Chapter Text
Alain Quintillan was only sixteen when he crafted the table that was judged a masterpiece worthy of his guild certificate. He was still short of twenty when the sky open and Barrayar was reintroduced to a universe far larger than the industrious young man had ever thought to imagine. But he was not the sort of man to be needlessly distracted by such things. It was said that if there was any peace to be found in the western corner of the Vorville district in those first confused days of excitement and uncertainty it lived in Alain’s steady hands as he carved a wooden toy beside his wife’s table.
Despite the jokes Alain’s older brother would make – had made in the years before all his jokes were silenced by strange soldiers that came from the stars – Alain does not win his flower through the delicacy of his carving. Flore was not won, so Alain never saw a need to defend his perceived lack of romantic offerings.
Flore had stood just inside the doorway of his master’s workshop, waiting for her father and Old Michel to finish. She was the same age as Alain. Just a few years before they’d sat near each other during their brief schooling, she had had a better sense for sums, and he had tended to remain quiet in his brother’s shadow. The spring light had caught on a strand of her brown hair that had escaped her cap and he’d felt every one of his fifteen years, time that felt like both nothing and eternity in the same breath.
She had been the one to cross the space to him, though once the first words had been spoken, neither had faltered in their conversation. They talked of her work on her family’s farm and his apprenticeship and Ethan, who was likely to end up in trouble one of these days. From the beginning, they spoke of the future. Not about the politics of the new Emperor or even what speculation was going around about their Count’s heir, certainly not about what might be heading toward them even now through the stars. Those are not their futures.
On that new spring afternoon, Flore speaks of the table in her family’s kitchen. It’s in need of repair, again. A poorly made piece, chosen poorly. A kitchen table, she says, should be made of stuff ready to withstand and support the generations that would gather around it. As Alain watches her speak, trying to readjust her cap even as her enthusiasm leaves it even more askew, he listens. They speak again over the weeks and months that follow, though nothing that isn’t respectable. Alain makes no offer until he can come to her free from an apprenticeship. He speaks to her father, straightforward and resolute. He had shown her the table first.
Their first son is born three years later, before the world changes. By the time Michel starts school, the maps he brings home are very different from the ones his parents had known. The wider world is not the district or the continent but the entire planet. Perhaps it’s fitting that Emperor Dorca has a new hold on the Empire, for the first time they are truly all children of Barrayar. Flore holds Alain’s hand under the table, as they listen to the new generation speak of other planets, but neither of them lets go of their future.
Change never arrives all at once. Count Vorville offers reassurances. Alain was brought up to respect his liege lord. Alain and Flore were also brought up to be sensible, which fit their natural inclination, so they listen closely to the men who come back from the Capital with the important news. Sometimes it’s hard to tell a wild rumor from fact, talk that the Emperor’s imposing new farming regulations might turn out to be false while stories that there are planets where a person can simply put an instruction into a machine and be given a chair that never wears down isn’t merely some fanciful invention of a too open mind. But the farmers still go out in the fields as they always have, and orders still come in for a reliable carpenter.
Things change, they endure. An invasion comes and it takes. It takes brothers and friends and parents and brave Count’s sons and their own brave son. The table lasts. Three more children survive to eat and argue and grow around it. There are some winters where they don’t eat, Cetagandan lords stand (in image, with a fierce guard set up around the temporary transmitters) in the village center to claim the suffering is imposed by those Barrayarans who are determined that everyone should bleed for a world far worse then they’re all being offered. Flore sells as little as she can get away with and hides the children when Cetagandan offer ‘opportunities’. Alain hides a bleeding rebel in their cellar, a boy who, only a few months before, had shown up with some fellows to demand their food for the resistance or face the fate of collaborators.
The table bares the weight of the harvest, and the lightness. It sees funeral dishes and early morning groats and wedding celebrations. The first grandson born after the Cetagandan Invasion is thrown back out of Barrayaran space sits on the, chewing on the wooden horse made for his father, as his grandmother hums to herself.
The family will outgrow the house, but they’ll always be drawn back. Weekend dinners become the time and place for all the important announcements and scandals and arguments. Fifteen years and two Emperors after the war, Hilaire Quintillan’s decision to go away for school will be announced and wondered over there.
Many decades after that, Hilaire speaks with a Princess about Barrayaran literature. His job doesn’t leave him much time for fiction, even if he had the inclination, but even he knows the stock tale of the boy from the countryside that goes to the big city to lose all those important moral values that the censorship board believes in supporting just as long as they won’t be expected to hold to them.
Since his grandparents’ table singularly fails to undergo even the smallest bit of dramatic and able to be understood as metaphorical damage to represent the corruption to the soul, Hilaire has to admit to finding the stories all rather unrealistic. There are days he’s tempted to scrape it up a bit, just for the sake of literature, but it’s not disappointing enough to risk his grandmother’s wrath.
After all, even in the face of metaphor, he would still have to live with himself one day at a time. Just like everyone else.