Forward Momentum -- Chapter 12 (a)

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Chapter Twelve

How fast Miles’s pangalactic bombshell seemed to go off depended, Helen later decided, on who you were and what else you were trying to do at the time.

As she anticipated, watching Gregor and his escorts leave Vorkosigan Surleau in haste that strange Sunday evening, some official matters were initiated very swiftly. A fast courier was des­patched to Sergyar the same night warning them not to expect their Viceroy and Vicereine anytime soon; another left for Komarr. Within a day more substantial traffic began to hum in various directions, starting with an intimate imperial dinner-invitation at oddly short notice to the longserving Cetagandan Ambassador, the haut Paramel Volusor, and his senior ghem-Colonels in security and chancery.

Establishment of individual frame-links between opposite numbers was equally swift once the courier had been escorted to Eta Ceta by an Imperial Guard frigate. On the Tuesday afternoon Georg, acquiring from somewhere both a frame for his basement lab and Dr Chandler, made contact with Artificer General Kariam, took a firm hold of Chandler’s collar and was little seen for several days. ImpSec security around their house discreetly increased, Helen noticed.

After eight days she learned from Ekaterin by secured comconsole that the Viceroy and Vicereine had departed for Eta Ceta with a hastily assembled array of surprised senior diplomats, administrators, and soldiers-as, apparently, in their equivalent way, had the hauts Palma Robine and Raniton Degtiar, for Barrayar. Helen wondered what Ceta­gandans finding themselves suddenly en route to Barrayar were making of it all and whether the ghem wore face-paint in private argument. The same call relayed edited highlights of Gregor’s animated, ironic report to Miles of a long, personal frame-call with Fletchir Giaja, entirely in the freer-speaking haut mode and at Gregor’s cue in Cetagandan, followed by one between Laisa and Rian Degtiar about which less seemed to be known, or could be said. Given their respective ages Gregor felt close personal friendship with Giaja was impossible, but the emperors seemed to have liked one another well enough as absolute rulers, made each other laugh at common frustrations, and found in one another uniquely qualified auditors. As Miles had hoped, Ekaterin added, leaving her aunt to wonder just how many agendas of his own the astonishing little man had really been advancing with his great galactic scheme. But perhaps, beyond serving his father-and there were several things about that Helen knew she hadn’t grasped at all-most of them came down to serving Gregor anyway, and provision of an understanding celestial ear was to Miles merely another wrinkle.

In her own life the bombshell’s detonation was both fast and slow, a private tide of news and excitements from Georg and Ekaterin qualified by a steady flow of year-end examinatorial duties. Professionally she also had a rising awareness of the vast Barrayaran public, sleeping through a notably warm early summer without the faintest suspicion of what was about to hit them, though there were a few early straws-in-the-wind as one or two news editors woke up to sharply increased traffic between Imperial Residence and Cetagandan Embassy. One Hassadar morning-paper she saw speculated with notable accuracy about possible links between tall tales from Vorkosigan Surleau about a surprise imperial visit and these suggestive diplomatic developments. A few days later the same paper reported Lady Vorkosigan’s Imperial commission, following widespread public acclaim for her beautiful Barrayaran garden at Vorkosigan House, to refurbish the gardens at the Occupation Memorial. Contacted with cautious congratulations, Ekaterin herself said smilingly only that she felt horribly underqualified for the job and wasn’t looking forward to what her classmates might have to say about it in the autumn semester, but it was a request she hadn’t been able to refuse, especially as General Coram was expected sooner rather than later on his pilgrimage of ancestral grace and would certainly wish to go there. Then she added with a different smile that Master Tsipis dealt with all family press-releases in Hassadar. Helen had nodded and let her niece go, thinking there were stranger ways for history-in-waiting to make itself known than preparation of a symbolic garden.

