Captain Vorpatril's alliance

Ivan stared open‑mouthed at Rish, who stared back in somewhat affronted dignity. “So you’re my sister‑in‑law?” He sat a moment, not so much in reflection as stunned‑like an ox that had just met a mallet. “That sure explains a lot…”

Byerly didn’t help by laughing like a loon.

“You could take some other course,” said Ivan Xav a week later, when Tej’s ground‑vehicle operation training had concluded in triumph, or at least not disaster, and left her with a certification giving her the freedom of the city‑if she could, first, borrow a vehicle, and second, wedge through the traffic. Bubble‑tube systems were being retrofitted in some areas, but the installation was evidently slow, plagued with problems. It sometimes seemed to Tej as if this entire planet was in process of being retrofitted.

“There are three major universities and over a dozen colleges and who knows how many tech schools in this town,” Ivan Xav went on. “They have courses for everything. Well, maybe not licensed practicing sexuality whats‑its, but given the way the conservative crowd complains, that may be next. You’re smart. You could pick anything you liked.”

Tej contemplated this offer, both uneasy and enticed. “I always had tutors, before. I never chose my own, like, off a menu.”

“It might be a way for you to meet more people, too,” Ivan Xav speculated. “I should really introduce you to more than the Koudelka girls, come to think. All the women I know have women friends‑to excess, sometimes.” He paused for thought. “There’s Tatya Vorbretten, though she’s up to her ears in infants right now, as bad as Ekaterin and Delia. Tattie Vorsmythe? She was always fun, despite her strange taste in men. Not sure who all Mamere could suggest, of the younger generation. She used to know lots of Vor maidens, daughters of her cronies, y’know, but they mostly seem to have gotten married and moved along.”

This mental search for names was interrupted when he went to answer his comconsole. When he came back, he looked stricken.

“Bad news?” asked Tej, sitting up on the couch and setting aside her reader.

“No, not…not really. It was the Clerk’s office at the Vorpatril District Court. Says they had a case fall off Falco’s docket for the first afternoon of next week, and did I want the slot? I, uh…said yes. Because God knows when there’ll be another, y’know?”

“Oh, excellent,” said Rish, wandering in from the kitchen with a fresh mug of tea in her hand in time to hear this. “One more chore out of the way.”

“Oh,” Tej echoed hollowly. “Yeah. Good.”

It was like some weird sort of honeymoon in reverse, Ivan thought. Taking a personal day’s leave from Ops left him facing a three‑day weekend, not something to waste. So Ivan seized the chance to show Tej more of Barrayar while he could, outside of the hectic confines of the capital. Rish, upon finding that her witness was not required, elected to stay behind under the loose supervision of Byerly, and just how loose that might be, Ivan wasn’t asking, gift horses and all that. It left him with a great chance for a real get‑away with Tej, just the two of them at last.

It was not the season for tourists in the northeastern coastal District traditionally held by the Vorpatril counts. As his lightflyer beat its way up the shoreline against a cold sea wind, Ivan explained to Tej, “People come up here from the south in the summer to escape the heat. Then go back down in the winter to find it again. If there’s time, maybe I could take you down to see the south coast, too.” Time. There wasn’t enough time. Yes, the marriage was supposed to have been temporary. But not bleeding instantaneous.

He took a detour over the rural territory, to give Tej an idea of the extent of it. A few areas of early snow, just inland, proved no novelty to her, as Jackson’s Whole was apparently temperate all the way to the equator, with large and barren polar regions. Happily, the snow covered up the last few biocide blights lingering from the Occupation. But a little way up the coast past the summer resort town of Bonsanklar, Good Saint Claire in one of the old tongues, lay a cozy little inn specializing in the Vor trade, fondly remembered from a few visits in Ivan’s youth. It was still there, perhaps a little shabbier, but just as cozy. He and Tej managed one walk on the pebbled beach before darkness drove them indoors; the next day it rained, but their end room boasted its own fireplace, food service, and no reason to go out. None at all.

Far too soon the next morning, they were back in his lightflyer, threading their way upriver to the Vorpatril District capital city of New Evias.

“I don’t understand what I’m supposed to call him,” said Tej, peering anxiously ahead out the front canopy. “Count Vorpatril or Count Falco? And if only his heir is Lord Vorpatril, why are you Lord Vorpatril too, or are you?”