The warrior's apprentice Read Free

directly across the street; a figure moved against the roofline. The battlements had changed, but the watchful soldiers still stalked along them.
    Bothari, looming silently beside him, bent suddenly to retrieve a lost coin from the walkway. He placed it carefully in his left pocket. The dedicated pocket.
    One corner of Miles’s mouth lifted, and his eyes warmed with amusement. “Still the dowry?”
    “Of course,” said Bothari serenely. His voice was deep bass, monotonous in cadence. One had to know him a long time to interpret its expressionlessness. Miles knew every minute variation in its timbre as a man knows his own room in the dark.
    “You’ve been pinching tenth-marks for Elena as long as I can remember. Dowries went out with the horse cavalry, for God’s sake. Even the Vor marry without them these days. This isn’t the Time of Isolation.” Miles made his mockery gentle in tone, carefully fitted to Bothari’s obsession. Bothari, after all, had always treated Miles’s ridiculous craze seriously.
    “I mean her to have everything right and proper.”
    “You ought to have enough saved up to buy Gregor Vorbarra by now,” said Miles, thinking of the hundreds of small economies his bodyguard had practiced before him, over the years, for the sake of his daughter’s dowry.
    “Shouldn’t joke about the Emperor.” Bothari depressed this random stab at humor firmly, as it deserved. Miles sighed and began to work his way cautiously up the steps, legs stiff in their plastic immobilizers.
    The painkillers he’d taken before he’d left the military infirmary were beginning to wear off. He felt unutterably weary. The night had been a sleepless one, sitting up under local anesthetics, talking and joking with the surgeon as he puttered endlessly, piecing the minute shattered fragments of bone back together like an unusually obstreperous jigsaw puzzle. I put on a pretty good show, Miles reassured himself; but he longed to get off stage and collapse. Just a couple more acts to go.
    “What kind of fellow are you planning to shop for?” Miles probed delicately during a pause in his climb.
    “An officer,” Bothari said firmly.
    Miles’s smile twisted. So that’s the pinnacle of your ambition, too, Sergeant? he inquired silently. “Not too soon, I trust.”
    Bothari snorted. “Of course not. She’s only...” He paused, the creases deepening between his narrow eyes. “Time’s gone by...” his mutter trailed off.
    Miles negotiated the steps successfully, and entered Vorkosigan House, bracing for relatives. The first was to be his mother, it seemed; that was no problem. She appeared at the foot of the great staircase in the front hall as the door was opened for him by a uniformed servant-cum-guard. Lady Vorkosigan was a middle-aged woman, the fiery red of her hair quenched by natural grey, her height neatly disguising a few extra kilos weight. She was breathing a bit heavily; probably had run downstairs when he was spotted approaching. They exchanged a brief hug. Her eyes were grave and unjudgemental.
    “Father here?” he asked.
    “No. He and Minister Quintillian are down at headquarters, arm-wrestling with the General Staff about their budget this morning. He said to give you his love and tell you he’d try to be here for lunch.”
    “He, ah—hasn’t told Grandfather about yesterday yet, has he?”
    “No—I really think you should have let him, though. It’s been rather awkward this morning.”
    “I’ll bet.” He gazed up at the stairs. It was more than his bad legs that made them seem mountainous. Well, let’s get the worst over with first... “Upstairs, is he?”
    “In his rooms. Although he actually took a walk in the garden this morning, I’m glad to say.”
    “Mm.” Miles started working his way upstairs.
    “Lift tube,” said Bothari.
    “Oh, hell, it’s only one flight.”
    “Surgeon said you’re to stay off them as much as possible.”
    Miles’s mother awarded Bothari an approving