The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)(44)

The second feeling Grayland had at the death of Nadashe Nohamapetan was sadness, and that was a fact that confused her and made her a little angry. Nadashe, it was clear, had never thought much of Grayland. Grayland had met her once when she was still Cardenia Wu-Patrick and her brother Rennered was the crown prince. Nadashe, who had been in the early days of dating Rennered, had sized her up, figured out the absolute minimum amount of courtesy she needed to provide the bastard sister of her royal boyfriend, and provided exactly that. Cardenia had not been emotionally sophisticated enough at the time to understand why she felt vaguely hurt and unhappy around Nadashe that day. Even now it was disquieting to her.

And perhaps that was the reason for her sadness. Had Nadashe been even a tiny bit kinder, or more wise, or simply frac tionally better as a human being, she and Cardenia (and also Grayland II, now in all her glory, waiting with her empty teacup for yet another meeting) could have been friends, and perhaps even more than friends. Confidantes.

Even now, Nadashe represented positive things to Grayland. She was smart and confident and beautiful and all the other sorts of things that Grayland had always had a hard time seeing in herself, and still did. To have won the friendship and the confidence of such a creature would have meant the world to her. To have missed that because Nadashe simply couldn’t see her, and didn’t feel like she was worth seeing, felt like a genuine tragedy.

You just miss having friends, Grayland’s brain said to her, and that was true enough. She thought back to her dear and departed Naffa, who had been all the things Nadashe could also have been, had Nadashe wanted that. Grayland’s heart ached for Naffa, not in a sexual or romantic way, just in the way you miss your dearest friend, the one person who just gets you.

Marce gets you, said the part of her brain that was a fifteen-year-old girl. And, well. Maybe he did at that. Grayland thought back to their first night together and was warmed with an almost languid happiness at the memory. The two of them had been ridiculously awkward with each other and then suddenly they weren’t, as the Oh God what is happening is this actually going to work commentary track was replaced by the Holy crap this is actually working and in fact is pretty amazing commentary track, which in turn was replaced by no commentary track for once, thank God, just happiness and contentment. For the first time since the loss of Naffa, and in a completely different way that was not unexpected and yet still entirely unanticipated in its scope, Grayland felt her whole self again.

Marce did that for her. Naffa had done that for her. Grayland sensed that Nadashe could have done that for her too, given all her strengths, which would have complemented Grayland’s own.

But Nadashe was … Nadashe. She was not the sum of her qualities. She was something else apart from that. Something that didn’t want what Grayland had to offer, except for her position, and what it could do for the House of Nohamapetan.

Obelees Atek reentered the garden, with Archbishop Korbijn in tow, Korbijn wearing a simple and conservative suit rather than her full archbishop’s finery. Grayland smiled at this. Korbijn was sending her a message that she was paying attention to Grayland’s own muted sartorial choices.

Grayland smiled and rose to greet her visitor and put Nadashe and the entire House of Nohamapetan out of her mind. Nadashe was gone now, and everything she had ever wanted for herself and her family was in the past tense, and everything she was or could have ever possibly been to Grayland had now slipped into the past as well. Grayland allowed herself to feel both the relief and the sadness she felt at Nadashe’s passing, and then put it aside to deal with Korbijn, and her real and present concerns.

Goodbye, Nadashe, Grayland thought. I wish you peace now. And I hope you will stay dead.





Chapter

11

After a day of hiding and skulking around with mercenaries, which was a thing too tedious to recount or indeed ever to think of again, Nadashe found herself on the You Can Blame It All on Me, her mother’s personal fiver.

Nadashe thought it was an almost unconscionable extravagance that her mother used a fiver to haul herself from star system to star system, but on the other hand her mother didn’t really live anywhere else. The fiver was her home, even when it was parked in orbit over Terhathum. She never went down to Terhathum, or Basantapur, its largest city.

Well, that was the deal, wasn’t it, Nadashe thought to herself. Dad got Terhathum. Mom got the rest of the universe.

Nadashe was tucked quite comfortably into her own private apartment on the Blame. It was the one her mother always kept for her, because it was a whole huge goddamn spaceship, and she could keep an apartment for a couple hundred of her closest friends if she wanted. And in fact she did travel with an entourage of friends and lackeys and what have you. She was a countess, and she was the head of the House of Nohamapetan, and she was a narcissist who needed and wanted attention. All of these things conspired to have her travel with a village in tow. But the villagers were kept on the other side of the ship’s ring from Mother and her quarters. The only living quarters on her side of the ring were the ones for her and her three children.

Two now, Nadashe said to herself, and sighed. She wasn’t ready to have that conversation with her mother.

But she didn’t have to, yet; Mother wasn’t on the Blame. She was down at Hubfall, where she was being told the horrible news that her daughter, the traitor, the murderer, the imperial assassin, had gone up like a firework in a botched escape attempt that killed her, three guards, a driver and the Lord Teran Assan.