The Warrior's Apprentice b-3

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  "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."

  "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 …"

  Cou
nt 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."

  EPILOGUE

  The emergency docking drill was called in the middle of the night cycle, naturally. He'd probably have timed it that way himself, Miles thought, as he scrambled through the corridors of the orbital weapons platform with his fellow cadets. This four-week stint of orbital and free-fall training was due to end tomorrow for his group, and the instructors hadn't pulled anything nasty for at least four days. Not for him the galloping anticipation of upcoming leave planetside that had formed the bulk of the conversation in the officer's mess last night. He had sat quietly, meditating on all the marvelous possibilities for a grand finale.

  He arrived at his assigned shuttle hatch corridor at the same moment as his co-trainee and the instructor. The instructor's face was a mask of neutrality. Cadet Kostolitz looked Miles over sourly.

  "Still carrying that obsolete pig-sticker, eh?" said Kostolitz, with an irritated nod at the dagger at Miles's waist.

  "I have permission," said Miles tranquilly.

  "D'you sleep with it?"

  A small, bland smile. "Yes."

  Miles considered the ongoing problem of Kostolitz. The accidents of Barrayaran history guaranteed he would be dealing with class-consciousness in his officers throughout his Imperial Service career, aggressive like Kostolitz's or in more subtle forms. He must learn to handle it not merely well, but creatively, if his officers were ever to give him their best.

  He had the uncanny sensation of being able to look through Kostolitz the way a doctor saw through a body with his diagnostic viewers. Every twist and tear and emotional abrasion, every young cancer of resentment growing from them, seemed red-lined in his mind's eye. Patience. The problem displayed itself with ever-increasing clarity. The solution would follow, in time, with opportunity. Kostolitz could teach him much. This docking drill might prove interesting after all.

  Kostolitz had acquired a thin green armband since they had last been paired, Miles saw. He wondered what wit among t
he instructors had come up with that idea. The armbands were rather like getting a gold star on your paper in reverse; green represented injury in drills, yellow represented death, in the judgment of whatever instructor was umpiring the simulated catastrophe. Very few cadets managed to escape these training cycles without a collection of them. Miles had encountered Ivan Vorpatril yesterday, sporting two greens and a yellow, not as bad as the unfortunate fellow he'd seen at mess last night with five yellows.

  Miles's own undecorated sleeve was attracting a bit more attention from the instructors than he really wanted, lately. The notoriety had a pleasant flip-side; some of the more alert among his fellow cadets vied quietly to have Miles in their groups, as armband repellent. Of course, the very most alert were now avoiding him like a plague, realizing he was beginning to draw fire. Miles grinned to himself, in happy anticipation of something really sneaky and underhanded coming up. Every cell of his body seemed awake and singing.

  Kostolitz, with a stifled yawn and a last growl at Miles's upper-class decorative blade, took the starboard side of the shuttle and began working forward with his checklist. Miles took the port side, ditto. The instructor floated between them, watching sharply over their shoulders. He'd got one good thing out of his adventures with the Dendarii Mercenaries, Miles reflected; his free-fall nausea had vanished, an unexpected side-benefit of the work Tung's surgeon had done on his stomach. Small favors.

  Kostolitz was working swiftly, Miles saw from the corner of his eye. They were being timed. Kostolitz counted emergency breath masks through the plexiglass of their case and hurried on. Miles almost called a suggestion to him, then clamped his jaw. It wouldn't be appreciated. Patience. Item. Item. Item—first aid kit, correctly in its wall socket. Automatically suspicious, Miles unlocked it and checked to see that all its contents were indeed intact. Tape, tourniquets, plastic bandage, IV tubing, meds, emergency oxygen—no surprises concealed there. He ran a hand along the bottom of the case, and caught his breath—plastic explosive? No, only a wad of chewing gum. Shucks.