Sparks began to shake his head. “Not in a—”
“I saw him,” Elco Teel said, and Sparks thought he heard a hint of malice in it “He went upstairs. Brein wanted to congratulate him on his marriage.” He glanced at Ariele, raising his eyebrows, smiling as Merovy’s face pinched with some emotion Sparks couldn’t name.
Ariele looked back at him, but she did not smile, this time. She pulled her arm free from his grasp. “I don’t care,” she said. “I want to dance.” She started away, leaving him behind. He scrambled after her through the crowd to the space where others were dancing already—old dances, offworlder dances, to music that had over time become a unique mixture of different heritages; like their world.
Sparks looked back at Merovy, seeing something secret and forlorn fill her face as she watched them go off without a word. Sensing that there was more to it than simply the casual rudeness of youth, he touched her arm gently. “I’ll find him, and send him to you.”
She nodded, smiling.
He made his way through the party toward the stairway at the back of the room. Kirard Set intersected his course, leaning against the banister at the foot of the stairs as he reached it. Kirard Set’s smile was annoyingly like his son’s. “The facilities are free down here at the moment—” He gestured at the bathroom.
Sparks felt his frown come back. “I’m looking for Tammis*. Is he up there?”
Kirard Set shrugged. “Yes.” He stepped aside, leaving the stairway clear, but his expression changed subtly. Sparks knew, with a sudden coldness in the pit of his stomach, that he should turn and walk away. But Kirard Set’s smile held him, gently mocking.
Instead he climbed the stairs to the second story of the townhouse, hearing the sound of voices speaking softly, growing more distinct, until he recognized one as Tammis’s. He reached the top of the stairs and saw two figures embracing in the dim light. They broke apart, startled by his sudden appearance, so that he saw them clearly—Tammis, with his bright wedding shirt hanging open, and Brein, a Winter boy from the crowd he was always with, stroking his bare chest.
He saw the sudden guilt, the sudden despair in Tammis’s eyes as son came face to face with father on his wedding day. Brein backed away, looking everywhere but at the two of them, and disappeared down the stairs.
“Tammis,” Sparks said, and Tammis flinched as if he had been struck. “What was that—?” He gestured at the empty spot where Brein had stood.
“Nothing. He was just … I …” Tammis flushed, pulling his shut together, and hung his head. His trefoil was lost in the tangle of his clothes.
“By the Lady and all the gods!” Sparks caught him by the shoulders, slamming him up against the wall. “You miserable— On your wedding day? When you have a beautiful wife who loves you searching for you downstairs? Why—?”
“I couldn’t help it,” Tammis murmured. The words were almost inaudible. He fumbled with the laces of his shirt, trying to fasten them.
“Damn it!” Sparks slapped his hands away. “Look at me when I’m talking to you!”
“Oh, don’t be so hard on the boy, Dawntreader,” Kirard Set’s voice said, behind him.
Sparks turned, his own face flushing with anger and humiliation as Wayaways joined them at the top of the stairs.
“You Summers are so narrow-minded about everything. You act as if there’s only one right answer to every question.” Kirard Set shook his head. “It’s only a little harmless flirtation. A boy’s got to be sure he’s not missing anything, you know.”
“Leave us alone, Wayaways.” Sparks turned his back on the other man, infuriatingly aware that Kirard Set made no move to depart, still hanging on every word and motion like a voyeur. Sparks caught Tammis by the jaw, forcing his son to look him in the eye, beyond caring what Kirard Set saw or heard or thought, now—sure that he had known it all along. “You are a Summer, a sibyl, by the Mother’s Will! Not some buggering Winter pervert, trying to make yourself smell like the offworlders by wallowing in shit!”
“Like you—?” Tammis said, suddenly and furiously, his dark eyes burning. “Like you did, at Arienrhod’s court, while you were supposed to be pledged to my mother—?”
Sparks froze, speechless, feeling the ice-taloned hand of the past reach into his chest and stop his heart. “Who…” he said at last, “who told you that about me?”
Tammis’s eyes flickered away from his face, briefly touching on Kirard Set still watching and listening behind them, and back again. “He told me you liked it both ways. He said you used to laugh at Summers for being narrow and stupid, that you did things for Arienrhod that—”
Sparks’s hand shot out, slapping his face, stopping the words. “Believe that if you want to,” he whispered, his mouth filled with bitterness. “But don’t ever use it as an excuse. Especially not with me.” He turned away, turning his back on his son’s anguish. Kirard Set shrugged as Sparks met his amused gaze. “Like father, like son… ?” he said softly, and pursed his lips. He shook his head. Sparks moved past him, pushing him aside with a heedless elbow.
Heading back down the steps, he barely registered the sight of Merovy, standing midway up the stairs, or the expression in her eyes as she watched him pass.
TIAMAT: Clearwater Plantation
“I can’t believe it.” Moon shook her head, standing knee-deep in water beside the canted hull of the abandoned boat. “I can’t.” Her mind refused to accept the obvious truth: that her grandmother was dead, as suddenly and as irrevocably as a wave broken against the shore. She ran her hand along the totem-creature on the boat’s prow, touching the third eye carved on its forehead above the other two in the Summer fashion. The Weather Eye, they always called it. Selen, her grandmother’s name, was painted on the stern; a boat was always called after a woman, because it pleased the Sea Mother…. But this time the Sea Mother had not been pleased, and the name on the stern of the abandoned craft left no doubt who had been taken away by the sudden, elemental sweep of Her hand.
Moon turned back again to Sparks, who stood between her and the small cluster of plantation hands. The workers had been led to the boat by mers from the colony that sheltered along the plantation’s shore. There had been no sign of any bodies.
Mers hovered near them in the water even now, or squatted on the beach a short distance away. Sparks shook his head, meeting her gaze, before his own gaze moved out across the sea. He squinted into the sun’s light, mirrored by a million chips of brilliance and thrown back again into his eyes by the changeable water surface. “Elco Teel said something about there being a storm down the coast, when we were at the wedding.”
Moon saw the wedding feast suddenly in her mind’s eye; the happy faces, the happiness she had felt in her own heart— She looked back at the workers. “Was there a storm, after they set out?”
They glanced at each other, murmuring and shrugging. “No, Lady, there wasn’t a storm,” a woman said. “The weather’s been clear down this way, for most of a week now.”
Moon looked at Sparks again. “Elco Teel said that? Why would he say that?”
Sparks shook his head again, and she saw his mouth pull down. “To make trouble,” he said sourly, glancing away. “To spoil someone’s moment. It’s what he lives for; like his father.”
“It’s as if he knew something was going to happen.”
“But there wasn’t a storm,” Sparks said.
“No,” she murmured, and fell silent; feeling suspicion like a sudden spear of , puncturing the stupefaction of her loss. “There wasn’t a storm.” She looked ay at the mers, their long necks pushed out of the water, their obsidian eyes fixed i her as she waded deeper, running her hand along the boat’s rail. There was no sign of damage to the craft, no evidence of anything at all. It was as if her grandmother .and Borah had simply vanished. She looked at the mers again. “You saw, didn’t lyou?” she said. “If you could only tell me what you saw—”