Irresistible Forces

'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 live fur 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 the pearls 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…' 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 the box. The room was so quiet he could hear the live fur's gentle rumble from here. 'Why would she send two? The blanket even came with a dirty limerick, handwritten on a card.' Not presently on display, true. 'Madame Vorsoisson laughed out loud when m'lord read it to her.'

A reluctant smile twitched Taura's 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 Supreme 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 live fur 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 down 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,' as 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.'