David Weber - Worlds of Honor

Seeker of Dreams felt his person's joy rising like sap in mud time, felt the scaly mental scabs cracking ever so slightly about the wounds deep within her, and bleeked another laugh at her. He remembered what Sings Truly had said, of how even the best hunter could suddenly find himself the hunted, and he knew she had been right. He had come hunting his dream; now he had found it, and it had captured him, and in the fullness of time, it would slay him.

But if not that, then something else would slay me in time, he thought. And though the choice was mine, the joy will be a thing we both share. Perhaps our time will be short, but oh, how we shall blaze against the night! The memory singers of the People will sing our song so long as there are People, and she and I will go on as one forever!

He gazed down at her for one more brief, endless moment, and then he released his grip on the head of the bed and pounced upon her, growling and capturing her hand and arm like a kitten, and the happy music of laughter, human and treecat alike, burned like a beacon against the darkness.

Coming out of a perfect double spiral flip high over the blue sands of the Indigo Salt Flats, Roger glanced over to see what Angelique thought of his performance. Gracefully poised on her own grav ski, dark hair whipping behind her in the wind, his wife and queen raised her hand in salute before executing the maneuver herself.

Her time was a trifle slower, but her control even better. Roger chuckled to himself. The judges—if there had been any—would have given the round to her.

"Ready for a quad, Angel?" he asked her over their com link.

"Why not?" she replied, her laughter rich. "I can't recall when the conditions have been so perfect."

"You go first," he answered.

"So you can study my technique?" She laughed again. "As Your Majesty commands."

Her quadruple spiral flip ended with a little flirt that could almost have been counted as another half turn.

King Roger III of Manticore hand signaled his appreciation for her technique, then checked his readouts. If he was to win this round in their private competition, he needed every advantage to be taken from the slight wind and the thermal updrafts.

When he judged conditions to be as close to ideal as possible, he glided up into the first spiral. Perfect!

The second went as smoothly, the third without a hitch. He was moving into the fourth, concentrating on gaining the velocity to imitate Angelique's flourish at the end, when he felt the ski jump under his feet.

He was far too experienced in the vagaries of the grav ski to believe that he had imagined the sensation. Temptation to ride the jolts out arose—although he had never competed publicly, he knew that he was among the best grav skiers in the Star Kingdom. But he also knew too well that his kingdom would be thrust into turmoil if anything happened to him.

Almost as swiftly as temptation rose and was rejected, his left hand was reaching for the tab that would release him from the grav ski and onto the stand-by grav pack. Another jolt, this one a buck that must be visible from the ground, shook his hand from the tab.

Over the com Angelique said, "I'm closing to help, Roger."

"I'm holding, love," he responded, continuing to fumble for the release.

Then, impossibly, the grav ski failed completely. The velocity he had brought into his last spiral now turned against him, ripping his hands away from the release tab.

Below him the salt sands glittered bright, hard, and utterly unforgiving. He died with the sound of his wife's scream in his ears and the sensation of a distant heart breaking from grief.

Elizabeth III, Queen of Manticore, stood with her fiancé, Justin Zyrr, in the small antechamber into which they had retreated after viewing the holo-video of Roger III's death.

After the first play through thirteen-year-old Prince Michael had bolted from the room, sobbing wildly. His relationship with his father had been affectionate enough, but recently acrimony over Roger's insistence that the boy enter the Navy had colored their meetings. Now those disagreements would never be resolved.

Normally, Justin would have worried about the boy, but he had no attention to spare from the tall, slim young woman who stood like a statue carved of mahogany, her features eloquently displaying her grief. Physically, they were not much alike.

She was dark of skin, hair, and eyes. Blond and blue-eyed, he was day to her night—a fact that the news services had happily seized upon and turned into iconography. At twenty-eight, he was the elder by a decade, taller, broad of shoulder and chest, but with a long, lean build. His posture was vaguely military, a remnant of his single term in the Army.

Gradually, Elizabeth's expression changed, resolution sculpting the grief into something firm and purposeful.

"I just don't believe it was an accident," she said, her first words since they had entered the room.

Justin gathered her into his arms, felt some relief as she relaxed within his embrace. It would have been almost too much if she had rejected the small comfort he could give her.

"Accidents do happen . . ." he began.

"I know they do," Elizabeth interrupted, "even to members of the House of Winton. Edward the First died in a boating accident. His sister succeeded him. Her name was Elizabeth, just like mine."

Her laughter held a ragged, almost hysterical note.

"Maybe it's bad luck to have an heir named Elizabeth," she continued. "Make a note of that, would you, my dear?"

Her treecat, Ariel, who had been sitting on a tabletop observing the conversation, gave a reproving "bleek." The Queen glanced at the 'cat, then pulled back within the circle of Justin's arms to look up at him.

Her eyes, dark brown behind velvety black lashes, were wet with the tears she would not shed in public—not when her bravery was needed to reassure both her little brother and her many subjects.

There had been little enough time for tears in the scant hours since King Roger's death. Directly following the verification that the King's accident had been fatal, she had been summoned from her Introductory Manticoran History class at the University and taken to a small student lounge. There, amid much-used furniture and vending machines, she had learned of her father's death, taken the Monarch's Oath, and accepted the loyalty oaths of the Speakers of both Houses of Parliament.

From the student lounge she had been whisked into a press conference where—pushing away the prepared statement—she had spoken of the King eloquently and from her heart.

Roger III had been a popular monarch; his sudden death hit his people hard. As the first monarch to receive the prolong treatments, his people's unspoken expectation had been that he would rule for decades to come, his wisdom guiding the Star Kingdom of Manticore into the increasingly complex politics of its fifth century.

"Ariel seems to think I'm being too rough on you," Elizabeth said, softly, through her tears. "I'm sorry, Justin."

"Apology accepted," he said. "You've been through too much recently. I don't expect you not to snap."

"But I do," she said firmly. "I am the Queen. I'm afraid I'm not permitted to snap. Not even at my fiancé—perhaps especially not at my fiancé. You shouldn't be the whipping boy for the rest of the Star Kingdom."

Justin laughed. "I'd like to say something gracious like: `Yet if your Majesty needs me as her whipping boy, I would be pleased to serve her in that fashion.' Honesty forces me to admit that I wouldn't like that role very much."