Captain Vorpatril's Alliance (22 page)

Rish had jerked upright in her chair. But there was nowhere to bolt to. Nothing to attack. Or to defend against, either.

“In which case,” Illyan continued, “one obvious solution presents itself. The ladies might be conveyed to Escobar as unlisted supercargo in a routine government fast courier, and discreetly deposited downside by the same means by which we used to insert agents. Or perhaps still do; I don’t suppose the procedures have changed all that much. The break in the trail from here, at least, would be clean, as our couriers go in all possible directions. And no record of your landing on Escobar, either.”

Rish’s mouth had fallen open; she leaned forward like a woman contemplating a bakery case. Tej’s heart was beating faster. She asked, “Could it really be done?”

“Ivan would no doubt have to call in some favors,” said Illyan, a bit blandly.

“Oh, yes, please!” said Rish.

“Er,” said Ivan Xav, glancing at Tej. “Is that what you really want?”

Tej sank back in new hesitation. No gifts came without price tags. “What would you want in return for this deal?” She looked in worry at Illyan, at Lady Alys. At Ivan Xav.

Lady Alys finished her drink. “I should have to think about that.”

Ivan Xav scratched his nose, frowned at Illyan. “Could you assist me, sir?”

Illyan replied airily, “Oh, I think that’s a problem you can solve on your own, Ivan. You know the same go-to men as I do.”

Ivan Xav’s brow wrinkled. He turned to Tej and said, rather plaintively, “But you just got here. Don’t you want to look around a little before running off again—forever?”

“I hardly know,” said Tej, wishing she had a net to catch her spinning wits.

Lady Alys touched her brooch again. “Indeed. Ivan’s aunt has often remarked on the inadvisability of making decisions on an empty stomach. Shall we dine?”

As she rose, and everyone else followed suit, the smiling woman servant spread wide another pair of marquetry doors at the end of the room, revealing a dining chamber with places for five ready and waiting. Lady Alys ushered them all through.

Ivan Xav had not lied; his mother set a first-rate table. The conversation became general as the discreet server brought course after course, with wines to complement. Rish made no signals regarding subtle poisons in the soup or salad, fish or vat-meat; instead, she bore the blissful smile of a trained aesthete given, for a change, no penance to endure in the name of good manners. It was all as well-choreographed as a dance. If Ivan’s mother fed her lover like this all the time, it was no wonder he never left.

“Have you lived here long, sir?” Tej asked Illyan, when a lull in the talk presented an opportunity.

“Say rather, I visit here frequently. I keep my old apartment as my official address, and stay there often enough to make it plausible. And for my mail—letter bombs and such—although I am officially retired, ImpSec still provides a courtesy squad to open it.” He smiled quite as if this were not a disconcerting remark. He added a little regretfully, “Just because I have forgotten so many old enemies does not mean they have forgotten me. We set it about that I am more addled than I am, to appease them. Please feel free to add to that public impression, should the subject come up.”

“I don’t find you addled at all, sir,” said Tej, quite sincerely.

“Ah, but you should have met me before the—no, perhaps you should not have. It’s far better this way, I assure you.”

Both Ivan and his mother shared an unreadable look at this, but it was gone from their faces before Illyan glanced up again from his plate. For all his silences, the man was about as self-effacing as a neutron star; light itself seemed to bend around him.

After dinner, Lady Alys kindly showed Tej and Rish around her more-than-flat, or at least the top floor. Ivan Xav slouched after, his hands in his pockets. The floor below was given over to personal apartments allotted to her servants, of whom she kept four: a cook, a scullion-and-housemaid, who was also the server they’d seen, a dresser-cum-personal secretary, and the driver, Christos. Two rooms she passed over in the tour; Ivan explained in a behind-the-hand whisper that they were Illyan’s bedroom and study. They stepped out briefly to a chilly roof garden, designed, Lady Alys told them proudly, by Lady Ekaterin Vorkosigan, who appeared to be famous for such things. It was past the season for lingering there, though a few late-blooming fall plants still gave up delicate scents, but Tej could see how one might want to, on warmer days or nights. The view was even better than the one from the living room below.

“I do appreciate your welcome,” said Tej to Lady Alys, as they paused at the parapet to take in one last look at the light-draped river valley. “I feel so much better about it all now. I wasn’t sure what to expect or what to do about—well, anything. I’d never planned to visit Barrayar.”

