The Serrano Succession Read Online Free PDF Page A

since they were taken from Our Texas. And Brun had discovered, to her annoyance, that when they woke, she also woke, even if someone else was doing the feeding and cleaning.
     
    She used the time to exercise, the exercises she never skipped these days. By the time her maid knocked, she had already worked herself into a sweat, and showered herself back to normal. In the mirrors of the bath, her face stared back at her, strange after nearly two standard years without a mirror . . . an older face, a harder face, but—in spite of everything—a face of memorable beauty.
     
    Something would have to be done about that . . . but not today. Today she would walk with her mother, her brothers, her older sister, in the funeral procession; today she would hold her head high in the face of the universe. They had forced her to bear their children. They could not force her to hide.
     
     
     
Palace Security, Castle Rock
    Colonel Bai-Darlin had not slept all night. Organizing a state funeral had always been—would always be—a nightmare of protocol and endless complicated detail, but ordinarily a state funeral was not mixed with a top-level security concern. Even when a head of state was assassinated, that usually ended the threat. Only 23.87 percent of political assassinations in the past five hundred years had been followed by subsequent assassinations.
     
    But this was different. The other branches of the New Texas Godfearing Militia had specifically threatened Lord Thornbuckle and his family, with additional threats to Hazel Takeris, the Rangers' wives and female dependents, and several members of the Regular Space Service, including Admiral Vida Serrano. Fleet, Colonel Bai-Darlin thought, could protect its own. His responsibility was the safety of the civilians, specifically those who would be present, vulnerable, in the funeral procession.
     
    His predecessor, Colonel Harris, was even now trying to explain why they had not taken sufficient precautions, why Lord Thornbuckle had died, and no one—not one single Militia member or sympathizer—had been captured.
     
    He would have to assume they'd try again. He would have to assume that everything Harris had done was wrong—that Harris had missed something vital.
     
    Unless it wasn't the New Texas Godfearing Militia after all. Bai-Darlin's head lifted, as if scenting game. What if it were someone else, someone trying to use the hotheaded NewTex as a cover?
     
    In that case, the funeral would probably go off without a hitch. Which, at the moment, was all he cared about.
     
     
     
    Brun eyed her mother as they came out onto the porch, into the cold sunlight. Security, dark-uniformed and obviously armed, hovered around them. Five cars, all identical polished burgundy with black and gold trim, awaited them.
     
    "Five?" Brun said.
     
    "Security," her mother said. "Four of them are drags."
     
    "Ah." Four would lay false trails, though since everyone knew where the funeral would be held, she didn't see how that would help.
     
    She could at least notice who was here, and who had not been able to—or wanted to—come. No Lady Cecelia . . . well, it was the Wherrin Trials, after all, and she might not even have heard yet. Her sister Berenice, though, and her brother Abelard. No Raffa or Ronnie—absurd how she had missed them. Raffa's Aunt Marta Saenz, such a support to her father while she was missing—her mother's report of that had been just a touch acidic—had gone back to her own world as soon as Brun returned. No George—but of course the odious George had his own critically wounded father to watch over. Of their own sept, her father's younger brother Harlis, and his son Kell, who didn't look to have improved from her last memory of him. A whole raft of Consellines, most of whom she didn't know well enough to put names to, and Venezia Morrelline.
     
    In ordinary times—not that the death of her father would ever have been ordinary—Kevil Mahoney would have