among the other counts, the military, and the people. Captain Lord Padma Vorpatril and his wife, Lady Alys, relatives and known allies of Regent Vorkosigan, had been cut off in the capital during the coup and gone into hiding. Padma’s death rated barely a footnote, less even than the skirmishes. Had it been a chill and foggy night like this?
How much more, not less, surreal the tale all seemed, now that Tej had been in the same room-and shared cream cakes-with the grown-up, forty-year-old Gregor. Not to mention…
The present Lady Alys, composed and commanding, turned to take Tej by the hands. “Good morning, Tej. I’m pleased you came.”
Tej considered the significant difference between husband shot and husband shot in front of your eyes. She ducked her head, suddenly shy before this woman in a whole new way. “Thank you,” she managed, unsure what else to say.
“This is the first such memorial service you will have seen, I understand?”
“Yes. I’d never even heard of them before.”
“It’s nothing at all difficult. Especially not after thirty-five repetitions. Sometimes people perform it on the anniversary of their loved one’s death, sometimes on their birthday, sometimes other occasions. As need arises. Keeping the memory alive, or getting in the last word, depending.” A dry smile turned her lips. The amber light leached the color from her face, and turned Ivan Xav’s uniform drab olive.
Lady Alys and Ivan Xav knelt by the brazier. With a brisk efficiency, Lady Alys pulled a plastic sack of scented bark and wood shavings from the cloth bag and upended it into the metal bowl. She pulled a smaller packet from her purse and shook out a mat of black and silver hair clippings atop. Ivan rummaged in his trouser pocket and unearthed a similar packet, adding a fuzzy black blot to the pile. Parsimoniously saved from their most recent haircuts, maybe? They both stood up.
Lady Alys nodded to the plaque. “This is where my husband was shot down by Vordarian’s security forces. Nerve disruptors-poor Padma never had a chance. I’ll never forget the smell…burning hair, among other things. This ceremony always brings that back.” She grimaced. “Ivan was born not an hour later.”
“Where was his uterine replicator?” Tej asked.
Three faces turned toward hers; Lady Alys’s twisted in a wry humor. She touched her stomach. “Here, dear.”
Tej gasped in new and unexpected horror. “You mean Ivan Xav was a body birth?”
“Everyone was, in those days. Replicator technology had barely reached Barrayar, and didn’t become widespread for another generation.” Lady Alys stared at her uneasy son in reminded ire. “Two weeks late, he was. Nine pounds!”
“Not my fault,” muttered Ivan Xav, very much under his breath. He added to Tej, not much louder: “She mentions that every year.”
Lady Alys went on more serenely, “The friends who rescued us…me, almost in time, hustled me away to an abandoned building in the old Caravanserai district-very run-down and dangerous, back then-not too far from here. Sergeant Bothari, rest to his troubled soul, played midwife, for lack of any other with the least experience in the task, including me. I was so terrified, but I couldn’t scream, you know, because Vordarian’s men were still out there looking for us. Bothari gave me a rag to bite…I can still remember the horrid taste, when I think of it. Nauseating. And we got through it somehow, dear heavens, but I still don’t know how. We were all so young. Ivan is older now than Padma was then.” She regarded Tej in sudden wonder. “I was just twenty-five. Your age, my dear. Now, there’s a strange chance.”
Half past strange and aiming for very unsettling, Tej thought. But a new, or newly-revealed, reason for this aging woman’s unexpected sympathy to another young refugee mourning her dead grew very clear, like ice, or crystal, or broken glass, or something else with sharp and dangerous edges. Oh.
She knows. She knows it all, and more, probably. Maybe Lady Alys’s glossy surface had to be so thick and smooth because it hid so much…?
Simon Illyan’s brow furrowed. “Where was I, during all of this? I do wish I could have been there for you, Alys…”
She touched his supporting arm in reassurance. “You were smuggling Admiral Kanzian out, to Aral’s great tactical benefit.”
