What the devil was Ekaterin's whole family doing up there with her? How had she persuaded Hugo and Vassily to cooperate with this visit? And what hand did Gregor have in it? Miles swore he'd seen a Vorbarra Armsman, turning away after escorting them to their seats. . . . On the floor of the Council, the Lord Guardian of the Speaker's Circle banged the butt of a cavalry spear bearing the Vorbarra pennon onto the wooden plaque set in the floor for that purpose. The clack-clack echoed through the chamber. No time now to dash up to the gallery and find out what was going on. Miles tore his attention from Ekaterin, and prepared to tend to business. The business that would decide if they were both to be plunged into dream or nightmare. . . . The Lord Guardian called out, "My Imperial Master recognizes Count Vormoncrief. Come forward and make your petition, my lord."
Count Boriz Vormoncrief stood up, patted his son-in-law on the shoulder, and strode forward to take his place in the Speaker's Circle under the colorful windows, facing the semi-circle of his fellow Counts. He made a short, formal plea for the recognition of Sigur as the rightful heir to the Vorbretten's District, with reference to René's gene scan evidence, already circulated among his colleagues well before this vote. He made no comment on Richars's case, waiting in the queue. A shift from alliance to distancing, yes by God! Richars's face, as he listened, was set and stolid. Boriz stood down.
The Lord Guardian banged the spear butt again. "My Imperial Master recognizes Count Vorbretten. Come forward and claim your right of rebuttal to this petition, my lord."
René stood up at his desk. "My Lord Guardian, I yield the Circle temporarily to Lord Dono Vorrutyer." He sat again.
A little murmur of commentary rose from the floor. Everyone followed the swap and its logic; to Miles's deep and concealed satisfaction, Richars seemed taken by surprise. Dono stood, limped forward into the Speaker's Circle, and turned to confront the assembled Counts of Barrayar. A brief white grin flashed in his beard. Miles followed his glance up into the gallery just in time to see Olivia standing on her seat and making a sweeping thumb's-up gesture.
"Sire, My Lord Guardian, my lords." Dono moistened his lips, and launched into the formal wording of his petition for the Countship of the Vorrutyer's District. He reminded all present that they had received certified copies of his complete medical report and the witnessed affidavits to his new gender. Briefly, he reiterated his arguments of right by male primogeniture, Count's Choice, and his prior experience assisting his late brother Pierre in the administration of the Vorrutyer's District.
Lord Dono stood legs apart, hands clasped behind the small of his back in an assertive stance, and raised his chin. "As some of you know by now, last night someone attempted to take this decision from you. To decide the future of Barrayar not in this Council Chamber, but in the back streets. I was attacked; luckily, I escaped serious injury. My assailants are now in the hands of Lord Vorbohn's guard, and a witness has given evidence sufficient for the arrest of my cousin Richars for suspicion of conspiracy to commit this mutilation. Vorbohn's men await him outside. Richars will depart this chamber either into their arresting arms, or placed by you above their jurisdiction—in which case, judgment of the crime will fall upon you later.
"Government by thugs in the Bloody Centuries gave Barrayar many colorful historical incidents, suitable for high drama. I don't think it's a drama we wish to return to in real life. I stand before you ready and willing to serve my Emperor, the Imperium, my District, and its people. I also stand for the rule of law." He gave a grave nod toward Count Vorhalas, who nodded back. "Gentlemen, over to you." Dono stood down.
Years ago—before Miles was born—one of Count Vorhalas's sons had been executed for dueling. The Count had chosen not to raise his banner in rebellion over it, and had made it clear ever since that he expected like loyalty to the law from his peers. It was a kind of moral suasion with sharp teeth; nobody dared oppose Vorhalas on ethical issues. If the Conservative Party had a backbone that kept it standing upright, it was old Vorhalas. And Dono, it appeared, had just put Vorhalas in his back pocket. Or Richars had put him there for him . . . Miles hissed through his teeth in suppressed excitement. Good pitch, Dono, good, good. Superb.
