A Civil Campaign

actually it was a sort of razor-edged glee; anyway, he smiled at her smile at his smile. She could only hope she'd done some little bit to ease his morning-after headache. A chiming clock began sounding in the antechamber. Ekaterin glanced at her chrono. Wait, how could it possibly be this late? 'Oh, my word, the time. My tree crew will be here any moment. Lord Vorkosigan, I must excuse myself.'

She jumped to her feet, and made polite farewells to Lord Mark. Both Pym and Lord Vorkosigan escorted her personally to the front door. Vorkosigan was still very stiff; she wondered how much pain his forced motion denied, or defied. He encouraged her to stop in again, any time she had the least question, or needed anything at all, and dispatched Pym to show her where to have the crew stack the maple wood, and stood in the doorway and watched them both till they turned the corner of the great house.

Ekaterin glanced back over her shoulder. 'He didn't look very well this morning, Pym. You really shouldn't have let him get out of bed.'

'Oh, I know it, ma'am,' Pym agreed morosely. 'But what's a mere Armsman to do? I haven't the authority to countermand his orders. What he really needs, is looking after by someone who won't stand his nonsense. A proper Lady Vorkosigan would do the trick. Not one of those shy, simpering ingenues all the young lords seem to be looking to these days, he'd just ride right over her. He needs a woman of experience, to stand up to him.' He smiled apologetically down at her.

'I suppose so,' sighed Ekaterin. She hadn't really thought about the Vor mating scene from the Armsmen's point of view. Was Pym hinting that his lord had such an ingenue in his eye, and his staff was worried it was some sort of mismatch?

Pym showed her the wood cache, and made a sensible suggestion for placing Lord Mark's compost heap near it rather than in the underground garage, assuring her it would be just fine there. Ekaterin thanked him and headed back toward the front gates.

Ingenues. Well, if a Vor wanted to marry within his caste, he almost had to look to the younger cohort, these days. Vorkosigan did not strike her as a man who would be happy with a woman who was not up to his intellectual weight, but how much choice did he have? Presumably any woman with brains enough to be interesting to him in the first place would not be so foolish as to reject him for his physical . . . it was no business of hers, she told herself firmly. And it was absurd to allow the vision of this imaginary ingenue, offering him an imaginary devastating insult about his disabilities, to raise one's real blood pressure. Completely absurd. She marched off to oversee the dismantling of the bad tree.

* * *

Mark was just reaching to reactivate the comconsole when Miles wandered back into the library, smiling absently. Mark turned to watch his progenitor-brother start to fling himself back into his armchair, only to hesitate, and lower himself more carefully. Miles stretched his shoulders as if to loosen knotted muscles, leaned back, and stuck his feet out. He picked up his half-eaten piece of bread, remarked cheerfully, 'That went well, don't you think?' and bit into it.

Mark eyed him doubtfully. 'What went well?'

'The co'versation.' Miles chased his bite with the last of his cold coffee. 'So, you've met Ekaterin. Good. What did you two find to talk about, before I got downstairs?'

'You. Actually.'

'Ah?' Miles's face lit, and he sat up a little straighter. 'What did she say about me?'

'We mainly discussed your seizures,' Mark said grimly. 'She seemed to know a great deal more about them than you had seen fit to confide to me.'

Miles subsided, frowning. 'Hm. That's not the aspect of me I'm really anxious to have her dwell on. Still, it's good she knows. I wouldn't want to be tempted to conceal a problem of that magnitude again. I've learned my lesson.'

'Oh, really.' Mark glowered at him.

'I sent you the basic facts,' his brother protested in response to this look. 'You didn't need to dwell on all the gory medical details. You were on Beta Colony; there was nothing you could do about it anyway.'

'They're my fault.'

'Rubbish.' Miles really did do a very good offended snort; Mark decided it was a touch of his—their—Aunt Vorpatril in it that gave it that nice upper-class edge. Miles waved a dismissive hand. 'It was the sniper's doing, followed by more medical random factors than I can calculate. Done's done; I'm alive again, and I mean to stay that way this time.'

Mark sighed, realizing reluctantly that if he wanted to wallow in guilt, he'd get no cooperation from his big brother. Who, it appeared, had other things on his mind.

'So what did you think of her?' Miles asked anxiously.

'Who?'

'Ekaterin , who else?'

'As a landscape designer? I'd have to see her work.'

'No, no, no! Not as a landscape designer, though she's good at that too . As the next Lady Vorkosigan.'

Mark blinked. 'What?'

'What do you mean, what ? She's beautiful, she's smart—dowries, ye gods, how perfect, Vormuir will split—she's incredibly level-headed in emergencies. Calm, y'know? A lovely calm. I adore her calm. I could swim in it. Guts and wit, in one package.'

'I wasn't questioning her fitness. That was a merely a random noise of surprise.'

'She's Lord Auditor Vorthys's niece. She has a son, Nikki, almost ten. Cute kid. Wants to be a jump-pilot, and I think he has the determination to make it. Ekaterin wants to be a garden designer, but I think she could go on to be a terraformer. She's a little too quiet, sometimes—she needs to build up her self-confidence.'

'Perhaps she was just waiting to get a word in edgewise,' Mark suggested.

Miles paused, stricken—briefly—by doubt. 'Do you think I talked too much, just now?'

Mark waved his fingers in a little perish-the-thought gesture, and poked through the bread basket for any lurking spice bread crumbs. Miles stared at the ceiling, stretched his legs, and counter-rotated his feet.

Mark thought back over the woman he had just seen here. Pretty enough, in that elegant brainy-brunette style Miles liked. Calm? Perhaps. Guarded, certainly. Not very expressive. Round blondes were much sexier. Kareen was wonderfully expressive; she'd even managed to rub some of those human skills off on him, he thought in his more optimistic moments. Miles was plenty expressive too, in his own unreliable way. Half of it was horseshit, but you were never sure which half.

Kareen, Kareen, Kareen . He must not take her attack of nerves as a rejection of him. She's met someone she likes better, and is dumping us , whispered someone from the Black Gang in the back of his head, and it wasn't the lustful Grunt. I know a few ways to get rid of excess fellows like that. They'd never even find the body. Mark ignored the vile suggestion. You have no place in this, Killer.

Even if she had met someone else, say, on the way home, all lonely by herself because he'd insisted on taking that other route, she had the compulsive honesty to tell him so if it were so. Her honesty was at the root of their present contretemps. She was constitutionally incapable of walking around pretending to be a chaste Barrayaran maiden unless she was. It was her unconscious solution to the cognitive dissonance of having one foot planted on Barrayar, the other on Beta Colony.

All Mark knew was that if it came down to a choice between Kareen and oxygen, he'd prefer to give up oxygen, thanks. Mark considered, briefly, laying his sexual frustrations open to his