Lois Bujold - The Warrior's Apprentice

By the time he reached the account of how he broke the blockade at last, Gregor's lips were parted in fascination, and Count Vorkosigan's eyes glinted with appreciation. Ivan's arrival, and Miles's deductions from it—he was reminded of the hour, and reached for his hip flask.

"What is that?" asked his father, startled.

"Antacid. Uh—want some?" he offered politely.

"Thank you," said Count Vorkosigan. "Don't mind if I do." He took a grave swig, so straight-faced even Miles was not sure if he was laughing.

Miles gave a brief, bald account of the thinking that led him to return in secret, to attempt to surprise Vordrozda and Hessman. Ivan endorsed all he had been eyewitness to, giving Hessman the lie. Gregor looked disturbed at having his assumptions about his new friends turned so bluntly inside-out. Wake up Gregor, thought Miles. You of all men cannot afford the luxury of comfortable illusions. No, indeed, I have no desire to trade places with you.

Gregor was downcast by the time Miles finished. Count Vorkosigan sat at Gregor's right hand, backwards on a plain chair as usual, and gazed at his son with a pensive hunger.

"Why, then?" asked Gregor. "What did you think to make of yourself, when you raised up such force, if not Emperor—if not of Barrayar, perhaps of someplace else?"

"My leige," Miles lowered his voice. "When we played together in the Imperial Residence in the winters, when did I ever demand any part except that of Vorthalia the loyal? You know me—now could you doubt? The Dendarii Mercenaries were an accident. I didn't plan them—they just happened, in the course of scrambling from crisis to crisis. I only wanted to serve Barrayar, as my father before me. When I couldn't serve Barrayar, I wanted—I wanted to serve something. To—" he raised his eyes to his father's, driven to a painful honesty, "to make my life an offering fit to lay at his feet." He shrugged. "Screwed up again."

"Clay, boy." Count Vorkosigan's voice was hoarse but clear. "Only clay. Not fit to receive so golden a sacrifice." His voice cracked.

For a moment, Miles forgot to care about his coming trial. He lidded his eyes, and stored tranquillity away in his heart's most secret recesses, to pleasure him in some lean and desperate future hour. Fatherless Gregor swallowed, and looked away, as if ashamed. Count Vorhalas stared at the floor discomfited, like a man accidentally intruding onto some private and delicate scene.

Gregor's right hand moved hesitantly to touch the shoulder of his first and most loyal protector. "I serve Barrayar," he offered. "It's justice is my duty. I never meant to dispense injustice."

"You were ring-led, boy," Count Vorkosigan muttered, to Gregor's ear alone. "Never mind. But learn from it."

Gregor sighed. "When we played together, Miles, you always beat me at Strat-O. It was because I knew you that I doubted."

Miles knelt, head bowed, and spread his arms. "Your will, my leige."

Gregor shook his head. "May I always endure such treason as that." He raised his voice to his witnesses. "Well, my lords? Are you satisfied that the substance of Vordozda's charge, intent to usurp the Imperium, is false and malicious? And will you so testify to your peers?"

"Absolutely," said Henri Vorvolk with enthusiasm. Miles gauged that the second-year cadet had fallen in love with him about halfway through his account of his adventures with the Dendarii Mercenaries.

Count Vorhalas remained cool and thoughtful. "The usurpation charge does indeed appear false," the old man agreed, "and by my honor I will so testify. But there is another treason here. By his own admission, Lord Vorkosigan was, and indeed remains, in violation of Vorloupulous's law, treason in its own right."

"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 leige." 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 its military context. So you changed the context."