The Lord Guardian banged his spear again, and called Richars up for his answer to Dono's petition. Richars looked shaken and angry. He strode forward to take his place in the Speaker's Circle with his lips already moving. He turned to face the chamber, took a deep breath, and launched into the formal preambles of his rebuttal.
Miles's attention was diverted by some rustling up in the gallery: more latecomers arriving. He glanced up, and his eyes widened to see his mother and father, in the row directly behind Ekaterin and the Professora, murmuring a negotiation for seats together and apologies and thanks to a startled Vor couple who instantly made way for the Viceroy and Vicereine. They'd evidently got away from their breakfast meeting in time to attend this vote, and were still formally dressed, Count Aral in the same brown-and-silver House uniform Miles wore, the Countess in a fancy embroidered beige ensemble, her red-roan hair in elaborate braids wreathing her head. Ivan craned around, looked surprised, nodded a greeting, and muttered something under his breath. The Professora, intent on hearing Richars's words, shushed him. Ekaterin hadn't looked behind her; she gripped the balcony rail and stared intently down at Richars as though willing him to pop an artery in the speech centers of his brain. But he droned on, coming to the summation of his arguments.
"That I have always been Pierre's heir is inherent in his lack of acknowledgement of any other in that place. I grant there was no love lost between us, which I always considered unfortunate, but as many of you have reason to know, Pierre was a, ah, difficult personality. But even he realized he could have no other successor but me.
"Dono is a sick joke of Lady Donna's, which we here have tolerated for too long. She is the very essence of the sort of galactic corruption," his glance, and his hand, flicked to mutie-Miles, as though to suggest his enemy's body was an outward and visible form of an inward and invisible poison, "against which we must fight, yes, I say fight, and I say it boldly and aloud, for our native purity. She is a breathing threat to our wives, daughters, sisters. She is an incitement to rebellion against our deepest and most fundamental order. She is an insult to the honor of the Imperium. I beg you will finish her strutting charade with the finality it deserves."
Richars glanced around, anxiously seeking signs of approval from his dauntingly impassive listeners, and continued, "With respect to Lady Donna's feeble threat to bring her claimed attack—which might in fact have come from any quarter sufficiently outraged by her posturing—onto the floor of this chamber for judgment. I say, bring it on. And who would be her stalking horse, to lay the case before you, in that event?" He made a broad gesture at Miles, sitting at his desk with his booted feet out and listening with as little expression as he could maintain. "One who stands accused of far worse crimes himself, even up to premeditated murder."
Richars was rattled; he was trying to set off his smokescreen way too early. It was a smoke Miles choked on all the same. Damn you, Richars. He could not let this pass unchallenged here, not for an instant.
"A point of order, my Lord Guardian." Not changing his posture, Miles pitched his drawl to carry across the chamber. "I am not accused; I am slandered. There is an unsubtle legal distinction between the two."
"It will be an ironic day when you try to lay down a criminal accusation here," Richars parried, stung, Miles hoped, by the implied threat of countersuit.
Count Vorhalas called out from his place in the back row, "In the event, Sire, my Lord Guardian, my lords, having viewed the evidence and listened to the preliminary interrogations, I should be pleased to lay the charge against Lord Richars myself."
The Lord Guardian frowned, and tapped his spear suggestively. Historically, permitting men to start speaking out of turn had quickly led to shouting matches, fist fights, and, in prior eras when weapons scanners hadn't been available, famous melees an
d duels to the death. But Emperor Gregor, listening with very little expression himself, made no move to intervene.
Richars was growing yet more off balance; Miles could see it in his reddening face and heavy breathing. To Miles's shock, he gestured up at Ekaterin. "It's a bold villain who can stand unashamed while his victim's own wife looks down at him—though I suppose she could hardly look up at him, eh?"
