The Summer Queen by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub

TIAMAT: Clearwater Plantation

“I can’t believe it.” Moon shook her head, standing knee-deep in water beside the canted hull of the abandoned boat. “I can’t.” Her mind refused to accept the obvious truth: that her grandmother was dead, as suddenly and as irrevocably as a wave broken against the shore. She ran her hand along the totem-creature on the boat’s prow, touching the third eye carved on its forehead above the other two in the Summer fashion. The Weather Eye, they always called it. Selen, her grandmother’s name, was painted on the stern; a boat was always called after a woman, because it pleased the Sea Mother .... But this time the Sea Mother had not been pleased, and the name on the stern of the abandoned craft left no doubt who had been taken away by the sudden, elemental sweep of Her hand.

Moon turned back again to Sparks, who stood between her and the small cluster of plantation hands. The workers had been led to the boat by mers from the colony that sheltered along the plantation’s shore. There had been no sign of any bodies.

Mers hovered near them in the water even now, or squatted on the beach a short distance away. Sparks shook his head, meeting her gaze, before his own gaze moved out across the sea. He squinted into the sun’s light, mirrored by a million chips of brilliance and thrown back again into his eyes by the changeable water surface. “Elco Teel said something about there being a storm down the coast, when we were at the wedding.”

Moon saw the wedding feast suddenly in her mind’s eye; the happy faces, the pmess she had felt in her own heart—She looked back at the workers. “Was there i storm, after they set out?”

They glanced at each other, murmuring and shrugging. “No, Lady, there wasn’t I storm,” a woman said. “The weather’s been clear down this way, for most of a now.”

Moon looked at Sparks again. “Elco Teel said that? Why would he say that?” Sparks shook his head again, and she saw his mouth pull down. “To make uble,” he said sourly, glancing away. “To spoil someone’s moment. It’s what he es for; like his father.”

“It’s as if he knew something was going to happen.”

“But there wasn’t a storm,” Sparks said.

“No,” she murmured, and fell silent; feeling suspicion like a sudden spear of , puncturing the stupefaction of her loss. “There wasn’t a storm.” She looked ay at the mers, their long necks pushed out of the water, their obsidian eyes fixed _ i her as she waded deeper, running her hand along the boat’s rail. There was no sign of damage to the craft, no evidence of anything at all. It was as if her grandmother .and Borah had simply vanished. She looked at the mers again. “You saw, didn’t lyou?” she said. “If you could only tell me what you saw—”

Sparks hesitated. He pulled the flute out of his belt pouch and put it to his lips.

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