“A bit,” Ivan agreed. The memory of so comfortably ignoring his thirty-sixth birthday drifted across his mind. But some deadlines demanded attention. “You know…I’m going to be a twenty-years man in just four more years. That used to seem forever away, and now it’s…not.”
“What does that mean? In Barrayaran. Or Vor, as the case may be.”
“MilSpeak. Yet another dialect for you. It’s the time a mid-grade officer like me either takes early retirement-not all that early, really-or retakes his oaths and gets serious about tracking for high command. They used to encourage men to stay in, but they don’t so much, these days. They’d rather have new young fellows with new young training.”
“So…what do you want to do? Or do instead?”
“Opting out would be a sure-fire way to avoid unwanted promotion.” He tried to remember his early military idealism, before the glitter had worn off. In retrospect, he wasn’t sure it had been idealism so much as a burning hunger for a status to overawe his fellow obnoxious eighteen-year-olds. Which…seemed much less important, now.
“Is that your answer, then?”
“Might be. It also depends on the alternatives on offer. The consul thinks I should consider the diplomatic corps. That’s-really not an unusual second-career path, for a twenty-years man like me.”
Tej’s lips curved up. “There’s no one like you, Ivan Xav.”
Ivan decided not to argue with this flattering viewpoint.
Tej tried it out in her mouth. “Ambassador Vorpatril?”
“Ambassador and Lady Vorpatril-they like you to come as a set. And they’d fall all over themselves for your language kink. But there’s an apprenticeship first, even if I were fast-tracked. Unless we were sent to the backside of nowhere.” He looked around, and added conscientiously, “Again.”
Tej let her gaze pass over the golden Yllan landscape, the odd but lovely deep blue-green for-want-of-a-better-term vegetation-much the color of a very chilled Rish-the wide, shining, corrosive sea. “Well, someone has to be,” she allowed, judiciously.
“It could involve a lot of wormhole jumps.”
“Mm, but only once every few years. I could…steel myself. And it would keep us far away from both our families.”
“I can see the appeal…”
In all, in truth, it was a problem for another day, Ivan decided. When life and chance handed you an afternoon as idyllic as this one promised to be, it seemed profoundly ungrateful not to pay attention.
Ivan ran a toe up Tej’s shin, and began attending.