Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [194]
"It could be worse," Da said cheerfully. "Think of what floating this harem would have been like back in the days of dowries!"
Kareen smiled dutifully—he'd been making that joke for at least fifteen years—and fled. She was going to have to come up with another solution. By herself.
* * *
The decor of the Green Room in the Imperial Residence was superior to that of any other conference chamber in which Miles had ever been trapped. Antique silk wall coverings, heavy drapes and thick carpeting gave it a hushed, serious, and somewhat submarine air, and the elegant tea laid out in elaborate service on the inlaid sideboard beat the extruded-food-in-plastic of the average military meeting all hollow. Spring sunshine streamed through the windows to make warm golden bars across the floor. Miles had been watching them hypnotically shift as the morning stretched.
An inescapable military tone was lent to the proceedings by the presence of three men in uniform: Colonel Lord Vortala the Younger, head of the ImpSec task force assigned to provide security for the Emperor's wedding; Captain Ivan Vorpatril, dutifully keeping notes for Lady Alys Vorpatril, just as he would have done as aide to his commander at any military HQ conference; and Commodore Duv Galeni, chief of Komarran Affairs for ImpSec, preparing for the day when the whole show would be replayed on Komarr. Miles wondered if Galeni, forty and saturnine, was picking up ideas for his own wedding with Delia Koudelka, or whether he had enough sense of self-preservation to hide out and leave it all to the highly competent, not to mention assertive, Koudelka women. All five of them. Miles would offer Vorkosigan House to Duv as a sanctuary, except the girls would certainly track him there.
Gregor and Laisa seemed to be holding up well so far. Emperor Gregor in his mid-thirties was tall and thin, dark and dry. Dr. Laisa Toscane was short, with ash-blond curls and blue-green eyes that narrowed often in amusement, and a figure that made Miles, for one, just want to sort of fall over on top of her and burrow in for the winter. No treason implied; he did not begrudge Gregor his good fortune. In fact, Miles regarded the months of public ceremony which were keeping Gregor from that consummation as a cruelty little short of sadistic. Assuming, of course, that they were keeping . . .
The voices droned on; Miles's thoughts drifted further. Dreamily, he wondered where he and Ekaterin might hold their future wedding. In the ballroom of Vorkosigan House, in the eye of the Empire? The place might not hold a big enough mob. He wanted witnesses, for this. Or did he, as heir to his father's Countship, have a political obligation to stage it at the Vorkosigan's District capital of Hassadar? The modern Count's Residence at Hassadar had always seemed more like a hotel than a home, attached as it was to all those District bureaucratic offices lining the city's main square. The most romantic site would be the house at Vorkosigan Surleau, in the gardens overlooking the Long Lake. An outdoor wedding, yes, he bet Ekaterin would like that. In a sense, it would give Sergeant Bothari a chance to attend, and General Piotr too. Did you ever believe such a day would come for me, Grandfather? The attraction of that venue would depend on the time of year, of course—high summer would be glorious, but it wouldn't seem so romantic in a mid-winter sleet storm. He wasn't at all sure he could bring Ekaterin up to the matrimonial fence before fall, and delaying the ceremony till next spring would be as agonizing as what was being done to Gregor . . . .
Laisa, across the conference table from Miles, flipped over the next page of her stack of flimsies, read down it for a few seconds, and said, "You people can't be serious!" Gregor, seated beside her, looked alarmed, and leaned to peer over her shoulder.
Oh, we must have got to page twelve