relatives nearby. At Vorkosigan Surleau most of Piotr’s armsmen’s families had escaped except Armsman Vogti’s wife and very aged mother, who had been taken away in a groundcar, no one knew where.
“And, oh yes, very strange,” Sonia added. “They took Karla Hysopi. That hardly makes sense. She was only the widow of a retired regular Service sergeant, what use do they expect to make of her?”
Cordelia froze. “Did they take the baby, too?”
“Baby? Donnia didn’t say about a baby. Grandchild, was it?”
Bothari was sitting by the window sharpening his knife on Sonia’s kitchen whetstone. His hand paused in mid-stroke. He looked up to meet Cordelias alarmed eyes. Beyond a tightening of his jaw his face did not change expression, yet the sudden increase of tension in his body made Cordelia’s stomach knot. He looked back down at what he was doing, and took a longer, firmer stroke that hissed along the whetstone like water on coals.
“Maybe … Kly will know something more, when he comes back,” Cordelia quavered.
“Belike,” said Sonia doubtfully.
At last, on schedule, on the evening of the seventh day, Kly rode into the clearing on his sorrel horse. A few minutes later Armsman Esterhazy rode in behind him. He was dressed in hillman’s togs, and his mount was a lean and spindle-shanked hill horse, not one of Piotr’s big glossy beasts. They put their horses away and came in to a dinner Sonia had apparently fixed this night of Kly’s rounds for eighteen years.
After dinner they pulled up chairs to the stone fireplace, and Kly and Esterhazy briefed Cordelia and Bothari in low tones. Gregor sat by Cordelias feet.
“Since Vordarian has greatly widened his search area,” Esterhazy began, “Count and Lord Vorkosigan have decided that the mountains are still the best place to hide Gregor. As the search radius grows enemy forces will be spread thinner and thinner.”
“Locally, Vordarian’s forces are still hunting up and down the caves,” Kly put in. “There’s about two hundred men still up there. But as soon as they finish finding each other, I expect they’ll pull out. I hear they’ve given up on finding you in there, Milady. Tomorrow, Sire,” Kly glanced down and addressed Gregor directly, “Armsman Esterhazy will take you to a new place, a lot like this one. You’ll have a new name for a while, for pretend. And Armsman Esterhazy will pretend he’s your da. Think you can do that?”
Gregor’s hand tightened on Cordelia’s skirt. “Will Lady Vorkosigan pretend she’s my ma?”
“We’re going to take Lady Vorkosigan back to Lord Vorkosigan, at Tanery Base Shuttleport.” At Gregor’s alarmed look Kly added, “There’s a pony, where you’re going. And goats. The lady there might teach you how to milk the goats.”
Gregor looked doubtful, but did not fuss further, though the next morning as he was put up behind Esterhazy on the shaggy horse he looked near to tears.
Cordelia said anxiously, “Take care of him, Armsman.”
Esterhazy gave her a driven look. “He’s my Emperor, Milady. He holds my oath.”
“He’s also a little boy, Armsman. Emperor is … a delusion you all have in your heads. Take care of the Emperor for Piotr, yes, but you take care of Gregor for me, eh?”
Esterhazy met her eyes. His voice softened. “My little boy is four, Milady.”
He did understand, then. Cordelia swallowed relief and grief. “Have you … heard anything from the capital? About your family?”
“Not yet,” said Esterhazy bleakly.
“I’ll keep my ears open. Do what I can.”
“Thank you.” He gave her a nod, not as retainer to his lady, but as one parent to another. No other word seemed necessary.
Bothari was out of earshot, having returned to the cabin to pack up their few supplies. Cordelia went to Kly’s stirrup, as he prepared to swing his black and white horse about and lead Esterhazy and Gregor on their way. “Major. Sonia passed on a rumor that Vordarian’s troops took Mistress Hysopi. Bothari had hired her to foster his baby girl. Do you know if they took Elena—the baby—too?”
