“Begging your pardon, milady, but I thought you might like to know that the lieutenant of your ImpSec security detail has laid a formal protest before his boss, asserting that Admiral Jole’s ImpSec training is too out-of-date to make him a substitute for a proper perimeter.”
“The little twerp!” said Cordelia, spitting a few crumbs. She rounded them up and put them more daintily back on her plate while she chewed this through. Her small crew of ImpSec Palace guards, arriving from home very excited to be guarding the Vicereine of Sergyar, were usually disappointed to discover their duties more nearly resembled something that could have been done by any hired commercial security service. Cheaper. The senior-most officers of ImpSec-Sergyar tended to be more focused on the neighbors—Cetaganda, Escobar, and transiting commercial ships of other flags—and upside station and wormhole security, and mostly dealt with Oliver. Who, having been trained on and by Simon Illyan, back in the day, handled it all with his usual unruffled efficiency, and seldom troubled Cordelia with anything but a short and accurate précis.
“I strongly disagree,” she said, when she’d sluiced down her bite with a swallow of tea. “And I am seriously annoyed. Oliver was judged fit to be last-man-standing next to Aral when that kid was still in diapers!” Her lower lip stuck out. “And he might say the same of you, for that matter. Does he include you in that…assertion?”
“No, milady, but only because he hasn’t thought of it. Naturally, I did not point it out.”
“I commend your restraint.”
He shrugged. “Seemed prudent.”
She supposed he was right. For all of Aral’s public life, which was nearly all the time she’d been married to him, his score of liveried retainers sworn to him as Count Vorkosigan had needed to work closely with the Imperial security appertaining from his wider duties. Cannily rendered smoother by Aral frequently recruiting his armsmen from Dendarii-district-born ImpSec veterans—Ryk was just such a one, who’d retired a twenty-year man and gone on into his Count’s personal service almost two decades ago. But ImpSec and the armsmen had always been two separate chains of command, with all the tension and arcane communication protocols that entailed.
Rykov’s official—and personal—loyalty was to the Dowager Countess Vorkosigan, not to the Vicereine of Sergyar. Well, now to Count Miles, she supposed, technically. But Ryk, among the armsmen that Aral had hauled along when he was appointed viceroy, had seldom worked with Miles, and barely knew him. Ryk had brought his wife and half-grown children in the baggage train; the four youths had adapted with alacrity to Sergyar, and were now all pursuing their adult lives here. Which was why Ryk and Ma Ryk had petitioned to return with the widowed Cordelia, a boon that Miles had readily granted upon his mother’s advice.
Ryk had first arrived at Vorkosigan House in Vorbarr Sultana at about the midpoint of Aral’s prime ministership, when Oliver was already a fixture. He had been discreetly introduced to the special security arrangements occasioned by the Vorkosigans’ three-sided marriage—because even then, she’d recognized Oliver as her co-spouse in all but name, though neither he nor Aral would ever have used the Betan term—by his armsman-commander and brother-armsmen of the day. Whatever Old-Barrayaran shock Rykov had felt had never been displayed to her, at least, and he’d settled into the household’s routine quickly. Everyone had had bigger things to worry about, back then.
“About this weekend,” Ryk began again, then, “…permission to speak freely, milady?”
“If you haven’t been speaking freely these past twenty years, it’s a surprise to me.” She gave him a nod nonetheless.
“It wouldn’t be my business, except that it is. The outward face of things, belike.”
She drew a long breath, for patience. “Acknowledged.”
“Was this a one-time event, or is it to be ongoing? A resumption of the former, um, system?”
Not quite the same questions Oliver had been asking, but uncomfortably like. Barrayarans. “Ongoing, I trust. The former-system part…I’m not sure you can call it a system when the whole benign conspiracy is down to one armsman. Does that make it easier or harder for you?”
“I don’t quite know, milady. Ongoing where? To what end?”
“I don’t think either of us knows, yet.” She added after a somber moment, “Though not another Barrayaran-style marriage, for me. It’s not—no reflection on Oliver, mind you—it’s just…not.”
He gave a short nod, Fair enough.
“Look, it’s not as if Oliver is, is, I don’t know. As if I’m running off with the gardener’s boy, or, or, a Cetagandan spy or whatever. He’s a loyal and very senior Barrayaran officer who has been a good and kind friend for twenty-three years. What those old Time-of-Isolationists would call an eligible connection.”
“Gentleman Jole, the troops call him.”
Cordelia laughed. “Do they? Well, I have heard him remark, You must never start a war at a cocktail party by accident. Lady Alys would doubtless agree.”
“Born a prole, though.”
“So was I.”
He rocked his head in a can’t-disagree-with-the-facts-but gesture. “Betan…is not the same thing.”
“You were born a prole, for that matter.”
He was beginning to look harassed. “That’s not the point I’m trying to make, milady. It’s not what I think, it’s what other people will think. As soon as—if ever—something is known to be going on, some people are going to start wondering how long it has been going on.”
“Like with poor Simon and Alys? My goings-on have been going on for one weekend, so far.” And a lovely weekend it was. “And that is true in every sense that most matters.”
He drew his own breath for patience. “M’lord was often careless. It gave us fits.”
Cordelia shook her head. “In the list of all the deadly Barrayaran political secrets we shared over the years, that little bit of—personal privacy—didn’t even make the top five.” She frowned into the past. “Ten.” And, after another moment: “Fifteen.”
His brows flicked. “See your fifteen and raise you twenty?”
She shrugged, her lips twitching. “I might have to fold at twenty.” She sighed. “All right, Ryk. If any of these nebulous people should approach you, it’s the same drill as always. Rumors are neither confirmed nor denied nor acknowledged. It’s pointless to do otherwise, since people will believe whatever the hell they want anyway, and damn it!”
Ryk jumped, or at least flinched.
“This is not some crisis, real or manufactured,” Cordelia boiled on. “Any widow or widower can date again, or, or whatever, after a decent interval. In general, their friends are pleased for them.”
“Not everyone is your friend, milady.”
Her palms came up, half fending, half accepting. “I decline to give them a Betan vote.” She placed her hands carefully back on the desk. “This is all very hypothetical, so far. So just keep an ear out as usual, and if you do hear anything substantial that you think I should know, pass it along. Preferably someplace out of earshot, in case I have to scream.”
He nodded shortly.
She considered further. Was his palpable unease personal as well as professional? “You do know, since those six embryos have proved viable, I plan to resign the viceroyalty within the year.” Armsman Rykov had necessarily been in on that from the time she’d collected the freezer case back on Barrayar. Although she hadn’t mentioned Oliver’s addendum to him, subsequently. No saying whether that would ever be his business.