House of Steel: The Honorverse Companion

by David Weber

  “I missed Uncle Jonas this year,” she continued, “but everyone else was great. And I really liked the new grav ski. I can hardly wait to try it out!”

  “Oh?” Something devilish glinted in Roger’s eyes. “Well, just be sure you take Sergeant Proctor along when you do.”

  “Daaaddy!” Elizabeth rolled her huge, expressive eyes with a martyred expression. Her devastating eleven-year-old crush (well, twelve-year-old now, he supposed, if he was going to be accurate) on Sergeant Bynum Proctor of the King’s Own Regiment was something of a sore point with her at the moment.

  “Roger,” Queen Consort Angelique said, never looking up from the forestry journal on her reader, “don’t tease your daughter. I believe we’ve discussed that.”

  “Tease my daughter?” Roger looked at her with wide eyed innocence. “I am shocked—shocked, I tell you!—that you could possibly accuse me of such a thing, Angel! I’m innocent as the new fallen snow.”

  “There is no new fallen snow in Landing, even in the middle of winter,” Angelique pointed out, looking up at last. “And if there were, you wouldn’t be as innocent as it . . . if that sentence makes any sense at all.” She furrowed her brow for a moment, considering it, then shrugged. “You’re about as ‘innocent’ as that fellow from Old Earth you were telling me about the other day. Who was it? Macky somebody?”

  “That was Machiavelli,” Roger said severely, fully aware that Angelique had remembered the name perfectly well. Elizabeth realized it too, judging from her chortle, and he looked down at her sternly.

  “Don’t you go around laughing at Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, Missy! He wasn’t a very nice person, but any ruler worth his—or her—unscrupulous salt should at least be familiar with his advice.”

  “You obviously are, anyway,” his daughter replied in a voice which was just slightly undutiful. “If you’ve got that entire name memorized, anyway!”

  She made a face, and Roger shook his head. Elizabeth was an excellent student, but at this point in her life she saw no reason why anyone should expect her to remember names and dates. They were boring. Besides, that was the sort of thing uni-links were for storing. Still, judging by the questions she’d been asking lately, she was beginning to develop some of that deep interest in history her grandmother had taken pains to inculcate into her own heir. It wouldn’t be much longer, Roger estimated, before she was the one rattling off names and dates and watching carefully from the corner of her eye to be sure her father was suitably impressed with her erudition.

  Monroe made a soft, amused sound from his shoulder, and Elizabeth looked up suspiciously.

  “You’re thinking something funny about me again,” she accused.

  “Never!” her father assured her.

  “Oh, yes you are. I can always tell by watching Monroe.”

  “I have absolutely no responsibility for the peculiar things ’cats find humorous, Beth. Some of them have very strange senses of humor, as far as I can tell. In fact, he was probably the one thinking something ‘funny’ about you, now that I think about it.”

  “You might want to remember, Bethie,” Angelique observed, “that one of the first things any successful politician has to learn is how to lie convincingly.”

  “You’re not helping here, Angel,” Roger said, as their daughter grinned triumphantly at him. “And I’m going to remember this conversation the next time I hear Michael asking you what kind of nuts he needs to plant in the palace garden to grow a crown oak.”

  “Don’t you dare put him up to that again, Roger Winton!”

  Angelique shuddered, and Roger chuckled.

  Michael was still shy of eight T-years old, but he was obviously at least as smart as his sister, in a tunnel vision, narrowly focused, seven-year-old sort of way, and that could have . . . interesting consequences in the strangest places. Like where crown oaks were concerned.

  His mother remained active in the Star Kingdom’s Royal Society of Silviculture, and Michael had accompanied her to Sphinx two years ago when she went to dedicate a new Sphinx Forestry Service preserve in East Slocum. It was the first time he’d actually seen a crown oak—eighty meters tall, with arrow-shaped leaves broader than his own chest had been at the time—and he’d instantly wanted one for his very own. He’d been even more impressed by that than by the treecats who always seemed to turn up to inspect members of the royal family whenever they visited Sphinx, and he’d pestered his mother to buy one for him all the way back to Landing. Expense had been no object, as far as he was concerned, since he’d had the same attitude towards money all five-year-olds—and politicians—seemed to possess. There was always plenty of it in someone else’s pockets; all they had to do was pry it loose for their own pockets. His parents were working hard on convincing him otherwise (for a lot of reasons), but they’d made far more progress with his older sister than with him. So far, at least.