Faces turned toward the pale black-clad woman in the gallery. She looked chilled and frightened, jerked out of her safe observer's invisibility by Richars's unwelcome attention. Beside her, Nikki stiffened. Miles sat upright; it was all he could do to keep himself from launching himself across the chamber at Richars's throat and attempting to throttle him on the spot. That wouldn't work anyway. He was compelled to other means of combat, slower, but, he swore, more effective in the end. How dare Richars turn on Ekaterin in this public venue, invade her most private concerns, attempt to manipulate her most intimate relationships just to serve his power-grab?
Miles's anticipated nightmare of defense was here, now. Already he would be forced to turn his attention not just to truth but to appearances, to check every word out his mouth for its effect on the listeners who could become his future judges. Richars had put himself one-down through his botched attack on Dono; could he scramble back up over Miles's and Ekaterin's bodies? It seemed he was about to try.
Ekaterin's face was utterly still, but white around the lips. Some prudent back part of Miles's brain couldn't help making a note of what she looked like when she was really angry, for future reference. "You are mistaken, Lord Richars," she snapped down at him. "Not your first mistake, apparently."
"Am I?" Richars shot back. "Why else, then, did you flee in horror from his public proposal, if not your belated realization of his hand in your late husband's death?"
"That's no business of yours!"
"One wonders what pressures he has brought to bear since to gain your compliance . . ." His smarmy sneer invited the listeners to imagine the worst.
"Only if one is a damned fool!"
"Proof is where you find it, madame."
"That's your idea of proof?" Ekaterin snarled. "Fine. Your legal theory is easily demolished—"
The Lord Guardian banged his spear. "Interjections from the gallery are not permitted," he began, staring up at her.
Behind Ekaterin, the Viceroy of Sergyar stared down at the Lord Guardian, tapped his index finger suggestively against the side of his nose, and made a small two-fingered sweeping gesture taking in Richars below: No; let him hang himself. Ivan, glancing over his shoulder, grinned abruptly and swiveled back. The Lord Guardian's eyes flicked to Gregor, whose face bore only the faintest smile and little other cue. The Lord Guardian continued more weakly, "But direct questions from the Speaker's Circle may be answered."
Richars's questions had been more rhetorical, for effect, than direct, Miles judged. Assuming Ekaterin would be safely silenced by her position in the gallery, he hadn't expected to have to deal with direct answers. The look on Richars's face made Miles think of a man tormenting a leopardess suddenly discovering that the creature had no leash. Which way would she pounce? Miles held his breath.
Ekaterin leaned forward, gripping the railing with her knuckles going pale. "Let's finish this. Lord Vorkosigan!"
Miles jerked in his seat, taken by surprise. "Madame?" He made a little half-bow gesture. "Yours to command . . ."
"Good. Will you marry me?"
A kind of roaring, like the sea, filled Miles's head; for a moment, there were only two people in this chamber, not two hundred. If this was a ploy to impress his colleagues with his innocence, would it work? Who cares? Seize the moment! Seize the woman! Don't let her get away again! One side of his lip curled up, then the other; then a broad grin took over his face. He tilted toward her. "Why, yes, madame. Certainly. Now?"
She looked a little taken aback at the vision this perhaps conjured of his abandoning the chamber instantly, to take her up on her offer this very hour, before she could change her mind. Well, he was ready if she was. . . . She waved him down. "We'll discuss that later. Settle this business."
"My pleasure." He grinned fiercely at Richars, who was now gaping like a fish. Then he just grinned. Two hundred witnesses. She can't back out now. . . .
"So much for that line of reasoning, Lord Richars," Ekaterin finished. She sat back with a hand-dusting gesture, and added, by no means under her breath, "Twit."
Emperor Gregor looked decidedly amused. Nikki, beside Ekaterin, was jittering with enthusiasm, mumbling something that looked like go-go-mama. The gallery had broken into half-choked titters. Ivan just rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand, though his eyes were narrowed with laughter. He glanced again behind Ekaterin, where the Vicereine looked as though she was choking, and the Viceroy turned a bark of laughter into a discreet cough. In a sudden flush of self-consciousness, Ekaterin shrank in her seat, hardly daring even to look at her brother Hugo or Vassily. She looked down at Miles, though, and her lips softened with a helpless smile.
