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."
"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.