A short nod. “Old Count Piotr hanged the lot of us, in the end.”
Galactic-style therapy and criminal rehabilitation not being even on the horizon, at that point. From the nightmarish bits she’d heard about the case, Ekaterin could scarcely regret this.
“Save one. I pleaded my belly.” A sharp look upward.
Ekaterin blinked. Right. Back in the Time of Isolation, pregnant women were never executed, a custom that had lingered right into times that made more modern provisions for crime. And Piotr had certainly been Old Vor, or at least had been made so by the passage of his many decades. Most of the marauders’ case would have been handled at a lower district judicial level, but execution orders would have been sent up to the Count’s Court for final review.
“Old Piotr gave me a choice of hanging or prison. I asked to come back to the zone, instead. And he said, So be it, and the bailiff-boy banged his spear-butt in the clacker. And so I did.”
All the gruesome details were doubtless available in court records in Hassadar, should Ekaterin muster the nerve to feed her curiosity. No need to make the old woman—old, hell, she could scarcely be done with her fifties, but she looked a proper ancient hag—relive that in her memory now, or re-confess it all either. Ekaterin’s rightful business was with what had happened next. She mustered a Go on nod.
“I liked it here. Everyone finally left me alone. Didn’t know how much I’d like that, till I had it to try, for the first time in my stupid young life. Piotr’s old ranger fellows kept an eye. They’d have scorned those dosimeter-hickeys that Vadim frets about so, in those days. Boris was about three when I first found the clearing in the woods, and the secrets that were left there.” Her gaze flicked up at last. “It wasn’t only muties exposed, you know. Back in the Time of Isolation, there was starvation, or just one baby too many to deal with. Or no man, though I’d say a girl could be better off without one of those. I sure was.”
Ekaterin said, “I understand.” Partly to indicate she was still listening. Mostly because it was true.
“It’d become a hobby of mine, picking up things thrown away in the zone. That was the first thrown-away baby I found. Not the last, though they got fewer and fewer, till Ingi, thirteen years ago. None after that, o’ course.”
“What happened thirteen years ago?”
A shrug. “Countess Vorkosigan’s lift-van clinics reached the last outlying hamlets west of t’ ridge.”
Ah. Yes. Ekaterin reflected on her normally cheery mother-in-law’s rants about modernizing education and medicine in the district. Piotr had at first given his son’s galactic bride access only to the lower-level schools, children for the woman. But when the district fell fully into her hands at the old man’s death seventeen years back, Countess Vorkosigan had pressed forward with her wave of eager young people all ready for the new technical schools. The larger towns had been served first, hoping to reach the most people the fastest; from that base, pushing outward with mobile clinics as the solution to the last and hardest part of the distribution problem.
“So this is already ended, lady,” said Ma Roga. “Years gone. We’re all ended, here.”
“No. It’s a new beginning.”
“Not for me.” Ma Roga shook her head. “I know your kind. You think you can do anything, but you can’t.”
Ekaterin set this aside for now, though she thought, You should meet Miles. “So what’s the story with Vadim and Jadwiga?”
Another shrug. “Vadim was fifteen when she was born. His parents sent him to me with her. A few folks around here knew about me by then, see. He wasn’t any too happy with the job, for all his da argued it was for his protection, too. Worse’n being set to drown kittens, y’know.”
“Ah.”
“He’d come by to check up on her, time to time, even before he got old enough to join the rangers. Then his da died, road accident, and then his ma took the one-way free passage to Sergyar that was on offer back then, when the new count was took away to be viceroy. Happy to leave all her sorrows behind, I suppose, b’cause last I heard she was still alive there.”
“You all”—Ekaterin glanced at her bare hand—”we all are going to have to go first to Hassadar General, for evaluation and treatment. After that we can make decisions with real information.”
“You can get to make t’em, don’t you mean,” said Ma Roga with a flash of sarcasm. “It’s too late for Jaddie. It was always meant to be that way, for her.”
“Maybe,” Ekaterin conceded. “Maybe not. That’s not for you or me to say, it’s for the doctors. But Ingi seems pretty healthy so far. Boris, too.”
“You can’t just fling these children on the outside world after all these years, and expect them to swim for it. Jaddie just can’t, Boris, well, he ran away once but dragged back smartin’, and poor Ingi—the boys his age would tear him to pieces. His heart if not his body, though maybe his body too. You can’t imagine it, how cruel they can be in a gang.”
Ekaterin’s lips thinned. “I’m married to the mutie lord. I don’t have to imagine it. I can just have Miles tell me.”
Ma Roga’s chin jerked. Not daunted, this was not a woman who did daunted, but maybe taken aback a trifle. Any little crack in her hopeless certainties was to the good.
“You’re not wrong to be concerned,” Ekaterin went on, “but it’s better out there than it was thirty years ago, I promise you. Once the children aren’t getting any more exposed and sicker, there will be time to take thought. Nobody’s flinging anyone anywhere without looking out to see where they’d land.”
And Ekaterin could guess whose job that was likely to be. Adding another task to her overflowing plate. I will cope. It’s what I do. She raised her chin. “I can’t know, and turn away.”
“I wish you would,” growled Ma Roga. “We were just fine out here, till you came. People left us alone.”
Ekaterin shook her head.
Ma Roga turned her face up, listening. Ekaterin heard it too, the distinctive whine and throb of a lift van.
“Yah, here’s more trouble, right in train,” Ma Roga sighed, and shoved to her feet with a grunt.
Ekaterin followed her back to the clearing in front of the hut in time to see the familiar lift van the rangers flew, the Vorkosigan mountains-and-maple-leaf markings distinctive on its sides, jounce on its landing feet and settle. She was by this time entirely unsurprised when Vadim hopped out.
Wearing civilian clothes, not his regulation rad suit, and carrying a couple of grocery bags. He turned and dropped them in shock when he took in Ekaterin, trailing Ma Roga. His breath hissed, he scrabbled for his stunner, pulled it, and froze.
They stared at each other for a long, teetering moment.
Ekaterin crossed her arms and said dryly, “If you pretend you never drew that, I’ll pretend I never saw it.”
Vadim’s blocky face seemed drained to clay. His hand twitched once, then, slowly, reholstered his sidearm. Ekaterin tried to let her pent breath out unobtrusively.
She straightened her spine and walked forward. “Am I right in guessing you have some of Enrique’s bug-transport canisters in the back of the van?”
“How did you…?”
“Fetch them along. We found the missing radbugs. They’re in the goat shed, along with Enrique.” She eyed his missing rad suit. “I trust you have some spare gloves back there as well. You’ll need a pair, and I need a clean right.” She held up her bare hand and wriggled it.