Moon felt wonder strike her, as she watched her daughter and the mer. The merling had followed Ngenet and Jerusha up the coast all the way from their plantation. It was a triumph of sorts, and not a small one, that they had successfully communicated their request. And beyond that, Silky had trusted them—loved them—enough to leave her home in Ngenet’s bay, and the mer colony that had adopted her, to journey this far with them.
But in this moment Moon was not sure whether the mer’s presence here, or Ariele’s gentle joy as she touched the face of her sea-friend, astonished her more. In the city, in the palace, Ariele showed her nothing but defiance and thorns; until there were times anymore when she looked at her daughter’s face and could not remember any emotion but anger or pain. When all she saw in that face so like her own was Arienrhod. Arienrhod. But in this fragile, unguarded moment she had glimpsed the beautiful spirit of the child she remembered: it was still there, only hidden, like a bud beneath the snow, waiting for spring to come in its own time.
Moon turned back as Jerusha and Miroe came along the pier toward her. She crossed the dock to meet them, smiling.
“We made it,” Jerusha said, her own pride and relief reflected in her husband’s face.
Moon nodded, gripping their hands. “We’ve come two thirds of the way. The third part is the hardest.” She glanced at the steps leading up the cliff face. “I hope we haven’t come this far for nothing.”
Jerusha smiled faintly. “Well, there’s strength in numbers.” She gestured toward the way up.
Moon looked back at them, hesitating, and shook her head. “First I have to go alone. I have to show the Goodventures that I’ve come in humility and without arrogance… or there’s no point. It will be hard enough to make them hear me out as it is, without—” She broke off, looking down; looked up again into their faces: offworlder faces. The faces of the Enemy, even more than her own was, to Capella Goodventure. She had long since stopped seeing anything unusual about the appearance of either of them. But she saw now, with sudden clarity, how they would stand out among the tradition-bound Summers up on the plateau. “Let me bring her here to you … and Silky.” She glanced away at the water.
“It isn’t safe for you to go alone,” Jerusha protested, with the habitual concern of years spent guarding the Queen’s back.
“Tammis and Ariele will be with me.” Moon nodded toward her children. “We’ll be safe. Not entirely welcome, but safe. Capella Goodventure may hate everything I stand for, but the duty and honor of her clan are at stake. She’ll guarantee my well-being.”
Jerusha glanced at Miroe, who made no protest, and nodded her head grudgingly.
Moon began to strip off the layers of slicker and knitted wool that had kept her warm on her journey. “I’ll bring Capella back here as quickly as I can.” She called Ariele and Tammis away from the ship’s rail. They came to her side, resigned, dressed as she was now in traditional Summer festival clothing—loose linen shirts and pants dyed in shades of green, decorated with shells and embroidery. Tammis looked selfconscious but expectant; Ariele looked resentful as she left Silky’s side. Neither of them had wanted to come. But they had, at least. Her eyes filled in the image of Sparks’s absent face, behind them.
Days had passed, after she had learned the news about the Hegemony and the stardnve, before she had told anyone else about it. She had moved through those days as if she were still outside reality, endlessly considering the consequences of what she knew but could not share, and what she must do about them … and waiting for a sign, from the sibyl mind, that had never come.
At last she had told the Council about what she had learned, and what it would mean for Tiamat. And she had told them that she had decided to turn all her efforts and the resources of the Sibyl College to finding a way to protect the mers.
The news had been greeted with shock and disbelief, and then, in a flood, the reactions she had anticipated and dreaded. She had seen the hunger come into the eyes of too many Winters, and even newly tech-proficient Summers, for a future like their past—a life of golden subservience in which all their needs were taken care of by the Hegemony, and the only measurable price they paid for it was the water of life.
Some of the new industrial leaders and even the sibyls had argued against abandoning the push to raise their technological level, saying that instead they should do everything possible to make what progress they could … that they should turn their efforts to weapons research.
She had rejected that outright, knowing from all Jerusha had told her that they would only be creating the weapons of their own destruction. But she could not reveal to the Council the reason why the mers’ survival was ultimately the key to their own survival, and even the Hegemony’s; why protecting the mers had to come before anything else … any more than she could explain to her husband why BZ Gundhalmu wanted to return to Tiamat, and save their world from his own people.
She could no longer rely on the people she had always relied on. And so she had turned to the traditional elements among the Summers for help and support; for their knowledge about the sea and the mers … which had meant even more resentment, more resistance, from the people in the city, who had always been her strength. And it had meant that somehow she must heal the long enmity between herself and the Goodventure clan.
She and Sparks had argued over every aspect of her decisions, even though she knew that for his own reasons he wanted to protect the mers as much as she did. He had refused to accept any changes in their plan for progress, even though for sixteen years he had spent as much time studying the mers as he had spent working with her on the task of building a new Tiamat. The reasons for his anger and his intractability had been as clear to her, through all their bitter words, as she knew they must be to him. But neither one of them had dared to speak the truth that might have freed them … or made it impossible for them ever to look into each other’s eyes again.
And when she had asked him to come with her to meet Capella Goodventure, he had refused to leave the city.
She sighed, pulling her memory and her fears back into the present, back under her control. She looked at her children, who stood nearly as tall as she was, waiting for her. She had been with Sparks through all the years that she had been Queen … and that was nearly as long as she had been with him in the islands before that, before the separation that had changed them, their world, their place in it. It was hard to believe so many years had passed so quickly—and yet so endlessly. Almost as hard to believe as the sudden image in her mind of the people they had become: such strangers that the innocents they had been in Summer would scarcely recognize themselves … such strangers to each other.
She shut that thought out of her mind with finality, not letting herself even begin to wonder whether the distance that had grown between them had become unbridgeable. Or what it would mean to them—to all three of them—if BZ Gundhalinu returned to this world …
She started toward the flight of steps that would lead her into a future that was not the one she had wanted, or intended. Silently she reminded herself that neither was the future she had now one she wanted, or intended.
She climbed, Tammis and Ariele trailing behind her. Her breath came hard by the time she reached the top. She wondered whether it was the years, or only her body’s enforced inactivity that had left her winded. But waiting for her was a sight that made her sudden sense of mortality fall away—a sea of Summer, of sea-greens, grass-greens… fair, sun-reddened faces, young and old, laughing, wrestling, eating, at play. A picture out of time. She moved among the ancient stone-walled houses with their newly rethatched roofs of dried seahair, moving forward into the past as she searched the crowds for a face she recognized. Curious strangers looked back at her, smiling as they saw the trefoil shining against her shirt, and called her “sibyl.” Some of them looked hauntingly familiar; she was not sure if she had seen their faces before, perhaps even dealt with them in the city … or whether they only reminded her of people she had known in her former life. Most of them gazed at her without recognition; but one or two bowed their heads, murmuring, “Lady…” in surprise, before they turned away to spread the news.