It's a chilling smile, but not one that surprises Camilla. She, after all, has always been capable of relatively terrible things; it's just that most people don't understand how capable until she's dislocating their arm behind their back.
"If I'd gotten over her fawning all over Gideon on the landing pad, we'd have probably spotted that earlier," she grouses. If there's anyone she feels like she failed as much as Palamedes at Canaan House -- and it's not that she wouldn't have loved to save the Fourth or the Fifth, or anyone really, but it doesn't feel like a personal failure -- it's Dulcie. It was genius, and beautifully brave too, not to mention them and what they were to her, and it meant she trusted they would know something was wrong. And instead Cam had wasted so much time baffled and betrayed and seething, believing their dearest friend for years was capable of the cruelty of ignoring Pal and flirting with Gideon in front of them.
For all the self-flagellation she's capable of inside her head, though, the actual comment is light, just a little wry. The Warden's on something big here. He doesn't need her regrets.
Him breaking his spectacles makes her smile a little bit, anyway. Every time. She leans from the bed to snag them by the arm, gesturing for him to continue and leaning back to dig in the thinner nightstand drawer, one of many places she's hidden the little plastic tubes of glasses repair kits that they sell at pharmacies here. As he talks, she sets down her tea and finds the tiny screw and miniature screwdriver, better able to listen for something to do with her hands anyway.
She nods, slowly, taking it in. A perpetual wheel. It's less horrifying, for one thing, but for some reason, she'd just accepted the idea that cavaliers had been created to die. One flesh, one end is a beautiful idea, and she's extraordinarily lucky to have someone like Palamedes sworn to her, someone entirely uninterested in her ever even getting injured, but there's idealism and there's practical reality, and somehow -- as nauseating as it was, the more they'd found, the more she'd realized it made sense.
The idea that perhaps power just doesn't work like that, that it should never have been used that way and that there is an alternative, is -- well, Cytherea was absolutely right, as much as she resents that. It's actually more horrifying.
"She wasn't the only of the original Lyctors to figure that out," she says suddenly, which is apropos of nothing, except that it absolutely is connected in her head, and she leans forward, eyes bright. "Well. I don't know if it was that lie that did it, but it seems like a good candidate. There's -- those eight months in Blood of Eden custody weren't for nothing. It's --" She takes a breath, trying to explain rationally. "They're terrorists, yes; they do terrible things. To them, necromancers are -- most of them probably don't think you're human beings. But they're people who've been forcibly displaced and had their homeworlds destroyed for thanergy and a war no one knows the rationale for. They've been roped generationally into some sort of life contract to the Emperor -- the Second knows all about this, I guess -- and they never knowing he was immortal. I got in with their commander so I could find out more, try to filter it all out. And here's the thing. Lyctors are helping them. Currently. Judith is still alive because of one."
"Pal, they have -- they still have -- a broadcast signal into the Houses, a sort of news channel, and it's somewhere on the Sixth. On the Sixth! They knew things about us, too, things no one who hadn't been to the Sixth would know, but it was like sitting in history class. Some of what they were describing hasn't existed on the Sixth for thousands of years. As if they'd learned it from Cassiopeia herself.
I think -- whatever the Emperor has done, whatever reason he had for deciding cavaliers were expendable, that that was better, the repercussion has been coming for millennia."
no subject
"If I'd gotten over her fawning all over Gideon on the landing pad, we'd have probably spotted that earlier," she grouses. If there's anyone she feels like she failed as much as Palamedes at Canaan House -- and it's not that she wouldn't have loved to save the Fourth or the Fifth, or anyone really, but it doesn't feel like a personal failure -- it's Dulcie. It was genius, and beautifully brave too, not to mention them and what they were to her, and it meant she trusted they would know something was wrong. And instead Cam had wasted so much time baffled and betrayed and seething, believing their dearest friend for years was capable of the cruelty of ignoring Pal and flirting with Gideon in front of them.
For all the self-flagellation she's capable of inside her head, though, the actual comment is light, just a little wry. The Warden's on something big here. He doesn't need her regrets.
Him breaking his spectacles makes her smile a little bit, anyway. Every time. She leans from the bed to snag them by the arm, gesturing for him to continue and leaning back to dig in the thinner nightstand drawer, one of many places she's hidden the little plastic tubes of glasses repair kits that they sell at pharmacies here. As he talks, she sets down her tea and finds the tiny screw and miniature screwdriver, better able to listen for something to do with her hands anyway.
She nods, slowly, taking it in. A perpetual wheel. It's less horrifying, for one thing, but for some reason, she'd just accepted the idea that cavaliers had been created to die. One flesh, one end is a beautiful idea, and she's extraordinarily lucky to have someone like Palamedes sworn to her, someone entirely uninterested in her ever even getting injured, but there's idealism and there's practical reality, and somehow -- as nauseating as it was, the more they'd found, the more she'd realized it made sense.
The idea that perhaps power just doesn't work like that, that it should never have been used that way and that there is an alternative, is -- well, Cytherea was absolutely right, as much as she resents that. It's actually more horrifying.
"She wasn't the only of the original Lyctors to figure that out," she says suddenly, which is apropos of nothing, except that it absolutely is connected in her head, and she leans forward, eyes bright. "Well. I don't know if it was that lie that did it, but it seems like a good candidate. There's -- those eight months in Blood of Eden custody weren't for nothing. It's --" She takes a breath, trying to explain rationally. "They're terrorists, yes; they do terrible things. To them, necromancers are -- most of them probably don't think you're human beings. But they're people who've been forcibly displaced and had their homeworlds destroyed for thanergy and a war no one knows the rationale for. They've been roped generationally into some sort of life contract to the Emperor -- the Second knows all about this, I guess -- and they never knowing he was immortal. I got in with their commander so I could find out more, try to filter it all out. And here's the thing. Lyctors are helping them. Currently. Judith is still alive because of one."
"Pal, they have -- they still have -- a broadcast signal into the Houses, a sort of news channel, and it's somewhere on the Sixth. On the Sixth! They knew things about us, too, things no one who hadn't been to the Sixth would know, but it was like sitting in history class. Some of what they were describing hasn't existed on the Sixth for thousands of years. As if they'd learned it from Cassiopeia herself.
I think -- whatever the Emperor has done, whatever reason he had for deciding cavaliers were expendable, that that was better, the repercussion has been coming for millennia."