Miles Errant - Lois McMaster Bujold [255]
"Lady . . . I don't know." His prodded honesty had an edge of anguish.
She watched him, sapiently. "There is time," she said calmly. "Miles . . . wanted you to be here, you know. He talked about showing you around. Imagined teaching you to ride horseback." She gave a furtive shudder.
"Galen tried to have me taught, in London," Mark recalled. "It was terrifically expensive, and I wasn't very good at it, so he finally told me just to avoid horses, when I got here."
"Ah?" She brightened slightly. "Hm. Miles, you see, has . . . had . . . has these only-child romantic notions about siblings. Now, I have a brother, so I have no such illusions." She paused, glanced around the room, and leaned forward with a suddenly confidential air, lowering her voice. "You have an uncle, a grandmother, and two cousins on Beta Colony who are just as much your relatives as Aral and myself and your cousin Ivan here on Barrayar. Remember, you have more than one choice. I've given one son to Barrayar. And watched for twenty-eight years while Barrayar tried to destroy him. Maybe Barrayar has had its turn, eh?"
"Ivan's not here now, is he?" Mark asked, diverted and horrified.
"He's not staying at Vorkosigan House, no, if that's what you mean. He is in Vorbarr Sultana, assigned to Imperial Service Headquarters. Perhaps," her eye lit in speculation, "he could take you out and show you some of the things Miles wanted you to see."
"Ivan may still be angry for what I did to him in London," Mark jittered.
"He'll get over it," the Countess predicted confidently. "I have to admit, Miles would have positively enjoyed unsettling people with you."
A quirk Miles inherited from his mother, clearly.
"I've lived almost three decades on Barrayar," she mused. "We've come such a long way. And yet there is still so terribly far to go. Even Aral's will grows weary. Maybe we can't do it all in one generation. Time for the changing of the guard, in my opinion . . . ah, well."
He sat back in his chair for the first time, letting it support him, starting to watch and listen instead of just cower. An ally. It seemed he had an ally, though he was still not sure just why. Galen had not spent much time on Countess Cordelia Vorkosigan, being totally obsessed with his old enemy the Butcher. Galen, it appeared, had seriously underestimated her. She had survived twenty-nine years here . . . might he? For the first time, it seemed something humanly possible.
A brief knock sounded on the hinged double doors to the hallway. At Countess Vorkosigan's "Yes?", they swung open partway, and a man poked his head around the frame and favored her with a strained smile.
"Is it all right for me to come in now, dear Captain?"
"Yes, I think so," said Countess Vorkosigan.
He let himself through and closed the doors again. Mark's throat locked; he swallowed and breathed, swallowed and breathed, with frighteningly fragile control. He would not pass out in front of this man. Or vomit. He hadn't more than a teaspoon of bile left in his belly by now anyway. It was him, unmistakably him, Prime Minister Admiral Count Aral Vorkosigan, formerly Regent of the Barrayaran Empire and de facto dictator of three worlds, conqueror of Komarr, military genius, political mastermind—accused murderer, torturer, madman, too many impossible things to be contained in that stocky form now striding toward Mark.
Mark had studied vids of him taken at every age; perhaps it was not so odd that his first coherent thought was, He looks older than I expected. Count Vorkosigan was ten standard years older than his Betan wife, but he looked twenty or thirty years older. His hair was a whiter shade of gray than in the vids from even two years ago. He was short for a Barrayaran, eye to eye with the Countess. His face was heavy, intense, weathered. He wore green uniform trousers but no jacket, just the cream shirt with the long sleeves rolled up and open at the round collar which, if it was an attempt at a casual look, was failing utterly. The tension in the room had risen