Leiber's breathing continued evenly, and his skin did not turn any alarming colors. All right so far.

"Follow me to Madame Suze's place," he instructed Johannes. Dr. Durona would be there, among other useful amenities. He thought a moment. "No, better-lead me to Suze's."

He locked the back of the van, doused its flashing lights, and followed Johannes in convoy out of the parking lot. Roic wondered if m'lord's approach to life, or at least to his Auditorial investigations, was rubbing off on him. He'd never used to be this cavalier about due process. It was hard to tell, sometimes, if m'lord's style was the result of single-minded dedication to duty, habits of overweening Vor privilege, or simple insanity. Roic only knew that he had an inexplicable desire to whistle cheerfully, right now.

Instead he raised his wristcom to his lips, called m'lord, and gave a concise precis of his morning's mission, if m'lord's laconic order of, Roic, go nail that twit could be so grandly styled.

And then, being alone in the driver's cab, he whistled all the way to Suze's.

?

His imagination afire with possibilities, Jin sat at the consulate's kitchen table and counted out, again, his share of the money Roic had solemnly distributed to him and Mina at breakfast that morning. Mina had already secreted hers in her backpack upstairs, but she watched him with interest as he reshuffled his stack of currency-five thousand nuyen, more than he'd ever had at one time in his life. Back in the good times, before his father had died, Jin had never been given more than five hundred even for his best birthday.

"What are you going to do with yours?" Mina asked.

"I'm not sure yet. I could buy food for my creatures for months with this. Or get something new. I always wanted to try keeping fish, but Aunt Lorna would never let me, and there was no way at Suze's. You can't cart fish around with you if you might have to go live on the street."

Mina's eyebrows knit. "Do you guess we're going to be here that long?"

Jin hesitated. "I don't know."

"Do you think I have enough for a pony?"

"Where would you keep a pony? You need, like, lots of terraformed ground, I think. The back garden here's not big enough."

"Aunt Lorna's patio sure wasn't big enough," Mina agreed. "At least Consul Vorlynkin has grass."

Jin tried to picture this. The consulate's patch of back lawn was barely larger than its living room. Nice for a chicken run, but he didn't think it would work for anything much bigger. "Anyway," he said bracingly, "you still have Lady Murasaki. Pony's got four legs, spider's got eight, so she has to be twice as good, right?"

Mina cast him a look of cold scorn. "I'd like to see you try and put a saddle and bridle and stuff on her."

Jin tried to imagine spider-sized tack-knotted thread, perhaps?-and what kind of insect could you persuade to ride a wolf spider? That the spider wouldn't eat? Riding would be a much more exciting sport, he thought, if ponies ate prey like spiders did. Did the consulate have any thread they could borrow…?? But before he could pursue the vision further, Consul Vorlynkin and Miles-san came through the kitchen pulling on their jackets.

"Vorlynkin is going to drive me down to Madame Suze's to see about something," Miles-san told them. He and Roic had been spending a lot of time there lately, Jin thought, and come back looking grim and thoughtful, though no one had said why. And Raven-sensei hadn't come back at all. "Yuuichi Matson's here, so you won't be alone. But if any strangers come in on consulate business, you'll need to stay out of the front rooms and hall. Upstairs should be all right, or the back garden, if you don't make too much noise."

"I'll be back directly," Vorlynkin promised.

Mina looked up. "Do you think you'll ever find Mommy?"

"We hope to have good news soon," said Miles-san.

Jin wasn't sure how to interpret that soothing tone of voice. More grownup lies? By her scrunched face, he didn't think Mina was buying it, either.

But what she said was, "Lord Vorkosigan, if you had children you'd give them ponies, wouldn't you? Not spiders?"

He looked a little taken aback. "I do and I have. Ponies, not spiders. Although I suppose they could have spiders if they wanted some. God knows we have butterbugs. Monogrammed. Didn't I ever show you my pictures?"

And then, to Jin's surprise and growing dismay, he pulled a holocube out of his pocket and proceeded to show off scans of a regular-sized, dark-haired woman-Jin could tell she was regular-sized because there were some shots of the two of them together, and the top of Miles-san's head barely reached her shoulder-and a bewildering succession of children at different ages. Jin didn't quite sort them out till they came to a group shot-a dark-haired boy and a red-haired girl a bit younger than Mina, an infant in the pretty woman's arms, and a leggy toddler in the middle of the pack. Four children. He hoped Mina would muster the wit to look interested and not distraught. He still wasn't altogether sure what Miles-san was, but he seemed to have a lot of clout. Even the consul did whatever he said.

"And here's Helen on her pony down at Vorkosigan Surleau-it's a place we have in the country, on a lake-and here's Sasha petting his. Xander. Alex, I mean."

Jin wondered what kind of inattentive father Miles-san was, that he couldn't seem to remember his own son's name. There was only the one boy, after all. It wasn't as if he needed to run down a list till he got to the one who was irritating him, the way Uncle Hikaru had with him and Tetsu and Ken sometimes.

But Jin had to admit, they were very fine-looking ponies, one dappled silvery-gray, the other a glossy dark brown with black socks and mane and tail and a white star on its forehead, both with dark, liquid, friendly gazes, seeming tolerant of their child-admirers. Mina goggled, her mouth dropping open in naked longing. Yah and double-yah-a big place in the country. With lots of animals-there had been dogs and cats and birds in the backgrounds of some of those shots, and who knew what creatures lurked in those wooded hills? And fish in a real lake, not just in some little glass tank, and maybe creeping and crawling native marvels living in the streams running down into it-better than Jin had dared to dream.

And all belonging to these other children. Children who had a live mother and father, too. What was that line of Uncle Hikaru's? Them what has, gets.

And those that didn't have, didn't get, Jin supposed was the unspoken half of that lesson. He looked at those other children, and at Miles-san, so obviously pleased and proud, and didn't doubt that Mina probably felt like crying. His own throat was tight with envy and ridiculous anger. It wasn't as if Miles-san had kept his family a secret on purpose, just to bait Jin so belatedly.

"I wouldn't have dared not teach them to ride," Miles-san went on. "My grandfather's ghost would have haunted me if I hadn't, not that the old buzzard doesn't anyway. The Vor were a military caste, back in the Time of Isolation. Knights, of a sort-or bandits, perhaps, depending on your point of view. Horse soldiers, in any case. It's a tradition." He gave that last word a peculiar emphasis, as if it tasted funny in his mouth. "A perfectly useless skill, nowadays, but we keep it up all the same."

"Perhaps we'd better go," said Vorlynkin, and "Yeah," said Miles-san. He pocketed his holocube carefully, like it was something special to him. They went off through the garden toward the big garage.

Jin and Mina stared at each other.

"Well," said Mina at last. "At least I was right about the ponies." She blinked rapidly, and rubbed her reddened eyes.

Jin glowered down at his little stack of money, which had seemed such a big pile of possibilities just minutes ago.