The Summer Queen

TIAMAT: Carbuncle

“You’re early, Justice Gundhalinu,” the blind woman said.

Gundhalmu stopped just inside the shellform doorway of the palace meeting hall, nonplussed. Fate Ravenglass, the blind woman who was the head of the Sibyl College, sat alone at the large circular table in the center of the room. Her shuttered gaze was fixed on him, on his general presence, not meeting his eyes. There was no one else present to have told her he was the one who had come into the room. “How did you know it was me?” he asked, curious, as he started toward her.

“You have a very distinctive walk,” she said, smiling, and did not elaborate.

“Oh.” He smiled wryly, hoping she could hear the smile in his voice. He stopped in front of her, not sitting down, folding his arms as he leaned against the high, hard back of a chair. “You seem to have come early, too, Fate Ravenglass.” He did not know where to look when he looked at her face; he was not used to speaking to someone who was sightless. It made him selfconscious. She nodded. “So I did. Tor dropped me off before she went to a business association meeting.” She cocked her head. “But you didn’t come here early, and alone, because you expected to meet me,” she said, with an odd gentleness.

“No,” he murmured, glancing away, at the empty room with its several empty doorways. “Tell me,” he said, changing the subject, “how did you come to be a sibyl, in the heart of Carbuncle, all those years ago? And how did you keep it hidden?”

“Someone infected me on Mask Night, during a Festival, many years ago.” Her fingers moved restlessly over the tabletop beside her.

Gods. He considered the implications. “Was it an accident?”

“No.” Her sightless eyes rose, finding his own this time with unnerving accuracy. “It wasn’t. Why do you ask, Justice Gundhalinu?”

He sat down, slowly, in the seat next to hers. “Something very like it … happened to me,” he said, not really answering the question.

“Then you are a sibyl too—?”

“Yes,” he said, surprised, until he remembered that she had no way of seeing his trefoil, or his tattoo; surprised again to realize that no one had even thought to tell her that.

“Did it terrify you when it happened?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said again. “I thought I’d lost my mind.”

She made a small, sympathetic noise, bowing her head.

“Was it an offworlder who infected you?” he asked.

She nodded. “I believe that it was. But he claimed he was a Summer… I kept what had happened to me a secret, for years, because I was afraid of what would happen to me if I was discovered, and cast out of the city.”

Gundhalinu pressed his mouth together, wondering what motivation a sibyl could possibly have had for knowingly infecting a blind woman with the virus, and then abandoning her, in a city where sibyls were hated and feared. “And so you never used the Transfer until M—the new Queen told you the truth?”

“Yes, I did—”

He looked up, surprised. “How…?”

“There were people who would seek me out, sometimes, to ask me questions. I’m not sure how they found me. They were always offworlders, but they never betrayed my secret. I always knew them because they said that they were ‘strangers far from home,’ and by their handshake.”

“Handshake—?” Gundhalinu stiffened. “Do you mean … like this?” He reached out, taking her hand, his fingers forming the hidden Survey sign against her palm.

Her hand jerked from his grasp. “Yes! How did you know that?”

“There is a secret order which works to change things for the better in the Hegemony, and in other parts of the Old Empire, as well… “

“And you belong to this group?”

“Yes.”

“And they work for the greater good—?”

“Yes,” he said again, more uncertainly.

“By infecting unsuspecting and unwilling people with the sibyl virus?”

“No.” He grimaced. “There must have been an extraordinarily important reason for a sibyl to have done that to you… . I’m sorry,” he said, inadequately.

“Is that what was done to you, too?” she asked, after a long silence.

“No.” He took a deep breath, exhaled it in a sigh. “There was no reason at all for what happened to me.” And yet, if it hadn’t been done to him, he would never have learned the secret of Fire Lake, or brought back the stardrive… . Song was mad, had been driven insane by the virus. But her mother Hahn, who had asked him to find her, had been a member of Survey. Had she been at a much higher level than he ever suspected? Had there actually been a hidden pattern inside the seeming randomness of his fate, all of it destined to pull him back here to Tiamat? Gods—he could go crazy with suspicion, once he started to let himself think about the possibilities… . “It was a random act.”

Her brow furrowed slightly, as if she heard doubt in his voice. But she only said, “I’m glad you told me this. I always wanted to believe that there was some meaning to what had happened to me. I only knew what the Summers claimed about their sibyls, and what the Winters claimed about the Summers, for so long. But still the offworlders would come to me. And sometimes I would be called away into Transfer from the other side; I was the only one, for years, who could answer questions about Carbuncle through the Transfer link. I always wanted to believe that what I had become mattered, somehow; that it was important. …”

“It was,” Gundhalinu said. “More than you’ll ever know.” He glanced down, and up again at the eyes like darkened windows in her lined, patient face. “So you never saw the people who came to ask you questions?” He wondered if that had been intentional on Survey’s part.

“Oh, I saw them—after a fashion. I wasn’t completely blind then—I had a vision sensor band from offworld. It gave me enough vision to ply my trade. I was a maskmaker; I made the mask of the Summer Queen, for the last Festival.”