Lady Alys smiled into the dark. “I considered leaving the time and place of your presentation up to Ivan, as a sort of test. Then I considered all the many ways that scenario could go so wrong, and changed my mind.”

“Hey,” said Ivan Xav, but not very loudly.

“There were two principal possibilities on the table.” Lady Alys turned to face Tej. Laying out her cards at last? “First, was that you were an adventuress who had somehow succeeded in entrapping Ivan, and he should be rescued from you as expeditiously as possible. Maybe. After I’d found out how you did it, for future reference. Or possibly he should be allowed to extricate himself from the consequences of his own folly, for a life lesson. I was having trouble deciding which—”

Another inarticulate noise of protest from her son.

Ignoring it, she went on, “But in any case, both Morozov’s and Simon’s evaluations put that as a low probability. The second main hypothesis was that you were exactly as you appeared to be, the unwitting victim of one of Ivan’s less-well-thought-out inspirations, and needed to be rescued from him. My ImpSec consultants were both united in setting that as a high probability.” She added after a contemplative moment, “ImpSec men never fail to hedge their bets, I’m afraid. It’s most annoying, when one must make decisions based on their reports.”

“If anyone needs any rescuing around here, Mamere, I’m perfectly capable of doing it,” said Ivan Xav, sounding annoyed.

“So I hope, love. So I hope.”

When, at length, they took their departure in the mirrored hallway, where Christos again waited to convey them to the groundcar, Ivan Xav bent and gave his Mamere a rather formal peck on the cheek, which seemed to make her smile despite herself. He really was much taller than her, Tej realized.

Lady Alys turned to Tej with a thoughtful look. “As he may or may not have told you, Ivan’s birthday is coming up next week. We always begin it with a little private ceremony, very early in the morning. I hope that he will decide to invite you.”

The startled and bemused glances Lady Alys won from both the men for this were the most mystifying yet.

“Uh…sure,” said Ivan, sounding oddly unsure. “G’night, Mamere. Simon, sir.”

He nodded to Illyan, and ushered Tej and Rish out to the foyer. The natural wood inlay on the wide doors that closed behind them made not an abstract jumble, but a mosaic picture, Tej realized in a last look back. It portrayed a dense woodland, with horses and riders half-hidden, crossing through the trees. Her eye had not parsed it at all, her first time through.

*
 
*
 
*

In the back of the groundcar, Ivan ran his fingers through his scalp in a harried swipe and moaned, “She makes me crazy.” Still, Tej and Rish seemed to have survived the daunting visit, as had he. That it was better to have behind them…he was not yet sure.

“You mean Lady Vorpatril?” said Tej. She gave Ivan a peeved poke in the arm. “She was not at
all
like what you led me to believe. From the way you talked, I thought there would be screaming and weeping and carrying on, at the very least. But she’s very practical.” She added after a moment, “And kind. I didn’t expect kind.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Ivan. “After thirty years of high Vor diplomacy and a few wars, of course she has the chops. This is a woman who knows how to get her way.”

Tej cast him a funny look. “Not always, it seems like.”

Rish turned her head from a long, thoughtful stare out the canopy to observe, “She reminds me of the Baronne.”

“A little, yes,” said Tej, with an introspective frown. “Not as tightly focused.”

“She’s mellowed a lot since Simon arrived in her life,” Ivan admitted. “And vice versa, though his was rather imposed upon him by his, um, brain injury.” Ivan was put uncomfortably in mind of Tej’s alarming response to his mother’s first greeting. Tej seemed such a sunny personality, much of the time—these flashes of dark were like a crack in the sky, shocking and wrong. Reminding him that the daylight was the illusion, the scattering of light by the atmosphere, and the endless night was the permanent default behind it all. And
God
that was a weird and morbid thought, but his mother did make him crazy. “Did you, um, love your mother? The Baronne?”

Tej hesitated, her brows lowering. When she spoke, it was slowly, as if she had to grope for truth in a thicket of thorny memories. “I admired her very much. We didn’t always get along. Actually, we clashed a lot. She said I wasn’t working up to my full potential. Not like my sisters.”

“Ah,” said Ivan, wisely. “That does sound all too familiar.”

