“Well, Tirady, look at this—I believe Elco Teel’s found true love.”
Ariele glanced up, startled, to see Kirard Set Wayaways and his wife Tirady Graymount standing together in the wide entrance to the room, staring at them. Elco Teel let go of Tammis, who half fell off of him in his desperate attempt to get away. But Elco Teel’s father only laughed, shaking his head as he came down the three steps into the room, casually unsealing his shining evening jacket. “Don’t stop on my account, children. You know I find it delightful and amusing, when you play with my game set behind my back. And I’m sure it was all quite innocent really. …”
“We were just practicing heart-and-breathing, Da.” Elco Teel rolled onto his side, propping his chin on his hand with a smirk that attempted to imitate his father’s languid smile. “Like at the Shop today … I was being the victim.”
Kirard Set raised his eyebrows. “You were being Capella Goodventure? Ye gods—or should I say, Lady’s Tits—now that’s depraved. Can you imagine, Tirady—having our child turn into a sanctimonious religious fanatic?”
Tirady Graymount murmured something Ariele couldn’t make out, that sounded bored and annoyed. She moved past him without looking at any of them, toward the angular cabinet that Ariele knew held their substantial supply of alcoholic drinks. Elco Teel said they also had a dwindling hoard of more exotic drugs left from before the Change; but even he didn’t know where those were hidden. Tirady’s movements were not too steady, and Ariele suspected she had had a lot to drink already. Maybe they’d argued, and that was why they’d come back so unexpectedly early.
Ariele looked back at Kirard Set, glanced at Elco Teel, trying to guess whether the father was really angry or only amused; whether the son was actually as unconcerned about being caught in the act as he seemed to be. Their family fascinated her. They were so different from her own that they sometimes seemed more alien than the mers.
But Kirard Set’s attention was on his wife. He moved toward her as she pulled a bottle of local wine out of the cabinet, and tried to take it from her. She looked at “ini, with eyes as cold and pale as glacier ice, and he let his hand drop, shrugging. She moved away from him again, heading toward a doorway at the far end of the room. She stopped as she passed a mirror, and peered into it as if she were seeing into another dimension. She put a pale, slender hand up to her face, pressing her cheek, pulling the skin taut until the deepening line along her mouth disappeared. She took her hand away, frowned, and left the room without a backward glance, as if they had all ceased to exist.
“Your mother is feeling old, tonight,” Kirard Set murmured. He took out another bottle, and removed the stopper. He drank deeply, straight from its mouth, and came back across the room toward the now-silent circle of friends. He held the bottle out. Several of the wide-eyed witnesses shook their heads, picking themselves up from where they sat in various stages of embarrassment and awkwardness, saying that they had to go home. One by one the others followed. He made no move to stop them, and neither did Elco Teel. Merovy began to get up, and Tammis followed her.
Ariele put out her hand, still standing where she had stopped when Elco Teel’s parents arrived. Kirard Set handed her the bottle with a measuring smile; his glance traveled down her body and back up it again in a way that made her tingle with an odd pleasure—knowing that for once he had not looked at her as if he saw a child. He was a very handsome man, and he still looked young, even though she knew that he was actually very old, and like his wife, was beginning to show signs of it. She took a drink of the wine, careful not to take too much, knowing the burn of it would make her cough. She swallowed it with passable grace, and handed the bottle back to him.
“Well done.” Kirard Set smiled again, approvingly. “Ah,” he said, “you look lovely in those colors, Anele. It takes me back to the old days, to see you standing there like that … I even remember that outfit, how she looked when she wore it You look so very much like her, you know … more so every day. More even than your mother, because you have more of Anenrhod’s spirit.”
“Arienrhod?” Anele said, uncertainly. She glanced down at her outfit. Among the endless possessions in the Snow Queen’s closets, she had found things that she had made over to fit her. Her mother had never touched any of those clothes, had never even looked at anything there, as far as she knew. Her mother seemed to hate the thought of it, and frowned when Anele put them on, even though she never forbade her to wear them. Sometimes, perversely, Anele wished that they were forbidden, so that she could wear them anyway, and defy her mother’s anger instead of her peculiar, distracted sorrow. All her Winter friends wore offworlder clothes, handed down, saved from Before … and she had fallen in love with the blazing beauty of their colors, the wonderful fineness and the exotic vaneties of the materials. She had wanted clothes like that—and she had found them. But did they actually make her look like a queen? She smiled, looking up again.
“Of course,” Kirard Set said softly. “As you should, since she was your grandmother.”
“What?” Ariele said. “No, my grandmother was a Summer. She died, I never met her …”
Kirard Set’s eyes widened. “Gods,” he murmured. “You don’t know? Is it possible you really don’t know?” He looked toward Tammis, who had stopped moving and was staring at him in equal curiosity. “Have you ever seen a picture of Arienrhod?”
Ariele shook her head; Tammis shook his.
“There was one in the bedroom on the third floor … a painting of her.”
“I remember that. I used to look at it when I was little. But that was a picture of my mother,” Anele said. “She didn’t like it, she had the servants put it away.”
Kirard Set laughed. “It wasn’t your mother. It was her mother. Her real mother. It was Arienrhod … That’s why she didn’t like it.”
“That’s not true,” Tammis said, frowning. “Our mother’s a Summer. And Gran is a Summer too.”
Anele waved him quiet. She sat down on the long, narrow reclining couch, pulling her feet up. “Are you making this up—?” she asked, meeting Kirard Set’s inscrutable gaze, her eyes begging him to tell her that he was not.
“Oh, no,” he said, smiling again as he moved to take a seat beside her on the couch. “It’s quite true, Ariele. Would you like to hear the whole, true story?”
She nodded eagerly, looked back at her brother. Tammis hesitated, glancing toward the door. He still wore half a frown, as if he were afraid to hear this. But he sat down again, cross-legged on the carpet beside Elco Teel, who was stretched out with his chin on his palms. Merovy, who had been pulling surreptitiously at Tammis’s hand, gave up and sat down beside him. Her habitual look of unease deepened.
Kirard Set leaned back into the sloping corner of the couch, taking another drink from the decanter. “Well, all of this began long ago, long before either of you were even a gleam in your father’s eye. …” His smile twitched. “Arienrhod had been the Snow Queen ever since the Hegemony arrived at the last Change, and the Goodventures’ Summer reign ended with a splash. She’d been Queen for nearly a century and a half, and she knew how the offworlders exploited us, manipulated us, kept us from our rightful equality in the Hegemony. She knew that when the offworlders left she’d be thrown into the sea, and Summer would drag us all back down into the darkness for a century again. So she decided to do something about it.”
Anele nodded, almost hypnotized by the lanquid flow of his words. “What did she do?”
“She used the offworlders’ own technology to have herself cloned—to have a perfect copy made of her, only her, with no one else’s genes in the mix to weaken her resolve … several copies, actually. She had them secretly implanted in the bodies of Summer women who had come to the next to last Festival, who would go home to the islands none the wiser, thinking the child they bore was a merrybegot, the result of a Mask Night fling with a man they would never see again. Out of all the clones she had implanted, only your mother was perfect … and grew up raised by Summers, as Arienrhod intended, so that she would understand her people’s ways when she came to rule in Arienrhod’s place. Arienrhod was willing to die—she told me many times that she didn’t want to live on in this miserable, half-dead world—as long as she knew that she would be reborn in the body of your mother.”