Young Miles Read Free Page B

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 one-hundred-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 lips, staring out the window, not looking at Miles. His fingers drummed again. "It's all the fault of this damned creeping democratism," he burst out querulously. "A lot of imported off-planet nonsense. Your father did not do Barrayar a service to encourage it. He had a fine opportunity to stamp it out when he was Regent—which he wasted totally, as far as I can see . . ." he trailed off. "In love with off-planet notions, off-planet women," he echoed himself more faintly. "I blame your mother, you know. Always pushing that egalitarian tripe . . ."
    "Oh, come on," Miles was stirred to object. "Mother's as apolitical as you can get and still be conscious and walking around."
    "Thank God, or she'd be running Barrayar today. I've never seen your father cross her yet. Well, well, it could have been worse . . ." The old man shifted again, twisting in his pain of spirit as Miles had in his pain of body.
    Miles lay in his chair, making no effort to defend the issue or himself. The Count could be trusted to argue himself down, taking both parts, in a little time.
    "We must bend with the times, I suppose. We must all bend with the times. Shopkeepers' sons are great soldiers, now. God knows, I commanded a few in my day. Did I ever tell you about the fellow, when we were fighting the Cetagandans up in the Dendarii Mountains back behind Vorkosigan Surleau—best guerilla lieutenant I ever had. I wasn't much older than you, then. He killed more Cetagandans that year . . . His father had been a tailor. A tailor, back when it was all cut and stitched by hand, hunched over all the little detailing . . ." He sighed for the irretrievable past. "What was the fellow's name . . ."
    "Tesslev," supplied Miles. He raised his eyebrows