Lois Bujold - The Warrior's Apprentice

"Yes, sir.

"I cannot change Dorca's law …" said Gregor slowly. Count Vorkosigan, who had begun to look uneasy, relaxed again. "It saved Barrayar. "'

The Emperor paused a long time, awash in bafflement. Miles knew just how he felt. Miles let him stew a few moments more, until the silence was stretched taut with expectation, and Gregor was starting to get that desperate glazed look Miles recognized from his candidacy orals, of a man caught without the answer. Now.

"The Emperor's Own Dendarii Mercenaries," Miles said suggestively.

"What?"

"Why not?" Miles straightened, and turned his hands palm-out. "I'd be delighted to give them to you. Declare them a Crown Troop. It's been done."

"With horse cavalry!" said Count Vorkosigan. But his face was suddenly much lighter.

"Whatever he does with them will be a legal fiction anyway, since they are beyond his reach," Miles bowed apologetically to Gregor. "He may as well arrange it to his own maximum convenience."

"Whose maximum convenience?" inquired Count Vorhalas dryly.

"You were thinking of this as a private declaration, I trust," said Count Vorkosigan.

"Well, yes—I'm afraid most of the mercenaries would be, uh, rather disturbed to hear they'd been drafted into the Barrayaran Imperial Service. But why not put them in Captain Illyan's department? Their status would have to remain covert then. Let him figure out something useful to do with 'em. A free mercenary fleet secretly owned by Barrayaran Imperial Security."

Gregor looked suddenly more reconciled; indeed, intrigued. "That might be practical …"

Count Vorkosigan's teeth glinted in a white flash of a grin, instantly suppressed. "Simon," he murmured, "will be overjoyed."

"Really?" said Gregor dubiously.

"You have my personal guarantee." Count Vorkosigan sketched a bow, sitting.

Vorhalas snorted, and eyed Miles. "You're too bloody clever for your own good, you know, boy?"

"Exactly, sir," said Miles agreeably, in a mild hysteria of relief, feeling lighter by 3000 soldiers and God knew how many tons of equipment. He had done it—the last piece glued back in its place …

"… dare play the fool with me," muttered Vorhalas. He raised his voice to Count Vorkosigan. "That only answers half my question, Aral."

Count Vorkosigan studied his fingernails, eyes alight. "True, we can't leave him running around loose. I, too, shudder to think what accidents he might commit next. He should doubtless be confined to an institution, where he would be forced to labor all day long under many watchful eyes." He paused thoughtfully. "May I suggest the Imperial Service Academy?"

Miles looked up, mouth open in an idiocy of sudden hope. All his calculations had been concentrated on wriggling out from under Vorloupulous's law. He'd scarcely dared even to dream of life afterwards, let alone such reward as this …

His father lowered his voice to him. "Assuming it's not beneath you—Admiral Naismith. I never did get to congratulate you on your promotion."

Miles reddened. "It was all just fakery. sir. You know that."

"All?"

"Well—mostly."

"Ah, you grow subtle, even with me … But you have tasted command. Can you go back to subordination? Demotions are a bitter meat to swallow." An old irony played around his mouth.

"You were demoted, after Komarr, sir …"

"Broken back to Captain, yes."

One corner of Miles's mouth twisted up. "I have a bionic stomach now, that can digest anything. I can handle it."

Count Vorhalas raised skeptical brows. "What sort of ensign do you think he will make, Admiral Vorkosigan?"

"I think he will make a terrible ensign," said Count Vorkosigan frankly. "But if he can avoid being strangled by his harried superiors for—er—excessive initiative, I think he might be a fine General Staff officer someday."

Vorhalas nodded reluctant agreement. Miles's eyes blazed up like bonfires, in reflection to his father's.

After two days of testimony and behind the-scenes maneuvering, the Council vote was unanimous for acquittal. For one thing, Gregor took his place by right as Count Vorbarra and cast a resounding "innocent" as the fourth vote called, instead of the usual abstention customary for the Emperor. The rest swung meekly into line.

Some of Count Vorkosigan's older political opponents looked as if they'd rather spit, but only Count Vorhalas voted an abstention. Then, Vorhalas had never been of Vordrozda's party, and had no taint of association to wash off.

"Ballsy bastard." Count Vorkosigan exchanged a familiar salute across the chamber with his closest enemy. "I wish they all had his backbone, if not his opinions."

Miles sat quietly, absorbing this most mitigated triumph. Elena would have been safe, after all. But not happy. Hunting hawks do not belong in cages, no matter how much a man covets their grace, no matter how golden the bars. They are far more beautiful soaring free. Heartbreakingly beautiful.

He sighed, and rose to go wrestle with his destiny.

The vinyards garlanding the terraced slopes of the long lake above Vorkosigan Surleau were misted with new green. The surface of the water glittered in a warm breath of air, a spatter of silver coins. It had once been a custom somewhere to put coins on the eyes of the dead, Miles had read, for their journey; it seemed appropriate. He imagined the sun-coins sinking to the bottom of the lake, there to pile up and up until they broke the surface, a new island.

The clods of earth were cold and wet yet, winter lingering beneath the surface of the soil. Heavy. He tossed a shovelful shoulder-high from the hole he dug.

"Your hands are bleeding," observed his mother. "You could do that in five seconds with a plasma arc."

"Blood," said Miles, "washes away sin. The Sergeant said so."

"I see." She made no further demur, but sat in companionable silence, her back against a tree, watching the lake. It was her Betan upbringing, Miles supposed; she never seemed to tire of the delight of water open to the sky.

He finished at last. Countess Vorkosigan gave him a hand up out of the pit. He took up the control lead of the float pallet, and lowered the oblong box, waiting patiently all this time, into its rest. Bothari had always waited patiently for him.

Covering it back up was quicker work. The marker his father had ordered was not yet finished; hand-carved, like the others in this family plot. Miles's grandfather lay not far away, next to the grandmother Miles had never known, dead decades before in Barrayaran civil strife. His eye lingered a moment, uncomfortably, on a double space reserved next to his grandfather, above the slope and perpendicular to the Sergeant's new grave. But that burden was yet to come.

He placed a shallow beaten copper bowl upon a tripod at the foot of the grave. In it he piled juniper twigs from the mountains, and a lock of his own hair. He then pulled a colored scarf from his jacket, carefully unfolded it, and placed a curl of finer dark hair among the twigs. His mother added a clipping of short grey hair, and a thick, generous tress of her own red roan, and withdrew to a distance.

Miles, after a pause, laid the scarf beside the hair. "I'm afraid I made a most improper Baba," he whispered in apology. "I never meant to mock you. But Baz loves her, he'll take good care of her … My word was too easy to give, too hard to keep. But there. There." He added flakes of aromatic bark. "You shall lie warm here, watching the long lake change its faces, winter to spring, summer to fall. No armies march here, and even the deepest midnights aren't wholly dark. Surely God won't overlook you, in such a spot as this. There will be grace and forgiveness enough, old dog, even for you." He lit the offering. "I pray you will spare me a drink from that cup, when it overflows for you."