Hir hands knotted in the new apron--violet, and very flattering. Hir lips began to shape something. An apology, or he missed his guess. Then sie swallowed hard and said, "Yes, Commodore. Perfectly."
He nudged hir, because he couldn't resist, and because in the long term he was certain he couldn't live with this fawning obsequiousness. He thought he'd rather employ revenant servants, like Benedick did. And that would be a horror. "There's a Captain on the bridge now, Head," he reminded, "Call me First Mate."
Sie blanched, as he had known sie would. So he offered a compromise.
"Or just Lord."
"Yes, Lord Tristen," sie said. "I thought I'd show you to your chambers first, and where you could also meet with your servants."
Mine, are they? But he held his peace. If Mallory had practiced deception, Tristen would bring his displeasure to the necromancer's notice at some convenient time, and it did not need to become Head's problem. Head had suffered enough of late that Tristen thought it fitting to shield hir a little.
The main hall of Rule was as much of a challenge as he had anticipated. Long and dark, echoing with footsteps and paneled in the dark wood of storied Earth, it offered no shelter, either physical or emotional. His chambers, sie said, so glibly.
But what sie meant was his father's rooms.
And he wondered now--passing the portraits of his murdered brothers and sisters, passing Aefre's portrait and the three turned to the wall without a sideways glance, though the muscles in his neck trembled with the effort of ignoring them--how was it possible that the old man still terrified him so? Head did him the politeness of pretending ignorance, for which he was grateful, but they both knew it for kindness instead of truth.
His symbiont would have remembered perfectly what the three effaced portraits had looked like, but Alasdair had ordered all his children to forget, as well, so all Tristen had was the blurred and transitory memories of flesh. Worse, he had seen Caitlin recently and so her adult face--more worn with responsibility, no longer the mask of an impudent, auburn-haired pixie--had overlaid what he remembered of her portrait.
Alasdair was dead and eaten. At the end of the corridor, Tristen hesitated. After a moment, he turned and stalked back.
He paused before the first of the reversed frames and tried to remember what lay behind it. A woman, tall and broad, her body concealed by charcoal, lavender, and violet armor blazoned silver and purple over the heart with a stylized iris. Caithness had held an unblade in one relaxed hand and rested the other on her hip, and her eyebrows had been the same rich brown as her hair. The second frame had also outlined a picture of a woman, but one more different from her sister than Cynric had been from Caithness was hard to imagine. Cynric had been fallow--sexless by choice, like Perceval--tall and spare and bony-chinned, her dark hair falling along either side of her face as if to accentuate the angles. She had been prone to flowing outfits remarkably unsuited for micro-G.
Tristen arrested his hand before it could touch the back of her portrait, aware that Head was staring. He turned away instead and continued with hir down the hall, past all the staring faces of his siblings, dead and living.
By the time they came to the end of the gauntlet, Tristen's hands were clammy and tendrils of hair stuck unpleasantly to his nape. As Head keyed the lock at the far end, Tristen looked down at the bones of his wrists. "I'm not glad of much that happened in this house," he said. "But I'm glad he's dead."
Head let hir shoulder brush his sleeve. "So am I. And you know what, Prince Tristen?"
He didn't correct hir to the less formal title. He'd registered his protest. He knew better than to make more of it. "What, Head?"
Sie opened the door and stepped through. "I'm glad that she's dead, too."
Tristen nodded. They had found something else to agree on. Neither one of them missed Ariane.
He had thought the hall, with its ghosts and memories, would be the hard part. When he thought of Rule, it was the hall he'd recollected--Alasdair's ringing footsteps, Cynric the Sorceress in her white and gold, a data-etched green sapphire glinting against her nostril as she paced in the midst of guards, dragging the sweep of nanochains. He thought of his father returning from the battle in which he had destroyed his oldest daughter, with Caithness's black unblade Innocence slung across his shoulder. That blade had eventually been handed down to Ariane, and, with a kind of horrible poetry, come back in her hand to claim Alasdair's life, as if with Caithness's death-curse behind it. Yes. The hall, he had assumed, would be the hard part.
But he'd been wrong. And as soon as Head unlocked the door to the family quarters, he knew it. Because in his memory, these had been the walls and corridors that held every rare happiness of the house. They had burst with family: his father, his father's women, his brothers and sisters and himself and all their lovers and children.
And now there was him and Head. And every door along the corridor was sealed.
Somehow, he made it past those as well. Here, he gave himself permission to look, to take in what was lost. In all honesty, he could hardly have stopped himself.
At last they came to his father's door.
His own door. He was the head of House Conn now. All that lay before him, and all that surrounded him, was his. Or, at least, his in service to his Captain, Perceval.
"Thank you, Head," he said, and stepped over the threshold. At least that was his intention, but the reality of the motion left him arrested, tottering, halfway in and halfway out. Because before Tristen, relaxed in an armchair, shirtless and clad only in the appearance of archaic blue jeans and boots, lounged the blond-haired, hound-faced angel Samael.
Not exactly as Tristen remembered him. He seemed assembled from bits--his hair bleached hay and bits of feather, his left eye a snail shell and his right eye flecks of bright color that Tristen understood from their powdery iridescence to be fragments of a butterfly's wing. The broad wings that spread from his shoulders whirred against themselves with his movement--the pinions were scraps of leaf and withered petals--but there was no mistaking his mosaic face.
At Samael's right hand stood Mallory, the basilisk as always on one shoulder, arms folded, wearing an expression composed of one-half self-satisfaction and one part childish apprehension over just how such a prank might be received.
"Hello, Tristen," Mallory said. "I made you an angel."
"Made?" He would have shut the door to seal Head out, but sie stepped through and put hir back to it.
"Collected," Samael said. He stood, and the light shone through the bits and pieces that made him. Tristen could make out the outline of the chair behind, and the curve of Mallory's hip. "As you can see, there isn't much left of me."
That explained why Nova had lost contact with Rule. And possibly why the world had started to come unraveled around Tristen on his way here. Tristen stepped forward and to the side, turning so he could keep all of the other inhabitants of the room in view. Trust was a lovely thing, when one could afford it. He made himself light inside the armor, ready for battle, and mourned the death of his old unblade. It would have been good to have at hand, facing such an enemy as this.
"Samael," he said. "I am the First Mate of this vessel, and the head of the house of Conn. Was it you who tried to destroy me on my journey here?"
Samael shook stringy blond locks across stringier shoulders, a swarm of organic particles tumbling. "First I've heard of it."
Head stepped forward, shoulders hunched miserably, and said, "He saved us, My Lord."
"Saved you?"
"From Lady Ariane's disease. And from the acceleration."
Tristen was not about to drop his guard, or shift his attention from the angel. His armor gave him a panoramic view, through which he observed Head's response as he demanded, "Explain."