Grail - By Elizabeth Bear Page 0,5

regard. But Benedick had also agreed to father a child on Arianrhod, for reasons of negotiating peace through hostage-sharing, and that Caitlin had been unable to abide.

They had barely spoken for fifteen years, and only the mortal peril engendered by the Angel Dust’s interest in their daughter had brought them back into alliance again. And now—

Now Perceval was Captain of the Jacob’s Ladder, and Caitlin was still Chief Engineer, and Benedick—Benedick was a man who had lost one daughter, and would do anything to defend the one who remained. Caitlin found it hard to reconcile her own anger and grief—for she, too, had been fond of Rien—with any forgiveness for Benedick. She knew some of her wrath was because she loved him. When we love, it is hard to forgive the beloved for not being the person we imagined them.

But he was also one of Caitlin’s greatest resources when it came to the running of the reborn Jacob’s Ladder—no longer a world but now a starship again. Tension between them was insupportable.

And Caitlin did not have the skills to lie to him about her feelings. Or the desire to learn how. There was nothing else to be done.

They were going to have to have A Conversation.

* * *

She went to find him in person, seeking for some time through the only slightly populated corridors of Engine until she found him working below the environmental services level in one of the adaptive maintenance microclimates. She could have asked the ship where he was, but there was always the chance that Nova would pass along her interest, and though the weakness shamed her, she craved the advantage of surprise.

She got it. The moss-carpeted floors and lichen-hung beams of the glen softened her footsteps beyond the hearing of even Exalt ears, and Benedick was invisible to the waist inside the bole of a symbiotic filtration tree. The world requires an awful lot of maintenance.

He was working with a toolkit—not the one that had been lost when Arianrhod tried to kill him and Chelsea so many decades ago, but a smoke blue one with long, grasping fingers adapted as holders and pullers. Caitlin watched his hand emerge from inside the tree, hanging out a rack of filters for the toolkit to lick clean, and when he would have collected the replacements she brushed his fingers.

The thump and startle from inside the bole were vividly audible. Caitlin winced even as she grinned. Cursing under his breath, Benedick telescoped out of the tree, shaking sap and cobwebs from his straight, black hair. “We’re both lucky I wasn’t armed,” he said.

“So much for the catlike reflexes.”

He studied her from his greater height, wiping his hands and face on a rag the toolkit offered. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

He didn’t even think the word dubious, as far as Caitlin could tell from inspecting his expression. Which made him, right there, a better person than she.

“We need to talk,” she said. “About your daughters.”

He glanced aside, finding a branch to drape the rag over, careful not to disturb the banners of Spanish moss and air-plant that grew there. “You have plenty of reasons to be angry with me,” he said. “I’ve never denied that. Is this about something else this time?”

As long as she was looking up at him, she decided, she might as well take a load off. The filtration tree had a number of low, louvered branches that arched comfortably for sitting. She hooked a leg over one at waist height and slid herself onto it, leaning back on the curve of the branch as if into an armchair. “I guess I want to understand,” she said. “What did you think could be achieved by placating him? By giving him a means of controlling you?”

He blew his bangs out of his eyes and plunked down on the moss, giving her an advantage. She wondered if he didn’t think he’d need it, or if he was capitulating preemptively. “I thought it would make him feel safer,” he said. “You know how many of the evils he was driven to were motivated by fear. You know how brutal Gerald was—”

I don’t believe you’re still making excuses for the old bastard! But as she opened her mouth to say it, she somehow managed to choke back her temper. Reasons were not excuses, and she had asked. Punishing Benedick because she didn’t like his honest answers got them no closer to healing.

“I know,” she said.

Benedick rubbed his palms across