Winterfair Gifts

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Lies and treachery? Trust and truth? What was he seeing, here? Suddenly, he wasn't sure. Back up, guardsman. "Why not?"

  She glowered at him narrow-eyed, as if trying to see through to the back of his head. "Do you care about Miles? Or is he just your employer?"

  Roic blinked in increasing confusion. He considered his armsman's oath, its high honor and weight. "A Vorkosigan armsman isn't just what I am; it's who I am. He's not my employer at all. He's my liege lord."

  She made a frustrated gesture. "If you knew a secret that would hurt him to the heart—would you, could you, keep it from him even if he asked?"

  What secret? This? That his ex-lover was a thief? It didn't seem as though that could be what she was talking about—around. Think, man.

  "I ... can't pass a judgment without knowledge." Knowledge. What did she know that he didn't? A million things, he was sure. He'd glimpsed some of them, dizzying vistas. But she didn't know him, now, did she? Not the way she evidently knew, say ... m'lord. To her, he was a blank in a brown and silver uniform. With his mirror-polished boot stuck in his mouth, eh. He hesitated, then countered, "M'lord can requisition my life with a word. I gave him that right on my name and breath. Can you trust me to hold his best interests to heart?"

  Stare met stare, and no one blinked.

  "Trust for trust," Roic breathed at last. "Trade, Taura."

  Slowly, not dropping her intent, searching gaze from his face, she drew the cloth from her pocket. She shook it gently, spilling the pearls back into their velvet box. She held the box out. "What do you see?"

  Roic frowned. "Pearls. Pretty. White and shiny."

  She shook her head. "I have a host of genetic modifications. Hideous bioengineered mutant or no—"

  He flinched, his mouth opening and shutting.

  "—among other things I can see slightly farther into the ultraviolet, and quite a bit farther into the infrared, than a normal person. I see dirty pearls. Strangely dirty pearls. And that's not what I usually see when I look at pearls. And then Miles's bride touched them, and an hour later was so sick she could hardly stand up."

  An unpleasant tremor coursed down Roic's body. And why the devil hadn't he noticed that progression of events? "Yes. That's so. They'll have to be checked."

  "Maybe I'm wrong. I could be wrong. Maybe I'm just being horrible and paranoid and, and jealous. If they were proved clean, that would be the end of it. But Roic—Quinn. You don't have any idea how much he loved Quinn. And vice versa. I've been going half-mad all evening, ever since it all clicked in, wondering if Quinn really sent these. It would about slay him, if it were so."

  "Wasn't him these are meant to slay." It seemed his liege lord's love life was as deceptively complicated as his intelligence, both camouflaged by his crippled body. Or by the assumptions people made about his crippled body. Roic considered the ambiguous message Arde Mayhew had evidently seen in the cat blanket. Had this Quinn woman, the other ex-lover—and how many more of them were going to turn up at this wedding, anyway? And in what frame of mind? How many were there, altogether? And what t' hell did the little guy do to have acquired what was beginning to seem far more than his fair share, when Roic didn't even have ... He cut off the gyrating digression. "Or—is this necklace lethal, or not? Could it be some nasty practical joke, to just make the bride sick on her wedding night?"

  "Ekaterin barely touched them. I don't know what this horrible goo may be, but I wouldn't lay those pearls against my skin for Betan dollars." Her face twisted up. "I want it to not be true. Or I want it to not be Quinn!"

  Her dismay, Roic was increasingly convinced, was unfeigned, a cry from her heart. "Taura, think. You know this Quinn woman. I don't. But you said she was smart. D'you think she'd be plain stupid enough to sign her own name to murder?"

  Taura looked taken aback, but then shook her head in renewed doubt. "Maybe. If it were done for rage or revenge, maybe."

  "What if her name was stolen by another? If she didn't send these, she deserves to be cleared. And if she did ... she doesn't deserve anything."

  What was Taura going to do? He hadn't the least doubt she could kill him with one clawed hand before he could fumble his stunner out. The box was still tightly clutched in her great hand. Her body radiated tension the way a bonfire radiated heat.

  "It seems almost unimaginable," she said. "Almost. But people mad in love do the wildest things. Sometimes things they regret forever, afterward. But then it's too late. That's why I wanted to sneak them away and check them in secret. I was praying I'd be proved wrong." Tears stood in her eyes, now.

