The Snow Queen (75 page)

“What—?”
Tor started and sat up abruptly, yawning. “Ohhh.” Her hands pressed her head
and her stomach indiscriminately. “I may not even live till Summer gets here.”

Jerusha
smiled faintly, leaning across the computer console. “If you’re going to throw
up, use the facilities; don’t do it out here.”

“Sure.” Tor
propped her head on her hands. “What time’s it, anyway?”

Jerusha
glanced at her watch. “Nearly time for me to start down toward the docks.” She
typed a summons on the comm frequency, to bring back a few more men to watch
the station while she was gone, and to accompany her to her final duty on this
world.

“You mean,
for the—sacrifice?” Tor looked up. Jerusha nodded. “Hm. Well, you know, I just
want to say ... thanks for letting me keep Polly here until the end of his
contract. I mean, I know you knew I heard—you know.” She shrugged.

“Don’t
remind me.” Jerusha pushed herself to her feet, stretching.
Lax, PalaThion, you were lax,
she
thought, taking a spiteful pleasure in acknowledging it.

“Well,
still, Polly an’ I—” Tor broke off, turning toward Pollux as someone else
entered the station: a tall man, an off worlder

Jerusha
caught at the corner of the duty desk. “Miroe!”

He stopped
across from Tor in the middle of the room. “Jerusha.” His voice sounded as
stupified as her own. “I didn’t think I’d find you here ... but I didn’t know
where else to look.” He looked as though he hadn’t known what he would say to
her when he did find her. He was dressed like any Winter sailor, and showing a
stubble of beard.

“Yes, still
on the job, Miroe. Until the New Millennium,” bitterly inane.

“I was
afraid I wasn’t going to reach Carbuncle in time; the weather was bad down the
coast.” She realized that he looked very tired. “One more day and I would have
been too late; you’d all have been gone.”

She shook
her head, keeping her face and her voice even. “No. Tomorrow we cease to exist
here technically; but it takes a few days to make sure nothing critical gets
left behind. What are you doing here, Miroe? Your people said—they said they
didn’t even know where you’d gone.”

“It was a
spur-of-the-moment decision.” His eyes searched the empty corners of the room.
“I didn’t plan on making this trip. The gods know I couldn’t afford the time.
There’s too much—preparation left to do, showing my people how to do things in
new ways, new old ways.” Jerusha had the feeling that she was hearing more than
she understood; perhaps more than she wanted to know.

“You going
off world,” Tor said with sudden interest. Ngenet glanced at her as though he
had only just noticed there was someone else in the station. “Looking for a
wife, handsome?”

Ngenet
looked only mildly incredulous. “Maybe. But not one who wants to leave Tiamat.
Because I’m not leaving Tiamat.” He glanced at Jerusha again and came on across
the room.

“Oh.” The
word was full of disbelief more than disappointment. “Thanks for warning me.
Who wants to marry a loony. Right, Pollux?” She nudged him.

“Whatever
you say, Tor.”

She laughed
loudly, for no obvious reason.

Jerusha
leaned against the desk. “So you’re really staying here for the rest of your
life, then. Forever.” The disappointment was all hers, although it had no right
to be. “You didn’t come here to be taken off.”

“No. Tiamat
is my home, Jerusha. Nothing has changed my feelings about that. And I don’t
expect anything has changed your feelings about leaving Tiamat either,” as
though it were a foregone conclusion.

“No.” She
heard the weakness, the moment of hesitation that should have been certainty.
But he was expecting what he heard, and did not. He nodded, resigned; not
taking it any further, simply accepting her decision without question—the way
he had done before, at their last meeting. As though it didn’t matter. “Then
why did you come?” with a little too much force. “You said that you didn’t want
to see this Festival.”

“I didn’t.”
He matched her sharpness with his own. “I came to say good-bye to you. That was
the only reason.”

