. “Oh, he certainly
does. Most of it never would have come to pass without him. He and your mother
were childhood sweethearts, you know. When she became a sibyl he thought she
had rejected him, and he ran away to Carbuncle.”

“What’s that got to do with Arienrhod?” Tammis said.

Kirard Set waved his impatience aside. “When Arienrhod
learned Sparks was in the City, she had him brought to her, thinking she could
use him to lure your mother to her, to get her to leave the islands and come to
the city .... She sent a message to your mother, supposedly from him, saying he
was in trouble. Your mother did come after him, because of course she still
loved him very much. But she had the misfortune to be abducted offworld by
technmners on her way here—or perhaps the good fortune, depending on your point
of view; since she learned the power of her sibylhood, which even Arienrhod
never dreamed of. But it took five years for her to get back, and in the
meantime Arienrhod thought she was lost forever.”

“My mother has been offworld? With pirates—?” Ariele murmured,
astonished by the secret lives her parents had led when they were hardly older
than she was herself. She had scarcely even wondered what their lives had been
like before she was born, imagining they had always been the way they were in
her earliest memories: old, weary, obsessed with work and not each other. To
picture her mother young, passionate, daring anything for her father’s sake ...
and not even her own mother’s child. Arienrhod’s. Ariele blinked and shook her
head, feeling giddy, tantalized, excited ... frightened.