  Roic swallowed and stood straighter. "Look, I can call ImpSec. They can have those ... whatever they are, on the best forensics lab bench on the planet inside half an hour. They can check the wrappings, check the origin—everything. If another person stole your friend Quinn's name to cloak their crime"—and he shuddered, as his imagination sketched that crime in elaborating and grotesque detail—m'lady dying at m'lord's feet in the snow while her vows were still frost in the air—m'lord's shock, disbelief, howling anguish—"then they should be hunted down without mercy. ImpSec can do that, too."

  She still stood poised in doubt, on the balls of her feet. "They would hunt her down with the same ... un-mercy. What if they got it wrong, made a mistake?"

  "ImpSec is competent."

  "Roic, I'm an ImpSec employee. I can absolutely guarantee you, they are not infallible."

  He ran his gaze down the crowded table. "Look. There's that other wedding gift." He pointed to the folds of shimmering black blanket, still piled in their box. The room was so quiet, he could hear the live fur's gentle rumble from here. "Why would she send two? It even came with a dirty limerick, hand-written on a card." Not presently on display, true. "Madame Vorsoisson laughed out loud when m'lord read it to her."

  A reluctant smile twitched her mouth for a moment. "Oh, that's Quinn, all right."

  "If that's truly Quinn, then this"—he pointed at the pearls—"can't be. Eh? Trust me. Trust your own judgment."

  Slowly, with the deepest distress in her strange gold eyes, Taura wrapped the box in the cloth and handed it to him.

  * * *

  Then Roic found himself facing the task, all by himself, of stirring up ImpSec's Imperial headquarters in the middle of the night. He almost wanted to wait for Pym's return. But he was a Vorkosigan armsman: senior man present, even if merely because sole man present. It was his duty, it was his right, and time was of the essence, if only to relieve Taura's troubled mind at the earliest possible instant. She hovered, bleak and worried, as he gulped for nerve and fired up the secured comconsole in the nearby library.

  A serious-looking ImpSec captain reported to the front hall in less than thirty minutes. He recorded everything, including Roic's verbal report, Taura's description of what the pearls had looked like to her, both their accounts of Madame Vorsoisson's witnessed symptoms, and a copy of Pym's original security check records. Roic tried to be straightforward, as he'd often wished witnesses would have been to him back in Hassadar, although in this version the fraught confrontation in the antechamber became merely, Sergeant Taura voiced a suspicion to me. Well, it was true.

  For Taura's sake, Roic made sure to mention the possibility that the pearls had not been sent by Quinn at all, and pointed out the other gift certainly known to be from her. The captain frowned and bundled up the cat blanket as well, and looked as though he wanted to bundle up Taura along with it. He carried off the pearls, the still-purring blanket, and all related packaging in a series of sealed and labeled plastic bags. All this chill efficiency took a bare half hour more.

  "Do you want to go to bed?" Roic asked Taura when the doors closed behind the ImpSec captain. She looks so tired. "I have to stay up anyway. I can give you a call to your room when there's any news. If there's any news."

  She shook her head. "I couldn't sleep. Maybe they'll have something soon."

  "There's no telling, but I hope so."

  They settled do
wn to wait together on a sturdy-looking sofa in the antechamber opposite the one displaying the gifts. The noises of the night—odd squeaks of the house settling against the winter cold, the faint whir or hum of distant automated machinery—were very noticeable in the stillness. Taura stretched what Roic suspected were knotted shoulders, and he was briefly inspired to offer a back rub, but he wasn't sure how she'd take it. The impulse dissolved in cowardice.

  "Quiet around here at night," she said after a moment.

  She was speaking to him again. Please, don't stop. "Yeah. I sort of like it, though."

  "Oh, you too? The night watch is a philosophical kind of time. Its own world. Nothing moving out there but maybe people being born or people dying, necessity, and us."

  "Eh, and the bad night people we're put on watch against."

  She glanced through the archway into the great hall, and beyond. "Apparently so. What an evil trick...." She trailed off in a grimace.

  "This Quinn ... you've known her a long time?"

  "She was in the Dendarii mercenaries at the time I joined the fleet—original equipment, she says. A good leader; a friend by many shared disasters. And victories, sometimes. Ten years adds up to some weight, even if you're not watching. Especially if you're not watching, I suppose."

