He was ashamed of himself. Ashamed for thinking of what he wanted, what he needed from her, yet he couldn't help it. Part of him wanted to shout at her, to curse her for abandoning the people who depended upon her, and another part wanted to weep for what leaving them behind must be costing her. He was trapped between his tangled emotions, unable to speak while his eyes burned, and then her treecat raised his head on her shoulder, looking in Cardones' direction. The 'cat's prick ears twitched, his green eyes glowed, and the Captain turned her head, as well.
"Rafe," she said very softly.
"Skipper." He had to clear his throat twice before the word came out, and she nodded to him, then looked back down and ran her hand along the arm of her command chair once more. He could feel her need to sit in that chair one more time, to look around her bridge and know it was hers. But she didn't. She only stood there, looking down at it, her long, strong fingers stroking its arm with delicate grace, and Cardones raised a hand. He held it out to her, with no idea of what he meant to do with it or say to her, and then she drew a deep breath and stepped back from the chair. She turned and saw his hand, and he opened his mouth, but she shook her head.
It was a tiny movement, barely seen, yet it crystallized all she was. It was a captain's headshake, its authority so absolute and unquestionable there would never be a need to enunciate it. And as he recognized it, Cardones recognized something he'd always known without quite realizing that he knew. Her authority came not from her rank; it came from who and what she was, not what the Navy had made her. Or perhaps it was even more complex than that. Perhaps the Navy had made her what she was, yet if that were true, she had long since become more than the sum of her parts.
She was Honor Harrington, he thought. No more and no less, and no one and nothing could ever take that from her, whatever happened.
He lowered his hand to his side, and she drew herself to her full height and straightened her shoulders.
"Carry on, Commander," she said quietly.
"Aye, aye, Ma'am." His voice was just as quiet, but he came to attention as he spoke, and his hand rose to the band of his beret in a salute that would have done Saganami Island proud.
Pain flickered in her eves, and sadness, yet there was more to it than that. A measuring something that he dared to hope was approval, as if she were passing something more precious than life itself into his keeping.
And then she nodded and turned away and walked away without another word, and HMS Nike's bridge was suddenly a smaller, a lonelier, and an infinitely poorer place than it had been only a moment before.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The rain which had begun late last night ended as Pavel Young's ground car passed through the gate in the vine-covered stone wall. He heard the distinctive, slurred crunch of wet gravel as the ground-effect counter-grav field died and the car settled, and the last silver beads of rain trembled down his window while hollow terror consumed him.
His chauffeur climbed out and came around to open his door, and Pavel stepped out into the gusty, wet morning. His brother Stefan followed with the pistol case, as silent as he'd been through the entire drive here, and Pavel wondered once more what he was thinking.
He shouldn't have been able to wonder that; he shouldn't have been able to wonder anything through his terrible, panicky horror. He tasted the fear, like vomit at the back of his throat, yet his brain raced madly down a dozen different tracks at once with a sort of fevered clarity, as if it sought preservation by disassociating itself from the moment.
Chill humidity lay against his cheek like clammy fingers, misty cloud raced low overhead, enveloping the towers of Landing beyond the dueling grounds' wall, and gusts of wind slapped like open hands at his clothing and the trees along the inner face of the wall. He heard it sucking at leaves and branches, blowing spatters of rain from them, sighing and rustling with mournful life, and he flinched as a gray-uniformed policewoman appeared.
"Good morning, My Lord," she said. "I'm Sergeant MacClinton. Lieutenant Castellano will be serving as Master of the Field this morning, and he's asked me, with his compliments, to escort you to the field."
The Earl of North Hollow nodded. It was a choppy, spastic movement, but he dared not trust his voice. MacClinton was a trim, attractive woman, the sort who normally started him speculating on her skills in bed. Today she only made him long desperately to live, made him want to cling to her, to beg her to make this all some nightmare that would pass and leave him unscathed.
He looked into her face, searching for... something, and what he saw beneath her professional neutrality was contempt overlaid by something far worse. MacClinton's eyes were distant and detached, as if looking upon a dead man who awaited only the grisly mechanics of dying to make his death official.
He looked away quickly and swallowed, and then he was following her against his will across the rainsoaked grass. The dense sod squelched, soaking his feet, and another corner of his damnably racing mind reflected that he should have worn boots instead of low-topped shoes. He wanted to scream at the utter banality of his own thoughts, and his jaws ached from the pressure on his clenched teeth.
And then they stopped, and a strangling bolus of terror choked the breath in his throat as he came face-to-face with Honor Harrington.
She didn't even look at him, and somehow that was infinitely more terrifying than hatred would have been. She stood beside Colonel Ramirez, strong face framed in a few, windblown curls that had escaped her short braid. Stray drops of water glittered on her hair and beret, as if she'd arrived early to wait for him, and there was no emotion on her face. None at all. He could see only her left profile from where he stood, watching numbly as Castellano recited the useless formal plea for reconciliation before he examined and selected the pistols. Ramirez and Stefan loaded the magazines at his command, their fingers flicking, flicking on the brass cartridge cases, and the stillnessthe focused, empty calm of Harrington's expressionmocked his own terror more cruelly than any sneer. Her confidence was a fist about his heart, squeezing with fingers of steel, and panic filled him like poison.
She'd destroyed him. She would complete his destruction in a few more moments, yet his death would be no more than a punctuation. His decades-long efforts to punish her, to break and humble her, had failed. More than failed, for she'd turned the tables and brought him to this shameful, degrading end after agonizing days of waiting for the axe to fall. She hadn't just made him afraid; she'd made him know he was afraid, exposed his shameful terror for all to see and made him live with it night after night, until he woke whimpering in his sweatsoaked sheets.
Hate pushed back some of the fear, but that was a mixed blessing. The paralysis eased, yet that only made the strobes of his panic sharper, more terrible in the clarity with which he perceived them. Sweat oozed down his temples in fat, oily snakes, and the air felt suddenly colder. The automatic pistol weighed his right hand like an anchor when he took it, and the fingers of his left hand were so numb he almost dropped the magazine Stefan handed him.
"Load, Lady Harrington." North Hollow's eyes were wide and fixed, showing white all around their rims, as he watched Harrington slide the five-round magazine into the butt of her pistol with a smooth precision so graceful it seemed choreographed.
"Load, Lord North Hollow," Castellano said, and he fumbled clumsily with his weapon. The magazine tried to slip from his sweaty fingers, twisting like a live thing before he got it in place, and he flushed with humiliation while Castellano waited for him to complete the simple mechanical task. He watched Ramirez touch Harrington's shoulder, saw the grim approval on his face before he turned away, and longed for the simple comfort of feeling the same touch from his brother. But Stefan only closed the pistol case and stepped back with cold hauteur, an expression that promised Harrington she was far from done with the Youngs whatever happened here, and in that moment, fleetingly and imperfectly, Pavel Young glimpsed the fundamental hollowness of his entire family. The futility and nihilism that infused them all. The arrogance that kept Stefan from even considering the value of one last physical contact.