In the courtyard of Rule, Tristen Conn had to stop and lean against an olive tree. He could make a pretense that it was the ache of mending bones that led him to prop himself against a trunk just as cracked, but the truth was that being here hurt worse than any of the damage from the acceleration tank.
Some of what hurt was the quiet, the way the uncollected olives indented the healing earth beneath his soles. And some of what hurt was the Homecoming, after so much lost and so many years gone by. Neither one seemed likely to respond to anything so simple as medication and meditation, the symbiotic and mental discipline that had seen him through years in the dark. He felt his colony race to normalize his neurochemical load, support the limbic system and blood sugar levels, maintain blood pressure and heart rate. It was an electrochemical mask of serenity, a cloak over the fury and grief he would have chosen otherwise to feel.
He crouched, long, aching legs folding awkwardly, and raked his hands through ragged grass. Tangled strands encircled his finger joints, stretching and parting when he tugged. The grass remained perfectly manicured--the ghostly machine gardeners setting things right even when there were no overseers to direct them.
Rule's maintenance colony--which should be possessed by Nova now, and inexplicably wasn't--tickled the edges of Tristen's own. He found the resilient ovals of two ripe, silver-black olives in the grass, rolled them between his fingers, and picked them up.
If he put them in his mouth in this state, just as they were off the tree, the alkalinity would pucker his mucous membranes and burn his tongue. Inedible unless processed--well, no: edible, perhaps, if you were Exalt, but Tristen was not that desperate now--and still the staff of life. Someone, sometime, had figured out how to render this tiny, loathsome fruit into delicious and essential oil and flesh. The olive, far from being vile, was transformed by technology and ingenuity into a resource so indispensable as to be regarded as sacred by every ancient culture that had encountered it.
He leaned against the trunk of the olive tree once more and dented the flesh of its fruit with his nail. When he was young, he and Aefre had dared each other to chew unprocessed olives from these selfsame trees, to hold them in their mouths as long as they could stand the bitterness. The first time she'd kissed him had not been beneath this tree--it had been in the hallway near the kitchens, and afterward she'd claimed a lock of his hair as her prize. But this was where they had married, under their father's gaze, and this was where the procession that had carried her body down into the graveyard of the holdes had departed Rule. And it was here, on this very spot, that Benedick had executed Cynric, and her blood had soaked the grass under his feet.
A ghost of her colony might still inhabit the colony in the earth here, in the flesh of the fruit in his hand.
In a moment, Tristen would collect his thoughts, collect himself, and walk forward into Rule. He would pass down the hall, and the portraits of his brothers and his sisters, living and dead, including the three that his father had ordered turned and nailed to the wall. And he would come face-to-face with what he feared most--the black-draped one of Aefre, leaning on a scabbarded sword almost as tall as she, her hair falling across her forehead in springy coils like yellow ribbon stripped against a blade.
He wasn't sure yet how he would look at her, when he passed. He would deal with that in a moment. Just as soon as his legs stopped aching quite so much.
He was still leaning against the olive tree--gathering himself, surely that was all--when Head came to greet him. As with so many things, he could have predicted exactly how it played out. Sie was still Head--virtually unchanged from the images stored in his symbiotic memory, except for having grown slightly stouter and slightly more lined, and Tristen thought the apron was new. That was to be expected, though. A Mean who was so valued by hir masters as Head was--and always had been--could expect a life as indeterminate as an Exalt's. And Head had never quite been a Mean like others, being as perfect for hir job as Cynric had made hir--back when Cynric made so many things.
Head still bustled as Head always had. Short steps bobbed hir briskly over the pavement and then the lawn. Sie plowed up to him like a cargo tug, stopped abruptly enough that hir toes furrowed the earth underneath, and--fists on hips--glared up at him until Tristen expected hir to reach right up, stand on tiptoe, and twist his earlobe between chastising fingers.
"Hello, Head," he said, holding out his right hand.
There was a long pause. Then sie muttered "Space you!" and threw hirself into his arms.
It might have been ridiculous--Tristen was half a meter taller--but the tears that wet the breastplate of his armor between hir clutching fists were anything but humorous. So he wrapped his arms around Head's head and hir stout shoulders, took a deep breath, and said, "There, there."
Having lost something, lost it, he thought, forever, lost everything good it ever brought into his life, he knew that sometimes it could be easier to simply let it go. To choose to remember only what was dreary, or terrible, so he did not feel the loss so acutely. For a long time, all he had permitted himself to remember of Rule was the storms of his father's house, the rages, the broken bones and savage politics, the funerals. The feel of family blood across his knuckles.
But that was not all there had ever been, and standing here under this broken tree, he found he remembered some of that now, as well.
He was taking a breath to tell Head so when sie tilted hir head back, stared up past his chin, and said--as clearly as if hir eyes were not still inflamed with weeping--"I thought the bitch had killed you."
Tristen stroked hir hair. "She tried. She didn't know her own limits, that was all." Then he put hir back at arm's length. "I'm First Mate now, Head."
"I know. Your necromancer told me," sie said, provoking a slow blink while Tristen wondered exactly when it was that he'd grown a personal necromancer. "Come on. You must be famished. Come inside."
The walk through the doors was as weird as he'd anticipated. A Homecoming. If Rule had ever been home, precisely.
Well, it was not as if he--unlike Benedick--had found another.
Head had recovered hirself, and though Tristen could read hir micromovements well enough to tell that sie was resisting the urge, sie did not take his elbow to steer him. "The house is in disarray. Please do not believe that what you will see is the normal state of affairs, sir. Things have not fallen so far from that to which you were accustomed." Sie hesitated, as if considering how to broach a delicate subject.
"Head," Tristen said. "You need never temporize with me."
"We are twelve," sie said, after an additional weighty pause. "There were twenty who escaped with me to the kitchens, but--"
"Acceleration trauma?"
Sie nodded. "I had no warning, sir. And even if I had, there were no tanks accessible."
Tristen would have touched hir shoulder, but the moment for that was past. It would be an affront to hir dignity now, and intimation that Tristen did not believe in hir strength and professionalism. Now he was lord, and sie was servant.
Still, he could not quite believe that sie was apologizing to him for saving twelve lives out of twenty-one, under impossible circumstances.
"Head."
Sie turned to him, eyes big, and he wondered--not for the first time--how he could be both things to hir: Tristen, whose wedding sie had catered; and Prince Tristen, lord of the House of Rule. "Lord?"
There were so many things he could say and only one of them would be the best one. Too much consideration before continuing would only feed hir worry. "When you have done something requiring an apology, I shall demand it. Are we clear?"