“He was a good man, one of my best. But he was rigid. His pride made him bottle. What happened to him when the nomads had him would have killed him—it nearly did—if you hadn’t shown him something stronger in himself. I gave him back his career. But you gave him back his life. You made him human.” Her smile widened. “Gods, you should have heard how that man talked about you. I couldn’t believe my ears.”
Moon turned back, opening her mouth.
“Moon!” Sparks was beside her, suddenly, pulling her close against him as he kissed her. She felt his arms surround her, the warmth and chill of his skin, the tang of sun and sweat. She looked up into his eyes, as green as the new grass, his red hair moving like flame in the wind; his handsome, peaceful face, as familiar to her as her own. She pressed against him, into the solid reality of his embrace, seeing Jerusha’s expression turn thoughtfully noncommittal as she watched them together. Moon looked out at the wide water, letting it fill her eyes until it was all she could see; trying to imagine that they had never left the islands, that there had been no lost time, no separation, no bitter secrets between them.
“Mama! Mama!” The twins joined them, and little Merovy—not so little, she reminded herself, looking down at the girl’s fair, freckled face and windblown brown hair. None of them were so small anymore. The twins’ heads butted her chest as they wrestled for hugging space. She put her arms around them, anchored by their warmth and unquestioning love … shaking off the unknowable, the impossible, the past, that was no longer an option.
“Mama, look, I found a carbuncle—!” Tammis held up one of the shining, blood-red stones that washed up along Tiamat’s shores: the semiprecious gems that the Winters said had been named for the city, or the city for them. “And look at our shells—!”
“I have one like Da’s, he’s going to make me a flute!” Ariele waved a slender, pearly corkscrew shell in front of Moon’s face.
“No, that’s mine!” Tammis cried. “It’ll be my flute! I found it!”
“I promised Ariele—” Sparks protested, with faint exasperation. “You wait.”
“If he found it, it’s his,” Moon said, separating small, struggling hands. “You’ll find another, and that will be yours, Ariele. You’ll have to wait.”
“No!” Ariele shook her head fiercely. “I want mine now!”
“I’ll let you use mine,” Sparks murmured, lifting her chin. “You can use mine.”
She gazed up at him, her smile coming out like the sun, as Tammis’s smile fell away suddenly. Moon touched his shoulder, soothing and distracting him. “Show me what you found.”
“Here, for you—”
She laughed and made expected ohhs of wonder, holding hands and shells with sudden heartfelt pleasure; refusing to listen to the voice of the past still calling her name, somewhere inside the joyful clamor of the present.
“Well now, well now, what is all this—?”
Moon looked over her shoulder, hearing her grandmother’s voice reaching cheerfully ahead up the hillside from the bay. Gran and Borah Clearwater made their way slowly but resolutely toward the gathering on the slope; Miroe paced beside them as host and guide. She saw their small boat, its slack sail flapping, down at the dock, surprised that she had not noticed them coming in. Miroe clearly had, from the house tarther up the hill. The children left her side in an abrupt flock and rushed to greet the new arrivals with more gleeful clamor.
Moon smiled, watching them, for a moment imagining that she watched herself, and Sparks. She saw the children’s pleasure reflected in her grandmother’s eyes; saw in Borah Clearwater, standing beside Gran, the grandfather she could not clearly remember now, who had died of a fever when she was only three. It still amazed her to see Gran beaming like a young girl, as far in spirit from the drawn, aged woman who had come to Carbuncle as the grandmother of Moon’s memory had been. Capella Goodventure had done them both a kindness they could never have imagined, on that day when her grandmother had arrived in the city—a fact which Moon silently hoped had caused the Goodventure elder disappointment equal to the pain she had inflicted on them.
It was hard for her to believe that it had taken a Winter to rekindle life’s fire in Gran. But over the years she had found that many of the outback Winters had more in common with Summers than they did with the inhabitants of Carbuncle. “Well, damn it!” Borah Clearwater said, peering with good-natured impatience over the swarming heads of the children. “I see you’ve added even more of those ‘windflowers’ to this crackbrained plantation of yours, Miroe Ngenet.” He gestured at the windscrews at the top of the hill behind them. “Damn shame it is too, when it was a perfectly fine example before—”
“It ran on hard human labor—and one very expensive offworlder power unit—before, Clearwater, just like yours, and you know it,” Miroe grunted, his mouth curving upward under the thick bush of his mustache. “We get twice as much productivity at half the expense with windscrews and generators and fuel made in our distillery, and it frees up my workers to learn trades at the processing plant—”
“Hmph. Sounds like a steaming pile of—”
“Borah!” Gran said sharply. “Watch your tongue. There are children.”
“Yes, heart,” he murmured, deflating abruptly, without further objection. “But rot me if I want to hear more about processing plants and new trades, new towns, new noise and stink and that miserable pissant Kirard Set … Now he’s after me again, wanting me to sell him the plantation to develop. It was an unlucky tumble that tossed his genetic code. I can live with the right of way, as long as he pays me well—” He looked at Moon, and she smiled. “But don’t expect me to thank you for it. And believe it’ll be a hot day in hell before he touches another inch of my lands with ‘progress.’ Over my dead body! Right, love—?” Gran nodded, her face mirroring his resolution. He put his arm around her, chuckled as she slapped his hand for getting familiar.
“Act your age, you old bull-klee,” she said, smiling-eyed; somehow still managing to slide back into his grasp while pushing him away. She accepted more hugs and treasured shells from a half-dozen small hands.
“Ah, but I am, you know I am,” he breathed in her ear, and she giggled like a girl. “Where’s that nephew of mine, and your mother?” He looked down at Merovy swinging back and forth, pulling on his arm.
“They couldn’t come,” she said, losing her own smile as she remembered.
“Why not?” He looked up, concerned. “Is his back plaguing him so much, then?”
Moon nodded, pressing her mouth together. Danaquil Lu’s back trouble had grown so bad that he could no longer walk upright. The voyage down the coast, even in a motorized craft, was too long and painful; and so they stayed in the city.
“But we’re getting close to where 1 can help him,” Miroe said. “The workmanship of our second-generation tool-making is getting finer all the time. Soon we’ll be able to produce the surgical equipment I have to have; when I have it, there’s a correctional procedure which is relatively simple—”
Borah snorted in disgust. “False hope! Why give him false hope? We can’t recreate something it took the offworlders centuries to produce in the first place, m only one century! Let things be, and accept it.” He waved his hand, turning away, dismissing them. Jerusha stiffened beside Moon; Moon remembered her childlessness, and how the new technology had not come in time to change that.
“My da will so get better!” Merovy cried indignantly. “Don’t say that.”
“Of course he will,” Miroe snapped, his good humor vanishing like smoke.
“If the Lady wills it,” Gran finished, patting Merovy’s head with stern resolution.
Moon looked away from them, rubbing her arms inside the loose sleeves of her sweater. Sparks rolled his eyes beside her, and pushed his fists into the pockets of his canvas trousers. “Goddess! He’s worse than the Summers,” he muttered, so softly that only she heard it.