As Tiewe moved away, trailing music, Fate’s face turned to his approach: half a smile, half a frown of concentration. “Sparks — is that you?” Malkin the cat meowed affirmation from his crouching spot in her doorway.
“Yes. Hello, Fate.” Sparks stopped in front of her, suddenly uncertain.
“Well, what a nice surprise. Sit down, don’t be a stranger. You’ve been too much of a stranger these past months.”
He grimaced his guilt as he sat down, carefully, among the trays on the stoop. “I know. I’m sorry, I—”
“No, no, don’t apologize.” She waved her hands, absolving him goodnaturedly. “After all, how often have I come to the palace to visit you?”
He laughed. “Never.”
“Then I should be grateful you come here at all.” She felt for the mask she had laid down. “Tell me gossip about the court — what they wear, how they play, what marvelous inconsequentialities they brood over. I need some cheering up. Tiewe is inspired with a needle and floss, but such a sad person…” She looked away, frowning at nothing, reached out abruptly for a tray of beads and upset it. “Damn!” Malkin leaped up from the doorway and disappeared into the shop.
“Here, let me—” Sparks leaned out, barely catching a cascade of shimmering green as it poured over the step’s edge. He righted the tray and refilled it patiently, soothed by the mindlessness of the task. “There.” He handed her three beads at a time, falling back gratefully into the habits and the comfortable feel of his days with her.
“See how I’ve missed you.” She smiled at the beads dropped into her palm. “But not just for your patient hands — for your lilting Summer songs and the freshness of your wonder.”
Sparks let his fingers dig into his knees, said nothing.
“Will you stay and play for me awhile? It’s been too long between songs in this alley.”
“I—” He swallowed the stone in his throat. “I didn’t bring my flute.”
“No?” More incredulous than if he’d told her he wasn’t wearing clothes. “Why not?”
“I — don’t feel like playing, lately.”
She sat leaning forward over the mask form, waiting for something more.
“I’ve been too busy,” defensively.
“I thought that was what you did for the Queen — played your music.”
“Not any more. I do… uh, other things, now.” He shifted on the hard surface of the step. “Other… things.”
She nodded; he had forgotten how disconcerting the gaze of her third eye was. “Like gambling and drinking too much wine at the Parallax View.” It was a statement of fact.
“How’d you know — where I’ve been?” not quite willing to admit the rest of it.
“I can smell you. Their incense is imported from D’doille. Every place has its own identity, and so does every drug. And your voice is just a little slurred.”
“Tell me if I won or lost.”
“You won. If you’d lost you wouldn’t sound so smug about it.”
He laughed, but it was not an easy laugh. “You’d make a good Blue.”
“No.” She shook her head, and searched a bead for its hole with her needle, “To become a Blue a person needs a certain sense of moral superiority; and I refuse to pass judgment on my fellow sinners Ah—” as the bead slipped into place. “Some green feathers, please.”
“I know you don’t.” He passed feathers to her.
“And is that why you’ve come here today?” She dipped her fingers in glue and dabbed the feather stems. “As long as you quit the tables while you’re ahead, the Queen can’t object to how you spend your free time and money, can she?”
“She wants me to gamble. She gives me the money.” The words came out inexorably; he could feel the forbidden secret rise inside him, knowing that it was only a matter of time.
“She does? Are you that good?” Fate said it as though she doubted it.
“No. I do it to learn things, about how the off worlders think, what their plans are, so I can tell her…”
“I thought that’s what she has Starbuck for.”
“It is.” The invisible wall of his anomie seemed to close them into a place of utter silence, and his voice that should have been proud barely carried across it: “I am Starbuck.”
The small sigh of her indrawn breath was all the answer she made, at first. “I heard that there was a new Starbuck. Is this true, Sparks? You, a Summer, a—” A boy, but she didn’t say it.
“Half Summer.” He nodded. “Yeah. It’s true.”
“How? Why?” Her hands lay motionless over the mask’s gaping mouth.
“Because she’s so like Moon. And Moon is gone.” Arienrhod was the only thing that had not changed for him. the only thing whole and real, more real to him than his own flesh. “She knew about Moon, knew what she meant to me. She’s the only one who could understand…” The wounded words crept out, to tell her what (but not all) had passed between Arienrhod and himself after the news of Moon’s kidnapping reached them. “…So I had to challenge Starbuck; because I love her. And she let me challenge him, because she loves me. And I won.”
“How did you manage to kill a man like that?”
“I killed him with my flute… in the Hall of the Winds.” Only he didn’t die.
“And you haven’t played it since.” Fate shook her head, her thick braid rolled on her shoulder. “Tell me — has it been v.orth it?”
“Yes!” He flinched back in surprise from his own voice.
“Why did I think I heard ‘no?”“
His fingers tightened over a tray of beads, his muscles tightened; she didn’t see it. “I had to be Starbuck. I had to be the best, or I wouldn’t be — worthy of her. I have to be the one who counts. But I thought once I won the challenge, the rest would be easy; and it’s not. I thought it would be everything I ever wanted.”
“And it’s not.”
He shook his own head. “What the hell’s wrong with me, anyway! Everything always goes wrong for me… everything I do.”
“Then maybe you weren’t meant to do it. You could still go back to Summer; nothing’s stopping you.”
“Back to what?” He spat the words. “No. I can’t go back.” He had already asked it of himself, and been answered. “Nobody goes back, I know that now; we just go on and on, and there’s never any reason… I won’t leave Arienrhod; I can’t. But if I can’t be what she wants me to be, I’ll lose her anyway.” Herne knew; Herne knows everything…
“You’ll find a way to take the off worlders pulse. If you were smart enough to outwit Starbuck, you’re smart enough to take his place. You’ll get the feel of being him; you’ve already begun to.”
Something in the words, a sorrow, surprised him. He made a fist, wrapped it in his hand. “I’ve got to. I’ve got to believe it — before the Hunt comes again.”
“The Hunt that brings in the water of life? The mer hunt?”
“Yes.” He stared down through the pavement, through the heart of the city and the world, toward the spaces of the sea controlled by the Winter nobles. In his mind he could see the Hunt again: the necklace of barren rocks strewn over the open sea; the rhythm of the ocean swells singing through the ship timbers, the song of the world he had left behind. Remembering how he had searched the horizon with sudden longing… But if the Lady called him home, he could not hear Her voice any more. Perhaps because he had come to hunt mers; or perhaps because the Sea was only the sea, a body of water, a chemical solution.
He had watched the shore of the nearest island, where the dwindling colony of mers had lain along the black-pebbled beach… until the Hounds had driven them back into the sea, and into the waiting nets that would entangle and drown them. If they could not resurface twice in an hour to breathe, they died.
No Summer would kill a mer; they were the Lady’s children, born to Her after stars fell into the sea and became the islands, her consorts, the Land. It was said that the sailor who killed a mer by accident had no luck from that day on… the sailor who killed one intentionally was drowned by the rest of the crew. He had heard a hundred different stories of mers saving sailors gone overboard, even whole crews of a ship that had foundered; seen the mer that lived in the harbor at Gateway Island , its brindle back stitching a track across the supple cloth of the harbor surface as it guided ships safely through the treacherous Gateway Reef. He remembered the mers that had greeted them at the sibyl island. He had never heard of a mer doing anything evil, or anyone harm.