Lady Ekaterin smiled in distraction. “Welcome to Vorkosigan House, Tej, Rish. I’m so glad you could visit before we have to leave.” She added aside to Ivan Xav, “I’m taking the twins to Sergyar to see their grandparents while Miles is about his affairs.”
“Nikki, too?” asked Ivan Xav.
She nodded. “He’s not too happy about having to do all the make-up work for school, but he’s tremendously excited about the travel.” She added over her shoulder to her husband. “Miles, why don’t you take them on into the library, and I’ll join you in a few minutes.”
The burdened woman trudged back up the staircase, and Lord Vorkosigan gestured them to follow him through the archway to the left. On the far side of a large antechamber with walls covered in pale green silk, double doors painted white were swung open by an unseen hand. Their host ushered them into a long room lined with antique bookcases. Tej’s station-bred eye was briefly shocked by the orange flicker of a fire, burning tamely in a white marble fireplace-no, not an emergency here, just decor. A pair of short sofas and some other chairs were grouped invitingly around the hearth. Upon one of the sofas, a lean, dark-haired, rather hatchet-faced man looked up from his viewer at their entry, stood, and waited with a grave smile. He was dressed in one of those Barrayaran faux-military suits, dark blue and very plain.
“Sire,” said Ivan Xav, as they herded up.
“Hi, Ivan. But I’m doing Count Vorbarra today,” said the man, his smile turning briefly saturnine. “It cuts down the circus by at least half.”
“Right,” said Ivan Xav. He was apparently growing introduction-fatigued at the most inopportune time, for he went on far too casually, “Gregor, my wife Tej, her friend Rish. I suppose you read the reports?”
“I had Allegre’s precis. And I talked in person with your mother this morning, which was rather more informative.” He turned to the women. “How do you do, Lady Vorpatril, Mademoiselle Rish. Welcome to Barrayar.”
He said this in the exact same way that Lady Vorkosigan had said, Welcome to Vorkosigan House. It came to Tej that he was the one man here who was not a subject. Did that make him an object…? He sat, apparently the signal for everyone else to do likewise. Ivan Xav gathered Tej to him and seized the other sofa, Lord Vorkosigan swung his cane out of the way and dropped into a smallish armchair, and Rish perched gingerly on a similar one.
Rish had to be madly trying to parse the many unfamiliar scents, of which the wood smoke was the strongest and strangest. There were two more men in the black uniforms standing statue-like in the room, one by a pair of glass doors at the far end, apparently leading outside, the other at the wall by their entry. They looked back over the two women like a pair of sleek guard dogs studying a couple of cats that had strayed onto their territory. As if they might grab them in their teeth and break their necks with one sharp shake, if their doggish reflexes were triggered by a wrong move. Tej tried to sit extra-carefully, and not let her fur stand on end.
The emperor of Barrayar leaned back at his ease, one arm stretched out along the top of the sofa, and asked genially, “So, Lady Tej-how did you come to meet our Ivan?”
Tej glanced wildly at Rish, whose stark, stuffed expression returned, This one’s all yours, sweetling. How far back was she supposed to begin? She swallowed, grabbed Ivan Xav’s hand for luck, and started at random: “We’d run out of money, trying to get to-” Wait, should she-but he said he’d talked to Lady Alys, how much of-
“Trying to get to your brother on Escobar, as I now understand it?” said The Gregor.
Tej gulped and nodded. “We were stuck downside on Komarr, dodging what we think were hirelings of the Prestene syndicate. I was working at this grubber shipping store, trying to rebuild our stake, and Rish was in hiding at our flat. Ivan Xav brought in this vase, wanting it packed and shipped-” To here, come to think. She looked up at him in belated indignation. “Hey! You bought that horrible thing on purpose just to have an excuse to come into the shop, didn’t you?”
He shrugged. “Well, sure.”
“We were just closing. He tried to pick me up.” Tej scowled in memory.
