Simon Illyan was dressed not unlike the driver, except in shades of sober cream and charcoal. He was barely taller than Lady Alys, who was surely of no more than average height for a Barrayaran woman. Thinning brown hair was succumbing to a tide of gray rising around the sides. Scans she’d seen of him from earlier in his career, always in the background of some Imperial event-and if she’d known, she’d have paid him more attention-had seemed to convey a sharp tension in his posture and grim expression. He smiled at her now with an amiable vagueness that went well with the slight pudge around his middle, but sat oddly with his reputation.
Lady Alys cast a look at her son that seemed to say, I’ll deal with you later, and turned to take the startled Tej’s hands in cool, slim fingers.
“Lady Tej,” she said, looking her guest in the eye as if…searching? “Welcome to my home. Congratulations on your marriage. And, I am so very sorry for your late losses.”
The last words floored Tej. No one had offered her condolences for the slaughter of her family, not one person in all the long months of their erratic flight from the Whole to here. Granted, the only people who’d known who she was were the ones trying to add her to the tally. But still, but still, but still. She gulped, breathless and trembling. Managed a constricted, “Thank you,” blinking back the blur in her eyes. Ivan Xav looked at her in concern.
With a peculiar little nod, Lady Alys squeezed her hands and released them. Ivan Xav moved in to slip an arm around her shoulders and give her an uncertain hug.
“And you too, Lapis Lazuli,” Lady Alys continued, turning to Rish, but offering more of a handshake. “Or do you prefer Rish?”
“I prefer Rish,” said Rish. “Lapis Lazuli has always been more of a stage name.”
“May I make you both known to my long-time friend, Simon Illyan.”
Illyan, too, shook their hands in turn, his clasp firm and dry. He lingered to look Tej up and down; his smile broadened slightly. But he made no remark.
“Please, won’t you come sit down.” Lady Alys made a graceful wave toward the seats in a close conversational grouping at the room’s far end. Ivan Xav grabbed Tej’s hand and kept her by him, aiming them onto the two-person sofa; Lady Alys and Illyan took their former chairs, and Rish perched on a rather antique-looking carved chair with new silk upholstery. The whole room, Tej noted, was put together with a quiet, firm taste, a mixture of the old and new that complemented rather than clashed, and, oh blessings, with an impeccable eye for color. Well, Rish stood out a little.
Lady Alys touched a jeweled pin on her vest, and in a moment a staidly dressed, middle-aged woman servant appeared trundling a sort of drinks trolley. “May we offer you an aperitif? Or there are teas.”
Tej, mind still swimming, rather blindly selected a Barrayaran wine she recognized from Admiral Desplains’s table, and Rish chose some native cordial, apparently for the strange name; the others were handed what were apparently their usual tipples without query by the servant. The glasses were small and finely-wrought, inviting appreciation, not inebriation. The servant trundled away as discreetly as she’d entered.
Lady Alys took a sip and turned to Rish-to give Tej time to recover herself? “Someone was kind enough to forward me a short vid of one of your performances with your fellow Jewels. Very impressive. I understand your emigration was forced upon you, but do you have plans or hopes for continuing your art in a new venue?”
Rish grimaced. “No plans, certainly. Performance arts do not mesh well with hiding for one’s life. Success requires-and generates-fame, not obscurity.”
Lady Alys nodded understanding. “Teaching or choreography…no, I suppose the same difficulty would arise.”
Illyan rubbed his chin, and offered, “Could you change your appearance? Cosmetic alterations to blend with the target population?”
A blue hand tightened on a black-clad knee. “That would be repugnant to me. And…when I started to dance, people would know who I was anyway.”
He gave a conceding nod, falling back into his listening quiet.
Tej decided she’d calmed enough that her voice wouldn’t crack. She set down her glass, gripped Ivan Xav’s hand for courage, and said, “Lady Alys, you should know right away that you needn’t worry about the marriage. Ivan Xav and I will be getting a divorce.”
