"But that would make you look worse," said Ekaterin. "It would make it look as if I believed Alexi's lies."

"The alternative would make it look as if we had somehow colluded in Tien's death. I don't see how to win this one. I do see how to cut the damage in half."

Ekaterin frowned deeply. And leave you standing there to be pelted with this garbage all alone? After a moment she said, "Your proposed solution is unacceptable. Find another."

His eyes rose searchingly to her face. "As you wish . . ."

"What are you talking about?" Nikki demanded, his brows drawn down in confusion.

"Ah." Miles touched his lips, and regarded the boy. "The reason, it seems, that my political opponents have accused me of sabotaging your da's breath mask, is that I want to court your mother."

Nikki's nose wrinkled, as he worked through this. "Did you really ask her to marry you?"

"Well, yes. In a pretty clumsy way. I did." Was he actually reddening? He spared her a quick glance, but she didn't know what he saw in her face. Or what he made of it. "But now I'm afraid that if she and I continue to go around together, people will say we must have plotted together against your da. She's afraid that if we don't continue to go around together, people will say that proves she thinks I did—I'm sorry if this distresses you—murder him. It's called, damned if you do, damned if you don't."

"Damn them all," said Ekaterin harshly. "I don't care what any of those ignorant idiots think, or say, or do. People can go choke on their vile gossip." Her hands clenched in her lap. "I do care what Nikki thinks." Rot Vormoncrief.

Vorkosigan raised an eyebrow at her. "And you think this version wouldn't come around to him too, the way the first one did?"

She looked away from him. Nikki was scrunching up again, glancing uncertainly from adult to adult. This was not, Ekaterin decided, the moment to tell him to keep his feet off the good furniture.

"Right," Miles breathed. "All right, then." He gave her a ghost of a nod. She was shaken by a weird inner vision of a knight drawing down his visor before facing the tilt. He studied Nikki a moment, and moistened his lips. "So—what do you think of it all so far, Nikki?"

"Dunno." Nikki, so briefly voluble, was drawing in again, not good.

"I don't mean facts. No one has given you enough facts yet for you to make much of. Try feelings. Worries. For example, are you afraid of me?"

"Naw," Nikki muttered, wrapping his arms around his knees and staring down at his shoes rubbing on the fine yellow silk upholstery.

"Are you afraid it might be true?"

"It could not be," said Ekaterin fiercely. "It was physically impossible."

Nikki looked up. "But he was in ImpSec, Mama! ImpSec agents can do anything, and make it look like anything!"

"Thank you for that . . . vote of confidence, Nikki," said Miles gravely. "I think. In fact, Ekaterin, Nikki's right. I can imagine several plausible scenarios that could have resulted in the physical evidence you saw."

"Name one," she said scornfully.

"Most simply, I might have had an unknown accomplice." Rather horribly, his fingers made a tiny twisting gesture, as of someone venting a bound man's oxygen supply. Nikki of course missed both the gesture and the reference. "It elaborates from there. If I can generate them, so can others, and I'm sure some won't hesitate to share their bright ideas with you."

"You foresaw this?" she asked, a little numb.

"Ten years in ImpSec does things to your brain. Some of them aren't very nice."

The tidal wave of anger that had hurled her here was receding, leaving her standing on a very bare shore indeed. She had not intended to talk so frankly in front of Nikki. But Vormoncrief had destroyed any chance of continuing to protect him by ignorance. Maybe Miles was right. They were going to have to deal with this. All three of them were going to have to deal, and go on dealing, ready or not, old enough or not.

"Shuffling facts only takes you so far anyway. Sooner or later, you come down to bare trust. Or mistrust." He turned to Nikki, his eyes unreadable. "Here's the truth. Nikki, I did not murder your father. He went out-dome with a breath mask with nearly empty reservoirs, which he did not check, and then got caught outside too long. I made two bad mistakes that prevented me from being able to save him. I don't feel very good about that, but I can't fix it now. The only thing I can do to make up for it is to take care of—" He stopped abruptly, and eyed Ekaterin with extreme wariness. "To see that his family is taken care of, and doesn't lack for any need."

She eyed him back. His family had been Tien's least concern, judging by his performance while he was alive, or else he would not have left her destitute, himself secretly dishonored, and Nikki untreated for a serious genetic disease. Yet Tien's larger failures, time bombs though they'd been for Nikki's future, had seldom impinged on the young boy. In a pensive moment during the funeral she had asked Nikki what one of his happy memories of his da was. He'd remembered Tien taking them for a wonderful week at the seaside. Ekaterin, recalling that the monorail tickets and reservations for that holiday had been slipped to her as a charity by her brother Hugo, had kept silent. Even from the grave, she thought bitterly, Tien's personal chaos still reached out to disrupt her grasp for peace. Maybe Vorkosigan's bid to shoulder responsibility was not a bad thing for Nikki to hear.

Nikki's lips were tight, and his eyes a little blurry, as he digested Miles's blunt words. "But," he began, and stalled.

"You must be starting to think of a lot of questions," Miles said in a tone of mild encouragement. "What are some of them? Or even just one or two of them?"

Nikki looked down, then up. "But—but—why didn't he check his breath mask?" He hesitated, then went on in a rush, "Why couldn't you share yours? What were your two mistakes? What did you lie to Mama about that got her so mad? Why couldn't you save him? How did your wrists get all chewed up?" Nikki took a deep breath, gave Miles an utterly daunted look, and almost wailed, "Am I supposed to kill you like Captain Vortalon?"

Miles had been following this spate with close attention, but at this last he looked taken aback. "Excuse me. Who?"

Ekaterin, flummoxed, supplied in an undervoice, "Captain Vortalon is Nikki's favorite holovid hero. He's a jump pilot who has galactic adventures with Prince Xav, smuggling arms to the Resistance during the Cetagandan invasion. There was a whole long sequence about him chasing down some collaborators who'd ambushed his da—Lord Vortalon—and avenging his death on them one by one."

"I somehow missed that one. Must have been off-world. You let him watch all that violence, at his tender age?" Miles's eyes were suddenly alight.

Ekaterin set her teeth. "It was supposed to be educational, on account of the historical accuracy of the background."

"When I was Nikki's age, my obsession was Lord Vorthalia the Bold, Legendary Hero from the Time of Isolation." His reminiscent voice took on a rather fruity narrator's cadence, delivering this last. "That started with a holovid too, come to think of it, though before I was done I was persuading my gran'da to take me to look up original Imperial archives. Turned out Vorthalia wasn't as legendary as all that, though his real adventures weren't all so heroic. I think I could still sing all nine verses of the song that went with—"

"Please don't," she growled.

"Well, it could have been worse. I'm glad you didn't let him watch Hamlet ."

"What's Hamlet?" asked Nikki instantly. He was starting to uncoil a little.

"Another great revenge drama on the same theme, except this one is an ancient stage play from Old Earth. Prince Hamlet comes home from college—by the way, how old was your Captain Vortalon?"