Chill

'This was your mother's blade,' Tristen said. 'And yours, when you were who you were before. Assuming I recognized your right to bring me to judgment, would you have me cast it down like trash?'

'Give it to your leman, then.' An imperious jerk of her head indicated Mallory. Tristen wasn't sure if Mallory's snort of amusement or Samael's was more dramatic. Merely by virtue of proximity, Gavin's was loudest.

Tristen did not remove his hand from the blade, nor did he nudge the basilisk from his shoulder. They could fight, if they had to, but he would prefer to talk his way out. The risk of fighting was the risk of losing, and the whole world rode on the success of his mission. And if he read Dorcas's body language correctly, she was quite confident in her threats.

Tristen said, 'We are on Errantry, and the Captain's business. You will let us pass.'

'What care we for Captains?' Her smile was bitter. 'Less even, I trust you understand, than we do for Commodores. We follow the divine will.'

Given his experience of Commodores, Tristen didn't fancy the morality of his position. And yet it was the one he had. He said, 'But for those of us who do care for Captains--or for Commodores, if you prefer--the treason would lie in disobeying their legal orders.' His teeth began to grind. He made a point of slackening his jaw. 'No matter how little to our taste those orders were.'

'So a good soldier follows bad orders? Every criminal prefers to go free.'

'It is unwise to hold me. The fate of the very world itself rests on our passage, Lady of the Edenites.'

She tilted her head and shrugged. 'I care very little for the fate of this spaceship,' she said. 'It is not a world, and to call it a world offends the spirit of real worlds--living worlds--everywhere. Would you call a tin box your mother?'

Tristen suspected that the only reason he didn't catch himself rubbing his temples in frustration was because the gauntlets would have gotten in the way. 'I insist you release my companions.'

'Are there no higher powers than rulers?' she asked. 'Are there no moral authorities greater than a bad king?'

Mallory shifted among the serpents, provoking another susurrus of warnings. Samael brushed halfmaterial hair behind his shoulders, shreds of dry grass making a whisking sound.

Tristen said, 'If there are higher moral powers, My Lady, you will forgive me if I admit that I do not know you as such. A man must keep his conscience.'

She flinched, so that he wondered what he had said to wound her so sharply. But she extended a hand before her, a gesture that brought the snakes rising between them. Her voice was level when she said, 'And have you kept your conscience, Sir Tristen?'

Tristen looked into his daughter's dead, alien, animated face, and shook his head. 'The state of my conscience is my own concern. I do not accept your authority. I will not stand your trial.'

She pursed her lips. Her face, he thought, was sadder than not. She said, 'Would that you had a choice, good sir knight. Fear not. Your companions will not be harmed.'

He touched the hilt of Mirth, where it still swung at his hip. The serpents swayed forward, but he did not withdraw his hand. It wasn't a threat; it was an offering. Whoever lived in her now, he knew the face, the steady gaze. He did not think he could fight her. 'You heard me say this blade was yours.'

'Not mine.' Was there a little sorrow behind the dismissal in her headshake? Hard to tell, when you had so much invested in believing there was.

'A bargain,' Tristen said. 'I will submit to your trial if you will accept this object from my hand.'

'Tristen!' interjected Mallory. Tristen let the protest roll down his armor and away, holding Dorcas's gaze the whole while.

'We could fight,' Tristen said. 'Whatever your resources, Lady of the Edenites, it would not go easy for you.'

Of course it was a trap, and she knew it. Her eyebrows lifted, her pupils contracted. But it was a trap for him as well.

Slowly, she nodded.

Tristen turned his head, to where Mallory and Samael stood side by side. Gavin rocked on his shoulder, a big bird hunching itself and shuffling from foot to foot.

'Don't fight them,' Tristen said, holding Mallory's gaze. He suspected Gavin was his real worry, so he raised one gauntlet and touched the basilisk's wing. 'Do not fight them. Do not kill her. I will handle this myself.'

Mallory, grim-jawed, nodded.

Tristen turned back to the woman who wore his daughter's skin. 'Do your worst.' When her hand fell, the snakes struck.

Perceval buried her feet in violets, leaning back in her Captain's chair, and stared up at the sky as if she could see through it to the night beyond.

Not as if. She could see through it to the night beyond if she chose.

She needed merely to extend her sight beyond the range of her physical eyes, into the web of the angel's awareness. The angel's slowly receding awareness, which Perceval knew was being worn back by the tide of the expanding nullities.

She would rather have waded through a sewer. Not because of what that web contained, but who. Hard enough to allow that intimacy with a stranger, a machine. But to do so with a machine that contained the desires and memories of someone to whom she had been as close as she was to Rien--

Every reach into the matrix was a monstrous effort of will, the sort of exertion she could manage only in surges. She'd never wanted a lover. She'd never cared to allow anyone within the borders of herself, not since she was a child, and too small and dependent to enforce her will.

Perceval had chosen to relax those limits for Rien because Rien had proven that she would honor whatever boundaries Perceval needed to establish. But this was an abrogation of them, a violation sharp enough to make her wish she could peel her skin back with her nails and wriggle out of it.

Actually, given what she'd become, she probably could do that. And survive it. Shed my skin. And if skinshedding could make it better, Perceval would choose that in a nanosecond. But this violation came from within, and it was something she'd chosen, out of duty, on her own.

So many voices, inside her, clamoring. Wrestling to speak with her mouth, to move with her limbs.

She hoped it would get easier with practice. That she would stop caring about privacy, boundaries, the integrity of her self. She didn't think she could live with it, otherwise.

Perceval drew a deep breath, closed her eyes, and reached outside her skin.

Nova was there, waiting, silent and aware as any colonized atmosphere. Perceval breathed deep, pulse accelerating, a tingling spreading the length of her arms to her fingertips. It was psychosomatic, she knew--and so she shut it down, not caring for the distraction, or the reminder that she had any physical body, because that reminder was too much temptation to return there and remain.

No wonder Captains go strange.

'Show me our boundaries, Nova.'

Nova opened the pathways and Perceval entered them as easily as spreading her lost wings would have been. She infiltrated the angel, stretched to the edges of its span of control, and felt there the prickly, eroding sensation of something nibbling. A war, a death struggle, taking place on the micro scale. Different from the one she'd lived through when angel fought angel, though. This was a battle of attrition.

'Those aren't ours,' she said, and wondered why the angel hadn't seen it.

--Those aren't our whats?--

'Our colonies,' she said. 'Those aren't you. They aren't remotely like you. And they're not reprogramming your colony, Nova. They're penetrating each mote so it reproduces more motes like theirs, not like ours. They're viral.'

'The thing is, I'm pretty sure they're not ... native to our world. And Nova can't tell,' Perceval said, gesturing to a monitor tank in which a schematic in blue and orange hovered, writhing uncertainly.

Caitlin folded her arms and frowned, considering her daughter the Captain's words with a mix of unease and pride.

Perceval continued, 'She can't even tell they exist. It's a very familiar-sounding model, if you think about it for a minute.'