The Summer Queen Read Online Free PDF Page A

his feet, swayed there a moment, dizzy with disbelief. He fumbled in his
pocket, dropped a coin on her board, not even noticing what it was that he gave
her, not caring. He turned away without another word, and disappeared into the
crowd.

TIAMAT: Carbuncle
    Gods, what am I doing here? Jerusha PalaThion bent her head,
pressing her fingertips against her eyes. The feeling that she was a prisoner
in someone else’s dream crept over her again as the scene before her suddenly
turned surreal. She raised her head and opened her eyes as the disorientation
passed. Yes, she was really here, standing in the Hall of the Winds; waiting
for the Summer Queen, watching over the crowd that waited with her.
    But still she seemed to hear the song of a goddess in the
air high overhead, feel the living breath of the Sea Mother chill her flesh.
The ageless chamber reeked of the Sea; the keening windsong carried Her voice
to Jerusha, and to the small gathering of the faithful who waited with
reverence and awe at the edge of the Pit for their audience with the Queen.
    The Sea Herself lay waiting too, at the bottom of the Pit,
three hundred meters below. A single fragile span of bridge crossed the
dizzying well, giving access to the palace on the other side. But high above
them gossamer curtains swelled and billowed with the restless wind, creating
treacherous air currents that could sweep a body from the bridge with
terrifying ease. The Lady gives, they said, and the Lady takes away.
    “The Lady.”
    “The Lady—”
    Hushed voices murmured Her name as the Summer Queen appeared
suddenly at the far end of the span. Jerusha took a deep breath and lowered her
hand to her side, focusing on the Queen, the Goddess Incarnate, as she stepped
carefully onto the bridge. Jerusha watched her come, slowly, regally, her
milk-white hair drifting around her in a shining cloud, her loose, summer-green
robes billowing like grass, like the sea. She wore a crown of flowers and
birdwings shot through with the light of jewels, and the trefoil of a sibyl.
The Lady.
     
    Damn it.’ Jerusha shook her head: a head-clearing, a denial.
She looked at the Queen again, seeing her clearly this time: Not a goddess
incarnate, but an eighteen-year-old girl named Moon. Her lace was drawn with
strain and weariness, her movements were made slow and awkward by the swelling
of an unexpected pregnancy that was now near term, no longer completely
concealed even by her flowing robes. There was no mystery to her, any more than
there was any divine presence in this room.
    Jerusha’s eyes still reminded her insistently that the Queen
wore another woman’s face; memory told her that Moon Dawntreader carried
another woman’s ambitions in her mind, in her heart. It was impossible not to
stare at her, not to wonder about the strange motion of a fate whose dance had
trapped them both ....
    She listened to the progression of high, piercing notes that
filled the chamber as the Queen touched the tone box she carried in her hand;
the sounds that controlled the movement of the wind curtains high above, to
create a space of quiet air through which she, and the three people who
followed her, could move. The tone box was an artifact of the Old Empire, like
the Hall, the Pit, the palace above them and the ancient, serpentine city at
whose pinnacle it sat. Technology was the real god at work here, and the Queen
knew that as well as Jerusha did. She had come here today to try to reconcile
this crucial gathering of her people to that truth, if she could.
    Jerusha felt a sudden twinge of compassion for the fragile
figure crossing the bridge toward her. Moon Dawntreader had defied the
offworlder rule that Jerusha PalaThion had represented, to become the new
Queen. And Jerusha had believed her cause was just, had believed in her;
instead of deporting her, had let her become Queen. In the end she had even
given up her own position as Commander of Police, stopped serving the Hegemony
that had brought nothing