Tej looked across at him in surprise. “But you were an only child!”

“Not…exactly. I always had my cousin Miles. And Gregor for an elder brother, but of course it was understood he was in a class by himself.” He added after a reflective moment, “All by himself, poor sod.”

“So your cousin Miles was like a brother to you?” asked Rish. Glints from her gold earrings flickered in the shadowy compartment as her head tilted.

“Miles…is really hard to explain. He was—is—smart.”

“
You’re
smart,” said Tej, in a tone of indignant protest.

Ivan’s heart nearly melted, but he sighed. “Yeah, but Miles was…the thing is, he was afflicted with a severe birth injury. He grew up pretty much crippled, so he poured all his frustrated energy into his intellect. Since the Vorkosigan family motto might as well be,
Anything worth achieving is worth overachieving
, the effect was pretty frightening. And it worked for him, so he did it some more.”

“Very like the Baronne,” murmured Rish.

Tej said slowly, “Yes…my mother loved being the Baronne, you see. Building the House was her passion. And in her way, I suppose, she loved us, and naturally wanted us to have this great thing she’d found, too. Except…I wasn’t her. It was like…if she could just fix me into being her, then she could shower me with the gifts she so valued.”

Ivan winced. “Ah.” It was kind of appalling, how little trouble he had following that whole line of reasoning. On both sides. Not sure what to say, he slipped an arm around Tej and hugged her in. Warm and soft, why didn’t anyone value warm and soft…?

“So will we get to meet your cousin?” asked Rish. Or, possibly, prodded?

“Not sure. He’s an Imperial Auditor now—that’s sort of a high-level government trouble-shooter—so he goes out of town at erratic intervals to find trouble to shoot. I should warn you, if we do go to Vorkosigan House, it’s knee-deep in infants these days. Twins, speaking of overachieving. They offer to let you hold one as if it was some kind of
treat
.” Ivan shuddered. “And they leak, and make the most horrible noises.”

“I never had much to do with infants,” said Tej. “Comes of being the youngest, I guess.”

“Yeah—only child, here,” said Ivan.

“Whereas I,” said Rish coolly, “was the babysitter.” She leaned back and stretched her legs, propping her feet on the seat opposite, beyond Tej. “I expect we’ll cope.”

Chapter Ten

Tej was plainly distracted and unnerved by her new surroundings, but by diligent efforts, Ivan won back her full attention in bed that night, and a smile when he brought her coffee in the morning. He had not guessed that any of his morning practice placating bleary-eyed admirals would transfer, but that one did. His plans for a post-coffee rematch were thwarted, however, by a call from his mother informing him that she was sending Cristos and her formidable dresser-cum-secretary to escort Tej and Rish on a hunting-and-gathering expedition for Barrayaran garb. Granted, the subject had come up last night, but he’d thought it was small talk.

“Is it safe to go out?” asked Rish, both dubiously and longingly. The building had a well-equipped exercise room on the second floor, but being immured inside was perhaps a little too much like being trapped aboard the
JP-9
all over again.

“Gotta be. Mamere and her people enjoy more attentive security than any Jacksonian House lording could ever hope to buy. On account of what she’s done for Illyan, y’know. ImpSec worships her, at least the old guard. And the newbies are all their daunted subordinates.”

“I didn’t notice the coverage, last night,” said Tej.

“You wouldn’t. And neither will anyone who attempts to stalk you, till it’s too late. You should go,” he told the women, wondering why he wasn’t more relieved to be let off the hook as sartorial escort. “You won’t get a better native guide, except maybe Mamere herself.” Who had duties at the Residence this morning or else, she had implied, she would have undertaken the task personally.

The middle-aged and gimlet-eyed dresser expanded upon this. “Clothing is a cultural and social language,” she intoned, when shepherding the women out. “And local dialects can be tricky for an outsider to interpret. We must make sure your dress says what you mean it to say, and not something unintended.”

Tej and Rish, at least, looked very impressed. If they were like every other woman Ivan had known, he was certain to be treated to a fashion show afterward anyway. This was much easier than tagging along, as all he had to do was approve each garment with suitable compliments, instead of frantically trying to guess which choices they wanted him to endorse, with the distinct hazard of guessing wrong. Much more restful.