Cordelia's Honor - Lois McMaster Bujold [18]
"You seem a fair nurse. Do you think it would help to open and drain it?" he asked Cordelia.
"I don't know. I'd be afraid messing around with it would just make it dirtier." She deduced the injury must be feeling very much worse for him to have mentioned it, confirmed when he took half a painkiller from his precious and limited store.
They pressed on, and Vorkosigan began to talk again. He told some sardonic anecdotes from his cadet days, and described his father, who had been a general commanding ground forces in his day, and a contemporary and friend of the wily old man who was now Emperor. Cordelia caught a faint, faraway impression of a cold father whom a young son could never quite please, even with his best efforts, yet who shared with him a bond of underlying loyalty. She described her mother, a tough-minded medical professional resisting retirement, and her brother, who had just purchased his second child permit.
"Do you remember your mother well?" Cordelia asked. "She died when you were quite young, I gather. An accident, like my father?"
"No accident. Politics." His face became sober, and distant. "Had you not heard of Yuri Vorbarra's Massacre?"
"I—don't know much about Barrayar."
"Ah. Well, Emperor Yuri, in the later days of his madness, became extremely paranoid about his relations. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy, in the end. He sent his death squads out, all in one night. The squad sent for Prince Xav never got past his liveried men. And for some obscure reason, he didn't send one for my father, presumably because he wasn't a descendant of Emperor Dorca Vorbarra. I can't imagine what old Yuri thought he was about, to kill my mother and leave my father alive. That was when my father threw his corps behind Ezar Vorbarra, in the civil war that followed."
"Oh." Her throat seemed dry and thick in the dusty afternoon. She had evoked a coldness in him, so that the film of sweat on his forehead seemed suddenly like a condensation.
"It's been on my mind. . . . You were talking about the peculiar things people do in a panic, earlier, and I remembered it. Hadn't thought of it in years. When Yuri's men blew in the door—"
"My God, you weren't present?"
"Oh, yes. I was on the list too, of course. Each assassin was assigned a particular target. The one assigned to my mother—I grabbed this knife, a table knife, by my plate, and struck at him. But right in front of me on the table there had been a good carving knife. If only I had grabbed it instead . . . I might as well have struck him with a spoon. He just picked me up, and threw me across the room—"
"How old were you?"
"Eleven. Small for my age. I was always small for my age. He cornered her against the far wall. He fired a . . ." He sucked his lower lip between his teeth and chewed it, just short of breaking the skin to bleed. "Odd how many details come back when you talk about something. I thought I had forgotten more."
He glanced at her white face, and grew suddenly contrite. "I've disturbed you, with this babble. I'm sorry. It was all very long ago. I don't know why I'm talking so much."
I do, thought Cordelia. He was pale and no longer sweating, in spite of the heat. Half-unconsciously, he fastened the top of his shirt. He feels cold, she thought; fever going up. How far up? Plus whatever effect those pills have. This could get very scary.
An obscure impulse made her say, "I know what you mean, though, about talking bringing it back. First there was the shuttle going up, like a bullet as usual, and my brother waving, which was silly, because he couldn't possibly see us—and then there was this smear of light across the sky, like a second sun, and a rain of fire. And this stupid feeling of total comprehension. You wait for the shock to set in, and relieve you—and it never does. Then the blank vision. Not blackness, but this silver-purple glow, for