Elizabeth Moon - Once a Hero

“Esmaya . . . I’m sorry.” He probably was, she let herself think, but it didn’t matter. He was sorry too late and too little. “If— since you remember, you probably need therapy.”

“Therapy here ?” That got out before she could control the emotion in it, the scorn and anger. “Here, where the therapists told me it was all my imagination, all fever dreams?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, but this time with an edge of irritation. She knew that tone; he could apologize, but that was supposed to be the end of it. She was supposed to accept that apology and let it go. Not this time. Not again. “I—we—made a mistake, Esmaya. We can’t change that now; it’s past. I can’t possibly convince you how badly I feel about it—that it was a mistake—but there were reasons. I asked advice . . .”

“Don’t,” she said harshly. “Don’t make excuses. I’m not stupid; I can see what you would like to call the realities. He—” she could not bring herself to dirty her mouth with the name. “He was an officer, the son of a friend; there was a civil war in progress; you could not risk a feud—” Memory reminded her that the young man’s father had commanded a sizable force himself. Not merely a feud, but potentially a lost war. Her military training argued that a child’s pain—even her pain—weighed less than an entire campaign. But the child she had been, the child whose pain still shaped her reactions, the child whose witness had been denied, refused that easy answer. She had not been the only victim—and for the victims, no victories sufficed . . . the victories were not for them, did not help them. Yet defeat promised only more of the same. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to force back all the feelings that wanted to escape, shut them back into the darkness. “It did not take rejuvenation to make you prudent ,” she said, throwing at him the only new weapon she had.

A short silence, during which her father’s breathing was almost as harsh as hers had been that bitter day.

“You need help, Esmaya,” her father said, finally. His voice was almost back to normal, warm and steady; the general in command of himself, a lifetime’s habit. She wanted to relax into the promise of fatherly love and protection.

She dared not. “Probably I do,” she said. “But not here. Not now.” Not with the father who had betrayed her.

“You won’t come back,” he said. He had never been stupid, only selfish. That wasn’t entirely fair, but neither was he. Now he looked at her, as straight a look as he might have given a commander he respected. “You won’t come back again, will you?”

She couldn’t imagine coming back, but she wasn’t quite ready for that negative commitment. “I don’t know. Probably not, but—you might as well know . . . I’ve worked out a deal with Luci for the herd.”

He nodded. “Good. I shouldn’t have done that, but . . . I suppose I was still hoping you’d come home for good, especially when they treated you like that.”

And you treated me better? hovered on her lips but did not quite emerge. Her father seemed to hear it anyway.

“I understand,” he said. He didn’t, but she wasn’t going to argue, not now. Now she wanted to get away, far away, and have some time alone. She suspected she would have to spend some time with Fleet psychnannies in the end, but for now . . . “Please, Esmaya,” he said. “Get help in your Fleet, if you won’t accept it here.”

“I’m going to ride out to the valley,” she said, ignoring that. He had no right to tell her what to do about the wound he’d inflicted. “Just for a day. Tomorrow. I don’t want company.”

“I understand,” he said again.

“No surveillance,” she said, meeting his gaze squarely. He blinked first.

“No surveillance,” he agreed. “But if you stay overnight, please let us know.”

“Of course,” she said, her voice relaxing even as his had. They were alike in ways she had never noticed; even in her anger she suddenly felt the urge to tell him about the mutiny, knowing that he would not find her actions surprising, inexplicable, as the Familias officers had.

She walked out into the afternoon, feeling nothing but a great light emptiness, as if she were a seed pod at summer’s end, ready to blow away on the first autumn stormwind. Across the gravel drive, crunching under her feet. Between the beds of flowers whose color hurt her eyes. Across the sunlit fields beyond, where shadows shifted and moved and called her name, but she did not answer.

She came back when the sun fell behind the distant mountains, tired in ways that had nothing to do with walking however far she’d walked, and went into the dim entrance hall, where the smell of food and clatter of dishes stopped her short.

“Dama?” Esmay whirled, but it was one of the servants, offering a tray with a cup and a folded note. She shook her head to the cup of tea, took the note, and went upstairs. No one followed, no one intruded. She lay the note on her bed, and went down the hall to the bathroom.

The note, as she’d half expected, was from her great-grandmother. Your father told me I am now free to talk to you. Come see me . She put it on the shelf above the clothes pole and thought about it. She had always assumed that her father obeyed his grandmother, as she obeyed her grandfather; though men and women had different roles, elders always ruled. She had thought so, anyway, imagining the chain of authority coming down, link by link, from eldest to youngest through all the generations.

Had her great-grandmother really known the truth and not told her? How had her father gained so much power?

She lay back on the bed, and as the hours passed she could not find the strength to move, to get up and bathe or change her clothes or even turn away from the square of sky she could see darkening from blue to gray to the star-spangled midnight. It was all she could do to blink her eyes when they burned from staring at the window; it was all she could do to breathe.

In the first light of dawn, she struggled up, stiff and miserable. How many mornings she had wakened stiff and miserable, hoping to see no one on the way to the baths, on the way out . . . and here she was again, supposedly a hero—she would have laughed at the thought if she could—once more alone at the top of her father’s house, once more awake and miserable after a sleepless night.

She told herself, firmly, in the tone she thought Admiral Serrano would use, to get a grip on herself. A deep breath of the morning air, sweet-scented with the nightblooming flowers on the house wall. She made it to the bathroom, showered, brushed her teeth. In her room she dressed in riding clothes; when she came down the stairs she heard the familiar clatter in the kitchen where the cooks were already at work. If she put her head in, hoping for a taste of the first baking, they’d want to talk to her. She went on, past the kitchen, to the storeroom. Inside on the right, if the custom hadn’t changed, was a stone jar of trail bread. Anyone could grab a handful, if headed out to do early chores.

The stable, busy as always by daylight . . . the grooms and their helpers scurrying from stall to stall, buckets clattering. She went to the stable office, where she found her name at the top of the list of the day’s riders. Her father had done that, probably the night before, and she felt no gratitude. In another hand, someone had written in a horse’s name, Sam.

“Dama?” One of the grooms. “When you’re ready, dama.”

“I’m ready,” Esmay said through a dry throat. She ought to have taken a water bottle too, but she didn’t want to go back for it. The groom went ahead of her, down the aisle of that barn and into another and out again into the small training ring, where a bored brown horse leaned its chin on the rail where it was tied. A trail saddle, slicker tied neatly behind the cantle, saddlebags, water bottle . . . her father must have specified that, too. She hadn’t needed to take the trail bread. A trail bridle, easy to unclip the bit so the horse could graze, a long lead-line now clipped into the hitching rail’s permanent loops.