Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [241]
"It's been hard on her too. She likes being a Countess. Olivia says, back in their school days, envy sometimes made the other girls mean to Tatya. Being picked out by René was kind of a boost for her, not that the rest of them couldn't see it coming, with her glorious soprano. She does adore him."
"So you think their marriage will weather this?" he asked hopefully.
"Mm . . ."
"Mm . . . ?"
"This whole thing began when they were going to start their baby. And they haven't gone ahead. Tatya . . . doesn't talk about that part of things. She'll talk about everything else, but not that."
"Oh." Miles tried to figure out what that might mean. It didn't sound very encouraging.
"Olivia is almost the only one of Tatya's old friends who've shown up, after all this blew up. Even René's sisters have kind of gone to ground, though for the opposite reason I suppose. It's like nobody wants to look her in the eye."
"If you go back far enough, we're all descended from off-worlders, dammit," Miles growled in frustration. "What's one-eighth? A tinge. Why should it disqualify one of the best people we have? Competence should count for something."
Martya's grin twisted. "If you want sympathy, you've come to the wrong store, Miles. If my da were a Count, it wouldn't matter how competent I was, I still wouldn't inherit. All the brilliance in the world wouldn't matter a bit. If you're just now finding out that this world is unjust, well, you're behind the times."
Miles grimaced. "It's not news to me, Martya." The car pulled up outside Commodore Koudelka's townhouse. "But justice wasn't my job, before." And power isn't nearly as all-powerful as it looks from the outside. He added, "But that's probably the one issue I can't help you on. I have the strongest personal reasons for not wanting to reintroduce inheritance through the female line into Barrayaran law. Like, my survival. I like my job very well. I don't want Gregor's."
He popped the canopy, and she climbed out, and gave him a sort of acknowledging salaam for both this last point and the ride. "See you at your dinner party."
"Give my best to the Commodore and Drou," he called after her.
She shot him a bright Team Koudelka smile over her shoulder, and bounced away.
Chapter Seven
Mark gently banked the lightflyer, to give the rear-seat passengers, Kareen and Madame Vorsoisson, a better view of the Vorkosigan's District capital of Hassadar glittering on the horizon. The weather was cooperating, a beautiful sunny day that breathed promise of imminent summer. Miles's lightflyer was a delight: sleek, fast, and maneuverable, knifing through the soft warm air, and best of all with the controls precisely aligned to be ergonomically perfect for a man just Mark's height. So what if the seat was a little on the narrow side. You couldn't have everything. For example, Miles can't have this anymore. Mark grimaced at the thought, and shunted it aside.
"It's lovely land," Madame Vorsoisson remarked, pressing her face to the canopy to take it all in.
"Miles would be flattered to hear you say so," Mark carefully encouraged this trend of thought. "He's pretty stuck on this place."
They were certainly viewing it in the best possible light, literally, this morning. A patchwork of spring verdure in the farms and woods—the woods no less a product of back-breaking human cultivation than the fields—rippled across the landscape. The green was broken up and set off by irregular slashes of Barrayaran native red-brown, in the ravines and creek bottoms and along uncultivable slopes.
Enrique, his nose also pressed to the canopy, said, "It's not at all what I was expecting, from Barrayar."
"What were you expecting?" asked Madame Vorsoisson curiously.
"Kilometers of flat gray concrete, I suppose. Military barracks and people in uniform marching around in lockstep."
"Economically unlikely for an entire planetary surface. Though uniforms, we do have," Mark admitted.
"But once it gets up to several hundred different kinds, the effect isn't so uniform anymore. And some of the colors are a little