Miles grinned back like a loon; Richars's blackest glare in his direction slid off him as though deflected by a force field. Gregor made a brief gesture to the Lord Guardian to move things along.
Richars had entirely lost the thread of his argument by now, as well as the momentum, center stage, and the sympathy of his audience. Anyone's attention that wasn't fixed on Ekaterin was aimed at Miles, with an amusement grown impatient with Richars's ugly drama. Richars finished weakly and incoherently, and left the Circle.
The Lord Guardian called the voice vote to begin. Gregor, who fell early in the roll as Count Vorbarra, voted Pass rather than an abstention, reserving the right to cast his ballot at the end, should a deciding vote be required, an Imperial privilege he didn't often invoke. Miles started to track the vote, but by the time the roll came around to him, had taken to jotting repeated iterations of Lady Ekaterin Nile Vorkosigan intertwined with Lord Miles Naismith Vorkosigan in his fanciest handwriting down the margins of his flimsy. René Vorbretten, grinning, had to prompt him to the correct response, which got another muffled laugh from the gallery.
No matter: Miles could tell when the magic majority of thirty-one had passed by the rustling that grew on floor and gallery, as others keeping the tally concluded that Dono was in. Richars was left with a poor showing of some dozen votes, as several of his counted-upon Conservative supporters called abstentions in the wake of Count Vorhalas's sturdy vote for Lord Dono. Dono's final total was thirty-two, not exactly an overwhelming victory, but with a vote to spare above the minimum for binding decision. Gregor, with obvious satisfaction, cast the Vorbarra vote as an abstention, affecting the outcome not at all.
A stunned-looking Richars climbed to his feet at the Vorrutyer's District desk, and cried desperately, "Sire, I appeal this decision!" Really, he had no other choice; tying the case up for another round was the only move that could now save him from the municipal guard lying patiently in wait for him outside the chamber.
"Lord Richars," Gregor responded formally, "I decline to hear your appeal. My Counts have spoken; their decision stands." He nodded to the Lord Guardian, who had the chamber's sergeants-at-arms swiftly escort Richars out the doors to his waiting fate before he could recover from his shock sufficiently to burst into futile protests or physical resistance. Miles's teeth clenched in savage contentment. Cross me, will you, Richars? You're done.
Well . . . really, Richars had done himself, when he'd struck at Dono in the middle of the night and missed. Thanks were due to Ivan, to Olivia, and, in a backhanded way Miles supposed, to Richars's secret supporter Byerly. With friends like By, who needed enemies? And yet . . . there was something about Ivan's version of last night's events that just didn't add up right. Later. If an Imperial Auditor can't get to the bottom of that one, no one can. He'd start by interrogating Byerly, now presumably safely in custody of ImpSec. Or better still, maybe with . . . Miles's eyes narrowed, but he had to give over the
line of thought as Dono rose again to his feet.
Count Dono Vorrutyer entered the Speaker's Circle to give calm thanks to his new colleagues, and to formally return the speaker's right to René Vorbretten. With a small, very satisfied smile, he returned to the Vorrutyer's District desk and took sole and undisputed possession. Miles was trying very hard not to crank his head over his shoulder and stare up into the gallery, but he did keep stealing little glances up Ekaterin's way. So it was he caught the moment when his mother finally leaned forward between Ekaterin and Nikki to convey her first greetings of the morning.
Ekaterin swiveled, and turned pale. Both her future parents-in-law smiled at her in perfect delight, and exchanged, Miles trusted, suitably enthusiastic welcomes.
The Professora turned too, and made some exclamation of surprise; she, however, followed it up by a handshake with the Vicereine exhibiting all the air of some secret sisterhood revealed. Miles was slightly unnerved by the older ladies' attitude of cheerful maternal conspiracy. Had intelligence been flowing in a hidden channel between their two households all this time? What has my mother been saying about me? He thought about trying to debrief the Vicereine later. Then he thought better of the idea.