The Lord Auditor Coz pressed a hand to his lips, briefly. “What, and failed? ”
Tej nodded again. “Then he turned up on my front steps. I thought he might be a capper stalking me. So I invited him in, and Rish shot him.”
The cousin jerked slightly. The emperor’s eyebrows went up.
“ Stunned him, sweetling,” Rish corrected, urgently. “Just a little light stun, really.”
“And then we dragged him up to our flat,” Tej went on.
“ This wasn’t in the ImpSec report,” said The Gregor.
“It wasn’t relevant by then,” said Ivan Xav, in a distant tone. “Forgive, forget…”
“So we tied him to a chair for the night,” said Tej.
The Lord Auditor Coz made a strange little wheeing sound. He was biting his own hand, Tej noticed. Ivan Xav pointedly ignored him.
“Which proved to be very lucky,” Tej forged on, “because when the real kidnappers turned up, we woke up and heard them talking to him and were able to get the drop on them.”
“That wasn’t luck,” protested Ivan Xav. “I engaged them in delay as loudly as I could, till the reinforcements came up. Rather slowly.”
“Quick thinking-for a man tied to a chair,” murmured the Coz.
“Well, it was!” said Ivan Xav.
“Anyway,” Tej plowed on, “he invited us to hide out in his flat for the next few days, which worked fine, till the Prestene contact thought of putting Komarran Immigration onto us, to smoke us out of hiding so they could target us. So Byerly, who came to warn us, and the Immigration officers, and those Dome cops who were trying to arrest Ivan Xav for kidnapping me, which he didn’t, all arrived at once before anyone had drunk any coffee, and then Admiral Desplains called Ivan Xav, very irate about the Dome cops, I think, and I was so tired and scared, and we-we panicked.” She glanced at Rish. Still no help there.
“Quit laughing,” said Ivan Xav irritably to the Coz, who actually wasn’t, out loud at least, except for the madly crinkling eyes. “It wasn’t funny at the time.”
Ivan Xav glanced aside at Tej, and his hand squeezed hers. She squeezed back. No, it hadn’t been. Not that part, not at the time.
In retrospect, though…“So he threw his wristcom into the refrigerator, grabbed this box of instant groats, and asked me to marry him. To keep the Immigration people from arresting me and the Dome cops from arresting him. And I said yes.”
“I see,” said The Gregor. “I think…”
“It worked,” said Ivan Xav, sounding stung.
“Why did he throw his wristcom into the freezer?” asked the Coz, diverted by this detail.
“His admiral kept calling back.”
“Ah. Makes perfect sense.”
“It does?” said The Gregor. The Coz nodded, and he seemed to accept this.
“And then Ivan Xav brought us here to Barrayar, where we are supposed to find this man named Count Falco who will give us a divorce, and then…” Tej ran aground, till she bethought herself of the kind and shrewd Lady Alys. “And Lady Alys’s Simon suggested that Rish and I might be smuggled to Escobar on a Barrayaran government courier vessel, if Ivan Xav would ask the right people.” She gathered her courage and looked up from her lap at The Gregor. “Would that be you, sir?”
“Possibly.” He leaned over and propped his chin in his hand, regarding her quizzically. He had one of those wildly unfair male face-transforming smiles, she noted, even more so than Ivan Xav’s; but then, The Gregor’s smile was transiting from a much sterner-looking start-point. Ivan Xav had to work hard to look stern, and even then it was more likely to come out just peeved. The emperor continued, “Where on Escobar is your brother?”
This was not the time to try to deal, Tej realized; this whole meeting was a deal. A big one, at that. “Amiri was never happy in the House, never wanted to be involved in the business with my brother Erik and my sisters. He had this passion all his life for biology and medicine, so eventually my parents made a deal for him to go to Escobar to this clinic where they had a special contact, and change his identity and finish his medical education. He’s a graduate researcher there, now, under a new name.” She moistened her lips and added, “It was always the plan that if something terrible happened, I would go to him, because we always got along best, and my sisters would go to Grandmama.”
