Lois Bujold - Barrayar

Gregor looked doubtful, but did not fuss further, though the next morning as he was put up behind Esterhazy on the shaggy horse he looked near to tears.

Cordelia said anxiously, “Take care of him, Armsman.”

Esterhazy gave her a driven look. “He’s my Emperor, Milady. He holds my oath.”

“He’s also a little boy, Armsman. Emperor is … a delusion you all have in your heads. Take care of the Emperor for Piotr, yes, but you take care of Gregor for me, eh?”

Esterhazy met her eyes. His voice softened. “My little boy is four, Milady.”

He did understand, then. Cordelia swallowed relief and grief. “Have you … heard anything from the capital? About your family?”

“Not yet,” said Esterhazy bleakly.

“I’ll keep my ears open. Do what I can.”

“Thank you.” He gave her a nod, not as retainer to his lady, but as one parent to another. No other word seemed necessary.

Bothari was out of earshot, having returned to the cabin to pack up their few supplies. Cordelia went to Kly’s stirrup, as he prepared to swing his black and white horse about and lead Esterhazy and Gregor on their way. “Major. Sonia passed on a rumor that Vordarian’s troops took Mistress Hysopi. Bothari had hired her to foster his baby girl. Do you know if they took Elena—the baby—too?”

Kly lowered his voice. “’Twas the other way around, as I have it. They went for the baby, Karla Hysopi raised hell, so they took her too even though she wasn’t on the list.”

“Do you know where?”

He shook his head. “Somewhere in Vorbarr Sultana. Belike your husband’s Intelligence will know exactly, by now.”

“Have you told the Sergeant yet?”

“His brother armsman told him, last night.”

“Ah.”

Gregor looked back over his shoulder at her as they rode away, until they were obscured from sight by the tree-boles.

For three days Kly’s nephew guided them through the mountains, Bothari on foot leading Cordelia on a bony-hipped little hill horse with a sheepskin pad cinched to its back. On the third afternoon, they came to a cabin which sheltered a skinny youth who led them to a shed that held, wonder of wonders, a rickety lightflyer. He loaded up the backseat with Cordelia and six jugs of maple syrup. Bothari shook hands silently with Kly’s nephew, who mounted the little horse and vanished into the woods.

Under Bothari’s narrow eye, the skinny youth coaxed his vehicle into the air. Brushing treetops, they followed ravines and ridges up over the snow-frosted spine of the mountains and down the other side, out of Vorkosigan’s District. They came at dusk to a little market town. The youth brought his flyer down in a side street. Cordelia and Bothari helped him carry his gurgling produce to a small grocer’s shop, where he bartered the syrup for coffee, flour, soap, and power cells.

Upon returning to his lightflyer, they found that a battered groundtruck had pulled up and parked behind it. The youth exchanged no more than a nod with its driver, who hopped out and slid the door to the cargo bay aside for Bothari and Cordelia. The bay was a quarter full of fiber sacks of cabbages. They did not make very good pillows, though Bothari did his best to arrange Cordelia a nest of them as the truck rocked along above the dismally uneven roads. Bothari then sat wedged against the side of the cargo bay and compulsively polished the edge of his knife to molecular sharpness with a makeshift strop, a bit of leather he’d begged from Sonia. Four hours of this and Cordelia was ready to start talking to the cabbages.

The truck thumped to a halt at last. The door slid aside, and first Bothari then Cordelia emerged to find themselves in the middle of nowhere: a gravel-surfaced road over a culvert, in the dark, in the country, in an unfamiliar district of unknown loyalties.

“They’ll pick you up at Kilometer Marker Ninety-six,” the truck driver said, pointing to a white smudge in the dimness that appeared to be merely a painted rock.

“When?” asked Cordelia desperately. For that matter, who were they?

“Don’t know.” The man returned to his truck and drove off in a spray of gravel from the hoverfan, as if he were already pursued.

Cordelia perched on the painted boulder and wondered morbidly which side was going to leap out of the night first, and by what test she might tell them apart. Time passed, and she entertained an even more depressed vision of no one picking them up at all.

But at last a darkened lightflyer floated down out of the night sky, its engines pitched to eerie near-silence. Its landing feet crunched in the gravel. Bothari crouched beside her, his useless knife gripped in his hand. But the man awkwardly levering himself up out of the passenger seat was Lieutenant Koudelka. “Milady?” he called uncertainly to the two human scarecrows. “Sergeant?” A breath of pure delight puffed from Cordelia as she recognized the pilot’s blonde head as Droushnakovi. My home is not a place, it is people, sir… .

With Bothari’s hand on her elbow, at Koudelka’s anxious gesture Cordelia fell gratefully into the padded backseat of the flyer. Droushnakovi cast a dark look over her shoulder at Bothari, wrinkled her nose, and asked, “Are you all right, Milady?”

“Better than I expected, really. Go, go.”

The canopy sealed, and they rose into the air. Vent fans powered up, cycling filtered air. Colored lights from the control interface highlighted Kou’s and Drou’s faces. A technological cocoon. Cordelia glanced at systems readouts over Droushnakovi’s shoulder, and then up through the canopy; yes, dark shapes paced them, guardian military flyers. Bothari saw them, too, his eyes narrowing in approval. Some fraction of tension eased from his body.

“Good to see you two—” some subtle cue of their body language, some hidden reserve, kept Cordelia from adding together again. “I gather you got that accusation about the comconsole sabotage straightened out in good order?”

“As soon as we got the chance to stop and fast-penta that guard corporal, Milady,” Droushnakovi answered. “He didn’t have the nerve to suicide before questioning.”

“He was the saboteur?”

“Yes,” answered Koudelka. “He’d intended to escape to Vordarian’s troops when they arrived to capture us. Vordarian apparently suborned him months ago.”

“That accounts for our security problems. Or does it?”

“He passed information about our route, the day of the sonic grenade attempt.” Koudelka rubbed at his sinuses in memory.

“So it was Vordarian behind that!”

“Confirmed. But the guard doesn’t seem to have known anything about the soltoxin. We turned him inside out. He wasn’t a high-level conspirator, just a tool.”

Nasty flow of thought, but, “Has Illyan reported in yet?”

“Not yet. Admiral Vorkosigan hopes he may be hiding in the capital, if he wasn’t killed in the first fighting.”

“Hm. Well, you’ll be glad to know Gregor’s all right—”

Koudelka held up an interrupting hand. “Excuse me, Milady. The Admiral ordered—you and the Sergeant are not to debrief anything about Gregor to anyone except Count Piotr or himself.”

“All right. Damn fast-penta. How is Aral?”

“He’s well, Milady. He ordered me to bring you up to date on the strategic situation—”

Screw the strategic situation, what about my baby? Alas, the two seemed inextricably intertwined.

“—and answer any questions you had.”

Very well. “What about our baby? Pi—Miles?”

“We’ve heard nothing bad, Milady.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we’ve heard nothing,” Droushnakovi put in glumly.

Koudelka shot her an irate look, which she shrugged off with a twitch of one shoulder.