And some fell back, but there were some who turned angrier, more hate-filled and reckless at the sight of a Summer wearing the face of then: Queen, wielding the power of a goddess. And among them she saw the iron pole crowned with a halo of metal thorns, the witch collar that had torn open Danaquil Lu’s throat. The collar came forward to meet her and keep her from stepping off the bridge. “Kneel down, sibyl, or go into the Pit!” The jewel-turba ned woman who held it thrust it at her; she took a step back, her hands knotting at her sides.

“Let me past or I’ll—” As she spoke she saw them turn, heard the processing echoes of many footsteps coming down the entry corridor toward the hall. And as suddenly the crescent of space behind the nobles began to fill with human figures — but this time they wore homespun and kleeskin: Summers! Their faces were as murderous as any Winter face had been until a second before; they carried knives and harpoons, and the faces looked at her, alone on the bridge, without changing.

“There she is! It’s the Queen!”

Moon saw the one face that didn’t belong with the rest, one man working his way forward among them with desperate determination.

“BZ!” She shouted over the rising noise as the mobs met, caught his searching gaze and felt it embrace her.

Gundhalinu elbowed aside a final Summer, making himself a space to draw his weapon and let the crowd see it clearly. “Hold it! j, Hold it!” He jerked the thin-mouthed woman holding the spined collar half around and wrenched it out of her startled hands. He ‘ hurled it over the edge into the Pit. “That’s gone far enough, Winter. i Get back — clear away, all of you!”

“What right have you got to interfere with us, foreigner? This is Winter business, Winter law—”

“That’s for damn sure,” BZ muttered, his eyes coming back to Moon even as he cleared a path for her through the human wall. “This woman’s under arrest; she’s mine.” Moon caught the wink of an eye in it, and smiled in spite of herself.

“That’s the Queen, Inspector Gundhalinu!” one of the Summers said angrily. “And she’s ours. She’s not going anywhere until the Change.” The words were as deadly as frost.

“She isn’t Arienrhod. She’s a Summer, a sibyl! Look at her throat.” BZ waved a hand. “If you want Arienrhod, you’ll have to cross that—” Following his own gesture, he looked out across the windless hall for the first time, and his face turned blank. “What—?”

“What business do you have with our Queen, fish farmers?” The jewel-turba ned woman who had lost control when she lost the sibyl collar tried to take it back again. “You’re not welcome in this palace while it still belongs to Winter.”

“Your Queen has business with us!” a Summer shouted. “She’s trying to kill us all, and we’ve come to make sure she doesn’t get away with it. And to make sure she goes down to the Lady for the third time.”

Moon listened without moving, overwhelmed with aching, irrelevant joy at hearing a voice speak with a Summer burr. “I’m Moon Dawntreader Summer—” Her voice was in rags. “The Queen is inside. Cross the bridge now! As long as I stand on it you’ll be safe.” She waved them forward, felt BZ’s astounded eyes on her.

The mob came more confidently as they saw her trefoil and put their trust in it. Her own belief wavered as the first of them joined her on the bridge; but the air lay resting, and the Summer smiled briefly and bent his head as he passed. One by one the others followed, treading nervously but driven by the furious need to reach their goal. Moon waited until the last Summer had stepped safely onto the ledge at the far side of the hall before she took the final steps onto solid ground. The Winters backed away, sullenly watching her and Gundhalinu. She turned as she reached his side, hearing a tremulous sigh behind her. She saw the storm walls open like languorous whig spreading, felt the chill winds rise again, the curtains shudder into life. The Pit groaned and stirred, reeking of the sea.

“Gods! Father of all my grandfathers,” BZ whispered. “It was you, holding back the wind. How — how did you do it?” He kept distance between them.

“I can’t tell you,” hugging herself. That it’s Carbuncle. I can never tell anyone; never. “I don’t even know.” Must never let anyone know. She followed the Pit down in her mind, down, down to the sea and below it, into the timeless bedrock of the planet itself, where the ultimate receptacle of human wisdom lay in secret omniscience. “Take me away from here, BZ. This is no place for a sibyl; the Winters are right. It’s too dangerous.” She felt the hostile, disbelieving stares of the nobles crawl over her.

BZ led her from the Hall of the Winds with regulation propriety, back down the corridor past the scenes of Winter’s reign. No one followed them. BZ still kept a small distance between them as they walked. Shaking out her mind, she picked through the dazzling fragments of her last hours for the terrible secret that had been uppermost until she stepped out onto the bridge: “What were they doing here, the Summers? Did they tell you what Arienrhod—” who almost killed me; she was suddenly dizzy, “what she had done?”

He shook his head, his concentration fixed on the motion of his feet. “I couldn’t make anything of it; they were in too much of a hurry. I don’t think they even knew. All a mob needs is a crazy rumor.”

“It’s not a rumor. It’s true. And they won’t stop it by holding her prisoner. She’s hired off worlders to start a plague.” Moon threw the words out at him heedlessly.

“What?” He stopped, stopping her. “How do you know—?” breaking off as the possibilities registered.

“Sparks told me.”

“Sparks.” He looked down again, nodding to himself. “So you found him, then. And it — you and he, still…”

“Yes.” Her hands locked in front of her.

“I see. Well.” He sagged against the wall, kept his face averted for a long moment, with his coughing as an excuse. She realized that his reluctance to touch her wasn’t all because of what he had seen in the Hall of the Winds. “He didn’t come out with you.”

“The — Arienrhod caught us. She took him back.” She looked back along the hall, felt herself tearing inside. But the spur of alien prescience goaded her again: Leave him, leave him. Leave now… “He’ll be all right, now that the Summers have come to guard the Queen. They don’t know him,” trusting the power that protected her to guard him too. “I have to stop the plague. I know who’s behind it; Sparks told me everything. I’ve got to tell someone, the police…”

“He didn’t turn you over to the sibyl baiters, then?” BZ said, as though his mind couldn’t leave the idea alone. He wiped his forehead on his sleeve, pulled open his coat.

“No. Arienrhod did it.”

“Arienrhod! But I thought she—” He didn’t finish it, didn’t need to. She felt his wordless compassion reach out to her.

She wrapped a strand of hair around her finger, looked at it, pulled on it. “There were nine of us, BZ… and none of us suited her. We weren’t what she wanted us to be. So she — she abandoned us, she threw us away.” Moon lifted a hand, a farewell to her own lost soul. But sudden sun shafts penetrated her clouded sight. “You knew. You knew about me too. Why did you trust me here, if you knew all along?”

“I knew all along that shed never make you into her image. Do you think I could spend — so much time with you, and not feel the difference between you?” He shook his head; his smile grew stronger. “And it won’t be long now before she’ll damn her haste in getting rid of you. Come on, and tell me what you know about this plot.”

Moon walked with him again, holding the healing warmth of his trust against the scars of grief as they went on toward the looming palace entrance, moving toward the end of Winter. She told him everything she knew, forcing herself to keep her mind on the narrow path through wild lands The doors opened, letting in the life force of the city, sucking them back into its vortex of vitality. There were no royal guards at the entrance now, but instead a knot of belligerent