* * * * *

For Captain Lord Ivan Vorpatril the great bombshell took five days to explode fully, and was by turns affronting, dismaying, irritating, heart­stopping, and mind-numbing without ever ceasing to be horribly confus­ing. He was enjoying his hard-earned Komarran posting and had privately decided to extend it for at least one additional tour, but his fond plans were tossed aside with a full week in Solstice still to go by urgent recall to Ops Command in Vorbarr Sultana. Dire invocations of what he had been promised, rising volubly up his chain of command, made no difference at all, even when he took a deep breath and invoked Gregor directly. After the tedious three-day, multi-jump journey to Barrayar by fast courier, and a very late arrival following some unusual docking and transfer delays suggesting heavy official traffic, he found himself met, welcomed, fed, washed, and sent to bed, gritting his teeth, by his mother, who like the hovering Illyan seemed uncommonly pleased about something. Next morning he reported to Ops Command, as required.

About an hour later, slamming into his mother’s office at the Imperial Residence, he found Illyan again present, standing behind Alys with a hand on her shoulder, reading something on her comconsole screen. After being politely requested by his mother to shut the door behind him, staring wildly, and doing so with exaggerated care, he stood trembling, waving the papers clutched in his hand.

“What is all this?” Ivan did not care how unreasonable he might sound. “How can I have been seconded back to you? You promised. Gregor promised. What madness are you up to now?”

“You have been given your majority, dear. I thought you’d be pleased. You’ve already changed your shoulder-tabs, I see.”

Actually, Ivan had had them changed for him by the general who had given him his orders. Left to his own devices he would have known well enough not to swallow the bribe of a promotion before at least trying to understand what he was being bribed to do-not that his majority wasn’t in his own opinion long overdue, and especially satisfatory in restoring his superiority in rank to his annoying cousin, who might be a Lord Auditor but had only made it to Captain by cheating with Gregor. He spluttered with pure frustration.

Alys pursed her lips and pushed a switch to one side of her comconsole. Ivan felt the odd, flattening pressure of a cone-of-silence damping-field come on, and looked up to see the distinctive triangular generator-bud protruding from the ceiling. With nasty suspicion growing in his heart and a worse feeling in his stomach he looked at his mother.

“You didn’t use to have one of those.”

“No, dear. I do now.”

He really didn’t want to know but found he couldn’t stop himself. “Why?”

“I’m helping to arrange something for Gregor and Laisa, dear.”

Visions of some hideous extension to the whole ghastly wedding rigmarole boiled in Ivan’s head. His first two months on Komarr had been entirely occupied by the second imperial marriage-ceremony, held in the bride’s home sector with more mercantile oligarchs attending than Ivan had known existed, all with enormous families. But even Gregor had been grey with exhaustion by the end and as mortally relieved as everyone to reach the finishing-line; surely he would not consent to anything more.

“I’m sure you’re helping them arrange half the Nexus, mother. Why am I here?”

“No, dear, arranging the Nexus would be your cousin’s responsibility. And you’re here so you can leave for Eta Ceta tomorrow.”

Miles! “I should have known.” Even to his own ears his voice was unpleasantly grating.  “What has the lunatic dwarf been …”

Ivan’s voice trailed away, gratings and all. Had his mother just said she was sending him to Eta Ceta? That was … a Cetagandan planet. He’d been there before, when Miles had turned a diplomatic disaster into some kind of bizarre personal triumph. In the process Ivan had been assaulted, drugged, humiliated, drugged again, kidnapped, and left unconscious on the floor of the Star Crèche, before being expected as usual to save everybody’s bacon. He had resented it all very much and no-one had taken the slightest notice. His eyes narrowed. Illyan seemed to be concealing some powerful emotion. His mother was at her most dangerously bland.

“Did you say Eta Ceta?”

“Yes, dear, I did.”

Again Ivan found he could not stop himself. “Eta Ceta is a Cetagandan planet.”

“Yes, dear.”