  He followed the thought spoken by her glance, as well as her words. "Eh, yeah. God spare me from ever facing such a puzzle. It would be as bad as having your count revolt against the Emperor, I suppose. Or like finding m'lord in on some insane plot to murder Empress Laisa. Shouldn't wonder that you've been running around in circles in your head all night."

  "Tighter and tighter, yes. I couldn't enjoy the Emperor's party from the moment I thought of it, and I know Miles so wanted me to. And I couldn't tell him why—I'm afraid he thought I was feeling out of place. Well, I was, but it wasn't a problem, exactly. I'm usually out of place." She blinked tawny eyes gone dark and wide in the half-light. "What would you do? If you discovered or suspected such a horror?"

  His lips twisted. "That's a tough one. A higher honor must underlie ours, the Count says. We can't ever obey unthinkingly."

  "Huh. That's what Miles says too. Is that where he got it, from his father?"

  "I shouldn't be surprised. M'lord's brother Mark says integrity is a disease, and you can only catch it from someone who has it."

  A little laugh sounded in her throat. "That sounds like Mark, all right."

  He considered her question with the seriousness it merited. "I'd have to turn him in, I guess. I hope I'd have the courage, anyways. Nobody would win, in the end. Least of all me."

  "Oh, yeah. I can see that."

  Her hand lay on the sofa fabric between them, clawed fingers tapping. He wanted to take it and squeeze it for comfort—hers, or his? But he didn't dare. Dammit, try, can't you?

  His argument with himself was interrupted when his wrist com sounded. The gate guard reported the return of the Vorkosigan House party from the Imperial Residence. Roic coded down the house shields and stood aside as the crowd disembarked from a small fleet of groundcars. Pym was in close attendance upon the Countess, smiling at something she was saying over her shoulder to him. The guests, variously cheerful, drowsy, or drunk, streamed past chatting and laughing.

  "Anything to report?" Pym inquired perfunctorily. He glanced in curiosity past Roic at Taura, looming over his shoulder.

  "Yes, sir. See me in private as soon as you can, please."

  The benign sleepy look evaporated from Pym's features. "Oh?" He glanced back at the mob now divesting wraps and streaming up the stairs. "Right."

  Low-voiced as Roic had been, the Countess had caught the exchange. A wave of her finger dismissed Pym from her side. "Although if this is of moment, Pym, I'll take a report before bed," she murmured.

  "Yes, my lady."

  Roic jerked his head toward the antechamber of the library, and Pym followed him and Taura through the archway. The moment the guests had cleared the next room, Roic decanted a short precis of the night's adventure, self-plagiarized from the one he'd just given to the ImpSec forensics captain. Omitting, again, the part about Taura's attempted theft. He hoped like hell that it wasn't going to turn out to be horribly pertinent, later. He would submit the full account to m'lord's judgment, he decided. When the devil was m'lord going to return?

  Pym grew rigid as he took in the report. "I checked that necklace myself, Roic. Scanned it clear of devices—the chemical sniffer didn't pick up anything, either."

  "Did you touch it?" asked Taura.

  Pym's eyes narrowed in memory. "I mainly handled it by the clasp. Well ... well, ImpSec will run it through the wringer. M'lord always claims they can use the exercise. It can't hurt. You acted correctly, Armsman Roic. You can continue about your duties, now. I'll follow it up with ImpSec."

  With this tepid praise, he moved off, frowning.

  "Is that all we get?" Taura whispered as Pym's ascending footsteps faded on the winding staircase.

  Roic glanced at his chrono. "Till ImpSec reports back, I guess. It depends on how hard that dirty stuff you saw"—he didn't insult her by phrasing it as you claimed you saw—"is to identify."

  She scrubbed tired-looking eyes with the back of her hand. "Can I, uh, can I stay with you till they call?"

  "Sure."

  In a moment of true inspiration, he led her down to the kitchen and introduced her to the staff refrigerator. He'd been correct; her extraordinary metabolism was in need of fuel again. Ruthlessly, he cleared out everything on the shelves and laid it in front of her. The early-morning crew could fend for themselves. There was no shame here in offering up servants' food to a guest; everyone ate well from Ma Kosti's kitchen. He dialed up coffee for himself, and tea for her, and they perched together on two stools at the counter.

