Grail - Elizabeth Bear [47]
Tristen did not have to duck much to look her in the eye. He was a Conn, and he had the weird old haunted blade called Mirth by his side. Little could stand before him, and certainly not the splintered remnants of a ravaged society.
He was Tristen Tiger, and it was for this that he bore claws.
But he did not relish it as he once would have. He nodded once, and assured her, “I can lead a fight, my dear. Though the Tristen you knew of old is dead.”
It was a very good smile. “Good,” she said. “I never liked him.”
Jordan of Engine had only met the girl from Rule one time, when Jordan had been young. Well, Jordan was still young, by Exalt standards. But she was seventy-odd years young, now, rather than seventeen.
She still remembered her, though, as clearly as she remembered everything else that had brought her here. The girl—Rien—had been pale, denuded, bare from the radiation and the healing tanks. Her skin had been flushed the pale aqua of a new colony, and—to Jordan’s Engineer’s eyes—she’d seemed unfinished.
Not just because the radiation of the River had caused her hair follicles to slip their shafts, leaving her egglike, fetal … neotenic. But because she was so close to baseline, physically, her body stocky and short by Engineer standards—a child’s untouched form. She had no wings, no fur, no extended digits, no modified eyesight—only four limbs and bare skin that would have been lightly prickled with vellus hair if she hadn’t been scathed by the River.
Jordan had been fascinated. The girl from Rule—Rien, Arianrhod’s daughter—had been so alien, and so diffident, and so strong. Jordan had wanted to make the girl from Rule her friend.
Some of that, Jordan knew, was because of the glamour that draped Rien—of which she seemed entirely unaware. Daughter of Prince Benedick, escapee from the enemy principality of Rule, survivor—hero, even—of a dramatic mission of mercy across the length and breadth of the world, she came to Engine clothed in seductiveness. But she was also young—Jordan’s age, then, more or less—and shy, and that made her approachable.
And then she’d been dead, before Jordan ever got a chance to do more than make her brief acquaintance, and the next thing Jordan knew, she was being awakened from the acceleration tank and told to report to Tristen Conn.
Tristen Conn, another name out of legend.
Jordan now remembered telling herself, then, that she had somehow walked into a story. In the stark light of the destination sun and some five decades later, she had to admit: the glamour wore thin after a while, and stories weren’t usually this messy. They had heroes and villains and clear-cut moralities, which was something she had come to realize was sadly lacking in the life she led under Tristen’s tutelage.
The one thing that never stopped seeming mythic, however, was Tristen himself. There were long passages of time when he might be just a commander, an acquaintance, possibly even a friend of sorts—if you could be friends with somebody who held your life in the palm of his hand. He would be jaded and calm, and Jordan in her role as his aide would find herself running interference, trying to protect him from importuning and unwelcome duties.
Until the times came when all the Chief Engineer’s, and the Captain’s, work at diplomacy would fail, and Tristen would rouse himself like a weary lion to go forth into whatever skirmish demanded his attention this time.
Then he assumed the myth like an old man putting on a stained uniform. The cloak of fable weighed him down and shaped him into Tristen Tiger, the warrior out of legend. Except Jordan would never have imagined from a storybook that a fighter who marshaled his forces with such heaviness of spirit and reluctance of hand could be what Tristen was on the battlefield: an ice-carved demon, without ruth or remorse.
The worst of the fighting had happened early on, and to Jordan’s surprise it wasn