The Serrano Succession by Elizabeth Moon

time, and Cecelia had a cramp in the small of her back from twisting to accommodate Miranda's position, by the time Miranda quieted.
     
    "Damnation," she said then. "I thought I was over it."
     
    "I don't think you can get over it," Cecelia said.
     
    "No. Not really. But over it enough to function. You're right, I have to do that much. But I really do not know how."
     
    "Your advisors—"
     
    "Are vultures." Miranda gave Cecelia a sideways glance and pulled back a little; Cecelia took that hint and stood, stretching. "You, never having married, may not realize just how complicated the situation is. Your estate is all yours, and you have the disposal of it—"
     
    "When my ham-fisted relatives don't interfere," Cecelia said. She had tried, and failed, to put out of her mind her sister's interference in her will. The legal repercussions had dragged on for several years.
     
    "True. But what I have is Bunny's legacy in several separate realms, some of which I stayed out of. The political—"
     
    "Surely no one expects you to take over as Speaker—"
     
    "No." Miranda's voice was sour. "Everyone is sure that the political realm is the one I know least about. More's the pity—since I actually do understand it, and could take over, if they'd only let me."
     
    Cecelia managed not to gape, by a small margin. Miranda politically minded? Then she thought of Lorenza, who certainly had been, and repressed a shiver. She sat down again and poured herself a cup of tea.
     
    "Lorenza," Miranda said, in another uncanny echo of Cecelia's thoughts. "Now there was another case of backstage expertise. She and I used to play the most delicate games of power . . . it would bore you, Cecelia, unless you could think of it in equestrian terms, but . . . if you could imagine yourself on a very, very advanced horse, which despised you but had, for some reason, agreed to obey exactly your commands."
     
    "I had one like that," Cecelia said, hoping to divert Miranda onto a more congenial topic. Miranda's hiss of annoyance stopped her.
     
    "We are not talking horses. Did you ever fence?"
     
    Fence. Possible meanings ran through Cecelia's mind, the most recent out of her Spacepilots' Glossary of Navigational Terms ; she couldn't imagine Miranda as a jump-point explorer probing into unknown routes.
     
    "Ancient sport," Miranda said. "Derived from an ancient method of warfare. Swordfighting, also called fencing."
     
    "No," Cecelia said, feeling grumpy. She had just spent a half hour comforting a woman in collapse, and now she was being questioned like a schoolgirl about a sport she had always considered supremely silly. For one thing, it had nothing to do with fences that horses could jump over. "I don't . . . er . . . fence."
     
    "You should," Miranda said. She stood, and moved restlessly around the room, touching the surfaces as if she felt her way, rather than saw them with her eyes. Curtain, curtain, bureau, chair . . . "It's an excellent discipline, and apt for use aboard spaceships, for instance."
     
    "Swords?" Cecelia could not quite keep the astonishment out of her voice. Was Miranda losing her mind? Tears, then politics, then swords?
     
    "They do less damage to bulkheads," Miranda said. "If your only purpose is to kill people, why destroy the ship?"
     
    She must be crazy. It must be, Cecelia thought, an effect of whatever had kept her so lovely for so long. Could she have been given bad rejuv drugs?
     
    "Cecelia, I am not crazy. Well . . . not very crazy. Distracted with grief, and frustration, and anger, but not in the way we usually mean. Fencing—if you knew anything about it—is the ideal metaphor for what Lorenza and I did, just as Bunny and her brother Piercy—but no. You don't know the terms."
     
    Cecelia felt her temper gathering like a boil behind her eyes. She squeezed them hard shut, and spoke with them closed. "Miranda. I know you're grieving; it was good for you to cry. But please quit treating me