The Snow Queen Read Free Page B

forever.”
    He repeated
the words, clearly and proudly, and together they sipped sea water from their
cupped hands to complete the vow. “Nobody can say we’re still too young to
pledge after this journey!” They had pledged their love for the first time when
they were barely old enough to recite the words, and everyone had laughed. But
they had been true to each other ever since; and through the years they had
shared everything, including the hesitant, yearning inevitability of lips
touching, and hands, and flesh ...
    Moon
remembered a hidden cranny among the rocks on a leeward bay; warm callused
hands of stone cupping their shivering bodies as they lay together in love under
the bright noon, while the tide whispered far away down the beach. Now, as
then, she could feel the strength of the need that bound them together: the
heat they made between them that held the cold loneliness of their world at
bay. The union of souls that overcame them in the final moment—the height, the
wholeness, that nothing else in their world could ever give her. Together they
would enter this new life, and at last they would belong to their world as
completely as they belonged to each other ... Sparks’s lips brushed her ear;
she leaned forward, her arms going around him again. The boat nosed toward
shore, untended.
    “Do you see
anything?”
Sparks
called.
    Sparks
checked the boat a last time where it
lay beached firmly in shells and storm wrack, beyond the high-tide line. The
family totem carved at its prow regarded him with three staring painted eyes.
The tide was still going out, but it had already exposed enough wet-mirrored
sand so that dragging the canoe up the beach had taken away their breath. One
of the mers had actually come out onto the shore with them, let them stroke its
wet, slick, brindle fur with timid hands. He had never been close enough to
touch one before; they were as large as he was, and twice as heavy.
    “Not
yet—here!” Moon’s voice reached him, along with the frantic waving of her hand.
She had followed the mer’s floundering progress as it moved on up the beach.
“Here by the stream, a path. It must be the one Gran told me about!”
    He started
across the littered beach slope toward the freshwater outlet, abandoned shells
crunching under his feet. The stream had laid down a wide band of red silt in
the ochre, cut into the red with channels of moss-green water flow. Where it
left the shore, Moon stood waiting to start into the hills.
    “We follow
the stream up?”
    She nodded,
following the swift blue-green rise of the cloaked land with her eyes. Naked
peaks of raw red stone soared even higher. Those islands were new on the
measureless time scale of the Sea; their spines still clawed the sky, undulled
by age.
    “Looks like
we climb.” He jammed his hands into his pockets, uncertain.
    “Yeah.”
Moon watched the mer start back down the beach. Her hand tingled with the feel
of its heavy fur. “We’ll dance in the rigging today.” She looked back at him,
suddenly very much aware of what their presence here meant. “Well, come on,”
almost impatiently. “The first step is the hardest.” They took it together.
    But it was
a step that had been taken before, Moon thought as she climbed ... how many times? She found the answer
engraved in the hillsides, where the passage of feet had worn down the airy
volcanic pumice until sometimes they walked in narrow tracks eaten away to the
height of their knees. And how many have
climbed it just to be refused? Moon thought a quick prayer, looking down as
the trail became a narrow ledge running ankle deep above a canyon of evergreen
fern and impenetrable bush. The day was utterly silent when the wind died; she
had not seen a trace of any living thing larger than a click beetle. Once,
perhaps, the distant cry of a bird ... The stream winked at her from cover
hundreds of feet below, and on her left the green-coated wall vaulted another
hundred into the sky. Though she