They reached the far side of the Pit at last, although it felt as if they had been walking suspended above it forever. They went up the broad stairway beyond, which he remembered with a peculiar fondness because it always followed that excruciating passage. At the top of the steps had been Arienrhod’s throne room, its carpet always as flawless as untrodden snow, bejeweled with brightly colored courtiers. There the Snow Queen had waited for her visitors—her victims, still sweating from their ordeal with the Pit—clothed in white, sitting on her crystal throne; pretending to be immortal, an elemental, Winter incarnate, as pitiless and cold as ice….
But it was not Winter that waited for him now. The throne room, which had once been as starkly white and silver as a crevasse, had melted into a place of random earth tones, the fresh colors of spring, greens of all shades, rust and clay, earth brown, a startling flash of blue.
The convoluted crystal throne still sat in the center of the dais at the center of the vast, suddenly silent room. It was surrounded by a small group of attentive, expectant faces, which had all turned in his direction. And at their center on the throne sat a woman, her hair the color of snow, her eyes like mist and moss-agate. But she was dressed like the room in the colors of Summer, in silks and tapestries and homespun, the contrasts of texture and cloth somehow not absurd but perfectly in harmony. She wore a simple circlet of gold on her hair, set with a blood-red stone: a carbuncle.
This time the face written into his memory had aged like his own … still unmistakably her face, but undeniably mortal, changed by time. And yet as he looked at her she struck his inner eye with such beauty that he had to look away or be paralyzed. His heart constricted. Moon, his heart said, his mind, his body… every part of him but his throat, which he would not allow to speak the word
He took a deep breath as he started on into the room. He forced his eyes to glance over the small group of people gathered around her, to do anything but touch her face again; suddenly afraid, after all these years, all the rehearsals of this scene he had played out in his mind, that he would lose control at this critical moment and destroy everything. Searching the crowd around her he found Sparks Dawntreader— remembered him, struck by his red hair, even though he had seen him only once, a mugging victim freshly arrived in the city from Summer, dazed and defiant at Jerusha PalaThion’s attempts to help him.
He had never laid eyes on Sparks Dawntreader again—although Dawntreader was a figure more real in his mind than any number of people he had seen constantly for years in the time since then: Moon’s consort, her lover; the father of the girl who had already reached their side and turned back to gaze at the approaching strangers. Sparks looked past her, meeting Gundhalinu’s stare with eyes as green as envy, his gaze full of suspicion.
Gundhalinu glanced away again into the crowd—stopped suddenly as he found the one face that stood out for its alienness the way his own would have, within that gathering of pale, sky-eyed figures. Jerusha PalaThion. He was stunned to see how her years of exile had aged her. He wondered with sudden empathy how much she had regretted her choice—if she had truly regretted it as much as her face said she had. But as she saw recognition in his eyes she smiled at him, a fleeting smile full of satisfaction She nodded her head slightly, in acknowledgment.
He let himself smile, barely, acknowledging her in turn before he had to look away again. Carrying her smile with him, he felt the room and everything in it suddenly stabilize.
“Who is that woman?” Vhanu whispered in Sandhi. “She’s not Tiamatan.”
“My former commanding officer,” Gundhalinu said softly. “Your predecessor, the former Commander of Police.”
“Why is she here?” Tilhonne said blankly; as if the idea that she might have chosen to stay was incomprehensible to him.
“Because the idea of seeing a Police uniform or a Hegemonic representative ever again for as long as she lived did not appeal to her,” Gundhalinu murmured, remembering the day of their parting, and the Commander’s badges Jerusha PalaThion had taken from her own collar and pressed into his hands.
He reached the edge of the dais, below the foot of the throne, and stopped, making a formal bow once more in acknowledgment of the woman who sat there. He lifted his head, meeting her gaze at last. “Lady,” he said softly, evenly.
“Your eyes …” The words were barely audible; her eyes held him riveted. “I had forgotten your eyes … how they—” She broke off, but her face, which until that moment had been as rigidly expressionless as his, colored suddenly, betraying the strength of her hidden emotion. “Inspector Gundhalinu,” she said at last, speaking clearly and calmly. “Welcome back to Tiamat. I never expected that I would live to see … to see you again.” She smiled, a smile that touched him tenderly, without seeming to.
Gundhalinu felt the cloud of tension in the group of men at his back dissolve; felt his face, which had seemed to him a moment ago to have frozen to death, actually begin to smile. “It’s Chief Justice Gundhalinu now, Lady. But I’m honored you still remember me, after so long.” He kept his eyes on only her, afraid now to look away and encounter any of the others witnessing what passed between them.
Moon rose, moving forward until she stood at the edge of the raised dais, facing him directly. “It would be difficult to forget, even after so long, the kindness you did me then.” She held her hand out to him, and to his surprise met his own hand palm against palm, Kharemoughi-fashion, not clasping wrists as he remembered the Tiamatans doing. “It is good to see you again.”
He let his hand fall away, feeling as if her touch had seared it, wondering if she felt the same thing. “I hope that… our relationship,” he stumbled imperceptibly on the word, “will be as mutually amicable in the years to come.”
“So it has truly happened, that you’ve come back to Tiamat… that the Hegemony has. To stay.” Her glance flicked past him, touching the faces of Vhanu and the others in brief acknowledgment, and assessment. He looked past her at Sparks Dawntreader; looked away again. “The Millennium has finally come, as youi people used to say.”
He smiled, and nodded in wry amusement. “Yes. We have the stardrive again. It means a great change for both our peoples.”
” For better or worse,” she murmured. Her eyes were dark, as if she had not been reassured by what she found in the faces of the men behind him. She turned away, moving back to her throne; but she did not sit down. She stood, with her own people flanking her. “The stardrive means that the relationship of the Hegemony and Tiamat will be permanent, from now on,” she said. “I hope that means that you intend to deal with us as you deal with your other member worlds. We deserve and desire equal citizenship with the rest of the Hegemony—equal right to leave and return, equal access to technology, equal treatment under your laws. We want a relationship based on autonomy and mutual cooperation. I hope that is the sort of change you mean. We’ve waited a millennium of our own for that to happen. I think we’ve waited long enough.”
He stared at her, pressing his lips together to keep his smile from becoming a sudden grin of pleasure and admiration. “Your point is well taken, Lady,” he said, and nodded. “I think you’ll find that our vision of Tiamat’s future is more like your own, this time.” He hesitated, sensing the restlessness at his back. “We have observed that you’ve brought considerable change to Tiamat yourself, in the years since the Departure,” he went on, carefully. “Some of my people were surprised to find that you had made so much technological progress. That had not been our experience with previous Summer Queens. I told them that perhaps the gods … including your Sea Mother … have given both our people a gift.” He spoke the words reluctantly, knowing that he could not afford to ignore the obvious.