The Snow Queen (20 page)

The night
of firelight and wind came back to him, overlaid by a thousand more images of
Moon: the child whirling with arms outflung on the shining beach; the muffled
girl hauling in a netful of coppery fish beside him on an icy deck; and again
the lover, whispering soft words, warm against his heart. “I can’t. I can’t
tell you about her ...” His voice fell apart. “Not if she’s gone.”

“She is
gone, Sparks.” Arienrhod pulled the diadem from her hair, shook it free like a
fall of water, down over her shoulders and her back, over the muted
cloud-colors of her simple robe. “But you haven’t lost her. Not if you don’t
want to.” She leaned forward. “We are very alike, aren’t we—she and I?”

He stared
at her, at the fall of ivory hair, the slender girlish body and the soft stuff
of the robe drawn tight across her small, high breasts ... the lips, the
moss-agate eyes that asked the question, her face that was the answer: “Yes.”

“Then let
me be Moon for you.” Her fingertips lifted a strand of his own hair in a
hauntingly familiar gesture; he felt the pulse begin to beat in his temple.
Inside his head he heard the voice of the Sea; but whether it blessed him or
cursed him he did not know, or care, any more. He was on fire, and not even the
Sea could quench the flame of his need. He reached out, touching her for the
first time, let his hand fall along her bared shoulder down the cool, curving
surfaces of her arm.

She leaned
eagerly into his caress, drew him down onto the bed beside her, guiding his
hands. “Show me how much you loved her ...”

Sparks
lay with his eyes closed, absorbing
the messages that reached him through his other senses—senses heightened by the
grateful heaviness of his weary body. He inhaled the warm, musky scent of
Arienrhod’s presence beside him, felt the soft pressure of her body contoured
against his own. There was no smell of the sea about her, but instead a
fragrance of imported perfumes. And yet he felt the Sea’s presence in her: she
who was the Lady incarnate, robed in foam, seabirds flying from her hair, with
lips like sunrise, like blood ... who had lain waiting for him for centuries.
He listened to the rhythm of her quiet breathing, opened his eyes to look over
at her face. Her own eyes were closed; smiling in half-sleep as she lay beside
him, she could even be the one he had named her at the moment when he lost
control ...

Amazement
touched him with a tingling hand as he realized again that he lay beside the
Queen of Winter. But a profound tenderness filled him, he ached to give her the
love, the loyalty, the life that he had pledged to her lost other ness
“Arienhrod ...” He breathed the unfamiliar name against her ear. “Arienrhod. I want
to be the only one with you.”

She opened
her eyes then, regarded him with gentle censure. “No. No, my love.”

“Why not?”
His arms closed her in, possessively. “I was the only one for Moon. Let me be
the only one with you. I’m not just another fish in the net; I don’t want to
share you with a hundred others.”

“But you
must share me,
Sparks
.
I am the Queen, the power. No one puts limits on me, no one commands me—I won’t
allow it, because it weakens my control. There will never be an only one, man
or woman.

Because I
am the Only One. But there will never be an other one like you ...” She kissed
him softly on the forehead, her fingers closing over the off world medal
resting on his chest. “My star child

He
shivered.

“What’s
wrong?”

“She used
to call me that.” He pushed up onto an elbow, looking down at her as she lay
back smiling, caught outside of time. “If I can’t be the only one, then I want
to be the only one who counts.” He saw in his mind the mocking figure dressed
in black who stood always at the Queen’s right hand, who baited him and bullied
him at every private opportunity, with an evil enjoyment rooted in bitter
jealousy. “I want to challenge Starbuck.”

“Starbuck?”
Arienrhod blinked at him with honest surprise, before she began to laugh. “My
love, you’re too new here to realize what you’re saying—and you’re far too
young and alive to throw away everything. Because that is what you’d be doing,
if you challenged Starbuck. I’m flattered by the gesture, but I forbid it.
Believe me when I tell you that he counts for nothing in my heart. Since the
first Festival night, when I put on the mask of the Winter Queen so long ago
...” her eyes changed, and she was no longer seeing him, “there has been no one
in my bed, or in my life, who made me long for the time when I was only
Arienrhod, and lived in a world that was ignorant but free; when wishes and
dreams meant something, because they weren’t always realized. You make me dream
of lost innocence ... you make me dream. There is no need for you to do, or be,
anything more to make me love you-and want to keep you from harm. Starbuck
could kill you with any weapon you could choose, including bare hands. And
besides, Starbuck must be an off worlder he must have have the knowledge and
the contacts among his own kind to help me keep them at bay.”

“I’m enough
of an off worlder He held out the medal, let it spin on its chain in the air
above her. “And enough a part of this world to hate them like you do. I’ve
listened and watched; I’ve learned a lot about the court, and the city too, how
the off worlders use it. Anything I didn’t know you could teach me ...” He
smiled, a smile that Moon would not have understood. “And I know the one thing
I really need to know, even if you don’t believe it—how I can challenge
Starbuck and win.” He stopped smiling.

Arienrhod
studied him silently; he felt her measure and weigh with her eyes. He thought a
shadow passed across her face, before she nodded. “Challenge him, then. But if
you do, and fail, I’ll call you a vain little braggart and make love to him on
your grave.” She caught the winking pendant and drew him down on top of her.

“I won’t
fail.” He found her lips again, hungrily. “And if I can’t be your only lover,
I’ll be the best.”

This was
the morning of the day. Starbuck prepared himself slowly, deliberately, in the
innermost room of his private suite; reassuring himself with each precise
movement and small decision that his control was absolute. He wore the
utilitarian coveralls of his hunting clothes instead of the funereal foppery of
his court clothing, for comfort and ease of movement. He pushed the black
leather gloves down over each finger, settled the hooded helmet onto his head.
It entered his mind that this might be the last time he would wear the mask, or
perform this ritual, and his muscles tightened. He brushed the thought aside
disdainfully—the way he would brush aside Sparks Dawntreader.

