Miles was awakened in a dim grey light by a servant apprehensively touching his shoulder.
'Lord Vorkosigan? Lord Vorkosigan?' the man murmured.
Miles peered through slitted eyes, feeling thick with sleep, as though moving under water. What hour—and why was the idiot miscalling him by his father's title? New, was he? No …
Cold consciousness washed over him, and his stomach knotted, as the full significance of the man's words penetrated. He sat up, head swimming, heart sinking. 'What?'
'The—y—your father requests you dress and join him downstairs immediately.' The man's tumbling tongue confirmed his fear.
It was the hour before dawn. Yellow lamps made small warm pools within the library as Miles entered. The windows were blue-grey cold translucent rectangles, balanced on the cusp of night, neither transmitting light from without nor reflecting it from within. His father stood, half-dressed in uniform trousers, shirt, and slippers, talking in a grave undertone with two men. Their personal physician, and an aide in the uniform of the Imperial Residence. His father—Count Vorkosigan?—looked up to meet his eyes.
'Grandfather, sir?' asked Miles softly.
The new Count nodded. 'Very quietly, in his sleep, about two hours ago. He felt no pain, I think.' His father's voice was low and clear, without tremor, but his face seemed more lined than usual, almost furrowed. Set, expressionless; the determined commander. Situation under control. Only his eyes, and only now and then, through a passing trick of angle, held the look of some stricken and bewildered child. The eyes frightened Miles far more than the stern mouth.
Miles's own vision blurred, and he brushed the foolish water from his eyes with the back of his hand in a brusque, angry swipe. 'God damn it,' he choked numbly. He had never felt smaller.
His father focused on him uncertainly. 'I—' he began. 'He's been hanging by a thread for months, you know that …'
And I cut that thread yesterday, Miles thought miserably. I'm sorry . .. But he said only, 'Yes, sir.'
The funeral for the old hero was nearly a State occasion. Three days of panoply and pantomime, thought Miles wearily; what's it all for? Proper clothing was produced, hastily, in somber correct black. Vorkosigan House became a chaotic staging-area for forays into public set-pieces. The lying-in-state at Vorhartung Castle, where the Council of Counts met. The eulogies. The procession, which was nearly a parade, thanks to the loan from Gregor Vorbarra of a military band in dress uniform and a contingent of his purely decorative horse cavalry. The interment.
Miles had thought his grandfather was the last of his generation. Not quite, it seemed, for the damndest set of ancient creaking martinets and their crones, in black like flapping crows, came creeping from whatever woodwork they'd been lurking in. Miles, grimly polite, endured their shocked and pitying stares when introduced as Piotr Vorkosigan's grandson, and their interminable reminiscences about people he'd never heard of, who'd died before he was born, and of whom—he sincerely hoped—he would never hear again.
Even after the last spadeful of dirt had been packed down, it was not ended. Vorkosigan House was invaded, that afternoon and evening, by hordes of—you couldn't call them well-wishers, exactly, he reflected—but friends, acquaintances, military men, public men, their wives, the courteous, the curious, and more relatives than he cared to think about.
Count and Countess Vorkosigan were nailed downstairs. Social duty was always yoked, for his father, to political duty, and so was doubly inescapable. But when is cousin Ivan Vorpatril arrived, in tow of his mother Lady Vorpatril, Miles determined to escape to the only bolt-hole left not occupied by enemy forces. Ivan had passed his candidacy exams, Miles had heard; he didn't think he could tolerate the details. He plucked a couple of gaudy blooms from a funeral floral display in passing, and fled by lift tube to the top floor, and refuge.
Miles knocked on the carved wood door. 'Who's there?' Elena's voice floated through faintly. He tried the enamel patterned knob, found it unlocked, and snaked a hand waving the flowers around the door. Her voice added, 'Oh, come in, Miles.'
He bobbed around the door, lean in black, and grinned tentatively. She was sitting in an antique chair by her window. 'How did you know it was me?' Miles asked.
'Well, it was either you or—nobody brings me flowers on their knees.' Her eye lingered a moment on the doorknob, unconsciously revealing the height scale used for her deduction.
Miles promptly dropped to his knees and quickmarched across the rug, to present his offering with a flourish. 'Voila!' he cried, surprising a laugh from her. His legs protested this abuse by going into painful cramping spasms. 'Ah …' He cleared his throat, and added in a much smaller voice, 'Do you suppose you could help me up? These damn grav-crutches …'
'Oh, dear.' Elena assisted him on to her narrow bed, made him put his legs out straight, and returned to her chair.
Miles looked around the tiny bedroom. 'Is this closet the best we can do for you?'
'I like it. I like the window on the street,' she assured him. 'It's bigger than my father's room here.' She tested the flowers scent, a musty green odor. Miles immediately regretted not sorting through to find some of the more perfumy kind. She looked up at him in sudden suspicion. 'Miles, where did you get these?'
He flushed, faintly guilty. 'Borrowed 'em from Grandfather. Believe me, they'll never be missed. It's a jungle down there.'
She shook her head helplessly. 'You're incorrigible.' But she smiled.
'You don't mind?' he asked anxiously. 'I thought you'd get more enjoyment from them than he would, at this point.'
'Just so nobody thinks I filched them myself!'
'Refer them to me,' he offered grandly. He jerked up his chin. She was gazing into the flowers delicate structure more somberly. 'Now what are you thinking? Sad thoughts?'
'Honestly, my face might as well be a window.'
'Not at all. Your face is more like—like water. All reflections and shifting lights—I never know what's lurking in the depths.' He dropped his voice at the end, to indicate the mystery of the depths.
Elena smiled derisively, then sighed seriously. 'I was just thinking—I've never put flowers on my mother's grave.'
He brightened at the prospect of a project. 'Do you want to? We could slip out the back—load up a cart or two—nobody'd notice …'
'Certainly not!' she said indignantly. 'This is quite bad enough of you.' She turned the flowers in the light from the window, silvered from the chill autumn cloudiness. 'Anyway, I don't know where it is.'
'Oh? How strange. As fixated as the Sergeant is on your mother, I'd have thought he'd be just the pilgrimmage type. Maybe he doesn't like to think about her death, though.'
'You're right about that. I asked him about it once, to go and see where she's buried and so on, and it was like talking to a wall. You know how he can be.'
'Yes, very like a wall. Particularly when it falls on someone.' A theorizing gleam lit Miles's eye. 'Maybe it's guilt. Maybe she was one of those rare women who die in childbirth—she did die about the time you were born, didn't she?'
'He said it was a flyer accident.'
'Oh.'
'But another time he said she'd drowned.'
'Hm?' The gleam deepened to a persistent smoulder. 'If she'd ditched her flyer in a river or something, they could both be true. Or if he ditched it …'
Elena shivered. Miles caught it, and castigated himself inwardly for being an insensitive clod. 'Oh, sorry. Didn't mean to—I'm in a gruesome mood today, I'm afraid,' he apologized. 'It's all this blasted black.' He flapped his elbows in imitation of a carrion bird.
He lapsed into introspective quiet for a time, meditating on the ceremonies of death. Elena fell in with his silence, gazing wistfully down on the darkly glittering throng of Barrayar's upper class, passing in and out four floors below her window.
'We could find out,' he said suddenly, startling her from her reverie.
'What?'
'Where your mother's buried. And we wouldn't even have to ask anyone.'
