“Are you… ?” He tried to imagine what relation they could be, who were so alike in every feature. “Moon’s aunt? Her father’s—”
She shook her head; a creamy strand of hair came loose and uncoiled along her neck. “Moon has no father… any more. And we don’t have her any more, you and I. I never even had the chance to meet her, but she was as important, as precious to me as she was to you. Perhaps even more so. I had hoped, in time, that we could have her with us here in the city.” Her eyes left him, moving restlessly over the ornate, cluttered table along the wall.
“She wouldn’t have come.” His voice went flat. “Not after she was a sibyl.”
“You think not? Not even for you?” The hand still rested sympathetically on his arm.
He sighed. “I wasn’t ever as important to her as being a sibyl was. But why didn’t you tell me about — her, and you, and — and us?” Somehow he was no longer speaking to the Queen, but to the one person who understood his own loss.
“I would have told you. I am telling you now. But I wanted to know what sort of lover my… kinswoman would choose over all the rest. 1 wanted to know you for myself first. And I approve of her choice, very much.” The hand squeezed lightly, left his arm again; she brushed irritably at the loose strand of her hair, only setting more free. He had never seen her like this, weary and distraught and disappointed. So very human, so much like he was… so much like Moon.
“I’ll never know Moon now, Sparks . I only have you to tell me about her, to remind me of her. Tell me what you remember most clearly, and feel the most deeply about her. What things did she love — what things about her did you love more than all the rest? Tell me how much you loved her…”
The night of firelight and wind came back to him, overlaid by a thousand more images of Moon: the child whirling with arms outflung on the shining beach; the muffled girl hauling in a netful of coppery fish beside him on an icy deck; and again the lover, whispering soft words, warm against his heart. “I can’t. I can’t tell you about her…” His voice fell apart. “Not if she’s gone.”
“She is gone, Sparks.” Arienrhod pulled the diadem from her hair, shook it free like a fall of water, down over her shoulders and her back, over the muted cloud-colors of her simple robe. “But you haven’t lost her. Not if you don’t want to.” She leaned forward. “We are very alike, aren’t we — she and I?”
He stared at her, at the fall of ivory hair, the slender girlish body and the soft stuff of the robe drawn tight across her small, high breasts… the lips, the moss-agate eyes that asked the question, her face that was the answer: “Yes.”
“Then let me be Moon for you.” Her fingertips lifted a strand of his own hair in a hauntingly familiar gesture; he felt the pulse begin to beat in his temple. Inside his head he heard the voice of the Sea; but whether it blessed him or cursed him he did not know, or care, any more. He was on fire, and not even the Sea could quench the flame of his need. He reached out, touching her for the first time, let his hand fall along her bared shoulder down the cool, curving surfaces of her arm.
She leaned eagerly into his caress, drew him down onto the bed beside her, guiding his hands. “Show me how much you loved her…”
Sparks lay with his eyes closed, absorbing the messages that reached him through his other senses — senses heightened by the grateful heaviness of his weary body. He inhaled the warm, musky scent of Arienrhod’s presence beside him, felt the soft pressure of her body contoured against his own. There was no smell of the sea about her, but instead a fragrance of imported perfumes. And yet he felt the Sea’s presence in her: she who was the Lady incarnate, robed in foam, seabirds flying from her hair, with lips like sunrise, like blood… who had lain waiting for him for centuries. He listened to the rhythm of her quiet breathing, opened his eyes to look over at her face. Her own eyes were closed; smiling in half-sleep as she lay beside him, she could even be the one he had named her at the moment when he lost control…
Amazement touched him with a tingling hand as he realized again that he lay beside the Queen of Winter. But a profound tenderness filled him, he ached to give her the love, the loyalty, the life that he had pledged to her lost other ness “Arienhrod…” He breathed the unfamiliar name against her ear. “Arienrhod. I want to be the only one with you.”
She opened her eyes then, regarded him with gentle censure. “No. No, my love.”
“Why not?” His arms closed her in, possessively. “I was the only one for Moon. Let me be the only one with you. I’m not just another fish in the net; I don’t want to share you with a hundred others.”
“But you must share me, Sparks. I am the Queen, the power. No one puts limits on me, no one commands me — I won’t allow it, because it weakens my control. There will never be an only one, man or woman.
Because I am the Only One. But there will never be an other one like you…” She kissed him softly on the forehead, her fingers closing over the off world medal resting on his chest. “My star child.”
He shivered.
“What’s wrong?”
“She used to call me that.” He pushed up onto an elbow, looking down at her as she lay back smiling, caught outside of time. “If I can’t be the only one, then I want to be the only one who counts.” He saw in his mind the mocking figure dressed in black who stood always at the Queen’s right hand, who baited him and bullied him at every private opportunity, with an evil enjoyment rooted in bitter jealousy. “I want to challenge Starbuck.”
“Starbuck?” Arienrhod blinked at him with honest surprise, before she began to laugh. “My love, you’re too new here to realize what you’re saying — and you’re far too young and alive to throw away everything. Because that is what you’d be doing, if you challenged Starbuck. I’m flattered by the gesture, but I forbid it. Believe me when I tell you that he counts for nothing in my heart. Since the first Festival night, when I put on the mask of the Winter Queen so long ago…” her eyes changed, and she was no longer seeing him, “there has been no one in my bed, or in my life, who made me long for the time when I was only Arienrhod, and lived in a world that was ignorant but free; when wishes and dreams meant something, because they weren’t always realized. You make me dream of lost innocence… you make me dream. There is no need for you to do, or be, anything more to make me love you-and want to keep you from harm. Starbuck could kill you with any weapon you could choose, including bare hands. And besides, Starbuck must be an off worlder he must have have the knowledge and the contacts among his own kind to help me keep them at bay.”
“I’m enough of an off worlder. He held out the medal, let it spin on its chain in the air above her. “And enough a part of this world to hate them like you do. I’ve listened and watched; I’ve learned a lot about the court, and the city too, how the off worlders use it. Anything I didn’t know you could teach me…” He smiled, a smile that Moon would not have understood. “And I know the one thing I really need to know, even if you don’t believe it — how I can challenge Starbuck and win.” He stopped smiling.
Arienrhod studied him silently; he felt her measure and weigh with her eyes. He thought a shadow passed across her face, before she nodded. “Challenge him, then. But if you do, and fail, I’ll call you a vain little braggart and make love to him on your grave.” She caught the winking pendant and drew him down on top of her.
“I won’t fail.” He found her lips again, hungrily. “And if I can’t be your only lover, I’ll be the best.”