She put her hand on his arm, feeling her chest ache with misery—his, her own. Feeling the cold breath of Winter again at their backs. “He wouldn’t let anyone near the merling until he knew what was wrong, and he was sure that she would live. He wanted to know what you discovered about the mersong—”
“So that he could tell me it was garbage.”
“It could be,” she said softly, “that he felt envious because you had a new insight into the data, after he had worked on it without any success for so long. But you never really gave him a chance.” She let go of his hand, her fingers stretching wide with sudden frustration. “After he told you to leave the room, you didn’t say three words to him all the rest of the time we spent there.”
“I was afraid, damn it! All right? Is that what you want to hear—?” His own hand made a fist. It loosened, he shook his head. “And I couldn’t stand it, to be near one of them; even to think about the mers. I see it in their eyes, too … fear, never forgiveness!” He looked away, his own eyes haunted.
“Sparks …” she whispered. “Arienrhod is dead! The past is dead. Starbuck is dead. Remember the Change, that last night? The Mask Night … and the morning, when …” When we sent Arienrhod into the sea. “When all of Winter, and all of Summer put off their masks and their sins and their sorrows. We swore that we would begin a new life, we’d renew our life’s-pledge again, because everything had changed.”
“But the problem is that everything has changed… .” He glanced away from her at the room, the sky beyond the windows. He turned back, looking into her eyes He put his arms around her suddenly and kissed her, holding her with desperate tenderness. “Moon … let’s go to bed. I haven’t loved you in the daylight for so long. … We haven’t made love at all, for so long.”
She felt her own desire waken to the pressure of his mouth, the pressure of his body against her. But she pushed away from him, shaking her head. “I can’t. I have so much work to do before I can even think about … think about … anything else—I’m so tired. I can’t.”
He held on to her. “Moon, please. I need you. I need you now, I need to know you—we—still feel something, still mean something to each other, in the middle of all this—” He jerked his head at what lay around them.
“You need?” she said, breaking free of his hold, as the emotion inside her curdled into resentment. “What about my needs? You need me, the children need me, everyone in this city, everyone on this damned world, needs me, even the sibyl net—it’s always now, it can never wait. Everyone needs needs needs—! No one ever asks me what I need! I need to be left alone for once! Leave me alone, damn it, leave me alone!”
Sparks backed away from her, his face stunned as he reached the doorway again. He turned and went out, granting her wish without looking back, without a word.
Sparks went back down the spiraling stairs, through the halls and the chambers and the chill, empty throne room; not seeing the superficial overlay of the present that still failed to transform them. He saw only the past, memories, Winter…. Her: Arienrhod, all in white, on her throne of glass in the white-carpeted hall, with her pitiless purity of beauty, of strength, of control.
He had not understood why they were so alike, then, Arienrhod and Moon; why they both wanted him, needed him, loved him … any more than he understood now the things that had come between Moon and himself like a curse, after she had wanted him so badly, come so far and suffered so much to find him, challenged Anenrhod herself for the right to his soul….
He went on, down, out; crossing the bridge over the silent Pit, going on through the Summer-frescoed entry hall and through the massive doors into the city beyond them. He walked, although there were electrified trams now that shuttled people up and down the Street; working off the frustration that clogged his chest until he found it hard to breathe.
He murmured desultory answers to the occasional greetings of passersby, mostly Winters. The Winters clung to their traditional upper sector of the city, where the once-exclusive townhouses still held fragments of the better days they had known when Winter ruled. Most of them were hard at work now, working for the Summer Queen, working toward a day when their useless offworlder luxuries would miraculously function again; when they would be the leaders of the new Tiamat, not by chance or whim, but because they had built its economy themselves, and earned the right to control it … for better or worse.
Glancing at faces, looking in through windows as he passed, he saw no one among them to whom he could talk about what he was feeling now—what he had done, and been, and could not ever seem to stop remembering. He went on walking, needing some destination, some human contact … drawn by memory into the Maze.
The Maze separated the Winters from the Summers who still inhabited Carbuncle’s lowest levels, the spiral of alleys nearest the sea. The Maze had been the heart of Carbuncle, a vibrant neutral zone between those two halves of the world, while the Hegemony had ruled Tiamat. It was the place where most offworlders had lived, plied their businesses, bought and sold their pleasures and vices. It was still mostly given over to the few local-run stores and businesses that existed now.
He glanced down one alley after another: spokes branching off from the Street’s lazy downward uncoiling, each of then} named for a color, it was said—more colors than he would ever have dreamed existed, even on this water world, whose sky was filled with rainbows every day. He still didn’t know what color half of the names actually were, any more than he knew what language they had been in originally, or how the alleys had gotten those names in the first place. Perhaps even the Old Empire builders of this city had been moved by the sight of the sky, with its days of rainbows endlessly forming and fading, its burning nights… .
He stopped at the entrance to Citron Alley. It had been some shade of yellow-green; the paint on shutters and doors and occasional building fronts still told his eyes that much. It had been his first home in the city, as a seventeen-year-old boy fresh from the Windwards. Fate Ravenglass, the maskmaker, had lived here then … still lived here, as Fate Ravenglass the sibyl. She had heard his music, and taught him how to survive as a street musician; had taken him in and given him shelter, until Arienrhod found him, and claimed him for her own.
Even after he became the Snow Queen’s favorite … after he became her consort, and then her henchman, her Starbuck, he had returned here. Even after he butchered the sacred mers and drank the water of life, he had returned to this alley seeking sanctuary, when what he had become was too much for him to bear. He had come back to see Fate, whose eyes saw almost nothing; whose soul saw everything, but seemed never to pass judgment on it.
He had never known why she continued to welcome him on her doorstep, any more than he had known that she was a sibyl, the only one in Carbuncle, hiding her secret from Winters and offworlders alike—the way Starbuck had hidden his identify behind a mask and gone all in black. But she had hidden her secret identity to serve a greater good, while he had hidden his reality behind a faceless lie, his only reasons for existence to commit treachery and murder… .
He shook his head, driving out the shadows as he started into Citron Alley. He had not visited Fate in a long time—not for the reasons he had visited her in the old days, or for the reason he was about to visit her now.
The buildings nearest the Street were occupied by a mix of new Winter-run businesses and a few Summer shops, although farther down the alley the ancient buildings were shuttered and abandoned, waiting with inhuman patience for someone to return. The transparent storm walls let in the garish colors of the sunset; twilight came late in the northern latitudes, as the lengthening days of the annual spring moved on toward annual summer, adding their warmth to the High Summer of the system’s approach to the Black Gate. Fewer and fewer people passed him as he made his way down the alley. By the time he reached Fate’s doorstep he was entirely alone, and glad that he was.