Taura spun like a huge cat at the flare of the overhead lights. After a moment, she let out her breath in a huff, visibly powering down. "Oh. It's you. You startled me."
Roic moistened his lips. Could he patch up this shattered fantasy? "Put them back, Taura. Please."
She stood still, looking back at him, tawny eyes wide; a grimace crossed her odd features. She seemed to coil, tension flowing back into her long body.
"Put them back now," Roic tried again, "and I won't tell." He bore a stunner. Could he draw it in time? He'd seen how fast she moved…
"I can't."
He stared at her without comprehension.
"I don't dare." Her voice grew edgy. "Please, Roic. Let me go now, and I promise I'll bring them back again tomorrow."
Huh? What? "I… can't. All the gifts have to go through a security check."
"Did this?" Her hand twitched by her pocket full of spoils.
"Yes, certainly."
"What kind? What did you check it for?"
"Everything is scanned for devices and explosives. All food and drink and their containers are tested for chemicals and biologicals."
"Only the food and drink?" She straightened, eyes glinting in rapid thought. "Anyway, I wasn't stealing it."
Maybe it was the covert ops training that enabled her to stand there and utter bald-faced… what? Counter-factual statements? Complicated things? "Well… then what were you doing?"
Again, a kind of frozen misery stiffened her features. She looked down, away, into the distance. "Borrowing it," she said in a gruff voice. She glanced across at him, as if to check his reaction to this feeble statement.
But Taura wasn't feeble, not by any definition. He felt out of his depth, flailing for firm footing and not finding it. He dared to move closer, to hold out his hand. "Give them to me."
"You mustn't touch them!" Her voice went frantic. "No one must touch them."
Lies and treachery? Trust and truth? What was he seeing here? Suddenly, he wasn't sure. Back up, guardsman. "Why not?"
She glowered at him narrow-eyed, as if trying to see through to the back of his head. "Do you care about Miles? Or is he just your employer?"
Roic blinked in increasing confusion. He considered his armsman's oath, its high honor and weight. "A Vorkosigan armsman isn't just what I am; it's who I am. He's not my employer at all. He's my liege lord."
She made a frustrated gesture. "If you knew a secret that would hurt him to the heart — would you, could you, keep it from him even if he asked?"
What secret? This? That his ex-lover was a thief? It didn't seem as though that could be what she was talking about — around. Think, man.
"I… can't pass a judgment without knowledge." Knowledge. What did she know that he didn't? A million things, he was sure. He'd glimpsed some of them, dizzying vistas. But she didn't know him, now, did she? Not the way she evidently knew, say, m'lord. To her, he was a blank in a brown-and-silver uniform. With his mirror-polished boot stuck in his mouth, eh. He hesitated, then countered, "M'lord can requisition my life with a word. I gave him that right on my name and breath. Can you trust me to hold his best interests to heart?"
Stare met stare, and no one blinked.
"Trust for trust," Roic breathed at last. "Trade, Taura."
Slowly, not dropping her intent, searching gaze from his face, she drew the cloth from her pocket. She shook it gently, spilling the pearls back into their velvet box. She held the box out. "What do you see?"
Roic frowned. "Pearls. Pretty. White and shiny."
She shook her head. "I have a host of genetic modifications. Hideous bioengineered mutant or no—"
He flinched, his mouth opening and shutting.
"— among other things I can see slightly farther into the ultraviolet, and quite a bit farther into the infrared, than a normal person. I see dirty pearls. Strangely dirty pearls. And that's not what I usually see when I look at pearls. And then Miles's bride touched them, and an hour later was so sick she could hardly stand up."
An unpleasant tremor coursed down Roic's body. And why the devil hadn't he noticed that progression of events? "Yes. That's so. They'll have to be checked."
"Maybe I'm wrong. I could be wrong. Maybe I'm just being horrible and paranoid and — and jealous. If they were proved clean, that would be the end of it. But, Roic—Quinn. You don't have any idea how much he loved Quinn. And vice versa. I've been going half-mad all evening, ever since it all clicked in, wondering if Quinn really sent these. It would about slay him, if it were so."
"Wasn't him these are meant to slay." It seemed his liege lord's love life was as deceptively complicated as his intelligence, both camouflaged by his crippled body. Or by the assumptions people made about his crippled body. Roic considered the ambiguous message Arde Mayhew had evidently seen in the live fur blanket. Had this Quinn woman, the other ex-lover — and how many more of them were going to turn up at this wedding, anyway? And in what frame of mind? How many were there, altogether? And what't' hell did the little guy do to have acquired what was beginning to seem far more than his fair share, when Roic didn't even have — He cut off the gyrating digression. "Or — is this necklace lethal, or not? Could it be some nasty practical joke, to just make the bride sick on her wedding night?"
"Ekaterin barely touched them. I don't know what this horrible goo may be, but I wouldn't lay those pearls against my skin for Betan dollars." Her face twisted up. "I want it to not be true. Or I want it to not be Quinn!"
Her dismay, Roic was increasingly convinced, was unfeigned, a cry from her heart. "Taura, think. You know this Quinn woman. I don't. But you said she was smart. D'you think she'd be plain stupid enough to sign her own name to murder?"
Taura looked taken aback, but then shook her head in renewed doubt. "Maybe. If it were done for rage or revenge, maybe."
"What if her name was stolen by another? If she didn't send these, she deserves to be cleared. And if she did… she doesn't deserve anything."
What was Taura going to do? He hadn't the least doubt she could kill him with one clawed hand before he could fumble his stunner out. The box was still tightly clutched in her great hand. Her body radiated tension the way a bonfire radiated heat.
"It seems almost unimaginable," she said. "Almost. But people mad in love do the wildest things. Sometimes things they regret forever afterward. But then it's too late. That's why I wanted to sneak the pearls away and check them in secret. I was praying I'd be proved wrong." Tears stood in her eyes now.
Roic swallowed and stood straighter. "Look, I can call ImpSec. They can have those — whatever they are — on the best forensics lab bench on the planet inside half an hour. They can check the wrappings, check the origin — everything. If another person stole your friend Quinn's name to cloak their crime…" He shuddered as his imagination sketched that crime in elaborating and grotesque detaiclass="underline" m'lady dying at m'lord's feet in the snow while her vows were still frost in the air; m'lord's shock, disbelief, howling anguish—"Then they should be hunted down without mercy. ImpSec can do that, too."
She still stood poised in doubt, on the balls of her feet. "They would hunt her down with the same… un-mercy. What if they got it wrong, made a mistake?"
"ImpSec is competent."
"Roic, I'm an ImpSec employee. I can absolutely guarantee you, they are not infallible."
He ran his gaze down the crowded table. "Look. There's that other wedding gift." He pointed to the folds of shimmering black blanket, still piled in the box. The room was so quiet he could hear the live fur's gentle rumble from here. "Why would she send two? The blanket even came with a dirty limerick, handwritten on a card." Not presently on display, true. "Madame Vorsoisson laughed out loud when m'lord read it to her."