Illyan suffered a setback in his struggle with emotion, a smile writhing onto his face. “Well remembered, Ivan.”

He glared at the man who had unaccountably become his … stepfather, he supposed, though without the benefit of anything so ordinary as courtship or marriage. Then he found a terrible insanity washing over his head as his mother spoke.

“While you were away, dear, kicking over your heels and cooling the traces, Miles met a Terran scientist who is rewriting the laws of physics, so he took the opportunity to get Gregor and the haut Fletchir Giaja to agree to a full peace treaty.” She smiled at him evenly. “We’re going to conquer Jackson’s Whole together as an ice-breaker. Aral and Cordelia have already left for the Celestial Garden with a sizeable mission, and we’re expecting their Cetagandan equivalents here any day.”

Illyan lost his struggle of concealment. The emotion was not amusement but an obscenely naked glee that made Ivan recoil. “We’ve agreed to rename it Aralyar Ceta after the conquest, by the way.”

“Anyway, dear, as I’m sure you can imagine there are a lot of other provisions.” His mother’s voice acquired a doubting tone. “Miles says you’ll understand perfectly, after a little thought, if I tell you the conquest looks as if it’s the ghem-lords’ end of the deal, while actually it’s the Star Crèche’s. So we have some business to pursue with the haut Pel Navarr, and as you already know one another she asked specially for you to serve as Gregor’s emissary.”

Ivan was too far gone in shock to be further affected by his troubling memories of the haut Pel. He was nevertheless aware that she was not only a woman possessed of the kind of beauty that made your raging desire for her as impossible to avoid or subdue as it was self-consciously hopeless, but also appallingly given, in as much as any haut could be, to an almost Milesian mania for gadgets and action. Distantly he felt himself shuddering. Things just went on getting worse.

“Miles is still resting down in Vorkosigan Surleau with Nikki and Ekaterin, I’m glad to say, but he’s sent you the general briefing-pack for those joining the need-to-know list, and some special instructions.” His mother frowned thoughtfully. “You know, when I spoke to her last Pel had a very nice young ghem-woman with her, a Lady Arvin, whom she seems to be grooming. It occurs to me, dear, that with this treaty and posting you may have an opportunity to set a trend and help Gregor with a Cetagandan marriage, so do keep your wits about you, please.”

Ivan’s emotions at that moment are hard to describe.

* * * * *

For Miles things were blessedly slow for a while. His obsession with contingencies and mute awareness of the mental state he would be in if all his plans came to improbable fruition had prompted him to have ready-and-waiting the bones of the briefing-pack that would be needed. Senior staff in special offices Allegre and Vorlynkin hastily established could (and did) fill in the rest. He stayed in touch with the Residence and while his parents were on Barrayar Vorkosigan House, but events had their own momentum and he was done with pushing. After Gregor’s report of a satisfactory first personal exchange with Giaja and before Ekaterin had to begin work at the Occupation Memorial, a prospect that delighted him, he sent a discreet warning to the Csuriks in Silvy Vale and organised a back-country expedition for the days before Midsummer. He also used his seizure stimulator.

Ekaterin, who understood where they were going and why, was willing to fall in with his plans, though expressing doubts and some trepidation. Nikki, examining the horse he was to ride with unalloyed nearly-twelve-year-old suspicion, took more persuading that camping out was after all such an enjoyable notion. But the elderly mare was placid, her saddle well padded, and once they had cleared the hacking-paths of the estate and rising foothills began to screen out any other world, then to give way to a rockier landscape with higher-altitude flora and fauna and occasional panoramas, the natural fascination of exploring took over.

Miles saw no reason camping should be needlessly rough. Besides taking Pym (who remembered riding this way eleven years before and asked to come) and Roic, as well as a female ostler with a passionate knowledge of mountain flowers, he had arranged for tents, food, and cooking-gear to be lightflyered ahead. These arrangements, mollifying Nikki, relieved the need for pack-horses, of which Miles did not in any case have enough with six people to mount. Fat Ninny was old and slow, picking his way carefully, but Miles could not think of riding any other horse and his short body weighed little enough, surely. When the geriatric gelding whickered with pleasure as they set off he felt his heart lift and the exhausted depression he had felt for days fall away.

