“Your ImpSec people didn’t even fast-penta me. Aren’t you at all worried that I might still be programmed to assassinate you?” Or did he seem so little threat?

“I thought you shot your father-figure once already. Catharsis enough.” A bemused grimace curved the Count’s mouth.

Mark remembered Galen’s surprised look, when the nerve-disruptor beam had taken him full in the face. Whatever Aral Vorkosigan would look like, dying, Mark fancied it would not be surprised.

“You saved Miles’s life then, according to his description of the affray,” the Count said. “You chose your side two years ago, on Earth. Very effectively. I have many fears for you, Mark, but my death at your hand is not one of them. You’re not as one-down with respect to your brother as you imagine. Even-all, by my count.”

“Progenitor. Not brother,” said Mark, stiff and congealed.

“Cordelia and I are your progenitors,” said the Count firmly.

Denial flashed in Mark’s face.

The Count shrugged. “Whatever Miles is, we made him. You are perhaps wise to approach us with caution. We may not be good for you, either.”

His belly shivered with a terrible longing, restrained by a terrible fear. Progenitors. Parents. He was not sure he wanted parents, at this late date. They were such enormous figures. He felt obliterated in their shadow, shattered like glass, annihilated. He felt a sudden weird wish to have Miles back. Somebody his own size and age, somebody he could talk to.

The Count glanced again into the bedchamber. “Pym should have arranged your things.”

“I don’t have any things. Just the clothes I’m wearing … sir.” It was impossible to keep his tongue from adding that honorific.

“You must have had something more to wear!”

“What I brought from Earth, I left in a storage locker on Escobar. The rent’s up by now, it’s probably confiscated.”

The Count looked him over. “I’ll send someone to take your measurements, and supply you with a kit. If you were visiting under more normal circumstances, we would be showing you around. Introducing you to friends and relatives. A tour of the city. Getting you aptitude tests, making arrangements for furthering your education. We’ll do some of that, in any case.”

A school? What kind? Assignment to a Barrayaran military academy was very close to Mark’s idea of a descent into hell. Could they make him … ? There were ways to resist. He had successfully resisted being lent Miles’s wardrobe.

“If you want anything, ring for Pym on your console,” the Count instructed.

Human servants. So very strange. The physical fear that had turned him inside out was fading, to be replaced by a more formless general anxiety. “Can I get something to eat?”

“Ah. Please join Cordelia and me for lunch in one hour. Pym will show you to the Yellow Parlor.”

“I can find it. Down one floor, one corridor south, third door on the right.”

The Count raised an eyebrow. “Correct.”

“I’ve studied you, you see.”

“That’s all right. We’ve studied you, too. We’ve all done our homework.”

“So what’s the test?”

“Ah, that’s the trick of it. It’s not a test. It’s real life.”

And real death. “I’m sorry,” Mark blurted. For Miles? For himself? He scarcely knew.

The Count looked like he was wondering too; a brief ironic smile twitched one corner of his mouth. “Well … in a strange way, it’s almost a relief to know that it’s as bad as it can be. Before, when Miles was missing, one didn’t know where he was, what he might be doing to, er, magnify the chaos. At least this time we know he can’t possibly get into any worse trouble.”

With a brief wave, the Count walked away, not entering the room after Mark, not crowding him in any way. Three ways to kill him flashed through Mark’s mind. But that training seemed ages stale. He was too out of shape now anyway. Climbing the stairs had exhausted him. He pulled the door shut and fell onto the carved bed, shivering with reaction.

Chapter Thirteen

Ostensibly to allow Mark to recover from jump-lag, the Count and Countess set no tasks for him the first two days. Indeed, except for the rather formal mealtimes, Mark did not see Count Vorkosigan at all. He wandered the house and grounds at will, with no apparent guard but the Countess’s discreet observation of him. There were uniformed guards at the gates; he did not yet have the nerve to test and discover if they were charged to keep him in as well as unauthorized persons out.

He had studied Vorkosigan House, yes, but the immediacy of actually being here took some getting used to. It all seemed subtly askew from his expectations. The place was a warren, but for all the antiques with which Vorkosigan House was cluttered, every original window had been replaced with modern high-grade armor-glass and automatic shutters, even the ones high up on the wall in the basement kitchen. It was like a shell, if a vast one, of protection, palace/fortress/prison. Could he slide into this shell?

I’ve been a prisoner all my life. I want to be a free man.

On the third day, his new clothing arrived. The Countess came to help him unpack it all. The morning light and cool air of early autumn streamed into his bedchamber through the window which he had, mulishly, opened wide to the mysterious, dangerous, unknown world.

He opened one bag on a hanger to reveal a garment in a disturbingly military style, a high-necked tunic and side-piped trousers in Vorkosigan brown and silver, very like the Count’s armsmen’s liveries, but with more glitter on the collar and epaulettes. “What’s this?” he asked suspiciously.

“Ah,” said the Countess. “Gaudy, isn’t it? It’s your uniform as a lord of House Vorkosigan.”

His, not Miles’s. All the new clothes were computer-cut to generous fit; his heart sank as he calculated how much he’d have to eat to escape this one.

The Countess’s lips curved up at the dismayed expression on his face. “The only two places you actually have to wear it are if you tend a session of the Council of Counts, or if you go to the Emperor’s birthday ceremonies. Which you might; they’re coming up in a w weeks.” She hesitated, her finger tracing over the Vorkosigan logo embroidered on the tunic’s collar. “Miles’s birthday isn’t very long after that.”

Well, Miles wasn’t aging at the moment, wherever he was. “Birthdays are sort of a non-concept, for me. What do you call it when you take someone out of a uterine replicator?”

“When I was taken out of my uterine replicator, my parents called my birthday,” she said dryly.

She was Betan. Right. “I don’t even know when mine is.”

“You don’t? It’s in your records.”

“What records?”

“Your Bharaputran medical file. Haven’t you ever seen it? I’ll have get you a copy. It’s, um, fascinating reading, in a sort of horrifying way. Your birthday was the seventeenth of last month, in point of fact.”

“I missed it anyway, then.” He closed the bag and stuffed the uniform far back in his closet. “Not important.”

“It’s important that someone celebrate our existence,” she objected amiably. “People are the only mirror we have to see ourselves in. The domain of all meaning. All virtue, all evil, are contained only in people. There is none in the universe at large. Solitary confinement is a punishment in every human culture.”

“That’s … true,” he admitted, remembering his own recent imprisonment. “Hm.” The next garment he shook out suited his mood: solid black. Though on closer examination it proved to be almost the same design as the cadet lord’s uniform, the logos and piping muted in black silk instead of glowing in silver thread, almost invisible against the black cloth.

“That’s for funerals,” commented the Countess. Her voice was suddenly rather flat.