Matushka

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The morning sky over Narsai’s northern continent was streaked with pink and gold dawn. It was unlike Catherine Romanova to wake this early on a day when she didn’t have to, on a morning when she could have stayed beside her husband’s warmth until he was ready to rise; but here she was on the terrace overlooking her garden, and she was as alert as if it were already mid-day.

She reached for Linc’s mind, and felt nothing but rest and contentment. That was good. When the two of them had finally come back here to live, in this comfortable little house on the home-world to whose citizenship Romanova had clung so stubbornly through more than forty years as a Star Service officer, he had been exhausted in every way that a sentient being could become weary. She had wondered for a time whether he would ever be himself again—but he was fine now, the same Linc she had met one day when they were both eighteen years old and had stood at a passenger liner’s lounge viewport and had looked out in wonder at their first sight of Terra’s blue-green globe.

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