  Angelique had stepped on the “But why won’t you buy it for me?” semi-whine, only to have him hit on the brilliant inspiration of growing one of his own. After all, there was plenty of room in the palace gardens, wasn’t there? And his mother had her own personal landscaping projects of her own, didn’t she? And a crown oak nut had to cost a lot less than a whole tree, didn’t it, Mommy?

  It had taken her the better part of an hour, but she’d finally gotten him to understand that a crown oak that size was at least the better part of four or five hundred T-years old. In fact, it was probably two or three times that age, and that meant it wasn’t exactly something even a queen could just whistle up whenever she wanted one.

  That was the point at which Roger had come on the scene, and, unaware of the ordeal his wife had just been through at the hands of their focused, maddeningly persistent five-year-old extortionist, laughingly suggested to Michael (who’d recently discovered the Old Earth fairy tale about Jack and the Beanstalk) that if they just planted the right kind of nut in the garden, they could probably have a proper crown oak by next Tuesday.

  He’d thought for a while that Angelique was going to commit regicide—not that any court would have convicted her, once the jury heard the extenuating circumstances—when Michael turned triumphantly around to his mother and said “Daddy says I can have one!”

  “I won’t put him up to that, if you’ll stop undermining my aura of truth and virtue in my daughter’s eyes,” he said now.

  “Too late, Dad,” Elizabeth told him with twelve-year-old cynicism. “I wasn’t going to mention this, but you and I need to have a talk about the Tooth Fairy, too.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t!” He slid an index finger under her chin, tipping her head back to smile down at her and shook the other index finger under her nose. “Don’t you go disillusioning me with your cynical skepticism!”

  “All right, I won’t,” she said, but there was a calculating look in her eye, and he raised one eyebrow as he saw it.

  “And just what is this unusual restraint on your part going to cost me?” he inquired.

  “I want to start learning about your job,” she told him with unusual seriousness, looking suddenly considerably older than her age. “Really learning, I mean, not just reading about it and watching holos. I mean, I know it’ll be years and years before I have to be Queen, but Jacob and Elisa have been telling me how much help you were to Grandmama way before you ever had to be King yourself. And I know how hard you’re working—and how worried you are, Dad.” She put her arms around his waist, hugging him tightly, pressing her cheek against his chest. “You try not to show it, but I know. And I want to help.”

  “Beth,” Angelique said softly, setting aside her book reader at last, “you just turned twelve, for goodness sake, and your Dad’s going to be King for decades yet. Probably at least another T-century! I know you want to help, honey, but there’s no need to be rushing that hard to grow up.”

  “I didn’t say I want to grow up, Mom,” Elizabeth turned her head to look at her mother without releasing her hug on her father. “And I know
there’s a lot of stuff I wouldn’t understand even if you and Dad explained it to me. But I do know how worried Dad is, and I know he’s doing stuff with Uncle Jonas that we’re not supposed to tell anybody about. I’m sure he’s doing lots of other stuff we’re not supposed to mention, either. I know I’m just a kid. I can’t fix the things that are worrying him—and you, even if you don’t want Mikey and me to know about it. But I do want to understand as much of it as I can, and if there’s any way I can help Dad—even if it’s just letting him talk to me the way he does to you when he says he’s ‘bouncing ideas off you’—then I want to do it.”

  “But you’re so young.”

  Angelique glanced at Roger, her distress obvious, and he knew what she was thinking. Her marriage to him had turned her own life inside out; she didn’t want to see her daughter rushing to discard her childhood and embrace the same sacrifices. Not yet. Not when she was still their little girl, despite the odd bursts of maturity that wandered through her from time to time . . . and despite what the destiny of her birth was going to demand of her one day.

