'And I decided that I didn't have to die — that I could live on, myself, and let I Winter live on with me. I made another plan, to let me do that; I didn't need you any more. But I still want you — I've always wanted you here by me: my own fair child; and no one else's.' She lifted Moon's face, with fingers under her chin.
No one else's ... Moon felt her eyes lock with Arienrhod's, her mind shifting heights — the voice that spoke to her like a mother, the face of a girl, the face in the mirror; the eyes that call her down the endless spiral of time... Who am I? Who am I? 'I'm a Summer! And you're trying to kill my people.'
Arienrhod recoiled, the moment shattered. 'He told you that ... he's a fool. He can't see that they're not his people, or yours. Moon, Myself, you are a Winter in your heart, just as Sparks is an off worlder She gestured at the stars. 'You've been off world you know how the Hegemony oppresses us — you've seen what they keep from us, and keep for themselves while they exploit us. Haven't you?' demanding an answer.
Moon stood looking up. 'Yes, I know it. And I hate it.' She saw the death of countless mers among the countless stars. 'The Change has to be changed.'
'Then you understand how the absurd, tech-hating superstition of the Summers keeps us in chains while the off worlders are gone. We'll never break free from their control unless we have the time to start developing a technological base of our own. How else can we keep even what little the off worlders leave to us, unless we destroy the Change pattern?'
'Not by destroying our people!' My people; they are my people! Blotting out Arienrhod's mirror image with the memories of her family, her childhood, her island world.
'Then how?' Arienrhod's voice lost its patience. 'How else will you ever convince them, or convert them?' But she stood as though she were actually listening, expecting a genuine alternative.
'I'm a sibyl.' Her heart lurched as she confessed it to the Queen of Winter, but she knew that Arienrhod must already know it, too. 'When I tell them the truth about what I am, when I prove it, they'll listen.'
Arienrhod frowned her disappointment. 'I thought you'd have lost your obsession with that religious mummery, after what you've seen off world There's no Sea Mother filling your mouth with holy drivel; any more than the other ten thousand gods of the Hegemony exist in any way except as straw men for the off worlders to curse at.' A gust of wind poured out of the Pit, smelling of seaweed; Moon shivered inside her cloak, in spite of herself. But Arienrhod, wrapped in fog layers of filmy cloth, laughed at her mirror's reflection of fear.
'Sibyls aren't a—' But Moon broke off again. She doesn't know the truth. She can't know ... suddenly aware that she held a hidden weapon, and that she had almost given it away. She felt her broken confidence begin to mend itself; tried to keep the knowledge from showing in her eyes, afraid that in some way Arienrhod would be able to read her every secret.
But Arienrhod was caught in the machinery of her own design. 'I know why you wanted to be a sibyl ... because you couldn't be a queen. But you can be, now—' A light behind the agate translucency of her eyes.
'Forget Summer! You can share a whole world with me, a Winter world forever. Throw away your trefoil and wear a crown. Cut the strings that tie you to those narrow-minded bigots, and be free to think freely, and dream.' She cast an invisible sign into the abyss. Moon felt the wind's blade at her back. 'They'll never accept you as one of them, or trust what you are now. It's too late to save them, anyway. The wheels have been set in motion. You can't stop their fate, you can't change it... Accept it. Rule with me, as you would have ruled after me. We'll build our dream of a new world together. We can do it together, we'll share it all—' She held out her hands, shining with passion. Moon lifted her own hands, spellbound by the nearness, the undeniable reality of her own self, her original self... formed in the image of her creator...
'Arienrhod,' Arienrhod said.
Moon pulled back, smarting: Realizing that Arienrhod did not see her at all, had no understanding of why words meant to win and seduce battered and bruised her other self like stones. Arienrhod's egotism saw only the thing she longed to see ... only Arienrhod. And you're wrong. A deep and unshakeable certainty that was more than her own relief moved in Moon, as though she had somehow been tested without knowing it, and had proven her worth. 'What about Sparks?' She heard her own question, brittle ice to match Arienrhod's expectations. 'Will we share him too?'
Arienrhod's placid face flickered, but she nodded. 'Why not? Could I really be jealous of my ... self? Could I refuse myself anything? He loves us both, how could he help it? Why should he have to deny it?' as though she had to make herself believe it.
'No.'
Arienrhod's head gave a curious twist. 'No? No what?'
'No more.' Moon drew herself up, feeling the limitless strength the word released in her. 'I'm not Arienrhod.'
'Of course you are,' Arienrhod said placatingly, as to a stubborn child. 'We share the same chromosomes, the same body — the same man and the same dream. I know this must be difficult for you to accept, when you never suspected... I would never have had it happen like this. But how can you deny the truth?'
Moon wavered, felt a deeper certainty harden her resolve. 'Because I know that what you plan to do is wrong. It's wrong. It's not the way.'
'Why is it wrong to change the world for the better, when you have the power to do it? The power of change, of birth, of creation — you can't separate those things from death and destruction. That's the way of nature, and the nature of power ... its inexorability, its amorality, its indifference.'
'Real power,' Moon lifted her hand to the sign at her throat, 'is control. Knowing that you can do anything ... and not doing it only because you can. Thousands of mers have died so that you could keep your power while the off worlders were here; and now thousands of human beings are going to die so that you can keep it when they're gone. I'm not worth a thousand lives, a hundred, ten, two — and neither are you.' She shook her head, seeing the face before her, seeing herself. 'If I have to believe that being what I am means I'd destroy Sparks, and destroy the people who gave me everything, then I should never have been born! But I don't believe it, I don't feel it,' fiercely. 'I'm not what you are, or what you think I am, or what you want me to be. I don't want your power ... I have my own.' She touched her throat again.
Arienrhod frowned; Moon felt her anger like sleet. 'So they were all imperfect, failures ... even you. I always believed I could supply the thing you lacked ... but no; no one can give you that. You're a gutless weakling — thank the gods I don't have to depend on you now to achieve my goals.'
Moon looked down at her hands, at white fists. 'Then we really have nothing to say to each other, after all. You told me I could go.' She took a step toward the bridge, her heart leaping ahead.
'Wait, Moon!' Arienrhod caught up to her again, drawing her back and around. 'Can you really leave me like this; so soon, so easily? Isn't there some way for us to share something more than our stubborn pride? You above all should have been the one, the only one, who would understand the things no one else could ever reach in me, the things that I've never been able to give to anyone else.' Her voice, her touch, softened. 'Give me time, and perhaps I can learn to reach what lies unreachable hi you.'
Moon swayed: a fatherless, motherless child hearing her own voice crying a lifelong loneliness; reaching out to embrace her own strength, and redouble it, parent and child hi one. But her inner eye showed her Sparks, scarred in body and mind, and what his final silence had sworn her to. 'No. No, we can't.' Her gaze fell. 'There's no time left.'
Arienrhod flushed; softness fell away from her face, left unforgiving iron. Her hand rose as if to strike Moon's face; but it caught the beaded choker instead and jerked, breaking the threads. 'You think you can stop me. Then leave, if you can. My nobles know that you're a Summer sibyl.' She waved at the Winters still standing patiently beyond the bridge and behind them. 'And they know that you came here disguised as me, to commit some treachery. If you can make them believe you're not those things, then you deserve to go free — and to be a part of me.' She turned away abruptly, striding back toward the palace halls alone.
As she went toward them the waiting nobles advanced, bowing as they passed her, and ringed Moon in at the foot of the bridge. Moon watched Arienrhod go on, never turning back, until she lost sight of her beyond the shifting wall of vengeful faces.
Chapter 43
