The Tears of the Sun Read Free

little Prince John.”
    Mathilda looked at him sharply; the order of succession hadn’t been settled yet, whether it should be the eldest or the eldest son . The conservative nobility of the Association mostly wanted the latter, of course; and he knew she was ambivalent herself. Then her eyes went wider.
    â€œYou know their names . The Sword knows their names?”
    â€œWell, we could choose others now, just to spite it, so. But they have a nice ring to them, don’t they? So we might as well . . . though it’s most surely a matter of the snake biting its own tail . . .”
    â€œÃ“rlaith,” Mathilda said. “That means . . . Golden Princess , doesn’t it?”
    â€œSo it does, in the ancient tongue. Her hair will be like white gold as a child, and palest yellow when she’s grown, with eyes like the sunlit sea; she’ll be tall and graceful as a willow-wand, stronger than sword steel.”
    He frowned seriously. “And she’ll be mad for strawberries and cream in season, and love cats, and play the mandolin—”
    Mathilda mock-punched him in the chest. “Now you’re making it up!”
    â€œThat I am. It’s true about the hair and all that, though.”
    She paused for a moment. “And John . . . that was Dad’s middle name.”
    â€œAnd so it was,” Rudi said mildly, meeting her eyes.
    â€œI wouldn’t have dared suggest naming him Norman . I know that’s impossible. The politics.”
    â€œYour father did great things, my heart, for good and ill. Let that part of him which did well and saved lives and built for the ages be remembered with the name, and the part of him that loved your mother and you. Let all else . . . be forgotten.”
    Mathilda looked away for a moment. “Thank you,” she whispered.
    Her father Norman John Arminger, the first Lord Protector and founder of the PPA, had been a very able man. A warrior to be feared with his own hands, and himself fearless as a lion, and still more to be respected as a battle-leader. Intelligent and quick-witted enough to see immediately what the Change that stopped the machines meant, while others dithered and denied and died. And with power of will enough to inspire and bully others into following him. Without him most of what became the PPA would have been ruins and charred bones split for marrow and wilderness long since. He’d truly loved Mathilda also, and in his odd way her mother Sandra.
    A strong man, Rudi thought. Even a great one, but bad at the heart; though no man is all one thing.
    As a ruler he’d also been a brutal terrorist and outright tyrant both from policy and by natural inclination, and from a half-mad determination to bring his obsessions to life and impose them as far as his sword’s writ reached. One who killed with a relish and delight that would probably have appalled even his idols and models, William the Bastard and Strongbow and Bohemond and Godfrey de Bouillon. Opportunities for that had been many in those early years of chaos and despair, when the most of human kind perished in a welter of famine and plague and desperate violence.
    And ten years after the Change he’d have killed me , if Matti’s mother hadn’t hustled us out of his way after Tiphaine d’Ath rescued Matti from us Mackenzies, and captured me in turn. Killed me with embellishments, just to give Mother anguish, I think. His mind worked that way, the creature. But Sandra saw she might have use for me, even then.
    Lady Regent Sandra Arminger was just as ruthless as her spouse had been. She was also even more intelligent, vastly more patient, and not hagridden by his inner demons. Since Norman’s death at the end of the War of the Eye she’d even been a good overlord to the Association from pure rational calculation; a hard ruler, very hard indeed, but not vicious. She had men killed without passion when she thought it necessary, like a