The escort of Whiter nobles gathered around the cart, all clad hi formless white, amorphous in white-on- white masks that mimed their family totem creatures. Half a dozen of them picked up the traces to draw the cart forward, starling it down the hill; the rest, all bearing some precious off worlder thing, formed a human curtain around it to shield her at least partly from the view, the insults, the occasional pieces of garbage flung by the Summers in the crowd along the way. Then: positions, this menial labor, were both an honor and a kind of penance.
She arranged the fall of her own ancient feather cloak, melting into the whiteness of the furs: the cloak she wore on all ceremonial occasions, the one she had worn at every challenge to Starbuck through a century and a half. Beneath it she wore only a simple white gown. White, the color of Whiter, and of mourning. Her hair fell free down her back like a veil, netted with diamonds and sapphires. She wore no mask — she was the only one who wore no mask — so that all the world could be certain that she was really the Snow Queen.
I am the Snow Queen. She watched the richly decorated townhouses of the nobility passing for the last time; imagining how they would look bare of Their off world elegance, remembering the loyal service she had been given by their many occupants who had been members of her court down through the years. And even today. She glanced from side to side at her retinue, listening to the defiantly off world song they sang to honor her and to drown out the crowd. A handful of the masked honor guard were nearly as old as she-although none were quite as well preserved. They had proven their loyalty and Their usefulness again and again, and they had always been rewarded, while the less useful and less pliant grew old and were banished to the countryside. They grieved sincerely today, she knew, like all the weeping, wailing Winters — and like all the Winters, grieved mainly for themselves. But that was only human. There was no one among them that she really regretted leaving behind: many whom she had enjoyed and even respected, but none for whom she had ever felt any real personal warmth that hadn't paled again like infatuation over the long reaches of time. There was only one whom she really loved — and she was not leaving him behind. She put a hand on Starbuck's cape-covered knee; he brushed it away before it could settle. But after a moment, as though in apology, his own hand slipped across her back beneath her cloak, his arm circled her waist. She smiled, until a fish head thumped into the furs behind her.
They had come to the edge of the Maze already. Is this city really so small? She glanced down the flotsam- full alleys, their throats choked with crowd; met the abandoned eyes of the empty storefronts directly. Seeing it all for the last time ... which shared something with the first time, every image as perfect and fresh as a walk through new-fallen snow. The first and the last were the same, and had nothing in common with all of the countless passages in between.
And they shared things in common in a literal sense: the Festival crowds, the abandoned and half-empty buildings. But the first time she had seen Carbuncle it had been at the end of Summer's reign, when she had come here from her family's plantation to the first Festival in a hundred years, to see the return of the off worlders and to compete in the choosing of the new Queen. Although she had come from a noble Winter family, growing up at the end of Summer had meant growing up barely more civilized than the Summers themselves were. All of the off world artifacts that were so common place to her now had seemed as strange and marvelous to that naive country girl as they must seem to any Summer.
But she had learned quickly enough the usefulness of the gifts the off worlders brought to this world — the strange magic of technology, strange customs, strange vices. And she had learned, too, what their patronizing lords wanted from her world in return, and from her as its inexperienced representative — begun to learn, painfully, how to take without giving, how to give without surrendering, how to squeeze blood from a stone. She had taken her first Starbuck, a man whose alien features she couldn't remember, whose real name she had long since forgotten. Dozens more had followed, until she had found the one...
And meanwhile she had watched Carbuncle transformed into a thriving star port she had kept learning, year upon year, more about the usefulness of technology, more about the frailty of human nature, more about the universe in general, and herself hi particular. Ten lifetimes would barely begin to teach her all that she could have learned, and she had barely been given two. But she had realized at last that this world was an extension of herself, and immortal in a way that no human body could ever be. She had made plans to leave it a legacy when her own reign had to end — to set it free to go on learning and growing when she could not.
But she had failed. Failed to hold onto the key to Tiamat's future; failed to carry out her altered plan of guiding Tiamat's future herself; failed again to keep her hold on Moon, when Moon would have been her last hope... And somehow, in the meantime, she had lost her perspective about her own future. She had lived the way the Summers lived, once, but it had been far too long ago now. She could not even imagine going back, doing without, living like a barbarian again. And even if the Summers weren't allowed to destroy every bit of technology they found remaining hi Carbuncle, the city and all of Tiamat would still cease to be even a blurred hologram of the thriving interplanetary stopover that it had been.
She had believed once — secure in her faith that Moon, her clone, would reincarnate her — that she would go willingly to sacrifice. She would play out the traditional role to the end; and death would be one final new experience for a body that had experienced every other imaginable sensation. She would not regret leaving her life behind, because life as she knew it would have ceased to exist.
But after she had lost Moon, and found Sparks instead, after she had begun to build new plans whose foundation lay in herself, she had lost sight of all that. She had forgotten that she and her lover would have to grow old and endure hardship to keep Winter and its heritage alive. No, not forgotten — she had ignored it, because the greater goal, and the greater chance for immortality, had so outweighed it.
But now — now she had failed, utterly, completely. She would end here in this dawn forever; become one more in an endless chain of forgotten Queens who lived and died without meaning. And she wasn't ready to die that way! No, no — not without leaving her legacy to the future! Damn them, damn the bastard off worlders who had ruined her plans for the future to keep their own intact. Damn the miserable stupidity of the Summers, those jeering, stinking imbeciles who would cheerfully carry out their purge of knowledge... She looked from side to side, radiating her useless fury.
'What's wrong, Arienrhod? Did you finally realize this is the end?'
She froze, her gaze on Starbuck. 'Who are you?' Whispered, it was louder in her mind than all the shouting of the crowd. 'Who are you? You aren't Starbuck!' She wrenched herself free from his encircling arm. Sparks — Oh, gods, what have you done -with him?
'I am Starbuck. Don't tell me you've forgotten me already, Arienrhod.' He caught her hand hi a vise grip. 'It's only been five years.' He turned his black-helmeted head until she could see his eyes, pitiless earth-brown eyes with long, dark lashes...
'Herne!' shaking her head. 'It can't be — gods, you can't have done this to me! You cripple, you dead man — you can't be here, I won't permit it!' Sparks ... damn you, where are you! 'I'll tell them you're the wrong man!'
'They won't care.' She felt his grin. 'They just want an off worlder body to pitch into the sea. They don't care whose it is. Why should you?'
'Where is he?' frantically. 'Where is Sparks? What have you done to him? And why?'
'So you really love him that much.' Herne's voice rasped. 'So much that you want him in your grave with you?' Black laughter. 'But not enough to let him live on without you ... or with your other self instead: greedy to the end. I traded places with him,
Arienrhod, because he doesn't love you enough to die for you — and I do.' He pressed the hand he held to his forehead. 'Arienrhod ... you belong with me, we're two of a kind. Not with that weakling; he was never enough of a man to appreciate you.'
She buried her hands beneath her cloak as he let her go. 'If I had a knife, Herne, I'd kill you myself!' I'd strangle you with my bare hands' You see what I mean?' He laughed again. 'Who else but me would want to spend forever like this? You tried to kill me once already, you bitch, and I wish you'd finished the job. But you didn't, and now I'm going to get my wish, and my revenge too. I'll have you forever now, all to myself; and if you spend forever hating me for it, all the better. But like you said, love, 'forever is a long time.'
Arienrhod wrapped herself in her cloak, shutting herself away, shutting her eyes against the sight of him. But the singing of the nobles was not enough to stop her ears against the wailing and taunting of the crowd; it seeped in through her pores and gave her despair a killing weight and substance.
