Joan Vinge - The Snow Queen

The night of firelight and wind came back to him, overlaid by a thousand more images of Moon: the child whirling with arms outflung on the shining beach; the muffled girl hauling in a netful of coppery fish beside him on an icy deck; and again the lover, whispering soft words, warm against his heart. “I can’t. I can’t tell you about her…” His voice fell apart. “Not if she’s gone.”

“She is gone, Sparks.” Arienrhod pulled the diadem from her hair, shook it free like a fall of water, down over her shoulders and her back, over the muted cloud-colors of her simple robe. “But you haven’t lost her. Not if you don’t want to.” She leaned forward. “We are very alike, aren’t we — she and I?”

He stared at her, at the fall of ivory hair, the slender girlish body and the soft stuff of the robe drawn tight across her small, high breasts… the lips, the moss-agate eyes that asked the question, her face that was the answer: “Yes.”

“Then let me be Moon for you.” Her fingertips lifted a strand of his own hair in a hauntingly familiar gesture; he felt the pulse begin to beat in his temple. Inside his head he heard the voice of the Sea; but whether it blessed him or cursed him he did not know, or care, any more. He was on fire, and not even the Sea could quench the flame of his need. He reached out, touching her for the first time, let his hand fall along her bared shoulder down the cool, curving surfaces of her arm.

She leaned eagerly into his caress, drew him down onto the bed beside her, guiding his hands. “Show me how much you loved her…”

Sparks lay with his eyes closed, absorbing the messages that reached him through his other senses — senses heightened by the grateful heaviness of his weary body. He inhaled the warm, musky scent of Arienrhod’s presence beside him, felt the soft pressure of her body contoured against his own. There was no smell of the sea about her, but instead a fragrance of imported perfumes. And yet he felt the Sea’s presence in her: she who was the Lady incarnate, robed in foam, seabirds flying from her hair, with lips like sunrise, like blood… who had lain waiting for him for centuries. He listened to the rhythm of her quiet breathing, opened his eyes to look over at her face. Her own eyes were closed; smiling in half-sleep as she lay beside him, she could even be the one he had named her at the moment when he lost control…

Amazement touched him with a tingling hand as he realized again that he lay beside the Queen of Winter. But a profound tenderness filled him, he ached to give her the love, the loyalty, the life that he had pledged to her lost other ness “Arienhrod…” He breathed the unfamiliar name against her ear. “Arienrhod. I want to be the only one with you.”

She opened her eyes then, regarded him with gentle censure. “No. No, my love.”

“Why not?” His arms closed her in, possessively. “I was the only one for Moon. Let me be the only one with you. I’m not just another fish in the net; I don’t want to share you with a hundred others.”

“But you must share me, Sparks. I am the Queen, the power. No one puts limits on me, no one commands me — I won’t allow it, because it weakens my control. There will never be an only one, man or woman.

Because I am the Only One. But there will never be an other one like you…” She kissed him softly on the forehead, her fingers closing over the off world medal resting on his chest. “My star child.”

He shivered.

“What’s wrong?”

“She used to call me that.” He pushed up onto an elbow, looking down at her as she lay back smiling, caught outside of time. “If I can’t be the only one, then I want to be the only one who counts.” He saw in his mind the mocking figure dressed in black who stood always at the Queen’s right hand, who baited him and bullied him at every private opportunity, with an evil enjoyment rooted in bitter jealousy. “I want to challenge Starbuck.”

“Starbuck?” Arienrhod blinked at him with honest surprise, before she began to laugh. “My love, you’re too new here to realize what you’re saying — and you’re far too young and alive to throw away everything. Because that is what you’d be doing, if you challenged Starbuck. I’m flattered by the gesture, but I forbid it. Believe me when I tell you that he counts for nothing in my heart. Since the first Festival night, when I put on the mask of the Winter Queen so long ago…” her eyes changed, and she was no longer seeing him, “there has been no one in my bed, or in my life, who made me long for the time when I was only Arienrhod, and lived in a world that was ignorant but free; when wishes and dreams meant something, because they weren’t always realized. You make me dream of lost innocence… you make me dream. There is no need for you to do, or be, anything more to make me love you-and want to keep you from harm. Starbuck could kill you with any weapon you could choose, including bare hands. And besides, Starbuck must be an off worlder he must have have the knowledge and the contacts among his own kind to help me keep them at bay.”

“I’m enough of an off worlder. He held out the medal, let it spin on its chain in the air above her. “And enough a part of this world to hate them like you do. I’ve listened and watched; I’ve learned a lot about the court, and the city too, how the off worlders use it. Anything I didn’t know you could teach me…” He smiled, a smile that Moon would not have understood. “And I know the one thing I really need to know, even if you don’t believe it — how I can challenge Starbuck and win.” He stopped smiling.

Arienrhod studied him silently; he felt her measure and weigh with her eyes. He thought a shadow passed across her face, before she nodded. “Challenge him, then. But if you do, and fail, I’ll call you a vain little braggart and make love to him on your grave.” She caught the winking pendant and drew him down on top of her.

“I won’t fail.” He found her lips again, hungrily. “And if I can’t be your only lover, I’ll be the best.”

This was the morning of the day. Starbuck prepared himself slowly, deliberately, in the innermost room of his private suite; reassuring himself with each precise movement and small decision that his control was absolute. He wore the utilitarian coveralls of his hunting clothes instead of the funereal foppery of his court clothing, for comfort and ease of movement. He pushed the black leather gloves down over each finger, settled the hooded helmet onto his head. It entered his mind that this might be the last time he would wear the mask, or perform this ritual, and his muscles tightened. He brushed the thought aside disdainfully — the way he would brush aside Sparks Dawntreader.

So that wet-eared Mother lover thought he could be Starbuck, had even gotten up the nerve to issue a challenge — and Arienrhod had accepted it. It would have smarted that shed done this to him, except that the contest was such an absurd mismatch he couldn’t believe she took it seriously. She wouldn’t let an ignorant punk from the outback with a pawnshop medal claim to be an off worlder unless she knew there was no chance in hell of his winning the contest.

No, she just wanted amusement; it was like her to come up with this. She hadn’t been the same since shed gotten the news about Dawntreader’s cousin: moody and spiteful, even harder to live with than usual. He wouldn’t have believed there was anything on this world that could pierce the armor of her supreme egotism or shake her unshakable arrogance. What had the girl been to her, that Arienrhod had had her watched all those years? He’d give a lot to know what made Arienrhod vulnerable…

He knew already what the boy had been to her — that shed finally gotten the elusive quarry bedded, after the longest pursuit he’d ever known her to need. The kid was either crazy or he’d played the reluctant innocent on purpose: It could have been either one, and either way it had worked too well. Arienrhod’s face when she watched the boy had driven him to private fury, with a jealousy he’d never known toward any of her lovers in the past.