The great swathe of feral roses he remembered was still there, glorious with colours, and the sudden sight as she crested a rise in the trail brought Ekaterin the pleasure he hoped for. If anything the rose colony had spread, and by the time Pym and Roic hacked a way through, with experimental help from Nikki, everyone had scratched hands and the horses had all had a good snack. Sucking a thumb beaded with blood Miles reached out with his other hand, leaning more than he ought, to place a rose-bud in Ekaterin’s hair and at her surprised smile knew another kind of content­ment again.

A few miles further on they climbed steeply for a while and camped for the first night in a small meadow with a rocky stream chattering to itself on one side. This northern sub-alpine world was wholly new to Nikki and Ekaterin, and they wandered together about meadow, stream, and wood-edge with the ostler, pointing things out to one another and learning local names of flowers and the visible peaks and ridges of the Dendarii. Miles lay back against a flat rock to watch them and assemble his thoughts in the last of the sun, while both Armsmen pitched tents, and Roic (having drawn the short straw) made necessary entrenchments at a decent distance. Miles did bestir himself to gather wood, and then, to everyone’s surprise, once a fire was crackling merrily in the gathering dusk, to cook, drawing Nikki to help him set wrapped potatoes to bake in the heat of the fire’s edge and sausages to grill in a porta-oven.

The food was as good as outdoor cooking always tasted at day’s end with a sauce of honourable hunger, and there was pleasantly light wine for the adults as well as Nikki. The boy sampled a glass dubiously but with evident pleasure-more for the implicit maturity of the offer than the taste, Miles thought-before taking a bottle of his favourite juice, which Roic, on first watch, also preferred. As Miles and Ekaterin settled back, replete, with second glasses he deliberately handed the wine-bottle off to a surprised Pym, and in flickering firelight began to talk softly to Nikki of the District and its dominating mountains, the solitude of communities and Barrayar’s cruelly absolute Time of Isolation, Bloody Centuries no sooner ended than followed by twenty years of equally cruel Cetagandan occupation. Then he told stories of his grandfather and mountains, absurdly young guerrilla command, mature generalship, the bewilder­ments of peace, and the reactions of former guerrillas to Mad Yuri’s massacre of their general’s wife and children. Seated on the edge of the light Roic listened as silently at Nikki, but as Miles wound towards his own lifetime Pym began to offer memories of a District lowland youth, and with a little persusasion the ostler joined in.

Early in the evening Miles took care to mention without emphasis the persistent back-country fears of mutation, sustained with traditional responses to it by the genomic legacy of Vorkosigan Vashnoi. Ekaterin’s and Pym’s eyes flickered with Nikki’s in the darkness. As Miles wound on he subtly stressed progress made and yet to be made, prices District communities had paid for the provocations that led to the punitive annihilation of its capital and financial centre, and for proud Vorkosigan capacities that had forced the absentee landlordism on imperial service of successive counts and their heirs over much of the the past century. This theme brought a gleam to the ostler’s eye and an oddly respectful expression to her face as she grasped the ironies echoing back and forth in his tales.

The morning was again fair, and after a slow, cheerful day of progress and side-excursions Miles chose to camp in the late afternoon a few hours short of Silvy Vale in a small glade he thought he recognised from the last time he rode this way with Pym. The lightflyer-crew delivered tents and food, and they followed the same routines making camp.