  Pym found them there as they were finishing eating. The senior armsman's face was so drained of blood as to be nearly green.

  "Well done, Roic—Sergeant Taura," he began in a stiff voice. "Very well done. I just now spoke with ImpSec HQ. The pearls were doctored—with a designer neurotoxin. ImpSec thinks it's of Jacksonian origin, but they're still cross-checking. The dose was sealed under a chemically-neutral transparent lacquer that dissolves at body-heat. Casual handling wouldn't release it, but if someone put the necklace on and wore it for a time ... half an hour or so..."

  "Enough to kill someone?" Taura's tone was tense.

  "Enough to kill a bloody elephant, the lab boys say." Pym moistened dry lips. "And I checked it myself. I bloody passed it." His teeth clenched. "She was going to wear them to—m'lord would have..." He choked himself off and ran a hand over his face, hard.

  "Does ImpSec know who really sent them, yet?" asked Taura.

  "Not yet. But they're all over it, you can believe."

  A vision of the deadly pale spheres lying on milady-to-be's warm throat flashed through Roic's memory. "Madame Vorsoisson touched the pearls last night—night before last, that is now," said Roic urgently. "She had them on for at least five minutes. Is she going to be all right?"

  "ImpSec is dispatching a physician to Lord Auditor Vorthys's to check her—one of their toxins experts. If she'd taken in enough to kill her, she'd have died right then, so that's not going to happen, but I don't know what other ... I have to go now and call m'lord there and warn him to expect a visitor. And ... and tell him why. Well done, Roic. Did I say well done? Well done." Pym drew a shaken, unhappy breath, and strode back out.

  Taura, her chin in her hand as she drooped over her plate, scowled after him. "Jacksonian neurotoxin, eh? That doesn't prove much. The Jacksonians will sell anything to anyone. Although Miles made enough enemies there in some of our old sorties, if they knew it was intended for him they'd probably offer a deep discount."

  "Yeah, I imagine tracing the source is going to take a little longer. Even for ImpSec." He hesitated. "Although wouldn't they just know him on Jackson's Whole under his old covert ops identity? Your little admiral?"

  "That cover's be
en well-blown for a couple of years, he tells me. Partly as a result of the mess his last mission there produced, partly from some other things. Over my head." She yawned, hugely. It was.... impressive. She'd been up since dawn, Roic was reminded, and hadn't slept through the afternoon as he had. Stranded in what must seem to her an alien place, and wrestling terrible fears. All by herself. For the first time, he wondered if she was lonely. One of a kind, the last of her kind if he understood correctly, without home or kin except for that chancy wandering mercenary fleet. And then he wondered why he hadn't noticed her essential aloneness sooner. Armsmen were supposed to be observant. Yeah?

  "If I promise to come by and tell you if I get any news, d'you suppose you could try to sleep?"

  She rubbed the back of her neck. "Would you? Then I think I could. Try, that is."

  He escorted her to her door, past m'lord's dark and empty suite. When he clasped her hand briefly, she clasped back. He swallowed, for courage.

  "Dirty pearls, eh?" he said, still holding her hand. "Y'know ... I don't know about any other Barrayarans ... but I think your genetic modifications are beautiful."

  Her lips curved up, he hoped not altogether bleakly. "You are getting better."

  When she let go and turned in, a claw trailing lightly over the skin of his palm made his body shudder in involuntary, sensual surprise. He stared at the closing door, and swallowed a perfectly foolish urge to call her back. Or follow her inside ... he was still on duty, he reminded himself. The next monitors-check was overdue. He forced himself to turn away.

  * * *

  The sky outside was shifting from the amber night of the city to a chill blue dawn when the gate guard called Roic to code down the house shields for m'lord's return. As the armsman who'd been called out to chauffeur drove the big car off to put away, Roic opened one door to admit the hunched, frowning figure. M'lord looked up to recognize Roic, and a rather ghastly smile lightened his furrowed features.

  Roic had seen m'lord looking strung-out before, but never so alarmingly as this, not even after one of his bad seizures or when he'd had that spectacular hangover after the disastrous butter bug banquet. His eyes stared out from gray circles like feral animals from their dens. His skin was pale, and lines of tension mapped the anxiety across his face. His movements were simultaneously tired and stiff, and jerky and nervous, a spinning exhaustion that could find no place of rest.