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"No such charge," said Count Vorkosigan distantly, "has been laid in the Council of Counts."

Henri Vorvolk grinned. "Who'd dare, after this?"

"A man of proven loyalty to the Imperium, with an academic interest in perfect justice, might so dare," said Count Vorkosigan, still dispassionate. "A man with nothing to lose, might dare—much. Might he not?"

"Beg for it, Vorkosigan," whispered Vorhalas, his coolness slipping. "Beg for mercy, as I did." His eyes shut tight, and he trembled.

Count Vorkosigan gazed at him in silence for a long moment. Then, "As you wish," he said, and rose, and slid to one knee before his enemy. "Let it lay, then, and I will see the boy does not trouble those waters any more."

"Still too stiff-necked."

"If it please you, then."

"Say, 'I beg of you.' "

"I beg of you," repeated Count Vorkosigan obediently. Miles searched for tensions of rage in his father's backbone, found none; this was something old, older than himself, between the two men, labyrinthine; he could scarcely penetrate its inward places. Gregor looked sick, Henri Vorvolk bewildered, Ivan terrified.

Vorhalas's hard stillness seemed edged with a kind of ecstasy. He leaned close to Miles's father's ear. "Shove it, Vorkosigan," he whispered. Count Vorkosigan's head bowed, and his hands clenched.

He sees me, if at all, only as a handle on my father. . . . Time to get his attention. "Count Vorhalas." Miles's voice flexed across the silence like a blade. "Be satisfied. For if you carry this through, at some point you are going to have to look my mother in the eye and repeat that. Dare you?"

Vorhalas wilted slightly. He frowned at Miles. "Can your mother look at you, and not understand desire for vengeance?" He gestured at Miles's stunted and twisted frame.

"Mother," said Miles, "calls it my great gift. Tests are a gift, she says, and great tests are a great gift. Of course," he added thoughtfully, "it's widely agreed my mother is a bit strange . . ." He trapped Vorhalas's gaze direct. "What do you propose to do with your gift, Count Vorhalas?"

"Hell," Vorhalas muttered, after a short, interminable silence, not to Miles but to Count Vorkosigan. "He's got his mother's eyes."

"I've noticed that," Count Vorkosigan murmured back. Vorhalas glared at him in exasperation.

"I am not a bloody saint," Vorhalas declared, to the air generally.

"No one is asking you to be," said Gregor, anxiously soothing. "But you are my sworn servant. And it does not serve me for my servants to be ripping up each other instead of my enemies."

Vorhalas sniffed, and shrugged grudgingly. "True, my liege." His hands unclenched, finger by finger, as if releasing some invisible possession. "Oh, get up," he added impatiently to Count Vorkosigan. The former Regent rose, quite bland again.

Vorhalas glared at Miles. "And just how, Aral, do you propose to keep this gifted young maniac and his accidental army under control?"

Count Vorkosigan measured out his words slowly, drop by drop, as though pursuing some delicate titration. "The Dendarii Mercenaries are a genuine puzzle." He glanced at Gregor. "What is your will, my liege?"

Gregor jerked, startled out of spectatorhood. He looked, rather pleadingly, at Miles. "Organizations do grow and die. Any chance of them just fading away?"

Miles chewed his lip. "That hope has crossed my mind, but—they looked awfully healthy when I left. Growing."

Gregor grimaced. "I can hardly march my army on them and break them up like old Dorca did—it's definitely too long a walk."

"They themselves are innocent of any wrongdoing," Miles hastened to point out. "They never knew who I was—most of them aren't even Barrayaran."

Gregor glanced uncertainly at Count Vorkosigan, who studied his boots, as if to say, You're the one who itched to make your own decisions, boy. But he did add, aloud, "You are just as much Emperor as Dorca ever was, Gregor. Do what you will."

Gregor's gaze returned to Miles for a long moment. "You couldn't break your blockade, within