In a firelit half-darkness thickened by the encircling trees Miles again passed the wine-bottle to Pym, first filling hi’s glass and the ostler’s, watched in silence by Nikki and Ekaterin. Then, sitting back and stretching out a hand to Ekaterin, he began the story of his journey with Pym eleven years before, leaving out nothing he remembered, from the first appearance of a hollow-eyed Harra Csurik at the gates of Vorkosigan Surleau, full-breasted with milk that would never be wanted, and the revelation of her infant daughter Raina, born with the cat’s mouth and dead within a fortnight of a subtly broken neck, to Harra’s suspicion of her husband Lem as the killer, his involvement at his father’s command, and the night-attacks on Fat Ninny and his tent, winding at last to his eventual judgement as the Count-his-father’s Voice of Harra’s mother, Mara Mattulich, for multiple infanticides of her own babes and newborn granddaughter. When he spoke of his roiling uncertainties for most of his time in Silvy Vale Pym was heard to observe that while m’lord might be pleased to say so now he had not shown it then, but the Armsman’s few comments otherwise supported Miles’s account, in sombre details of Raina Csurik’s makeshift autopsy and the reluctant, fascinated, ashamed community gathering that heard Miles’s judgement. On the edge of the light Roic again listened intently. When Miles finished that part of the story, the ostler sat forward, eyes moving between him and Nikki.

“I remember that judgement, m’lord. It was your first as Count’s Voice, wasn’t it? I heard Pym here tell that story the day he got back, in the kitchen, with his ribs all strapped up where poor Ninny had kicked him.” She grinned at the Armsman, teeth gleaming in the half-darkness.

Miles looked curiously at Pym. “I didn’t know you were in the habit of below-stairs recitations.”

“I’m not, m’lord, though I must say you are very good about providing temptations.” He sipped wine with a bland expression as Miles laughed. “But you and the Count were clear that judgement should resound throughout the District, so I helped it on its way.”

The ostler smiled mirthlessly. “Oh it resounded all right. I come from the High Vale, above Pierrotin village, and they were still talking about it next time I went home, a year later. The time after it was Ma Mattu­lich’s death and unmarked burial on everyone’s tongue. You said she should die without remembrance, m’lord, like the childless, but though you don’t hear her name spoken these days she’s remembered all right.”

“I know.” Miles’s voice was soft. “In the last decade reported infant deaths in the mountain sub-districts have fallen by more than half.” He looked at Nikki. “That’s one part of little Raina’s memorial. The other is the school.”

He spoke on, telling the rest of the story-sponsoring Harra Csurik to train at the teacher’s college in Hassadar, seeing her graduate during a rare leave from ImpSec, and his impromptu return visit on his thirtieth birthday two years before, with its revelations of Lem’s appointment as Speaker of Silvy Vale in succession to old man Karal and his visionary drive to create the vale’s new dam for hydroelectric power, the wooden frames of the health clinic being constructed under Lem’s supervision, and the busy two-room Raina Csurik School that Harra now ran. Both Pym and the ostler, as well as Ekaterin, wore smiles of satisfaction in the darkness but his last detail made them sit up.

“I’d really gone there that day, you know, to burn an offering for Raina, but where her grave had been was under the new lake, and Harra said she’d not been able to find a body to move. Raina just … went back to the earth. The only person left under the lake was Ma Mattulich, and by my own Word in the Count-my-father’s Voice no offerings can be burned for her. So I couldn’t do anything then, but later I did burn an offering for Raina, in the cemetery at Vorkosigan Surleau, by my Gran’da’s grave. Just a lock of my hair, and a little bit of his that I had, with some incense. It was very peaceful.”

Pym had seen him often enough at that graveside to appreciate what the gesture had referred to, and had once heard him say it outright all those years before, waiting in Speaker Karal’s house for Mara Mattulich to arrive. Ekaterin also knew from Miles’s own lips that his Gran’da had more than once sought his ‘mutant’ grandson’s abortion and infanticide. From the expression in her eyes the ostler, who would have served the old man, knew it too. But Roic and Nikki didn’t, so Miles told them.

