Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [300]
I love you. But I lust after and covet so much more than your body. I wanted to possess the power of your eyes, the way they see form and beauty that isn't even there yet and draw it up out of nothing into the solid world. I wanted to own the honor of your heart, unbowed in the vilest horrors of those bleak hours on Komarr. I wanted your courage and your will, your caution and serenity. I wanted, I suppose, your soul, and that was too much to want.
She put the letter down, shaken. After a few deep breaths, she took it up again.
I wanted to give you a victory. But by their essential nature triumphs can't be given. They must be taken, and the worse the odds and the fiercer the resistance, the greater the honor. Victories can't be gifts.
But gifts can be victories, can't they. It's what you said. The garden could have been your gift, a dowry of talent, skill, and vision.
I know it's too late now, but I just wanted to say, it would have been a victory most worthy of our House.
Yours to command,
Miles Vorkosigan.
Ekaterin rested her forehead in her hand, and closed her eyes. She regained control of her breathing again in a few gulps.
She sat up again, and reread the letter in the fading light. Twice. It neither demanded nor requested nor seemed to anticipate reply. Good, because she doubted she could string two coherent clauses together just now. What did he expect her to make of this? Every sentence that didn't start with I seemed to begin with But. It wasn't just honest, it was naked.
With the back of her dirty hand, she swiped the water from her eyes across her hot cheeks to cool and evaporate. She turned over the envelope and stared again at the seal. In the Time of Isolation, such incised seals had been smeared with blood, to signify a lord's most personal protestation of loyalty. Subsequently, soft pigment sticks had been invented for rubbing over the indentations, in a palette of colors of various fashionable meanings. Wine red and purple had been popular for love letters, pink and blue for announcements of births, black for notifications of deaths. This seal-rubbing was the very most conservative and traditional color, red-brown.
The reason for that, Ekaterin realized with a blurred blink, was that it was blood. Conscious melodrama on Miles's part, or unthinking routine? She had not the slightest doubt that he was perfectly capable of melodrama. In fact, she was beginning to suspect he reveled in it, when he got the chance. But the horrible conviction grew on her, staring at the smear and imagining him pricking his thumb and applying it, that for him it had been as natural and original as breathing. She bet he even owned one of those daggers with the seal concealed in the hilt for the purpose, which the high lords had used to wear. One could buy imitation reproductions of them in antique and souvenir shops, with soft and blunted metal blades because nobody ever actually nicked themselves anymore to testify in blood. Genuine seal daggers with provenance from the Time of Isolation, on the rare occasions when they appeared on the market, were bid up to tens and hundreds of thousands of marks.
Miles probably used his for a letter opener, or to clean under his fingernails.
And when and how had he ever hijacked a ship? She was unreasonably certain he hadn't plucked that comparison out of the air.
A helpless puff of a laugh escaped her lips. If she ever saw him again, she would say, People who've been in Covert Ops shouldn't write letters while high on fast-penta.
Though if he really was suffering a virulent outbreak of truthfulness, what about that part that started, I love you? She turned the letter over, and read that bit again. Four times. The tense, square, distinctive letters seemed to waver before her eyes.
Something was missing, though, she realized as she read the letter through one more time. Confession was there in plenty, but nowhere was any plea for forgiveness, absolution, penance, or any begging to call or see her again. No