Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [60]
And if Tien had pulled a hundred thousand marks out of his hat, and told you he won them on trade fleet shares, would you have asked the first question about their origin? Or would you have been overjoyed and thought him a secret genius?
She sat now bent over, aching in every part of her body, up her back, her neck, inside and outside her head. In her heart. Her eyes were dry.
A Vor woman's first loyalty was supposed to be to her husband. Even unto treason, even unto death. The sixth Countess Vorvayne had followed her husband right up to the stocks in which he had been hung to die for his part in the Saltpetre Plot, and sat at his feet in a hunger strike, and died, in fact a day before him, of exposure. Great tragic story, that one—one of the best bloody melodramas from the history of the Time of Isolation. They'd made a holovid of it, though in the vid version the couple had died at the same moment, as if achieving mutual orgasm.
Has a Vor woman no honor of her own, then? Before Tien entered my life, did I not have integrity all the same?
Yes, and I laid it on my marriage oath. Rather like buying all your shares in one fleet .
If Tien had been afflicted with some great misguided political passion—thrown in his lot with the wrong side in Vordarian's Pretendership, whatever—if he had followed his convictions, she might well have followed him with all good will. But this was not allegiance to some greater truth, or even to some grandly tragic mistake.
It was just stupidity, piled on venality. It wasn't tragedy, it was farce. It was Tien all over. But if there was any honor to be regained by turning her own sick husband over to the authorities, she surely did not see it either.
If I grow much smaller, trying to keep my height under his, I believe I must soon disappear altogether.
But if she was not a Vor woman, what was she? To step away from her oath-sworn place at Tien's side was to step across a precipice into the dark, naked of any identity at all.
It was, what did they call it, a window of opportunity. If she left before the crisis broke, before this whole hideous mess came out in some public way, she would not be deserting Tien in his hour of greatest need, would she?
Ask your soldier's heart, woman. Is deserting the night before the battle any better than deserting in the heat?
Yet if she did not go, she tacitly acquiesced to this farce. Only ignorance was innocence, was bliss. Knowledge was . . . anything but power.
No one else would save her. No one else could. And even to open her lips and whisper "help" was to choose Tien's destruction.
She sat still as stone, in silence, for a very long time.
Chapter Eight
Captain Tuomonen arranged to rendezvous with Miles and Tien in the lobby of the Vorsoissons' residence building, rather than at the Terraforming Project offices, a blandly sociable gesture that did not fool Miles for a moment. The Imperial Auditor was to be saddled with an ImpSec guard whether he'd ordered one or not, it appeared. Miles almost looked forward to seeing the test of Tuomonen's polite ingenuity this security determination was doubtless going to demonstrate.
At the bubble-car platform across the park, Miles seized the opportunity to shunt Tien into another car and claim a private one for himself and Tuomonen, the better to decant the night's news from him. A few early morning commuters crowded in with the administrator, and his car slid away into the tubes. But as soon as the next pair of Komarrans, already hesitant at the sight of the green Imperial uniform, got close enough to make out the ImpSec eyes on the captain's collar, they sheered off hastily from any attempt to join Miles's little party.
"Do you always get a bubble-car to yourself?" Miles inquired of Tuomonen as the canopy closed and the car began to move.
"When I'm in uniform. Works like a charm." Tuomonen smiled slightly. "But if I want to eavesdrop on Serifosans, I make sure to wear civvies."
"Ha. So what's the status on Radovas's library this morning?"
"I dispatched one of the compound guards