In the silence that followed a grim-faced Roic built up the fire and the wine passed around, Miles offering Nikki another juice. He settled back as Nikki looked up from fiddling with the bottle-top and took a deep breath.

“I’m sorry, sir”-the apology served more than one purpose-“but I’m not sure I understand. Are you saying your Gran’da and Ma Mattulich were alike?”

“In some ways. She was one who called me the Mutie Lord, certainly.”

“Like Alexi Vormoncrief.”

Miles was sufficiently satisfied with the idiot Vormoncrief’s permanent transfer to Kyril Island that he no longer bridled at the name, but beside him he felt Ekaterin stiffen slightly. “Yes, but Ma Mattulich said it to my face. She didn’t lack courage.”

“What did she lack, sir?”

“Besides kindness and conscience?” He thought a moment. “I’d call it flexibility. Even under fast-penta she spoke of her misshapen babies as a punishment, and the need to keep the poison out by killing them. She would have had us all think, even then, she only did her duty. But really she was afraid of the new ways and having to change her beliefs, not in love with the old ones.”

The ostler spat into the fire. “The old harridan never loved anything in her whole life. Heart of cold stone, the way folks tell it.”

“Just like the wicked mutants in the old tales, eh?” Miles’s voice was very soft, and the woman shifted uneasily.

“I didn’t mean-”

“No, don’t worry, you’re quite right. A heart of cold stone she kept in a little box. But a heart nevertheless. Your Grandma Cordelia, Nikki, if you asked her, would first tell you Ma Mattulich lacked the will to forgive herself for what she had felt she had to do, and was really punishing her daughter for not sharing mother’s guilt in her turn. If you pushed your Grandma a little she would also tell you the woman lacked grace, which she would mean in the religious sense, and if you pushed her a lot you might hear her say that all Barrayarans eat their own young, which she would mean more literally than you might think.”

Nikki stared uncertainly, unsure whether to smile at any of this, and sensibly decided to stick to his own guns. “But your Gran’da didn’t lack flexibility, sir, did he?”

“Not usually, Nikki. The Cetagandans taught him a whole lot of it, but Mad Yuri used much up, and so did our long road to Komarr. And then, just once when it mattered, it failed him. By the time he got it back again, it was too late-not for me, but for your Grandma and Gran’da Aral. He’d never have admitted it, but he walked scared around both of them for the rest of his life.” Miles let his voice carry some of the passion he felt, warming him to life again as they neared Silvy Vale. “Still, Nikki, he walked, and your heart has to beat to do that. You’re right that I’m drawing a comparison between him and Ma Mattulich but it points all the differences as well as the echo. If he’d been alive, and her judgement in his hands, she’d probably have thought herself safe, but he would have had her own neck broken for her. Bothari could have done that without blinking. And after facing my judgement, she died within two years. I thought she would. Hoped she would.”

Pym stared at his lord over the flames, not showing any of his shades of bland liege-man’s deference but a profound respect that had nothing to do with privileges and powers of rank save how you saw someone use them. Pym had replaced Bothari in the Vorkosigan Armsmens’ Score, and he knew Miles had spared him executing Mara Mattulich partly because he was not Bothari and had allowed his acute dismay at the task in prospect to show. But he had not, even when he learned of the old woman’s solitary winter death, realised Miles had not so much held the formal sentence of execution he necessarily passed on Mattulich as changed the method, taking Bothari’s responsibilities on himself.

“But your great-Gran’da Piotr, Nikki, after facing your Grandma’s and Gran’da Aral’s judgements, and his own, walked on. He knew he’d been fatally wrong, that he’d never reach his son and daughter-in-law again, but first he reached back into himself, and then even though he’d forbidden them to give me his name, he reached out to me. He taught me to ride. He gave me Ninny. He taught me how to use his seal-dagger properly, and what the smear of blood on a Vor seal really meant. And in the summers he took me up into the mountains to meet his people. Bothari was always with us, of course, or your Grandma would never have let me go, but I don’t think she’s ever quite realised how completely Gran’da had reversed his position.”