Ivan Xav freed his arm only to put it around her shoulders, hugging her in tight. He endorsed this: “That’s right, Mamere. Just as soon as I can catch up with Count Falco, that is.”
Lady Alys tilted her head and stared at them. “Has my son proved such an unsatisfactory husband in a mere week? Surely you should give him a longer chance.”
“Oh, no, no!” said Tej, hurrying to correct this strange misconception. “I think Ivan Xav would make a wonderful husband!”
“So I had always hoped,” murmured Lady Alys, “and yet, somehow, it seemed never to be…”
Ivan Xav squirmed slightly, inching closer to Tej, or trying to. There weren’t any inches left.
Tej said sturdily, “He has so very many good qualities. He’s brave, he’s kind, he’s smart, he has excellent manners, and he thinks quickly in emergencies.” When pressed hard enough, anyway. “Very good-looking, too, of course.” She probably ought not to add good in bed here; Barrayarans seemed to have funny notions about sex, which she didn’t quite understand yet. “And, um…” What was that unusual word Desplains had used? “Chivalrous, too, which is why he rescued us and brought us here, but really, he owes me nothing.”
Lady Alys pressed a finger to her lips. “That is not what those words in the groat circle say, however. Assuming Ivan managed to remember the right ones.”
“I did,” asserted Ivan Xav indignantly. “And anyway, I shouldn’t think you would be in such a tearing hurry to become the Dowager Lady Vorpatril.”
“My dear and only child, how did you come by that misapprehension? I’ve longed for it any time these past ten years. And anyway, if the title comes to seem too dreadfully aging, I now have other resources to correct the problem.” She glanced at Simon Illyan, who raised his brows and smiled back. Very private smiles that made Tej feel an intruder, though she wasn’t sure on what.
“So,” Lady Alys went on, “it is to be a marriage of convenience, then?”
Illyan put in, “Or inconvenience,” and pressed a concealing hand across his jaw. His eyes were alight, betraying his upward lip-twitch nonetheless.
“The inconvenience,” said Lady Alys, “would seem to reside not in the marriage, but in this Jacksonian syndicate which pursues the girls. About which, I confess, I understand very little as yet. But I feel constrained to point out to you, Ivan-just in case you have overlooked it-that there is no point in your catching up with Falco for a divorce until you have figured out what happens to Tej and her companion after the protection of your name and position is removed. You dragged them here to Barrayar, after all.”
“I, uh…hadn’t got that far yet,” Ivan Xav admitted.
Lady Alys turned to Tej, and asked seriously, “Do you know what you would want?”
It came to Tej then, belatedly, that Lady Alys had just spent much of the prior conversation slowly, gently, and thoroughly roasting her son. And that she wasn’t at all the person Tej had been led to expect. She allowed herself a moment of crossness-she would have words with Ivan Xav about that, later. But right now, she needed to give Lady Alys’s serious question the serious attention it deserved.
“We had a place we were planning to go-not here on Barrayar, not in the Imperium, in fact. But we can only go there if we are absolutely certain that we’ve broken our trail in a way that the Prestene syndicate can’t pick up again. Otherwise, it’s…it would be worse than getting caught ourselves.”
“That would actually come to the same thing,” Rish pointed out. “Once they have us, they have…” A blue hand made an ambiguous, if fluid, wave.
Tej nodded grimly. “That was why the balcony, in the end.”
“So you protect another,” said Illyan, leaning back and tenting his hands together. “One very dear to you.” He blinked vaguely. “Must be the missing brother, what’s-his-name.”
Tej gasped and turned in alarm to Ivan Xav.
He shrugged, and muttered out of the corner of his mouth, “I said he’d lost his memory, not his wits.”
“The point was mentioned in Morozov’s report,” said Illyan, sounding apologetic. “I only read it this morning. It hasn’t had time to go fuzzy yet.” He took up and emptied his glass, appearing to study the curious absence of his drink before setting it down again. “From the direction and duration of your travel, I would posit that he’s hiding on Escobar, with remoter possibilities being Beta Colony, Kibou-daini, or Tau Ceti. Not farther.”
