Grail - Elizabeth Bear [122]
There was a silence, as if Perceval’s hesitation had cued her that what came next would be a prickly topic. “I’m listening.”
Perceval nerved herself, and tried to speak not as Captain to Bioengineer but rather as younger relative to elder. Whatever happened, she wouldn’t be Captain much longer now. She probed the bullet wound in her abdomen with her fingertips and tried to imagine what it would be like to regret that.
“I know it’s been a long time, and a lot of changes. I know you might not remember. But—I have wondered for a long time. What was Caithness like?”
Whatever Cynric had expected, whatever she had been braced for, it was not that. She started—the first time Perceval had ever seen that cultivated mask of serenity slip. And then she said, softly, one word.
“Fair.”
“Beautiful? She is not remembered so—”
“No.” Cynric’s hand slid down, a gesture that cut. “They called her Caithness the Just, and she was. To a fineness, to a fault. It must have been a reaction to our father, who was arbitrary and capricious, but in many ways Cate was the one of us most like him. Though she would have scowled to hear me say so.”
“Scowled and not raged?” Perceval handed the bedpan back with care.
Cynric took it with no evidence of distaste. Of course, she’d seen worse. And of course, if you were cutting yourself for tight storage, squeamishness would be one of the first things to go. “She had a temper. But she did not give it rein.”
“That doesn’t sound much like Alasdair.”
She’d met him only once, and she’d been his daughter’s prisoner at the time—a daughter he was furious with, and who was about to kill him—which might not be the best way to get a sense of someone’s personality. But she’d known enough of his sons and daughters now to learn secondhand what they thought of him, and she’d seen the results of his child-rearing. If you could dignify it with that term.
Cynric, sliding the bedpan into what must be a sterilizer, shrugged. It made the long drapes of the robe that concealed her narrow body sway, ripples moving down them as if someone had shaken out a sheet. “The thing in her that was most like our father was her ruthlessness. I call her just. I do not mean to suggest that she was compassionate.”
“Oh.” Perceval settled back against the pillow. Her breath lifted and settled her chest; her heart beat even and sure. She took a moment to contemplate just what a luxury that was, as the stitch of pain across her back eased, forgiving her movement for the immobility that followed.
Perceval had made choices since becoming Captain of which she was not proud. Some—many—of them, she would make again, though she did not claim that justified them. And she blanched at what Cynric had considered a reasonable price—to herself and others—for the survival of the world.
She thought for a moment on what Cynric Conn might experience as an excess of ruthlessness, and folded her arms across her abdomen, mindful of the tubes that fed, medicated, and watered her. “I think I’m glad she’s gone.”
“She would have made a good Captain,” Cynric said. “But so do you. And now you should try to sleep again.”
24
the world and the world
Then was there a maiden in the queen’s court that was come of high
blood, and she was dumb and never spake word. Right so she came
straight into the hall, and went unto sir percivale, and took him by
the hand and said aloud, that the king and all the knights might hear it: Arise,
sir percivale, the noble knight and God’s knight, and go with
me; and so he did.
—SIR THOMAS MALORY, Le Morte d’Arthur, Book X, Chapter 23
The man Captain Amanda had shot was dead, and it was not Amanda’s doing. The sedative rounds hadn’t killed him; the poison capsule in his mouth had done the work instead.
Danilaw couldn’t blame Amanda for the fatality, especially when she so patently blamed herself. But he did find himself confused by it, distressed and befuddled.
“It’s like something from the bad old days,” he said, drawing his legs up into