His face cleared. “Ah, yes, now I recall.” He frowned again. “Fragments, at least.”
“Trust me, love, after thirty-five years, fragments are all anyone recalls.” She turned again to Tej. “As Ivan’s bride, you are now a part of this-however temporarily. Would you care to lay some hair on the fire as well? Since you’re here.”
Tej was taken aback all over again. That seemed to be happening a lot, lately. “I…is it permitted?” Not offensive? Apparently, it was perfectly allowable, because all the Barrayarans nodded. Lady Alys drew a small pair of scissors from her purse-secreted for just this hope, or did she always carry them? — and snipped a curl from Tej’s bent head. She handed it to Ivan Xav, who laid it atop the pile and set the wood shavings alight. Little flames crackled up, hot and swift. There did not seem to be any formal words to be recited, because everyone just stood around watching, the flames reflecting in their shadowed eyes as tiny molten glints. The tops of the highest buildings, visible in the distance, sprang into color as the first sunlight reached them, but down here all was yet a pool of damp gray, with the fire a shimmering orange blur in the autumn murk.
Not formal, but words-very low, from Lady Alys; as though she told secrets. “Padma and I were hiding in what was then a cheap boarding house down the street. Just there.” She pointed to a building a few doors down, half-concealed by renovation scaffolding. The scent of burning hair was very pungent, now. “When I went into labor, Padma panicked. I begged him not to go out, but he was frantic to find someone, anyone, to take over the terrifying task of delivering a baby that women all over the planet had been doing every damned day since the Firsters landed. Though I had the biggest part of the job, and wasn’t going to be able to wriggle out of it by any means whatsoever. So he went out, leaving me alone and petrified for hours with my contractions getting worse, waiting, and of course he promptly got picked up. Once they brought him back and we’d both been dragged out into the street, he tried to stand up to armed men, all penta-drunk as he was. But I knew, then and forever after, that it wasn’t his bravery that killed him-it was his cowardice. Oh, dear God, I was so angry at him for that. For years. ”
Illyan touched her shoulder; Ivan Xav stood warily away. Illyan said, “Kou got you and baby Ivan out, didn’t he?” Giving her thoughts a more positive direction?
“Yes. Lieutenant Koudelka-later Commodore,” she glossed to Tej, “Kou managed to smuggle us out of the city in the back of a grocery van, of all things. His father had been a grocer, you see. Lurching along in the vegetable detritus-Ivan very hungry and noisy, to be sure, and not happy to be thrust out into the cold world in the middle of a war.”
The little flames were almost gone, gray ash starting to drift away in the stirrings of air from the passing vehicles. The acrid smell was abating.
“This is a Barrayaran ceremony for remembrance,” said Lady Alys, turning to Tej. “It was always my intention, when Ivan married, to turn this task of remembrance over to him, to continue or not as he willed. Because…memory isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” Her hand reached out and gripped Illyan’s, who gripped it back in a disturbed little shake, though he smiled at her.
“Thirty-five years seems long enough, to me,” Lady Alys went on. “Long enough to mourn, quite long enough to be enraged. It’s time for me to retire from remembering. From the pain and sorrow and anger and attachment, and the smell of burning hair in the fog. For Ivan, it’s not the same, of course. His memories of this place are very different from mine.”
“I never knew,” said Ivan Xav, shifting uncomfortably. “All that.”
Lady Alys shrugged. “I never said. First you were too young to understand, and then you were too adolescent to understand, and then…we were both much busier with our lives, and this had all become a rote exercise. But lately…in recent years…I began to think more and more about giving it up.”
By every sign, she’d been thinking about this for quite a while, Tej thought. No one built up that much head- pressure overnight. She looked her alarm at Ivan Xav who, belatedly, slid closer and put a bracing arm around her waist.
“It was just something we did, every year,” said Ivan Xav. “When I was really little, of course, I didn’t understand it at all. We just came here, burned this stuff, stood around for a few minutes, and then you took me to