“I remember it,” he said; remembering it like a dream. Moon had come to him where he lay, delirious with fever in a hospital bed. She had carried the mask of Summer in her arms, to let him know that she had won. … He blinked the present back into focus. “You lost your vision when we deactivated all the tech equipment we were leaving behind at the Departure, then.”

She nodded.

“I’ll make it a point to see that you receive new vision sensors as soon as possible.”

“Thank you,” she murmured, surprised.

He nodded in turn; realized that she couldn’t see the gesture. He touched her band, making a certain sign with his fingers.

She smiled; her own hand closed over his as he would have withdrawn it. “May I touch your face?” she asked.

Comprehension overtook his surprise, and he lifted his hand, guiding her fingers until they touched his cheek.

Moon watched the two figures sitting side by side in the room beyond the hidden window. She saw Fate’s fingers trace the face-map of the man who sat perfectly still beneath her touch, sensing a portrait of him for her mind with her artist’s hands.

Moon closed her own hands, when they would have begun to tell her the feel of his skin, the gentle, insistent touch of his mouth against her palm, her lips… . She began to turn away, feeling her face flush; angry at her body’s tingling betrayal, the arousal that played like silver music through her nerves—at the fact that she had come here to stand, behind this one-way window in this hidden hall, waiting, watching for the first glimpse of that face….

This was one of Arienrhod’s secrets, hidden from the room beyond behind what appeared to be an imported mural. Arienrhod had had observation points all through the palace, so that she could watch anyone she chose, whenever she wanted to. That had been one of her tricks, to hide like this, living a lie, betraying herself and whatever unsuspecting person she observed.

But— She turned back again, unable to help herself. She needed to see him, she needed this time… . She could not keep her public mask of calm indifference perfectly in place, unless she first took this secret moment alone to gaze at him. He had come early to this meeting, not waiting for any of his own people; arriving even before any of hers should have been here. He had come early; she was sure that he had done it for one reason, and that it was not Fate Ravenglass he had been looking for… .

Three other people entered the room—all members of her Council. Fate and BZ turned away, and she could no longer see his face. She pressed her hand against the window, wondering how long it would be before she no longer felt this piercing urgency, this desperate need for even the sight of him. She had never expected to feel this way; not after so many years. But when she had seen him again—and realized that she had seen his face every day through the long years of their separation, in the face of her son … his son…

She bit her lips. Had that been the reason he had been in her thoughts so often, for so long? Or had it really been the memory of the one night they had spent together? Perhaps it was only because she could never resolve them that her feelings for him obsessed her so, now that he had come back. For the sake of her marriage, her children, her world’s future… herself, she must not weaken; must never meet with him unless they were not alone, until she was certain that she could control her emotions completely….

She turned away from the window, the spell broken as more people, offworlders now, arrived for the meeting in the room beyond. She started back toward the hidden doorway; stopped suddenly, as her husband blocked her path. “Sparks—”

His gaze flicked past her, to what lay beyond the windows; lingered there, for an endless moment, before it came back to her face. She felt her face redden under his stare; unable to speak, to answer the accusation in his eyes, because there was no possible excuse she could make for what she had been doing here, when the truth was so obvious.

“Why bother with this?” he said, in disgust. “Have him for a lover, if after twenty years you still find him so irresistible.”

“I don’t want him—”

“Then what do you want? You don’t seem to want me.” His hand struck his chest, hard. “For twenty years I’ve been trying to win you back, your love, your respect; running after you, begging you for every touch, every bit of proof that you still cared. And all the time you just kept getting further and further away from me… .”He shook his head. “All that time, you were still in love with a memory. I always suspected it. But I could live with it, as long as that was all he was—” His hand jerked at the window. “I can’t live with this. Seeing him. Seeing how you look at him … Seeing the truth: Even Ariele and Tammis aren’t mine. They’re his!”

He turned away from her, and she felt her face convulse with pain. “That’s not true. They’ve always been your children! I’ve always been your wife. I love you—”

He turned back, his eyes burning. “Do you think I’m blind? Stupid? They’re not my children! And you’re not my wife—not in any way that means anything.” His anger turned to ashes. “I can’t take it. Do whatever you want … just don’t lie to me about it anymore.” He turned and left her without a backward glance.

She stood alone, unable to move, as if she had been turned to stone, until she could no longer hear his footsteps.

She moved again at last, taking in a long, tremulous breath. She looked away from the empty corridor toward the hidden window; saw the faces beyond it looking toward her as if they could see her. She realized that the sound of arguing voices had carried into the meeting hall. But they were already turning away again, their expressions uncertain. She wondered how much they had actually heard.

She clenched her fists until her hands spasmed; released them again, her fingers white and cold, as she made her way back out of the hidden space. She entered the large chamber beyond, where a dozen people waited for her now, waiting to begin a meeting that would shape the future of her world. She saw BZ’s eyes on her; resisted meeting them. She wondered how she would get through this next hour, this next day; where she would find the strength she needed to be the Queen, and not a woman. In her mind she pictured the mask of the Summer Queen that Fate Ravenglass had placed on her head one fateful day, half a lifetime ago. She built an image of its serenity and calm, superimposing them on her own features as she walked toward the expectant representatives of the old and new.