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.
But for the good they could do humans — the ultimate good of eternal youth — they must die. He had always believed that the myth of mers being immortal, and granting immortality to humans, was only an old tale ... until he had come to Carbuncle. And then he had met the Queen, who had reigned for one hundred and fifty years and Arienrhod had placed the vial of viscous silver liquid into his hands, and he had let the spray fall into his throat, and realized that he too could stay young forever.
And so he had stood by, paying for his immortality with his presence, betraying all that he had ever been or believed in, while the Hounds netted and drowned their helpless victims somewhere below.
Then they had hauled the carcasses aboard the ship, and shoving him aside like the useless thing he was, they had squatted down with their knives to rip open the dappled throats. They drained away the precious mer blood while their tentacles reddened and the deck turned slippery under his feet.
And the red leaked back into the sea, and the mutilated bodies followed, their dark eyes still incredulous with death. Wasted ... all wasted! He had turned away, sick at heart, long before the butchery was finished, trying to lose himself in the infinite vista of ocean and sky. But there was no escape from the splash of carcasses plunged back into the sea, too late, too late, or the savage lashing of the water as the scavengers gathered, defiling the green-blue purity with the ecstasy of their feeding. The Sea Mother in her pitiless wisdom wasted nothing, and cursed the wantonness of those who did...
'Sparks?' Fate's voice called him back; the sheltering city closed around him, keeping him from the Lady's curses, denying that they even existed at all.
'It was so ugly — it was all wasted' I couldn't—' He shook his head. 'But I'm going to do it right this time. I can gut a dead mer, I'm not some superstitious Mother lover any more.' Remembering the disdain of the Hounds, which had been all too plain even without words; remembering Arienrhod's soothing condescension as she set free the devils of doubt and self-disgust he carried back with him to Carbuncle. And then she had handed him the gilded vial of the water of life, without comment.
'No, I suppose you're not, are you?' Again the regret. 'Death is never an easy thing to face. That's why we all long to taste the water of life. And we take it for ourselves because our own death is the hardest thing of all... We do what we think we have to.' She reached out, searched the air for his arm.
'Uh, not to interrupt—' A stranger's voice came at them over his shoulder. 'Got a delivery here.'
Sparks turned, looking up with Fate at the two figures standing in the alley, one drab, one inhuman —
