“Justice Gundhalinu,” Fate said, her own voice remarkably calm.
He smiled wryly. “You recognized my footsteps.”
“You aren’t in uniform. You’re wearing different boots,” she said. “But I knew you. Welcome. What brings you here to my home?”
“A special delivery, Fate Ravenglass.” He started on across the room. Moon followed mm, avoiding cats. She watched silently as he produced something from inside his cloak, and set it on the glue-scarred tabletop. He opened the container and took something out of it, very gently—a glittering mesh web that resembled headsets Moon had seen the offworlders use. But she had never seen one like this. “Here… .” BZ laid it against Fate’s forehead, spreading its tendrils with infinite care; Moon watched in fascination as the spreading filaments seemed to take on a life of their own, conforming to the shape of Fate’s head.
Fate, who had sat motionless even while he touched her, gasped suddenly and stiffened, her hand rising—not to pull the thing away, or even touch it; but instead reaching out, to touch Gundhalinu’s chest. She rose slowly from her chair as he took hold of her hand, steadying her until she stood before him, staring up at his face. Her own face filled with wonder. “Justice Gundhalinu …” she murmured, “I can see you!” And now her hand rose to his face, touching its features, verifying its reality.
“Good,” he said softly, in his faintly accented Tiamatan. “That’s good . . that’s as it should be.” He smiled.
Fate turned away from him, moving uncertainly as she matched the sudden input of her eyes to the feedback of her other senses. She faced Moon, gazing at her for a long moment, and although her eyes were still like shuttered windows, Moon knew by the expression on her face that she saw. Fate’s tentative smile widened, growing strong with her belief. “Lady … Moon … I remember you,” she murmured “Oh, yes, I do, my dear. … I remember the moment when you came to my door, like a lost child. … I remember the moment when I placed the mask of the Summer Queen on your head.” She moved forward to touch Moon’s face in turn, almost caressingly, and Clavally’s, which she had never seen. “You are much as I imagined you, Clavally Bluestone,” she said contentedly. Clavally’s hand squeezed hers.
Fate turned back to Gundhalinu again, and this time her hands rose to touch the shining filaments that lay against her skin. “I see so much more clearly, this time. I never saw this clearly, when I had my sight before the Departure. Even my dreams of how clearly I saw are not like this—” Her hands trembled faintly.
“This is the best sensor system available that doesn’t require surgery.”
“Thank you,” Fate murmured. Her restless eyes held his for a long moment. “I had forgotten. …”
“My promise?” he asked. “I didn’t. But it took some time to get a special request through the maze of bureaucratic red tape, I’m afraid.”
“Justice Gundhalinu,” Clavally said, asking the question Moon’s lips refused to form, “why did you do this?”
He looked at her, as if for a moment he couldn’t imagine why she would even ask such a thing. And then he glanced at Fate again, at her gaze moving everywhere with glad distraction. “To right an old wrong.”
“Do you mean the Departure?” Moon asked; thinking he meant all the things that they had lost, that had been taken away from them like Fate’s sight when the Hegemony abandoned them.
“Oh, you beauties!” Fate leaned down to stroke the cats that were winding around her legs. “Look at you, I never dreamed you were so many colors… .”
BZ shook his head, his own eyes holding Moon’s, but filled with a secret he did not share with her. “An older wrong than that—and a more personal one.”
Fate straightened up again, with a squirming cat under each arm. “You are a sibyl, Justice Gundhalinu,” she said, gazing at him, at the trefoil hanging against his shirt. It was not a question. But he said, “Yes,” his voice oddly strained.
Moon’s fingers touched her own sibyl sign, as she realized all at once that everyone in this room was a sibyl. She watched BZ’s eyes flicker from face to face, as if he had suddenly realized the same thing. His gaze came back to her again, touching her face, her pale, plaited hair; glancing down at her pragmatic native clothing. His hands tightened unobtrusively over the deep-blue fabric of his simple, ordinary shirt. She saw in his eyes then no Queen, no Chief Justice.
She remembered with sudden clarity a moment half a lifetime ago, when she had been a stranger lost in this strange city-world at Festival time. How his eyes had gazed at her then, and pierced her heart like light through windowglass….
He looked away abruptly. “I have to be getting back,” he murmured. “My staff thinks I’m on my lunch break.”
Fate smiled at him, letting go of her cats. She held out her hands in wordless farewell. He touched them briefly, as Moon watched in silent envy. “Bless you,” Fate said.
He smiled back at her. “Fate’s blessing is what I’ll need, to accomplish my work here,” he said. He nodded to them all, not meeting Moon’s eyes again as he started toward the door.
“Wait—” Moon said. He turned back, waiting as she picked up her untouched meat pie from the table. “Don’t leave without something to eat on the way … Justice Gundhalinu.” She put the food selfconsciously into his hands, an excuse to reach out and touch him, for even a moment, across the impossible distance that separated them. His fingers closed over hers briefly, warmly, as he took the food from her hands. He smiled at her, this time looking directly into her eyes. She saw the hunger there, before he turned away again. He looked back at her once more as he went out; he was still looking at her as the door closed between them, cutting off her view.
She turned back again, slowly, to find both Clavally and Fate watching her. She felt her face redden; looked down, away from their unspoken curiosity.
“He is a good man,” Clavally said at last, with what sounded like surprise. “I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, especially in an offworlder who has so much power.”
“They really aren’t so different from us,” Moon murmured. She pushed at her sleeves, raising her head again. “They’re only human. They want the same things we want.…”
Fate shook her head, her face caught in a strange expression as she looked at Moon. But then she looked down at her own hands, turning them over and back, over again. She moved away, going cautiously across the room to the painted wooden storage chest below the diamond-paned window. She raised the lid and began to search through its contents. With a soft exclamation she pulled something out, and held it up. Light flashed, the random beam spearing Moon’s eye. She realized that it was a mirror Fate was holding.
As she watched, Fate turned toward the light to look at her own reflection, which she had not seen even dimly in almost twenty years. Her hand rose slowly, visibly trembling, to touch the deep lines of age on her face, the whiteness of her hair, that had not been that way when she had last looked into a mirror. Her hand fell away again. Still slowly, carefully, she placed the mirror back in the chest and closed the lid. Turning to face them, she found in their eyes the affirmation of what she had seen with her own. “I still feel like the same person I was before. Where did this body come from…?” She spread her hands helplessly.
Moon glanced down; felt Clavally do the same beside her. She made herself look up again, seeing the woman she had always known, standing suddenly in a different light. “Fate,” she said, as realization struck her. “Mask Night—”
Fate straightened, her face brightening as her thoughts left the last Festival, coming back into the present, and reaching toward the future. “Yes, of course—” she said, starting back toward them across the room, holding up her hands. “I can work again, on my own. Only a few masks, but very special… My dear, you shall have one fit for a Queen.”