So that
wet-eared Mother lover thought he could be Starbuck, had even gotten up the
nerve to issue a challenge—and Arienrhod had accepted it. It would have smarted
that shed done this to him, except that the contest was such an absurd mismatch
he couldn’t believe she took it seriously. She wouldn’t let an ignorant punk
from the outback with a pawnshop medal claim to be an off worlder unless she
knew there was no chance in hell of his winning the contest.

No, she
just wanted amusement; it was like her to come up with this. She hadn’t been
the same since shed gotten the news about Dawntreader’s cousin: moody and
spiteful, even harder to live with than usual. He wouldn’t have believed there
was anything on this world that could pierce the armor of her supreme egotism
or shake her unshakable arrogance. What had the girl been to her, that
Arienrhod had had her watched all those years? He’d give a lot to know what
made Arienrhod vulnerable ...

He knew
already what the boy had been to her—that shed finally gotten the elusive
quarry bedded, after the longest pursuit he’d ever known her to need. The kid
was either crazy or he’d played the reluctant innocent on purpose: It could
have been either one, and either way it had worked too well. Arienrhod’s face
when she watched the boy had driven him to private fury, with a jealousy he’d
never known toward any of her lovers in the past.

But none of
that mattered now. It had been a waste of time to sweat over it; she was
already bored with him. Once the excitement of the chase was gone and the
unattainable object was just another lousy lay, it figured that shed decide to
get rid of this one like all the rest. That made sense. That fitted the
Arienrhod he had always known. She would be his again, she would come back to
him as she had always done; because he knew what she wanted, in everything, and
he could give it to her.

And it was
going to be a pleasure to take care of this next piece of business for her, by
killing that troublesome little son of a bitch. Arienrhod had granted the boy
choice of weapons; that didn’t bother him either, because he was good with any
weapon, and the kid was a flute-playing sissy. It was almost beneath his
dignity ... but he planned to enjoy it anyway.

Starbuck
studied himself in the long mirror and was pleased with the effect. He strapped
on his weapons belt and left his chambers, heading for the Hall of the Winds,
where Arienrhod had ordered them to meet. That had surprised him, but he hadn’t
questioned it. The nobility and servants he passed in the halls gave him a wide
berth, stealing fleeting, nervous glances. (Even the nobility always treated
him respectfully, to his face, pampered highborn weaklings that they were.)
They all knew that there had been a challenge, and that this was the day,
although none would ever know who the challenger was ... or the outcome,
although everyone would guess.

What weapon
would the kid try? he wondered. An electric eagerness tingled in his hands; he
flexed them. The challenges were the kind of thing no respectable Winter liked
to admit still existed anywhere in their half of the world: something left over
from the dim dark times before the Hegemony had brought enlightenment back to
this lost world; a time when the Queen was the actual Sea Mother in her
people’s eyes, and men fought for her divine favors . just as they did now. The
fact that it was a vestige of an uncivilized age did not bother him. He enjoyed
testing himself against other men, proving to the world—to Arienrhod, to
himself—every time he won that he was a better man than the ones who tried to
bring him down. Not just the strongest, but the smartest, too. That was why
he’d always won, and why he always would. Even if he had been born Unclassified
on Kharemough, with the whole world on his back making him eat shit, he’d
fought his way out of that sewer, and into a position of power the
best-educated technocrat on Kharemough could not match. He had everything they
had, and more—he had the water of life. How many of them squandered their
lives’ fortunes to erase a day from every week, or month, that they aged? He
drank from the fountain of youth every day—it came with the job. As long as he
gave Arienrhod what she wanted, he would have everything he wanted, and he
would never have to grow old. And as long as he stayed in his prime no
challenger would ever take that away from him.

He reached
the audience hall. It was empty now, vast and still, as though it held its
breath. He started across it, and his passage did nothing to disturb the
stillness. He wondered what it would be like to hold power for one hundred and
fifty years, as Arienrhod had. What would it be like just to be alive for that
long; to have seen the return of the off worlders and the rebirth of Winter—to
watch civilization reborn, and to have your pick of its pleasures? He would
like to know how a man—or a woman—would feel after all that; and he wondered
whether if he’d lived that long he might have begun to understand the
involutions of Arienhrod’s mind.

He’d lost
count long ago of the women he’d known, from highborn tech to slave; he’d hated
some of them and used most of them and respected one or two, but he’d never
loved even one of them. Nothing had given him any evidence that love was
anything but a four-letter word. Only weaklings and losers believed in love or
gods ...

But he had
never experienced anything like Arienrhod. She was not so much a woman as an
elemental; her magnetism was created of all the things he found desirable. She
had made him an unwilling believer in his own vulnerability; and that had made
him half-willing to believe in the power of strange gods, too ... or strange
goddesses. And he wouldn’t have one hundred and fifty years of youth and
pleasure, one hundred and fifty years to work at unraveling her mysteries, even
if he wanted to. He had only five years before he would have to leave this
world forever—or die. In five years it would all end at the Change, and Arienrhod
would die ... and he would die with her, unless he cleared out in time. He
loved her, and he had never loved anyone except himself in all his life. But he
didn’t think he loved her more than life.

She stood
waiting for him on the platform as he entered the Hall of the Winds; the pit
groaned and sighed its eager greeting at her back. Stray tendrils of wind
lifted her milk-white hair, let it fall free over the enfolding whiteness of
her ceremonial cape. The cape was made from the down of arctic birds, flecked
with silver, the softness of clouds ... he remembered the feel of it against
his skin. She had worn it six times, at each of his previous challenges; she
had worn it the first time, when he had been the challenger.