“Hm.” Imola stared at the address on his autofiler, evidently memorizing it, then deleted the screen. “You might have said.”
“You didn’t think I’d pester you with something trivial, did you?”
“No, I suppose not. You always were a beat ahead of the rest of us, back when.” Imola sighed. “Do give my best to your lady. She’s still with you, I suppose?”
Dada nodded.
“And the rest of the clan?”
“All safe with us, for now.” Dada, Tej noticed, did not go into the distressing details about Ruby and Topaz and Eric.
“Mustering for a fresh move on Prestene, are you? Or something?”
“More or less. Or something.” Dada’s lips twitched. “Or we might buy a tropical island.”
Imola looked nonplussed at this last, but said, “Eh, good luck on that. People just don’t keep up with each other, these scattered times. Does Udine still have her fancy dance troupe? Quite the show, I heard, when you were all on Cordonah Station.”
“Her Jewels, yes. And they will dance again,” said Dada firmly. “You’ll have to stop by, next you get out that way.”
After a few more anecdotes about the Good Old Days, which sounded like the Repulsive Old Days to Tej, Dada rose and they extracted themselves, and exited to the street once more. The fog was thinning, or perhaps just condensing into a cold drizzle.
“Let’s wait in the car,” Dada directed, when they’d made their way back to the pipe-layer’s building. “No point in stepping on Star’s script.”
She slid into the driver’s side, and Dada into the seat beside her. He turned to face her.
She eyed him sideways. “You weren’t quite straight with that man. Imola. Do you trust him or not?”
“The limits of trust depend much on whether you mean to do business more than once. But it’s just good practice never to show all your cards in the first round of a deal. One must maintain reserves. Besides, what he doesn’t need to know he can’t tell, not even under fast-penta. Speaking of sound practice. He knows that game.”
“I suppose.” Tej sighed.
“You don’t seem happy, honey.”
“None of us are just now, I expect.”
“True. Well, we’ll all be home-soon enough.”
He’s leaving out a few steps. And the new House Cordonah was going to be unavoidably different from the old, Tej suspected. Home would be changed. Or I will be.
“You know,” Dada went on, “you were Udine’s special gift to me. All the other kids, I was happy enough to let her play the haut geneticist, but you were merely gene-cleaned. Unmodified her, unmodified me. My almost- natural offspring.”
“I knew that.” Star had once called her the control child; it hadn’t been a compliment.
“I always wanted to see you do well.”
To prove what for you, Dada?
“I meant to hold out for something really special, when it came to your marital contract. Still could, you know.”
“Mm,” said Tej.
“But…there’s another possible deal in the air, now. How well do you like that Barrayaran boy?”
“Ivan Xav? I like him fine.” And one of the things she most liked about him, she realized, was that he’d had nothing whatsoever to do with any Arqua deals, ever. He was surrounded by his own Barrayaran style of crazy, true, but surprisingly little seemed to have rubbed off on him.
“Should a deal emerge that did involve him, would you be willing to be party to it?”
“What kind of a deal?” she asked automatically, then said, “Wait. Do you mean a marriage contract? We’re kind of a done deal that way, I thought.” Count Falco said so. And they’d made it themselves, with their own breath and voices-funny Barrayaran phrase, that. Their own breath and no one else’s. “The only way that deal could change is to be un done.”
“Which could happen in so many ways. I can’t help but notice that you’ve not been pursuing any of them.”
“We’ve been busy. And then you all arrived, and we’ve been busier.”
“Does your Ivan Xav know that you think it’s a done deal? Or your stepfather-in-law?”
“I…” don’t know, Tej realized. Did she even know herself, for real, for sure?
“Because if they don’t, I can certainly see no reason for you to tell them. That could be slick. Trade them something they already have, for…heh. Considerations, yes.”
Tej tried to keep her face from scrunching up in dismay. “Has this got anything to do with that private talk you had with Simon?”
He looked cagey. “Might.”
Her heart chilled. Ivan Xav had seemed very sure that his um-stepfather couldn’t be suborned by threats or bribed by wealth. But what about love?
In more than one form. It was plain that the strange, reserved man wanted some better relations with his stepson than he had yet been able to construct, if only to please his high Vor lady. And more: Simon liked Ivan Xav in his own right-in his own quietly awkward way-though Ivan Xav didn’t seem to see it. The late great Captain Illyan had been superb with security, it was said; maybe not so deft with family. He’d evidently never had one before, in all his long adult life, or was that only…his long adult career? But surely the man couldn’t be compromising his peculiar Barrayaran honor just to secure his stepson’s marriage. Simon was a mystery; how could you tell what he was thinking?
Although it was bad enough that Dada wanted to use her as a counter in his deals. Dada at least was Dada, Baron Cordonah for real. Simon had no right…
“Have you already made some kind of a deal with Simon about me?” she demanded in alarm.
“Mm, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a deal. More of a bet.”
“That’s worse.”
“Oh, it didn’t involve you. Yet. Though it was clear that you and Ivan Xav weighed in his calculations.”
“What did it involve?”
“Step One of our program here-the site mapping. Simon bet we couldn’t do it in any way. Undetected by ImpSec, that is, on ImpSec’s doorstep. I bet we could.” He added after a moment’s reflection, “As long as one doesn’t count Simon himself as ImpSec, of course. We won.”
“What did we win?” she asked suspiciously.
“Round Two. Which Simon thinks Star is pursuing as we speak. The Mycoborer, fortunately, still remains outside the realm of his otherwise far-reaching imagination.”
“Oh. So-every round you win buys us another round?”
“Yes. But we only need two. Simon’s thinking three or four.”
Weasels, that was term Ivan Xav kept using. But which old weasel was the, the weaseliest?
Maybe Simon simply wanted Lady Alys all to himself. Was Ivan Xav’s protracted bachelorhood holding up Simon’s own marriage, the way it had evidently been holding up Lady Alys’s longed-for release from the burning ritual? Maybe he thought he was trading not Tej, but Ivan Xav-to be carried off by Clan Arqua to the Whole as a prize, or what? Would the The Gregor allow that-or applaud it? The emperor had his own sons now-maybe Ivan Xav was reclassified as redundant, an heir in excess of need. An embarrassing leftover, and everyone relieved to have him be shunted out of the way.
Tej didn’t know whether to be distressed or really, really annoyed. With the whole lot of them, Arquan and Barrayaran both.
Dada, watching whatever parade of emotions was passing across her face, said a bit plaintively, “I’d do my best for you, honey, but you have to give your old Dada a clue.”
“If I get one,” she sighed, “I’ll share.”
His belly jumped in a muffled, pained laugh that didn’t make it out his mouth. Women, eh, didn’t quite appear as a caption over his head, but it might as well have. She wanted to return, Men, ugh!