  “You’re right when you say you probably wouldn’t understand some of the stuff we grown-ups worry about,” Angelique continued, her gray eyes dark. “But some of it’s pretty scary, Bethie. There are parts of it I wish I didn’t know, and I’m sure your Dad feels the same way about it. Can’t you just let the grown-ups deal with it for at least a few more years?”

  Roger looked back and forth between his wife and his daughter, seeing Angelique’s worry and a familiar stubbornness in Elizabeth’s eyes. He knew where she’d gotten that, just as he knew where she’d gotten her temper, and his lips twitched for a moment as he wondered how his subjects would have reacted to the knowledge that their monarch, the man proposing to build a military capable of defeating the second largest navy in the entire galaxy, recognized defeat when he saw it in a twelve-year-old’s eyes. But that didn’t mean he had to surrender without a fight or that he couldn’t wage a valiant delaying action first, he reminded himself.

  “Your Mom’s right, Beth,” he said. “I think I understand what you’re saying. Of course, when I was your age, learning to be King was the last thing I was interested in! It was the Navy I wanted, but I was just as stubborn. Well, maybe not just as stubborn; I don’t think there’s anyone this side of Monroe who’s really as stubborn as you are. But I was pretty stubborn, and your grandmother had a terrible time dealing with me. It was kind of like Mikey and the crown oak, I guess.”

  Elizabeth giggled, and he smiled and ruffled her hair again.

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” he said. “This isn’t one of those we’ll-argue-back-and-forth-about-the-terms-of-the-deal deals, either—it’s one of those take-it-or-leave-it, nonnegotiable, Daddy-decree deals. Got it?”

  She looked at him for a moment, obviously considering the terms, then nodded, and he nodded back.

  “I don’t think you’re ready to start going off to Cabinet meetings and diplomatic conferences with me just yet. In fact, I seem to remember someone who fell asleep halfway through her very first state dinner about a year ago. I wonder who that might have been?”

  He raised his eyebrows at her, and she giggled again, looking suddenly much more like a twelve-year-old than someone twice that age.

  “So here’s the deal. If you have any questions you want answered about current events, or what I’m discussing with Duke Cromarty, or something you’ve seen on HD, like Into the Fire, or on the public boards, or any of that kind of stuff, I’ll answer them. And Elisa and Jacob will answer questions for you, too. But I’m not going to haul you in to listen to all of those endless conferences and arguments and planning sessions a king has to deal with. Not yet. I think Mom’s absolutely right about your being too young just yet, even though I know you’re already tired of hearing that. Trust me, you’ll be even more tired of it by the time you hit high school . . . and we’ll be pretty darned tired of telling you so. But if you’re still interested when you turn fifteen, I’ll let you start sitting in on at least some of those boring conferences then.

  “I’m pretty sure you’ll decide they’re nowhere near as interesting as you thought they might be, but you’re right. One day you will be Queen, and even though Mom’s right that it’s not going to happen anytime soon, you’re going to be Heir for a long time, and the Heir has a lot of responsibilities of her own, including ribbon cuttings, really tedious speeches, and smiling and being polite and attentive at political rallies the King can’t make it to—and is just delighted to send someone else off to in his place! A lot of it’s more boring than anyone who isn’t the Heir—or the queen consort—” he looked up again to give Angelique a flashing smile “—could possibly believe, but it is going to be your job, and however boring it may be, it really is important, too. So I guess it won’t hurt to let you start sort of easing your way into it early.”

  She smiled hugely, and he smiled back, looking across her head at Angelique and seeing the resignation—and the gratitude that at least the moment had been deferred—in those gray, beloved eyes.

  And let’s face it, Beth really is only twelve, he told himself. Twelve-year-olds have notions, and she’s no different from any other twelve-year-old in that respect! In two weeks she’s more likely than not to have forgotten all about this and be more worried about Sergeant Proctor or her next soccer game. So maybe it’s not just “deferred,” Angel. I’ll do my damnedest to keep her out of the mess as long as I can, but I know that look in her eyes. I see one a lot like it in my eyes when I look in the mirror . . . and I see one just like it when I look into your eyes when you really, really want something, too.

  “Deal?” he asked his daughter.

  “Deal!” she said firmly.

