"Pym can drive you," Miles offered immediately.

He made no attempt to trap her here this time, she noted with dark amusement. Not a slow learner, indeed?

Promising to call her when he'd cleared Nikki's interview, Miles handed them personally into the rear compartment of the groundcar, and watched them out the gates. Nikki was quiet on this trip, too, but the silence was much less fraught now.

After a little, he gave her an odd, appraising look. "Mama . . . did you turn Lord Vorkosigan down 'cause he's a mutie?"

"No," she replied at once, and firmly. His brows bent. If he didn't get a more explicit answer, he would likely make up his own, she realized with an inward sigh. "You see, when he hired me to make his garden, it wasn't because he wanted a garden, or thought I was good at the work. He just thought it would give him a chance to see me a lot."

"Well," said Nikki, "that makes sense. I mean, it did, didn't it?"

She managed not to glower at him. Her work meant nothing to him—what did? If you could say anything to anyone . . . "Would you like it, if somebody promised to help you become a jump pilot, and you worked your heart out studying, and then it turned out they were tricking you into doing something else?"

"Oh." The light glimmered, dimly.

"I was angry because he'd tried to manipulate me, and my situation, in a way I found invasive and offensive." After a short, reflective pause, she added helplessly, "It seems to be hisstyle ." Was it a style she could learn to live with? Or was it a style he could bloody well learn not to try on her? Live, or learn? Can we have some of both?

"So . . . d'you like him? Or not?"

Like was surely not an adequate word for this hash of delight and anger and longing, this profound respect laced with profound irritation, all floating on a dark pool of old pain. The past and the future, at war in her head. "I don't know. Some of the time I do, yes, very much."

Another long pause. "Are you in love with him?"

What Nikki knew of adult love, he'd mostly garnered off the holovid. Part of her mind readily translated this question as code for, Which way are you going to jump, and what will happen to me? And yet . . . he could not share or even imagine the complexity of her romantic hopes and fears, but he certainly knew how such stories were supposed to Come Out Right.

"I don't know. Some of the time. I think."

He favored her with his Big People Are Crazy look. In all, she could only agree.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Miles had obtained copies of archives from the Council of Counts covering all the contested succession debates from the last two centuries. Together with a stack of gleanings from Vorkosigan House's own document room, they spread themselves over two tables and a desk in the library. He was deeply engrossed in a hundred-and-fifty-year-old account of the fourth Count Vorlakial's family tragedy when Armsman Jankowski appeared at the door from the anteroom and announced, "Commodore Galeni, m'lord."

Miles looked up in surprise. "Thank you, Jankowski." The Armsman gave him an acknowledging nod, and withdrew, closing the double doors discreetly behind himself.

Galeni trod across the great library, and regarded the scattering of papers, parchments, and flimsies with an ex-historian's alert eye. "Cramming, are you?" he inquired.

"Yes. Now, you had that doctorate in Barrayaran history. Do any really interesting District succession squabbles spring to your memory?"

"Lord Midnight the horse," Galeni replied at once. "Who always voted `neigh.' "

"Got that one already." Miles waved at the pile on the far end of the inlaid table. "What brings you here, Duv?"

"Official ImpSec business. Your requested analyst's report, My Lord Auditor, regarding certain rumors about Madame Vorsoisson's late husband."

Miles scowled, reminded. "ImpSec is late off the mark. This would have done a lot more good yesterday. Not a hell of a lot of point to order me to back off, and then let Ekaterin and Nikki be subjected to that surprise harassment—in her own home, good God—by that idiot Vormoncrief."

"Yes. Illyan told Allegre. Allegre told me. I wish I had someone to tell . . . I was still pulling in informants' reports and cross-checks as of midnight last night, thank you very much, my lord. I wasn't able to calculate anything like a decent reliability score till late yesterday."

"Oh. Oh, no, Allegre didn't put you on this . . . slander matter personally, did he? Sit, sit." Miles waved Galeni to a chair, which the Komarran pulled up around the corner of the table from Miles.

"Of course he did. I was an eyewitness to your ghastly dinner party, which seems to have launched the whole thing, and more to the point, I'm already in the need-to-know pool regarding the Komarr case." Galeni seated himself with a tired grunt; his eye automatically began to scan the documents sideways. "There was no way Allegre would add another man to that pool if he could possibly avoid it."

"Mm, makes sense, I guess. But I'd hardly think you'd have time ."

"I didn't," said Galeni bitterly. "I've been putting in an extra half shift after dinner nearly every day since I was promoted to head of Komarran Affairs. This came out of my sleep cycle. I'm considering abandoning meals and just hanging a food tube over my desk, which I could suck on now and then."

"I'd think Delia would put her foot down, after a while."

"Yes, and that's another thing," Galeni added, in an aggravated tone.

Miles waited a beat, but Duv did not elaborate. Well, and did he really need to? Miles sighed. "Sorry," he offered.

"Yes, well. From ImpSec's point of view, I have excellent news. No evidence has yet surfaced indicating any leak of the classified matters surrounding Tien Vorsoisson's death. No names, no hints of . . . technical activities, not even rumors of financial chicanery. There continues to be a complete and most welcome absence of Komarran conspirators of any stripe from any of the several scenarios of your murder of Vorsoisson."

"Several scenarios—! How many versions are circulating—no, don't tell me. It would just raise my blood pressure to no good purpose." Miles gritted his teeth. "So, what, am I supposed to have made away with Vorsoisson—a man twice my size—through some devilish ex-ImpSec trick?"

"Perhaps. In the one version concocted so far where you were not pictured as acting alone, the only henchmen posited were vile and corrupt ImpSec personnel. In your pay."

"This could only have been imagined by someone who never had to fill out one of Illyan's arcane expenditure-and/or-income reports," Miles growled.

Galeni shrugged amused agreement.

"And were there—no, let me tell you," Miles said. "There were no leaks traced from the Vorthys's household."

"None," Galeni conceded.

Miles grumbled a few satisfied swear words under his breath. He knew he hadn't misestimated Ekaterin. "Do me a personal favor and be sure to highlight that fact in the copy of this you send up to Allegre, eh?"

Galeni opened his hand in a carefully noncommittal gesture.

Miles blew out his breath, slowly. No leaks, no treasons: just idle malice and circumstance. And a touch of theoretical blackmail. Upsetting to himself, to his parents when it came to them, as it soon must, upsetting to the Vorthyses, to Nikki, to Ekaterin. They had dared to upset Ekaterin with this . . . He carefully ignored his simmering fury. Rage had no place in this. Calculation and implacable action did.

"So what, if anything, is ImpSec planning to do about it all?" Miles asked at last.

"At present, as little as possible. It's not as though we don't have enough other tasks on our plate. We will, of course, continue to monitor all data for any key items that might lead public attention back to where we don't want it. It's a poor second choice to no attention at all, but this murder scenario does us one favor. For anyone who refuses to accept Tien Vorsoisson's death as a mere accident, it presents a plausible cover story, which entirely accounts for no further investigation being permitted."