The only reason?
She felt her face turn hot with
surprise and embarrassment.
Damn it.
Ngenet! I don’t understand you at all!
But she didn’t question this failure
to question; couldn’t bring herself to ask, if he would not. “I ... uh, I’m
glad that you came. I’m honored, that you’ve come so far just to say good-bye.”
Glancing at Tor, she caught hold of the gap between them again, and pulled it
together. “Because this way I can tell you the news in person: Your young
friend Moon is alive.”

“Moon?” He
shook his head, pushed back his hair. “How? I can’t believe—” He laughed, and
she saw something alive in him again that she thought had been torn out of him
forever that day on the beach.

“She was
picked up by Winter nomads; but she got away from them, along with one of my
inspectors they’d been holding.”

“She’s
here, in the city, then?” Jerusha saw him glance away suddenly, toward the
unseen interior of the station. “Where is she?”

“Not in a
cell, Miroe.” Jerusha straightened away from the desk. “As far as I know she’s
reigning over the Festival along with her cousin Sparks. She’s the Summer
Queen.”

He looked
astounded, and so did Tor, standing behind him. But his expression changed
again to something more private and prescient. “And a more perfect Queen could
not have been chosen ... Thank you, Jerusha.” He nodded.

“Me? I had
nothing to do with it.”

“You had
everything to do with it—you could have stopped it.”

She almost
smiled. “No. I don’t think anyone could have stopped it, somehow.”

“Maybe not.”
He did smile. “And she found her cousin Sparks, then? After all this time?”

“And yanked
him out of the Snow Queen’s boudoir. He was Starbuck.”

“Gods—” His
face emptied. “Starbuck.” The word turned as ugly on his tongue as it had on
hers. “And—Moon?”

She nodded,
her mouth tight. “I know. Strange bedfellows; a sibyl and a monster. But I knew
that boy before Arienrhod got her claws in him—and so did Moon. And that’s
still the boy she sees, even knowing the truth about him. Maybe she’s right,
maybe she’s not; who knows? That’s not up to me to judge, thank the gods.”

“Then
you’ve let him go? That doesn’t erase what he’s done. That doesn’t change it!”
Revenge rose in his voice.

So even you would take revenge over justice, if
the wound went deep enough,
she thought.
Even
you.
And I thought you were a
goddamn saint, all these years
. Not disappointed, but only relieved to
understand finally that even he was human, with a right to human emotions,
human failings. “I know, Miroe ... And they’ll know it, too. The best day of
their lives, it’ll come between them like an open grave, it’ll carry away their
happiness like the smoke of a funeral pyre.” She saw the knowledge of what
Starbuck had done to the mers struggle with his feelings for Moon.

He looked
down at last; his head jerked once, accepting it.

“And Miroe,
I’ve got the one who’s really to blame ... Arienrhod, that’s who I’m talking
about. She’s the one who put him up to it. And she tried to take over the city
by starting a plague among the Summers. But she didn’t get away with it; and at
dawn this morning her unnaturally prolonged reign comes to an unnatural end.”

Ngenet
looked up again. “She tried to do that? The Winters’ Queen?”

“I told you
what she was. And I told you I’d see that the guilty party paid. So now I’ve
kept all my promises here.”
Except for
the ones I made to myself
.

“Then I owe
you my thanks again, for seeing that justice was done. Real justice, not blind
justice.” He smiled, barely. “At our last meeting, as at our first ... Where
are you going next, Jerusha? Where’s your new assignment?”

She pushed
away from the desk abruptly. “I’m being sent to Big Blue.” She moved in a
tight, restless circle, tugged at her jacket sleeves.

Ngenet
raised his eyebrows when she didn’t say more. “Whereabouts? Not the cinder
camps, I hope,” reaching for a joke.

“Yes.” She
turned on him, stung. “That is where I’m going. I’m in charge of the penal
colonies there.”

“What?” He
laughed uncomfortably, not able to believe it wasn’t a joke in return.

“It’s no
joke,” flatly.

