“Then stay.” Moon smiled, too. If this world changed you, then it can change itself… we can change it… I can. “Everything you want to give I’ll need, Commander—”
“Jerusha.”
“Jerusha.” Moon stretched out her hand; PalaThion gripped her wrist, the handshake of a native.
“I won’t be free of this,” gesturing at her uniform, “till the last ship is gone from here; but neither will any of you. After that I’ll be finished with the Hegemony, and ready to belong wholeheartedly to the future.”
Moon nodded.
“And now, with your permission, I’ll leave you, Your Majesty. While I have the guts to change my old mistakes for new ones, I’m going to say some things that need to be said to a man who can’t speak for himself.”
Moon nodded, blankly, and watched her lonely journey back across the open space to the ranks of the off worlders. Moon raised her voice again as Jerusha disappeared among the stands, to pronounce the end of the ceremonies, of the Festival, of Winter… but only the beginning of the Change.
Cold twilight moved on wind wings through the oozing underworld of docks and moorages, where cold dawn had seen the Change come to Carbuncle. Moon walked with Sparks, trailed by a discrete retinue, among the creakings and sighings of the restless ships, the dim, echoing voices of their weary crews. The jam of Winter and Summer craft that had clogged every open patch of water surface had thinned by half already, as Summers and Winters alike began their post-Festival exodus from the city.
The Summers would be returning before long; the Change was the sign for them to begin their northward exodus, leaving the equatorial ranges of the sea to fill the interstices of the Winters’ range. As Tiamat approached the Black Gate and the Twins’ solar activity intensified, the lower latitudes would become uninhabitable — the sea would turn against them, its indigenous life retreating to the depths or the higher latitudes, forcing them to do the same.
The Winters would have to share with them the scattering of islands and the vast reaches of ocean that had been theirs alone, and share as well a new, hand-to-mouth existence without off world sustenance. The nobility now would be going out of the city to relearn the task of making their plantations, which had been little more than boundaries for the Hunt, into a base that could support the precarious balance of life the off worlders had left them to.
And in the middle of this cyclical chaos, somehow she, Moon, had to begin a new order. “I thought that once I got to Carbuncle all my problems would be over. But they’re just beginning.” Her plaintive breath frosted. Even here, while they walked together, soothed by the presence of the sea, she felt the burden of the future bear down on her like the weight of the city overhead. She leaned on a time-grayed railing, looking down at the mottled, green-black water. Sparks leaned beside her, silent, as he had been all day: trying to make the best of what he could not change — to accept that change happened indiscriminately, and made its favorites and its victims one.
“You’ve got supporters now. And you’ll get more. You won’t have to carry it all alone. You’ll always have them around you.” A sullen note crept into his voice, and he moved slightly away from her. She knew that all of the people that she would be depending on knew what he had been; and even if they didn’t still hate him for it, they would always remind him of it, and let him go on hating himself. “No one rules all alone… not even Arienrhod.”
“I’m not Arienrhod!” She stopped, realizing that he didn’t mean it that way, but too late “I thought you—”
“I didn’t.”
“I know.” But knowing that a part of him would always see Arienrhod when he looked at her — because Arienrhod would always be there for him to see; always there, making them afraid to meet each other’s eyes. She wiped the twilight dampness from her face. Beyond the city’s looming edge she could see the band of sunset in the west, a dying rainbow. “When will we ever see another rainbow now? Will we have to live all our lives without one?”
Something broke the water surface below them, a soft intrusion on the words. Looking down, Moon saw a sleek, brindled head rising sinuously to meet her gaze. She felt her own breath catch, heard Sparks’s involuntary protest, “No.”
“Sparks!” She caught his arm as he would have pulled away from the railing. “Wait. Don’t.” She held him.
“Moon, what are you trying to do to me?”
But she didn’t answer, crouching down, drawing him with her, the beadwork of her gossamer green shawl rattling on the wooden pier. She put out her arm, reached until the mer’s dark silhouette met her outstretched hand, becoming real under her touch. “What are you doing here?” The lone mer looked at her with ebony, expressionless eyes, as though it didn’t have the answer even in its own mind. But it made no move to leave them, its flippers stirring the flotsam-littered water at the dock’s edge rhythmically in place. It began to croon forlornly, a single voice from a lost chorus of patterned song. The songs… why do you sing? Are they more than songs? Could they tell you your purpose, your duty, your reason for existence, if you only understood? Excitement tingled in her. Ngenet. Ngenet could help her learn. And if she was right, learn to teach them. She had seen him in the crowds today, seen the pride and hope on his face, but hadn’t been able to reach him. And she had also seen the unforgiving memory as his eyes found Sparks beside her. She kept Sparks’s hand locked in her own, holding on against his trembling resistance; forced it out over the water. He groaned, as though she were holding his hand over a fire. The mer looked cryptically from her face to his, and sank slowly back into the dark water without touching him.
Moon let his hand go, watched it stay outstretched above the water of its own accord. Slowly Sparks drew his hand back to himself; crouched, staring at it, bracing against the rail.
Behind them Moon heard the incredulous mutterings of her Summer retinue — the omnipresent Goodventures, who had seemed to follow while trying to lead her all through the day. She had antagonized them by her willful disobedience of their ritual expectations, and she knew that because of their royal background they could be dangerous enemies to the future. She resented them even more now, when she needed this moment alone with Sparks in the intimacy of his grief. She understood at last that becoming Queen did not mean absolute freedom, but the end of it.
“The Sea never forgets. But She forgives, Sparkie.” Moon reached to touch his hair, cupped his chill, tear-wet face between her chill, wet hands, feeling his shame like one more icy splinter of doubt. “It just takes time.”
“A lifetime will never be enough!” A dagger, driven by his own hand. He would never belong, here, anywhere, until he found peace within himself.
“Oh, Sparks — let the Sea witness that you hold my willing heart, you alone, now and forever.” She spoke the pledge words defiantly; the only words that filled her need to fill the need in him.
“Let the Sea witness…” He repeated the words, softening as he spoke, his strength, his resistance, melting away.
“Sparks… the day’s finished out there, even if it never ends in Carbuncle. Let’s find our place for tonight, where you can forget I’m a queen, and I can forget it…” She glanced over her shoulder at the Goodventures. But what about tomorrow? “Tomorrow everything will start to fit into place. Tomorrow we’ll be free of today; and then on the day after…” She brushed her hair back from her eyes, looking out across the darkening waters again, where no trace lay at all of the sacrifice they had given to the Sea this dawn. The Sea rested, sublime in Her indifference, an imperturbable mirror for the face of universal truth. Today never ends in Carbuncle… will tomorrow really ever come? She saw the future that lay dying beneath the dark waters: the future that would never come, if she failed, if she stumbled, if she weakened for a moment -