Shards of Honour (Vorkosigan Saga, #1)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

She took the story in like some strange, spiked gift, too fragile to drop, too painful to hold.

Why can’t you just lose your temper with subordinates, like normal men, instead of with superiors, like a lunatic?

Cordelia slumped from her knees to a sitting position on the floor and gazed at him in joyless triumph. “Suffering bastard.” “I thought you saw meaning in that sort of thing,” said Vorkosigan. “In the abstract. Most days it’s just stumbling around in the dark with the rest of creation, smashing into things and wondering why it hurts.”

He was just a little villain. An old-fashioned craftsman, making crimes one-off. The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present—they are real.”

“Well, I don’t hate him. Can’t say as I worship him, either.” She paused a long time, and looked up to meet her mother’s eyes square on. “But when he’s cut, I bleed.”

“Yes,” Cordelia agreed cordially, writhing within. “One doesn’t expect a thirty-four-year-old to fall in love like an adolescent. Quite an unexpected—gift, at my age. Even more unexpected at forty-four, I gather.”

“I am an atheist, myself. A simple faith, but a great comfort to me, in these last days.”

“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “The dead cannot hurt you. They give you no pain, except that of seeing your own death in their faces. And one can face that, I find.”