Elizabeth Moon: Change of Command

Bunny was dead.

She stood, unable to move for a long moment. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. People their age were supposed to be adult, mature, stable . . . they were resigned to loss, said the books she’d read.

She wasn’t resigned. She wanted to shake her fist and scream at the sky; she wanted to fall off a cliff and drown. The secret was that the rich had hearts too . . . she had loved Bunny the way girls in romance storycubes loved their heroes, and forty years of marriage had not changed that.

And he was dead.

And she was alive, with children and grandchildren and bastard grandchildren who were not at fault for their fathers’ sins, and a daughter still healing from what had been done to her, and all Bunny’s hopes and dreams for the peace of the world crashing down around them, shattered.

When her maid knocked, Miranda smiled and calmly accepted a cup of tea, which she drank with perfect composure while her maid ran her bath.

Brun Meager had wakened even earlier, when the twins cried, as they often did, in the middle of the night. They should be sleeping through the night, the nursemaids said, but they hadn’t done so more than one night in four since they were taken from Our Texas. And Brun had discovered, to her annoyance, that when they woke, she also woke, even if someone else was doing the feeding and cleaning.

She used the time to exercise, the exercises she never skipped these days. By the time her maid knocked, she had already worked herself into a sweat, and showered herself back to normal. In the mirrors of the bath, her face stared back at her, strange after nearly two standard years without a mirror . . . an older face, a harder face, but—in spite of everything—a face of memorable beauty.

Something would have to be done about that . . . but not today. Today she would walk with her mother, her brothers, her older sister, in the funeral procession; today she would hold her head high in the face of the universe. They had forced her to bear their children. They could not force her to hide.

Colonel Bai-Darlin had not slept all night. Organizing a state funeral had always been—would always be—a nightmare of protocol and endless complicated detail, but ordinarily a state funeral was not mixed with a top-level security concern. Even when a head of state was assassinated, that usually ended the threat. Only 23.87 percent of political assassinations in the past five hundred years had been followed by subsequent assassinations.

But this was different. The other branches of the New Texas Godfearing Militia had specifically threatened Lord Thornbuckle and his family, with additional threats to Hazel Takeris, the Rangers’ wives and female dependents, and several members of the Regular Space Service, including Admiral Vida Serrano. Fleet, Colonel Bai-Darlin thought, could protect its own. His responsibility was the safety of the civilians, specifically those who would be present, vulnerable, in the funeral procession.

His predecessor, Colonel Harris, was even now trying to explain why they had not taken sufficient precautions, why Lord Thornbuckle had died, and no one—not one single Militia member or sympathizer—had been captured.

He would have to assume they’d try again. He would have to assume that everything Harris had done was wrong—that Harris had missed something vital.

Unless it wasn’t the New Texas Godfearing Militia after all. Bai-Darlin’s head lifted, as if scenting game. What if it were someone else, someone trying to use the hotheaded NewTex as a cover?

In that case, the funeral would probably go off without a hitch. Which, at the moment, was all he cared about.

Brun eyed her mother as they came out onto the porch, into the cold sunlight. Security, dark-uniformed and obviously armed, hovered around them. Five cars, all identical polished burgundy with black and gold trim, awaited them.

“Five?” Brun said.

“Security,” her mother said. “Four of them are drags.”

“Ah.” Four would lay false trails, though since everyone knew where the funeral would be held, she didn’t see how that would help.

She could at least notice who was here, and who had not been able to—or wanted to—come. No Lady Cecelia . . . well, it was the Wherrin Trials, after all, and she might not even have heard yet. Her sister Berenice, though, and her brother Abelard. No Raffa or Ronnie—absurd how she had missed them. Raffa’s Aunt Marta Saenz, such a support to her father while she was missing—her mother’s report of that had been just a touch acidic—had gone back to her own world as soon as Brun returned. No George—but of course the odious George had his own critically wounded father to watch over. Of their own sept, her father’s younger brother Harlis, and his son Kell, who didn’t look to have improved from her last memory of him. A whole raft of Consellines, most of whom she didn’t know well enough to put names to, and Venezia Morrelline.

In ordinary times—not that the death of her father would ever have been ordinary—Kevil Mahoney would have given the eulogy. Instead it was her Uncle Harlis, and the eulogy slid into a subtle critique of her father’s policies. A fine man, a man with strong family loyalties . . . to his children, a man of great abilities who had perhaps not quite lived up to them . . .

“Bollocks!” That low mutter was a great-great-uncle in the Barraclough main line. He took the floor next, praising Bunny the way Brun had expected him to be praised. That was the father she remembered: generous, loyal, intelligent, capable.

Others followed. Political friends, describing how Lord Thornbuckle’s tactful but firm handling of the government had held it together when Kemtre abdicated. Political enemies, praising with delicate cuts at her father’s occasional mistakes, and being so tactful in ignoring the obvious one that Brun found herself the target of one covert glance after another.

If it hadn’t been for her—if it hadn’t been for her idiot rashness—her father would still be alive, and in power, and these sly critics would be silent. She glanced down at her mother’s hands, and saw the knuckles whitening the skin, though Miranda’s face betrayed nothing. Guilt, sorrow, shame . . . and a deep, deep anger. It was her fault—in part—but it was not all her fault. Their maneuvering, their use of her misfortune and her father’s death—that was their responsibility.

She had been determined to go away, to change herself into someone else, and break the connection with the rash young Brun who fell into captivity; but watching her father’s enemies—enemies she had not known he had—at her father’s funeral, that resolve weakened.

Prima Bowie sat embroidering a collar with a row of tiny green leaves, and kept a sharp eye on her household. It was hard to realize that only a short time ago she had been Prima Bowie in truth, Mitch’s first wife and mother of nine children, with a real household to manage, a household with a garden and weaving shed, with courtyards for the children, and servants and tutors. Now she was Prima Bowie on her new Familias identity card, because that’s what Hazel had told them, and even Hazel didn’t know that wasn’t a name but a title. She had been called Ruth Ann in childhood, long before she was any man’s prima, but no one had called her that since her father died. And Mitch’s last name wasn’t Bowie—that was his title. He was really a Pardue. So her name ought to be Ruth Ann Pardue.

Should she tell someone? It would not be fitting to be called Prima Serrano, when that young woman became his first wife. She knew that, even as she hated the thought of being second or third behind such a young thing—and, what was worse, a heathen abomination who was actually in the military.