He turned to the ostler, listening like Pym with narrowed eyes and new depths of respect.

“You’ll remember. He took me up through all the high villages, starting when I was ten. I could ride well enough, but my height and leg-braces and spine were plain to see. He saw the hexes people cast and heard the comments they made behind our backs, and ignored them, as I did. But he kept me with him whomever we met, wherever we went, and he let them see and hear me. Then he let them see his approval of my competence. That was all. How would you describe what he did?”

The ostler stared, then scratched her head, frowning. “I don’t rightly know, m’lord, though I understand you exactly. I saw you with him myself up in Pierrotin, nearly twenty years ago, and it was as you said, him showing he approved you as his heir’s heir. And you’re right it was more, because of … well, your braces and your spine and all, m’lord. We knew what change you meant to us. And we knew it for an order in his Voice, though you’re right again he never said it out loud.” She grinned a little sourly in the yellow light. “If he didn’t have the words, m’lord, and you don’t, I don’t know why you think I can find some.”

In the silence popping embers and knots in the burning branches were clearly audible. Roic’s face, like Pym’s, turned slowly between the ostler and Miles. Ekaterin’s voice floated over the small sounds of the fire.

“He put his honour into you, for all to see. Not just the honour of the rank and the family you were both born to, but the honour he’d earned from the people here with his life. As you are putting your honour into Nikki now.”

After a moment the ostler smiled fiercely. “Yes, that was the way of it, my Lady.” Then in a fascinating aside, the only sign Miles had seen all evening that his wine had done its job, she turned to Pym. “You never said she was a gardener with words as well.”

Pym’s reply was swift and low. “No need, was there?”

“Huh.”

Much as Miles wanted to follow this up he couldn’t quite see how to do so. Beside him Ekaterin was, he thought, equally tenter-hooked between indignation, pleasure, and curiosity, but their attentions were sharply recaptured when Nikki stirred, turning his empty bottle in his hands so that flashes of light sparked on curves and edges.

“Is that what you’re doing, sir?” Miles said nothing. “I don’t think I really understand, but what Mama said felt right.” He looked up at Miles, his eyes clear. “I do understand about the missing third term, though.”

Speaking to his stepson about the Vortalon imbroglio, as he had shown him round the house the Friday night before the great weekend, Miles had explained the value, if two things that should make sense didn’t, of asking what a missing third term might be. He had used it then to explain Lord Vortalon’s question to Prince Xav about what Emperor Dorca would think; now his heart surged as Nikki’s eyes went to Ekaterin’s face, seeking permission to speak freely of this last thing. Beside him she nodded firmly.

“Say what you will about this, Nikki dear. I can’t tell you we’ll have no secrets here. You know there are things none of us can say aloud. But we don’t need to keep this secret anymore, here or anywhere, if you don’t want to.”

“No, I can see that.” Nikki looked again at Miles, and turned slightly to look at Pym, Roic, and the ostler, sitting quietly on the far side of the flames. Then he took a deep breath. “My Da, my real da who’s dead, he was a mutant too. He had Vorzohn’s Dystrophy.” Surprise and dismay flashed on the faces of Roic and the ostler, but not, Miles saw, on Pym’s. No-one spoke, giving Nikki time to gather himself after the first plunge. “It’s not like Raina Csurik was. You can’t see anything, and at first there are no signs. But there’s this protein in your cells that doesn’t work properly, so when you get older you lose control of yourself or go mad, and die.” He brooded a moment. “I think my Da’s was starting when he died. But I didn’t know about it then. He never told me anything about any of it, and wouldn’t let Mama tell me either, because he was scared of what other people might think. So he never got any treatment. What did he think would happen to us?”