  August 1883 PD

  “SO, IS MIKEY—I MEAN, MICHAEL—still pissed off with me?” Roger Winton asked as the armored air limo, accompanied by the sting ships in the blue and silver livery of the House of Winton, descended sedately towards Admiralty House’s rooftop pad.

  “I wouldn’t say he was ‘pissed’ at you, Dad,” Elizabeth replied, wrinkling her nose in thought. “I’d say he was more . . . intensely irritated by circumstances beyond his control.”

  “You’ve been spending too much time with Allen and Elisa. Or with your Uncle Ed, at least.” Her father grinned at her, and the treecats sprawled across their laps bleeked in their species’ equivalent of laughter. “No, I detect Allen’s fell hand. He’s the diplomat spinmeister—comes with being Prime Minister, I suppose. Ed’s still a staff weenie; he hasn’t learned how to weasel-word his way around unpleasant issues yet. And Elisa can’t quite forget she used to be a Marine, so she just swings straight from the shoulder. Usually with a lead-loaded clue stick, now that I come to think of it.”

  “I guess that’s at least a little fair.” Elizabeth held up her right hand, thumb and forefinger perhaps a half-centimeter apart. “I stand by my original diagnosis, though. It’s not so much you personally he’s mad at, Dad. He’s mad at the fact that he’s not in control, not in a position to make his own decisions.”

  Roger crooked a thoughtful eyebrow, one hand stroking smoothly and reflexively down Monroe’s silky spine. She was probably right, he decided, although it was a bit hard for a harassed parent—especially a harassed male parent—to remember that when teenaged angst reared its ugly head in all its passionate glory.

  “I have to say I wish the two of you wouldn’t keep . . . locking horns this way, though,” Elizabeth continued. “I know there’ve been times I was just as upset as he is about how little choice either of us have in our lives, but I really don’t remember having had this kind of . . . of—what is it Mom calls it? War in the camp?—with either of you when I was his age.”

  “All of four whole T-years ago! Gosh!” Roger shook his head in astonishment. “You know, sometimes I forget what an ancient and decrepit sort you are, Beth.”

  His daughter stuck out her tongue at him, and the treecat in her lap—over twenty T-y
ears younger than Monroe, with four fewer age bands around his tail—bared needle fangs in a long, laughing yawn.

  “That doesn’t make it untrue,” she pointed out after a moment, and he nodded.

  “No, it doesn’t. But you and Mikey have always been different, honey. That’s not a slam at him, either, but there’s no point pretending you weren’t pretty darned . . . precocious, even for a Winton. Probably your mom’s genetic contribution, now that I think about it.” Her eyes twinkled at him, and he shrugged. “Even so, though, you were only a year or so younger than he is now when you decided you wanted to get involved in the ‘family business.’ He’s got time to make up his mind about what he wants to do—or, at least, how graciously he wants to do it.” Roger grimaced. “I won’t lie about it and say I don’t wish both of you had more options, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that. Except for your mom and me never to have had either of you, and, frankly, I’m too selfish a man to’ve put up with a world without the two of you in it.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes softened, and he snorted.

  “Don’t worry! I’m not going all gooey on you. But it’s true. And I think he’s having a harder time with adolescence than you did. In fact, I’m sure he is. Your mom and I discussed it with Doctor Sugiyama earlier this year, and Mikey’s having heavier sledding with the prolong therapies than you did. Frankly, I was a little surprised by some of what Sugiyama had to say about it, to be honest. Your mom and I are both first-generation prolong, and we didn’t have to go through the hormone adjustment and monitoring you and Mikey have—we were both pretty much through that phase before we got the initial treatments in the first place, and I don’t think either of us really understood just how different it was going to be for someone like you, with the third-gen therapies. They explained it to us, but there’s a big difference between having it explained and actually experiencing it, and, unfortunately, Mikey’s experiencing it right along with us. Sugiyama’s working on balancing dosages, but he doesn’t want to medicate Mikey’s mood swings if he doesn’t have to. And, so far, it’s nothing we can’t cope with . . . even if it does seem to Mikey sometimes that I’ve turned into a slave driver instead of a father!”