"I know. I've been to the staff meetings. Just because I don't say anything doesn't mean I'm not listening."
"Then listen to them when they say they need your leadership."
"I swear to God, Elena, I don't know what for." He ran his hands through his hair, and jerked up his chin. "Baz fixes things, Arde runs them, Tung and Thorne and Auson and their people do the fighting, you keep them all sharp and in condition—I'm the one person who doesn't do anything real at all." He paused. "They say? What do you say?"
"What does it matter what I say?"
"You came …"
"They asked me to come. You haven't been letting anyone else in, remember? They've been pestering me for days. They act like a bunch of ancient Christians asking the Virgin Mary to intercede with God."
A ghost of his old grin flitted across his mouth. "No, only with Jesus. God is back on Barrayar."
She choked, then buried her face in her hands. "Damn you for making me laugh!" she said, muffled.
He rose to capture her hands and make her sit beside him. "Why shouldn't you laugh? You deserve laughter, and all good things."
She did not answer, but stared across the room at the oblong silver box resting in the corner, at the bright scars on the far wall. "You never doubted her accusations," she said at last. "Not even for the first instant."
"I saw a lot more of him than you ever did. He practically lived in my back pocket for seventeen years."
"Yes …" her eyes fell to her hands, now twisting in her lap. "I suppose I never did see more than glimpses. He would come to the village at Vorkosigan Surleau and give Mistress Hysop her money once a month—he'd hardly ever stay more than an hour. Looking three meters tall in that brown and silver livery of yours. I'd be so excited, I couldn't sleep for a day before or after. Summers were heaven, because when your mother asked me up the lake to the summer place to play with you, I'd see him all day long." Her hands tightened to fists, and her voice broke. "And it was all lies. Faking glory, while all the time underneath was this—cess-pit."
He made his voice more gentle than he had ever known he could. "I don't think he was lying, Elena. I think he was trying to forge a new truth."
Her teeth were clenched and feral. "The truth is, I am a madman's rape-bred bastard, my mother is a murderess who hates the very shape of my shadow—I can't believe I've inherited no more from them than my nose and my eyes—"
There it was, the dark fear, most secret. He started in recognition, and dove after it like a knight pursuing a dragon underground. "No! You're not them. You are you, your own person—totally separate—innocent—"
"Coming from you, I think that's the most hypocritical thing I've ever heard."
"Huh?"
"What are you but the culmination of your generations? The flower of the Vor—"
"Me?" He stared in astonishment. "The culmination of degeneration, maybe. A stunted weed .. ." He paused; her face seemed a mirror of his own astonishment. "They do add up, it's true. My grandfather carried nine generations on his back. My father carried ten. I carry eleven—and I swear that last one weighs more than all the rest put together. It's a wonder I'm not squashed even shorter. I feel like I'm down to about half a meter right now. Soon I'll disappear altogether."
He was babbling, knew he was babbling. Some dam had broken in him. He gave himself over to the flood and boiled on down the sluice.
"Elena, I love you, I've always loved you—" She leaped like a startled deer, he gasped and flung his arms around her. "No, listen! I love you, I don't know what the Sergeant was but I loved him too, and whatever of him is in you I honor with all my heart, I don't know what is truth and I don't give a damn anymore, we'll make our own like he did, he did a bloody good job I think, I can't live without my Bothari, marry me!" He spent the last of his air shouting the last two words, and had to pause for a long inhalation.
"I can't marry you! The genetic risks—"
"I am not a mutant! Look, no gills—" he stuck his fingers into the corners of his mouth and spread it wide, "no antlers—" he planted his thumbs on either side of his head and wriggled his fingers.
"I wasn't thinking of your genetic risks. Mine. His. Your father must have known what he was—he'll never accept—"
"Look, anybody who can trace a blood relationship with Mad Emperor Yuri through two lines of descent has no room to criticize anybody else's genes."
"Your father is loyal to his class, Miles, like your grandfather, like Lady Vorpatril—they could never accept me as Lady Vorkosigan."
"Then I'll present them with an alternative. I'll tell them I'm going to marry Bel Thorne. They'll come around so fast they'll trip over themselves."
She sat back helplessly and buried her face in his pillow, shoulders shaking. He had a moment of terror that he'd broken her down into tears. Not break down, build up, and up, and up … But, "Damn you for making me laugh!" she repeated. "Damn you . . ."
He galloped on, encouraged. "And I wouldn't be so sure about my father's class loyalties. He married a foreign plebe, after all." He dropped into seriousness. "And you cannot doubt my mother. She always longed for a daughter, secretly—never paraded it, so as not to hurt the old man, of course—let her be your mother in truth."
"Oh," she said, as if he had stabbed her. "Oh …"
"You'll see, when we get back to Barrayar—"
"I pray to God," she interrupted him, voice intense, "I may never set foot on Barrayar again."
"Oh," he said in turn. After a long pause he said, "We could live somewhere else. Beta Colony. It would have to be pretty quietly, once the exchange rate got done with my income—I could get a job, doing—doing—doing something."
"And on the day the Emperor calls you to take your place on the Council of Counts, to speak for your district and all the poor sods in it, where will you go then?"
He swallowed, struck silent. "Ivan Vorpatril is my heir," he offered at last. "Let him take the Countship."
"Ivan Vorpatril is a jerk."
"Oh, he's not such a bad sort."
"He used to corner me, when my father wasn't around, and try to feel me up."
"What! You never said—"
"I didn't want to start a big flap." She frowned into the past. "I almost wish I could go back in time, just to boot him in the balls."
He glanced sideways at her, considerably startled. "Yes," he said slowly, "you've changed."
"I don't know what I am anymore. Miles, you must believe me—I love you as I love breath—"
His heart rocketed.
"But I can't be your annex."
And crashed. "I don't understand."
"I don't know how to put it plainer. You'd swallow me up the way an ocean swallows a bucket of water. I'd disappear in you. I love you, but I'm terrified of you, and of your future."
His bafflement sought simplicity. "Baz. It's Baz, isn't it?"
"If Baz had never existed, my answer would be the same. But as it happens—I have given him my word."
"You—" the breath went out of him in a "ha,"—"Break it," he ordered.
She merely looked at him, silently. In a moment he reddened, and dropped his eyes in shame.
"You own honor by the ocean," she whispered. "I have only a little bucketful. Unfair to jostle it—my lord."
He fell back across his bed, defeated.
She rose. "Are you coming to the staff meeting?"
"Why bother? It's hopeless."
She stared down at him, lips thinned, and glanced across to the box in the corner. "Isn't it time you learned to walk on your own feet—cripple?"
She ducked out the door just in time to avoid the pillow he threw at her, her lips curving just slightly at this spasmodic display of energy.
"You know me too bloody well," he whispered. "Ought to keep you just for security reasons."