Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [397]
Ekaterin leaned forward, gripping the railing with her knuckles going pale. "Let's finish this. Lord Vorkosigan!"
Miles jerked in his seat, taken by surprise. "Madame?" He made a little half-bow gesture. "Yours to command . . ."
"Good. Will you marry me?"
A kind of roaring, like the sea, filled Miles's head; for a moment, there were only two people in this chamber, not two hundred. If this was a ploy to impress his colleagues with his innocence, would it work? Who cares? Seize the moment! Seize the woman! Don't let her get away again! One side of his lip curled up, then the other; then a broad grin took over his face. He tilted toward her. "Why, yes, madame. Certainly. Now?"
She looked a little taken aback at the vision this perhaps conjured of his abandoning the chamber instantly, to take her up on her offer this very hour, before she could change her mind. Well, he was ready if she was . . . . She waved him down. "We'll discuss that later. Settle this business."
"My pleasure." He grinned fiercely at Richars, who was now gaping like a fish. Then he just grinned. Two hundred witnesses. She can't back out now . . . .
"So much for that line of reasoning, Lord Richars," Ekaterin finished. She sat back with a hand-dusting gesture, and added, by no means under her breath, "Twit."
Emperor Gregor looked decidedly amused. Nikki, beside Ekaterin, was jittering with enthusiasm, mumbling something that looked like go-go-mama. The gallery had broken into half-choked titters. Ivan just rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand, though his eyes were narrowed with laughter. He glanced again behind Ekaterin, where the Vicereine looked as though she was choking, and the Viceroy turned a bark of laughter into a discreet cough. In a sudden flush of self-consciousness, Ekaterin shrank in her seat, hardly daring even to look at her brother Hugo or Vassily. She looked down at Miles, though, and her lips softened with a helpless smile.
Miles grinned back like a loon; Richars's blackest glare in his direction slid off him as though deflected by a force field. Gregor made a brief gesture to the Lord Guardian to move things along.
Richars had entirely lost the thread of his argument by now, as well as the momentum, center stage, and the sympathy of his audience. Anyone's attention that wasn't fixed on Ekaterin was aimed at Miles, with an amusement grown impatient with Richars's ugly drama. Richars finished weakly and incoherently, and left the Circle.
The Lord Guardian called the voice vote to begin. Gregor, who fell early in the roll as Count Vorbarra, voted Pass rather than an abstention, reserving the right to cast his ballot at the end, should a deciding vote be required, an Imperial privilege he didn't often invoke. Miles started to track the vote, but by the time the roll came around to him, had taken to jotting repeated iterations of Lady Ekaterin Nile Vorkosigan intertwined with Lord Miles Naismith Vorkosigan in his fanciest handwriting down the margins of his flimsy. René Vorbretten, grinning, had to prompt him to the correct response, which got another muffled laugh from the gallery.
No matter: Miles could tell when the magic majority of thirty-one had passed by the rustling that grew on floor and gallery, as others keeping the tally concluded that Dono was in. Richars was left with a poor showing of some dozen votes, as several of his counted-upon Conservative supporters called abstentions in the wake of Count Vorhalas's sturdy vote for Lord Dono. Dono's final total was thirty-two, not exactly an overwhelming victory, but with a vote to spare above the minimum for binding decision. Gregor, with obvious satisfaction, cast the Vorbarra vote as an abstention, affecting the outcome not at all.
A stunned-looking Richars climbed to his feet at the Vorrutyer's District desk, and cried desperately, "Sire, I appeal this decision!" Really,