The warrior's apprentice Read Free Page A

smile, which he acknowledged blandly with a murmured, “Mi-lady.” Miles shrugged grudgingly and headed for the back of the house instead.
    “Miles,” said his mother as he passed, “don’t, ah... He’s very old, he’s not too well, and he hasn’t had to be polite to anybody in years—just take him on his own terms, all right?’
    “You know I do.” He grinned ironically, to prove how unaffected he proposed to be. Her lips curved in return, but her eyes remained grave.
    He met Elena Bothari, coming out of his grandfather’s chambers. His bodyguard greeted his daughter with a silent nod, and won for himself one of her rather shy smiles.
    For the thousandth time Miles wondered how such an ugly man could have produced such a beautiful daughter. Every one of his features was echoed in her face, but richly transmuted. At eighteen she was tall, like her father, fully six feet to his six-and-a-half; but while he was whipcord lean and tense, she was slim and vibrant. His nose a beak, hers an elegant aquiline profile; his face too narrow, hers with the air of some perfectlybred aristocratic sight-hound, a borzoi or a greyhound. Perhaps it was the eyes that made the difference; hers were dark and lustrous, alert, but without his constantly shifting, unsmiling watchfulness. Or the hair; his greying, clipped in his habitual military burr, hers long, dark, straight-shining. A gargoyle and a saint, by the same sculptor, facing each other across some ancient cathedral portal.
    Miles shook himself from his trance. Her eyes met his briefly, and her smile faded. He straightened up from his tired slouch and produced a false smile for her, hoping to lure her real one back. Not too soon. Sergeant . . .
    “Oh, good, I’m so glad you’re here,” she greeted him. “It’s been gruesome this morning.”
    “Has he been crotchety?”
    “No, cheerful. Playing Strat-O with me and paying no attention—do you know, I almost beat him? Telling his war stories and wondering about you—if he’d had a map of your course, he’d have been sticking pins in it to
    mark your imaginary progress... I don’t have to stay, do I?”
    “No, of course not.”
    Elena twitched a relieved smile at him, and trailed off down the corridor, casting one disquieted look back over her shoulder.
    Miles took a breath, and stepped across General Count Piotr Vorkosigan’s inner threshold.

 
     
    CHAPTER TWO
     
    *        *        *
     
     
    The old man was out of bed, shaved and crisply dressed for the day. He sat up in a chair, gazing pensively out the window overlooking his back garden. He glanced up with a frown at the interrupter of his meditations, saw that it was Miles, and smiled broadly.
    “Ah, come, boy...” He gestured at the chair Miles guessed Elena had recently vacated. The old man’s smile became tinged with puzzlement. “By God, have I lost a day somewhere? I thought this was the day you were out on that 100 kilometer trot up and down Mt. Sencele.”
    “No, sir, you haven’t lost a day.” Miles eased into the chair. Bothari set another before him and pointed at his feet. Miles started to lift them, but the effort was sabotaged by a particularly savage twinge of pain. “Yeah, put ‘em up. Sergeant,” Miles acquiesced wearily. Bothari helped him place the offending feet at the medically correct angle and withdrew, strategically Miles thought, to stand at attention by the door. The old Count watched this pantomime, understanding dawning painfully in his face.
    “What have you done, boy?” he sighed.
    Let’s make it quick and painless, like a beheading... “Jumped off a wall in the obstacle course yesterday and broke both my legs. Washed myself out of the physical tests completely. The others—well, they don’t matter now.”
    “So you came home.”
    “So I came home.”
    “Ah.” The old man drummed his long gnarled fingers once on the arm of the chair. “Ah.” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and thinned his