1

Here on Tiamat, where there is more water than land, the sharp edge between ocean and sky is blurred; the two merge into one. Water is drawn up from the shining plate of the sea and showers down again in petulant squalls. Clouds pass like emotion across the fiery red faces of the Twins, and are shaken off, splintering into rainbows: dozens of rainbows every day, until the people cease to be amazed by them. Until no one stops to wonder, no one looks up…

“It’s a shame,” Moon said suddenly, pulling hard on the steering oar.

“What is?” Sparks ducked down as the flapping sail filled and the boom swept across over his head. The outrigger canoe plunged like a wing fish “It’s a shame you aren’t paying attention. What do you want to do, sink us?”

Moon frowned, the moment’s mood broken. “Oh, drown yourself.”

“I’m half-drowned already; that’s the trouble.” He grimaced at the water lapping the ankles of their waterproof kleeskin over boots and picked up the bailer again. The last squall had drowned his good nature, anyway, she thought, along with the sodden supply baskets. Or maybe it was only fatigue. They had been at sea on this journey for nearly a month, creeping from island to island along the Windward chain. And for the last day they had been beyond the Windwards, beyond the charts they knew, striking out across the expanse of open ocean toward three islands that kept to themselves, a sanctuary of the Sea Mother. Their boat was tiny for such far ranging, and they had only the stars and a rough current-chart of crisscrossed sticks to guide them. But they were children of the Sea as truly as they were the children of their birth-mothers; and because they were on a sacred quest, Moon knew that She would be kind.

Moon watched Spark’s bobbing head catch fire as the pinwheeled binary of Tiamat’s double sun broke the clouds, to kindle flame in the red of his hair and his sparse, newly starting beard; throw the soft-edged shadow of his slim, muscular body down into the bottom of the boat. She sighed, unable to keep hold of her irritation when she looked at him, and reached out tenderly to finger a red, shining braid.

“Rainbows… I was talking about rainbows. Nobody appreciates them. What if there was never another rainbow?” She brushed back the hood of her mottled slicker and tugged loose the laces at her throat. Braids as white as cream spilled out and down over her back. Her eyes were the color of mist and moss agate. She looked up through the crab-claw sail, squinting as she sorted tumbled cloud from sky to find vaulting ribbons of fractured light, dimmed here to nothingness, brightening there until their banners doubled and redoubled.

Sparks dumped another shellful of water overboard, sending it home, before he lifted his head to follow her gaze. Even without its sun-browning, his skin was dark for an islander’s. But lashes and eyebrows as pale as her own tightened against the glare, above eyes that changed color like the sea. “Come on. We’ll always have rainbows, Cuz. As long as we have the Twins and the rain. A simple case of diffraction; I showed you—”

She hated it when he talked tech — the unthinking arrogance that came into his voice. “I know that. I’m not stupid.” She jerked the coppery braid sharply.

“Ow!”

“But I’d still rather hear Gran tell us that it was the Lady’s promise of plenty, instead of hearing that trader turn it into something without any point at all. And so would you. Wouldn’t you, my star child. Admit it!”

“No!” He beat her hand away; anger blazed. “Don’t make fun of that, damn it!” He turned his back on her, splashing. She pictured his knuckles whitening over the corroded crosses-inside-a-circle: the token his off worlder father had given to his mother at the last Festival. “Mother of Us All!”

It was the one thing that drove between them like a blade — their awareness of a heritage that he did not share with her, or with anyone they knew. They were Summers, and their people rarely had contact with the tech-loving Winters who consorted with the off worlders except at the Festivals, when the adventurous and joyful from all over this world gathered in Carbuncle; when they put on masks and put off their differences, to celebrate the Prime Minister’s cyclical visit and a tradition that was far older.

Their two mothers, who were sisters, had gone to Carbuncle to the last Festival, and returned to Neith carrying, as her mother had told her, “the living memory of a magic night.” She and Sparks had been born on the same day; his mother had died in childbirth. Their grandmother had raised them both while Moon’s mother was at sea with the fishing fleet. They had grown up together like twins, she often thought: strange, changeling twins growing up under the vaguely uneasy gaze of the stolid, provincial islanders. But there had always been a part of Sparks that she was shut off from, that she could not share: the part of him that heard the stars whisper. He bartered surreptitiously with passing traders for mechanical trinkets from other worlds, wasted days taking them apart and putting them back together, finally throwing them into the sea in a fit of self disgust along with propitiating effigies made of leaves.

Moon kept his tech secrets from Gran and the world, grateful that he at least shared them with her, but nursing a secret resentment. For all she knew her own father could have been a Winter or even an off worlder, but she was content with building a future that fit under her own sky. Because of that it was hard for her to be patient with Sparks , who was not, who was caught in the space between the heritage he lived and the one he saw in starlight.

“Oh, Sparks.” She leaned forward, rested a chilly hand on his shoulder, massaging the knotted muscles through the thickness of cloth and oilskins. “I’m not teasing. I didn’t mean to; I’m sorry,” thinking, I’d rather have no father at all than live with a shadow all my life. “Don’t be sad. Look there!” Blue sparks danced on the ocean beyond red sparks gleaming in his hair. Wingfish flashed and soared above the swells of the Mother Sea , and she saw the island clearly now, leeward, the highest of three. Serpentine lace marked the distant meeting of sea and shore. “The choosing-place! And look, mers!” She blew a kiss in awed reverence.

Long, sinuous, brindle-colored necks were breaking the water surface around and ahead of them; ebony eyes studied them with inscrutable knowledge. The mers were the Sea’s children, and a sailor’s luck. Their presence could only mean that the Lady was smiling.

Sparks looked back at her, suddenly smiling too, and caught her hand. “They’re leading us in — She knows why we’ve come. We’ve really come, we’re going to be chosen at last.” He pulled the coiled shell flute out of the pouch at his hip and set free a joyous run of notes. The mers’ heads began to weave with the music, and their own eerie whistles and cries sang counterpoint. The old tales said that they lamented a terrible loss, and a terrible wrong; but no two tales agreed on what the loss or the wrong had been.

Moon listened to their music, not finding it sad at all. Her own throat was suddenly too tight for song: She saw in her mind another shore, half their lifetime ago, where two children had picked up a dream lying like a rare coiled shell in the sand at the feet of a stranger. She followed the memory back through time…

Moon and Sparks ran barefoot along the rough walls between the shallow harbor pens, a net slung swaying like a hammock from shoulder to slim shoulder between them. Their deft, callused feet slapped and splashed along the piled-stone pathways, immune to bruises and the lapping icy water. The klee in the pens, usually as sluggish as stones on the weedy bottom, surfaced with ungainly haste to watch the children pass. They blew spray and grunted with hunger; but the net was empty, its burden of dried sea hair already dumped into the family stock-pens for the midday feeding.