The
laughter stopped. “You ... running a place like that?” He looked at the desk,
as though he expected it to give him an explanation. “Do they think so little
of Tiamat that a penal colony is considered a step up?”

“No,
Miroe.”
They think so little of me
. She
covered the Commander’s insignia on her collar with the fingers of a hand. “You
could say it’s a case of blind justice.”

“Do you
want the job?” He stroked his mustache.

“No.” She
frowned. “It’s a dead end, an insult—” She caught her breath.

“Didn’t you
complain, then? After all, you’re a Commander of Police—” trying to comprehend
the suddenly incomprehensible.

It was her
turn to laugh without meaning. “I am a joke, that’s what I am.” She shook her
head. “I either go where I’m assigned, or I quit.”

“Quit,
then.”

“Damn it,
that’s all I ever hear from a man! Give up ... give in ... you can’t handle it!
Well, I can! I expected more from you, but I should have known better—”

“Jerusha,”
shaking his head, “for gods’ sakes. Don’t turn me into a thing.”

“Then don’t
treat me like one.”

“I don’t
want to see you turn yourself into one! And you will, running a place like that
... when you treat another human being like something less than human, you make
yourself less than human. Either it’ll destroy your humanity, or it’ll destroy
your sanity. And I don’t want to remember you going toward that; or imagine
you—” He moved his large hands futilely.

“Then what
else am I supposed to do? All my life I wanted to do something with my
life—something worthwhile, something important. And becoming a police officer
gave me that. Maybe it hasn’t exactly been everything I thought it would be—but
what ever is, anyway?”
If only there was
something.

“You
consider what you’ll be doing there worthwhile?” thick with sarcasm. He pushed
his hands into his pockets.

“I already
answered that.” She turned away. “In time, maybe I’ll be able to get a
transfer. And besides, what else can I do? There’s nothing else.”

“You could
stay here,” an uncertain invitation.

She shook
her head, not looking at him. “And do what? I’m not cut out to be a fishwife,
Miroe.”
Tell me there’s something else.

But if
there was an answer, he was kept from making it by the arrival of two of the
officers she had called in. They had Festival confetti in their hair and
faintly martyred expressions on their faces, but they saluted her with
reasonable deference.

She
returned the salute, tugged her uniform and her thoughts into order. “Make
yourselves official; you’re going to the Change ceremony with me as soon as
Mantagnes gets here.”

They
brightened some at the prospect of getting front-row seats for the human
sacrifice; stole curious glances at Tor Starhiker as they moved away. Jerusha
recalled her presence with belated chagrin, until she saw that Tor had fallen
asleep again.

Miroe stood
broodingly beside her, his gaze on the floor. “You’re attending the—sacrifice?”
He seemed to have a hard time getting the word out, just as Tor had. “The Snow
Queen’s death?”

She nodded,
feeling uncomfortable with the thought despite having lived with the prospect
of it for so long.
The
Snow Queen’s death.
A human sacrifice.
My gods
.
And yet she wondered why the
prospect of the clean, public execution of a woman who richly deserved it
should seem more terrible than the living death of punishment at the place she
was going to. The gods knew, a society that could undergo a total restructuring
with only two executions as a result was better off than most. “It’s my last
official act as a Hegemonic representative; we turn over to the new Queen the
keys to her kingdom, so to speak.”
And
watch Arienrhod drown in regret
. She glanced down, faltering. “Will you
come, Miroe? I know it’s not a thing you want to see—so I don’t ask it
lightly.”

He shifted
his weight, shifting his emotions. “Yes, I’ll come. You’re right, it’s not a
thing I ever thought I’d want to see. But knowing what I know of her now ...
They say it’s supposed to be a catharsis, to watch the living symbol of the old
order die: something that everyone needs, to clean the ugliness out of their
souls. Well, I never thought I’d need it ... but maybe I’m not so much better
than anyone else, after all.”

“Welcome to
the club,” not quite smiling. “I’ll be right back.” She went to her office for
her cloak and helmet.