Chill

armor between hir clutching fists were anything but humorous. So he wrapped his arms around Head's head and hir stout shoulders, took a deep breath, and said, 'There, there.'

Having lost something, lost it, he thought, forever, lost everything good it ever brought into his life, he knew that sometimes it could be easier to simply let it go. To choose to remember only what was dreary, or terrible, so he did not feel the loss so acutely. For a long time, all he had permitted himself to remember of Rule was the storms of his father's house, the rages, the broken bones and savage politics, the funerals. The feel of family blood across his knuckles.

But that was not all there had ever been, and standing here under this broken tree, he found he remembered some of that now, as well.

He was taking a breath to tell Head so when sie tilted hir head back, stared up past his chin, and said--as clearly as if hir eyes were not still inflamed with weeping--'I thought the bitch had killed you.'

Tristen stroked hir hair. 'She tried. She didn't know her own limits, that was all.' Then he put hir back at arm's length. 'I'm First Mate now, Head.'

'I know. Your necromancer told me,' sie said, provoking a slow blink while Tristen wondered exactly when it was that he'd grown a personal necromancer. 'Come on. You must be famished. Come inside.'

The walk through the doors was as weird as he'd anticipated. A Homecoming. If Rule had ever been home, precisely.

Well, it was not as if he--unlike Benedick--had found another.

Head had recovered hirself, and though Tristen could read hir micromovements well enough to tell that sie was resisting the urge, sie did not take his elbow to steer him. 'The house is in disarray. Please do not believe that what you will see is the normal state of affairs, sir. Things have not fallen so far from that to which you were accustomed.' Sie hesitated, as if considering how to broach a delicate subject.

'Head,' Tristen said. 'You need never temporize with me.'

'We are twelve,' sie said, after an additional weighty pause. 'There were twenty who escaped with me to the kitchens, but--'

'Acceleration trauma?'

Sie nodded. 'I had no warning, sir. And even if I had, there were no tanks accessible.'

Tristen would have touched hir shoulder, but the moment for that was past. It would be an affront to hir dignity now, and intimation that Tristen did not believe in hir strength and professionalism. Now he was lord, and sie was servant.

Still, he could not quite believe that sie was apologizing to him for saving twelve lives out of twenty-one, under impossible circumstances.

'Head.'

Sie turned to him, eyes big, and he wondered--not for the first time--how he could be both things to hir: Tristen, whose wedding sie had catered; and Prince Tristen, lord of the House of Rule. 'Lord?'

There were so many things he could say and only one of them would be the best one. Too much consideration before continuing would only feed hir worry. 'When you have done something requiring an apology, I shall demand it. Are we clear?'

Hir hands knotted in the new apron--violet, and very flattering. Hir lips began to shape something. An apology, or he missed his guess. Then sie swallowed hard and said, 'Yes, Commodore. Perfectly.'

He nudged hir, because he couldn't resist, and because in the long term he was certain he couldn't live with this fawning obsequiousness. He thought he'd rather employ revenant servants, like Benedick did. And that would be a horror. 'There's a Captain on the bridge now, Head,' he reminded, 'Call me First Mate.'

Sie blanched, as he had known sie would. So he offered a compromise.

'Or just Lord.'

'Yes, Lord Tristen,' sie said. 'I thought I'd show you to your chambers first, and where you could also meet with your servants.'

Mine, are they? But he held his peace. If Mallory had practiced deception, Tristen would bring his displeasure to the necromancer's notice at some convenient time, and it did not need to become Head's problem. Head had suffered enough of late that Tristen thought it fitting to shield hir a little.

The main hall of Rule was as much of a challenge as he had anticipated. Long and dark, echoing with footsteps and paneled in the dark wood of storied Earth, it offered no shelter, either physical or emotional. His chambers, sie said, so glibly.

But what sie meant was his father's rooms.

And he wondered now--passing the portraits of his murdered brothers and sisters, passing Aefre's portrait and the three turned to the wall without a sideways glance, though the muscles in his neck trembled with the effort of ignoring them--how was it possible that the old man still terrified him so? Head did him the politeness of pretending ignorance, for which he was grateful, but they both knew it for kindness instead of truth.

His symbiont would have remembered perfectly what the three effaced portraits had looked like, but Alasdair had ordered all his children to forget, as well, so all Tristen had was the blurred and transitory memories of flesh. Worse, he had seen Caitlin recently and so her adult face--more worn with responsibility, no longer the mask of an impudent, auburn-haired pixie--had overlaid what he remembered of her portrait.

Alasdair was dead and eaten. At the end of the corridor, Tristen hesitated. After a moment, he turned and stalked back.

He paused before the first of the reversed frames and tried to remember what lay behind it. A woman, tall and broad, her body concealed by charcoal, lavender, and violet armor blazoned silver and purple over the heart with a stylized iris. Caithness had held an unblade in one relaxed hand and rested the other on her hip, and her eyebrows had been the same rich brown as her hair. The second frame had also outlined a picture of a woman, but one more different from her sister than Cynric had been from Caithness was hard to imagine. Cynric had been fallow--sexless by choice, like Perceval--tall and spare and bony-chinned, her dark hair falling along either side of her face as if to accentuate the angles. She had been prone to flowing outfits remarkably unsuited for micro-G.

Tristen arrested his hand before it could touch the back of her portrait, aware that Head was staring. He turned away instead and continued with hir down the hall, past all the staring faces of his siblings, dead and living.

By the time they came to the end of the gauntlet, Tristen's hands were clammy and tendrils of hair stuck unpleasantly to his nape. As Head keyed the lock at the far end, Tristen looked down at the bones of his wrists. 'I'm not glad of much that happened in this house,' he said. 'But I'm glad he's dead.'

Head let hir shoulder brush his sleeve. 'So am I. And you know what, Prince Tristen?'

He didn't correct hir to the less formal title. He'd registered his protest. He knew better than to make more of it. 'What, Head?'

Sie opened the door and stepped through. 'I'm glad that she's dead, too.'

Tristen nodded. They had found something else to agree on. Neither one of them missed Ariane.

He had thought the hall, with its ghosts and memories, would be the hard part. When he thought of Rule, it was the hall he'd recollected--Alasdair's ringing footsteps, Cynric the Sorceress in her white and gold, a data-etched green sapphire glinting against her nostril as she paced in the midst of guards, dragging the sweep of nanochains. He thought of his father returning from the battle in which he had destroyed his oldest daughter, with Caithness's black unblade Innocence slung across his shoulder. That blade had eventually been handed down to Ariane, and, with a kind of horrible poetry, come back in her hand to claim Alasdair's life, as if with Caithness's death-curse behind it. Yes. The hall, he had assumed, would be the hard part.

But he'd been wrong. And as soon as Head unlocked the door to the family quarters, he knew it. Because in his memory, these had been the walls and corridors that held every rare happiness of the house. They had burst with family: his father, his father's women, his brothers and sisters and himself and all their lovers and children.

And now there was him and Head. And every door along the corridor was sealed.

Somehow, he made it past those as well. Here, he gave himself permission to look, to take in what was lost. In all honesty, he could hardly have stopped himself.

At last they came to his father's door.

His own door. He was the head of House Conn now. All that lay before him, and all that surrounded him, was his. Or, at least, his in service to his Captain, Perceval.