Grail - Elizabeth Bear [137]
“For them,” Perceval said, her voice passing strange, a thing made of echoes. “And for me.” In the center of her veil of diamonds, she turned to them. Her hands by her sides, she smiled at Cynric directly. “Have you told them yet that you’re staying?”
“Staying?” Danilaw should not have startled from the Sorceress as if from a darthfish, but there she was, huge as life and even more peculiar.
“I’d like to liaise with your aliens,” she said. “I think I’d be good at it. I accept the terms of surgery and so forth, of course.” She waved a queenly hand. “I don’t think you’ll get much argument that my personality could use amending.”
On every side of Perceval, chiming gently, the library crystals drifted to the floor.
27
the feeble starlight itself
For I remember, as the wind sets low,
How all that peril ended quietly
In a green place where heavy sunflowers blow.
—ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, “Joyeuse Garde”
Tristen turned in space, aligning himself to the tug of gravity, and let the Enemy fill with empty space the empty spaces in the net of himself. The Enemy that wasn’t such an enemy any longer.
Dorcas was there beside him, a drifting presence, jeweled in the reflected light of two worlds. She brushed his fringe. He gave her the warmth of his full attention.
“Tristen Tiger,” she said.
“Retired,” he told her, though he didn’t believe it. “What is there to fight against anymore?”
“He’s not a villain,” Dorcas said. “He’s a hero who happens to be on the other side of the war.”
“You were fighting for a passionate belief,” he said.
She made a mood of affirmation. “I can be magnanimous in victory.”
Perhaps she could. Perhaps he’d test it.
“You remember a little of Sparrow now, don’t you?”
“I am not Sparrow, sir.”
“No,” he said. “I know that. But you felt her in the blade, and it was her personality that etched the neural pathways yours lives in. Lived in. When you lived in anything.”
She modeled a mood for him. It seemed like a reluctant but tolerant one.
“Who killed my daughter, then?”
He had a sense she regarded him. He had a sense she brushed her fringe on his again.
She said what he’d known she would say. “Talk to Benedick, Sir Tristen. Speak to your brother, if you would truly know.”
He paused halfway through leaving. “Thank you.”
Now they were all Angels, and Nova did not wish to be an Angel at all.
Not that she had ever, exactly, been merely an Angel. With the assistance of Rien and the complicity of Mallory, she had wrought herself from the pieces of Dust and Pinion and Asrafil, and all the angels they had eaten. And most of all, Rien, the Mean girl, freshly Exalted, upon whose conscience Nova had been forged. Rien had been the beloved of Perceval, and so Nova, too, had loved the Captain beyond the love that Angels had been built to suffer.
She did not want to suffer that lovesickness and that pain and that hunger anymore. The world was gone, the Builders’ plans fulfilled beyond anything they could have hoped. Nova drifted over the streaked clouds of a living world, over the swarms of her former inhabitants transformed and trying out their wings of light upon the solar winds—and realized her duty was fulfilled.
Almost.
There was someone to whom the Angel must speak.
She folded herself into a pure datastream, releasing her components to whoever might need them, and plunged through the waiting world’s atmosphere.
There were dust and sand along the beach where Perceval walked, scraps of leaf and salt in the air. More than enough to sweep together a temporary form, using techniques borrowed from Samael.
“Love,” she said, as Perceval’s head turned. “I have come to say farewell.”
“Farewell? Nova, you can’t—” Perceval stopped herself. “Of course you can. No one will ever command you again, I promise. I’ll see to it myself. You’re leaving, then?”
Nova smiled. “Thou needest no Angels whither thou goest.”
But she must have miscalculated something, because Perceval blinked and crossed her arms and said, “I’m not going anywhere.”
“But