Kly lowered his voice. “’Twas the other way around, as I have it. They went for the baby, Karla Hysopi raised hell, so they took her too even though she wasn’t on the list.”
“Do you know where?”
He shook his head. “Somewhere in Vorbarr Sultana. Belike your husband’s Intelligence will know exactly, by now.”
“Have you told the Sergeant yet?”
“His brother armsman told him, last night.”
“Ah.”
Gregor looked back over his shoulder at her as they rode away, until they were obscured from sight by the tree-boles.
For three days Kly’s nephew guided them through the mountains, Bothari on foot leading Cordelia on a bony-hipped little hill horse with a sheepskin pad cinched to its back. On the third afternoon, they came to a cabin which sheltered a skinny youth who led them to a shed that held, wonder of wonders, a rickety lightflyer. He loaded up the backseat with Cordelia and six jugs of maple syrup. Bothari shook hands silently with Kly’s nephew, who mounted the little horse and vanished into the woods.
Under Bothari’s narrow eye, the skinny youth coaxed his vehicle into the air. Brushing treetops, they followed ravines and ridges up over the snow-frosted spine of the mountains and down the other side, out of Vorkosigan’s District. They came at dusk to a little market town. The youth brought his flyer down in a side street. Cordelia and Bothari helped him carry his gurgling produce to a small grocer’s shop, where he bartered the syrup for coffee, flour, soap, and power cells.
Upon returning to his lightflyer, they found that a battered groundtruck had pulled up and parked behind it. The youth exchanged no more than a nod with its driver, who hopped out and slid the door to the cargo bay aside for Bothari and Cordelia. The bay was a quarter full of fiber sacks of cabbages. They did not make very good pillows, though Bothari did his best to arrange Cordelia a nest of them as the truck rocked along above the dismally uneven roads. Bothari then sat wedged against the side of the cargo bay and compulsively polished the edge of his knife to molecular sharpness with a makeshift strop, a bit of leather he’d begged from Sonia. Four hours of this and Cordelia was ready to start talking to the cabbages.
The truck thumped to a halt at last. The door slid aside, and first Bothari then Cordelia emerged to find themselves in the middle of nowhere: a gravel-surfaced road over a culvert, in the dark, in the country, in an unfamiliar district of unknown loyalties.
“They’ll pick you up at Kilometer Marker Ninety-six,” the truck driver said, pointing to a white smudge in the dimness that appeared to be merely a painted rock.
“When?” asked Cordelia desperately. For that matter, who were they?
“Don’t know.” The man returned to his truck and drove off in a spray of gravel from the hoverfan, as if he were already pursued.
Cordelia perched on the painted boulder and wondered morbidly which side was going to leap out of the night first, and by what test she might tell them apart. Time passed, and she entertained an even more depressed vision of no one picking them up at all.
But at last a darkened lightflyer floated down out of the night sky, its engines pitched to eerie near-silence. Its landing feet crunched in the gravel. Bothari crouched beside her, his useless knife gripped in his hand. But the man awkwardly levering himself up out of the passenger seat was Lieutenant Koudelka. “Milady?” he called uncertainly to the two human scarecrows. “Sergeant?” A breath of pure delight puffed from Cordelia as she recognized the pilot’s blonde head as Droushnakovi. My home is not a place, it is people, sir… .
With Bothari’s hand on her elbow, at Koudelka’s anxious gesture Cordelia fell gratefully into the padded backseat of the flyer. Droushnakovi cast a dark look over her shoulder at Bothari, wrinkled her nose, and asked, “Are you all right, Milady?”
“Better than I expected, really. Go, go.”
The canopy sealed, and they rose into the air. Vent fans powered up, cycling filtered air. Colored lights from the control interface highlighted Kou’s and Drou’s faces. A technological cocoon. Cordelia glanced at systems readouts over Droushnakovi’s shoulder, and then up through the canopy; yes, dark shapes paced them, guardian military flyers. Bothari saw them, too, his eyes narrowing in approval. Some fraction of tension eased from his body.
