Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [163]
Her lips puffed, not quite mirthfully. "What would I do with so useless an object as a medal?"
He thought bemusedly of the contents a certain drawer at home in Vorkosigan House. "Frame it? Use it as a paperweight? Dust it?"
"Just what I always wanted. More clutter."
He grinned at her; she smiled back at last, clearly beginning to come off her adrenaline jag, and without breaking down, either. She drew breath and started forward again, and he kept pace. She had met the enemy, mastered her moment, hung three hours on death's doorstep, all that, and she'd emerged still on her feet and snarling. Oversocialized, hah. Oh, yeah, Da, I want this one.
He stopped at the door to the infirmary; the Professora vanished within, borne off by her medical minions like a lady on a palanquin. Ekaterin paused with him.
"I have to leave you for a time and check on my prisoners. The stationers will take care of you."
Her brow wrinkled. "Prisoners? Oh. Yes. How did you get rid of the Komarrans?"
Miles smiled grimly. "Persuasion."
She stared down at him, one side of her lovely mouth curving up. Her lower lip was split; he wanted to kiss it and make it well. Not yet. Timing, boy. And one other thing.
"You must be very persuasive."
"I hope so." He took a deep breath. "I bluffed them into believing that I wouldn't let them go no matter what they did to you and the Professora. Except that I wasn't bluffing. We could not have let them go." There. Betrayal confessed. His empty hands clenched.
She stared at him in disbelief; his heart shrank. "Well, of course not!"
"Eh . . . what?"
"Don't you know what they wanted to do to Barrayar?" she demanded. "It was a horror show. Utterly vile, and they couldn't even see it. They actually tried to tell me that collapsing the wormhole wouldn't hurt anyone! Monstrous fools."
"That's what I thought, actually."
"So, wouldn't you put your life on the line to stop them?"
"Yes, but I wasn't putting my life—I was putting yours."
"But I'm Vor," she said simply.
His smile and his heart revived, dizzy with delight. "True Vor, milady," he breathed.
A female medtech was approaching, murmuring anxiously, "Madame Vorsoisson?" Miles yielded to her shepherding motions, gave Ekaterin an analyst's salute, and turned away. He was humming, off-key, by the time he rounded the first corner.
Chapter Twenty-One
The station infirmary personnel insisted on keeping both Vor women overnight, a precaution with which neither argued. Despite her exhaustion Ekaterin did get dispensation to go pick up her valise from her never-used hostel room, under the watchful eye of a very young ImpSec guard who called her "Ma'am" in every sentence and was determined to carry her luggage.
One message waited on her hostel room's comconsole: an urgent order from Lord Vorkosigan for her to take her aunt and flee the station at once, delivered in a tone of such intense conviction as to almost send her scurrying off despite its obviously outdated content. Instructions only, she noted; no explanations whatsoever. He really must have once held military command. The contrast between this strained, forceful lord and the almost goofy geniality of the young man who'd bowed her out of the airlock bemused her; which was the real Lord Vorkosigan? For all his apparently self-revealing babble, the man remained as elusive as a handful of water. Water in the desert. The thought popped unbidden into her mind, and she shook her head to clear it.
After she returned to the infirmary, Ekaterin sat up for a while with her aunt, waiting for the Professor. Uncle Vorthys arrived in the next hour. He was unusually breathless and subdued as he sat on the edge of his wife's bed and embraced her. She hugged him back, tears starting in her eyes for almost the first time in this