This was not a rhetorical question, Miles realised, but a passionate address to Ekaterin. Her hand was tense in his, and her voice, warm to Nikki, had edges of anger curling underneath love.

“Tien didn’t think at all, Nikki dear. He didn’t want it to be true, so he pretended it wasn’t.”

“But that’s silly!”

“Yes, it is, and worse things as well.”

“I know.” Resolutely Nikki turned again to the intent faces beyond the fire. “Almost the first thing Mama did after my Da died was take me for genetic treatment. I didn’t understand then, but after Mama got engaged she and my stepda explained that even after the treatment the military would never take me for jump-pilot training. It was all I’d ever wanted to do.”

“But you’re alright now, aren’t you, Master Nikki?” Roic’s face was open with relief. “You won’t get this dystrophy yourself?”

“No, I won’t get it. I’ve been cured. It’s just my dream that can’t be fixed.” He looked at Roic for a moment. “But thank you for asking.”

Then he turned squarely to Miles. “What you’re telling me, sir, is that my Da was really a coward, like Ma Mattulich. Not because he was afraid but because he let it paralyse him and make him blind to truths he knew, so he couldn’t change when he needed to. Your Gran’da was scared too, you said, but he didn’t let it stop him at all. Nor did Ma Csurik, even when she thought her husband had killed Raina and no-one would listen. And you don’t ever let it stop you either, despite everything that’s happened to you.”

His face was sombre as he brooded again for a minute.

“But you’re also telling me I don’t have to be afraid like Da, here or anywhere. I can follow you into the mountains. I don’t have to follow him into an early grave.” The adult phrase, heard, Miles guessed, from his Vorsoisson relatives at Tien’s funeral, made everyone wince and Ekaterin’s hand twitched in his, but Nikki was still intent, his voice level. “And you’re saying to go on I have to face him, face my memory of him, and what he did to me because he was scared, and I have to forgive him, because otherwise I’ll be fighting myself all the time. I think that’s what Uncle Gregor was saying too, in the village, about blood-feuds and feuding over blood. So that’s what I’ll do.”

Abruptly he stood up. “Can I get some more wood for the fire?”

Ekaterin was clearly torn between Nikki’s understandable need for time alone and the darkness of the surrounding trees. With a very odd look that Miles doubted ‘Uncle Gregor’ had helped, Roic picked up a heavy branch whose end lay in the fire, and stood himself.

“Perhaps I might come with you, Master Nikki? I need to scout around before my watch.”

“Alright.”

Roic passed Nikki his hand-torch and they went together, the flaring brand, held high, and the swinging torch-beam showing Ekaterin clearly where they both were. She relaxed again beside him, and Miles thought with approval that Armsman Roic was coming along very nicely, since his unfortunate, confidence-destroying, and very bug-buttery entanglement with Enrique Burgos and Parole Officer Gustioz; he rather thought Taura might have had something to do with that, during his and Ekaterin’s first, brief honeymoon here in Vorkosigan Surleau. And Nikki was also doing well, very well; superbly, in fact. Pym and the ostler rose, nodding to Miles and Ekaterin, and moved back into the darkness. Pym went to check tent-ropes and pegs, while the ostler equally needlessly fiddled with horse-tethers and then began stroking Ninny and the other beasts who came crowding around her at the end of the little clearing. Taking advantage of their tact Ekaterin shifted closer to Miles, put her arm around his waist, and rested her cheek on the top of his head. Her voice was low, and full of wonder.

“I didn’t think he’d talk about it for years yet, if ever. He was so hurt and silent, crying inside the soul-trap Tien built for him. And you just walked him straight out of it, as if it were no harder than leaving that locked bathroom in Serifosa.” She kissed the top of his head and sat back to look at him. “You are the most amazing man, my love. And you are already a wonderful father.”

Now Miles leant over to snuggle into his wife’s arms, pillowing his head on her breast. “I had the very best model.”

* * * * *

[1]      A Civil Campaign, Epilogue.