Roic's own conviction was that as soon as that poor frozen woman had intersected m'lord's orbit, this chain of events had become inevitable.  Worse than dangling a string in front of a cat, it was.  He likely shouldn't explain this to Vorlynkin; an Armsman was supposed to be loyal in thought, word, and deed.  But not blind . . .

"But if Jin and Mina were your children, would you want some off-worlder as good as kidnapping them to use for his own purposes?" Vorlynkin persisted.  "No matter how well-intentioned?"

"In my defense, I must point out, they turned up here on their own, but—if I were dead, my widow frozen, my children fallen into the hands of people either unwilling or incapable of helping them?  I doubt I would care where the man came from who could reunite them with Ekaterin.  I'd shower all my posthumous blessings upon him."  M'lord wheeled around and drummed his fingers on the comconsole counter.  "Poor Jin!  He makes me think about my missing grandmother, actually."

"Missing grandmother?" said Raven, leaning back against the counter.  "I didn't know you had any."

"Most people have two—not you, of course.  My Betan grandmother is alive and well and opinionated to this day, in fact.  If you ever meet her, you'll understand a whole lot more about my mother.  No, it's a Barrayaran tale, the fate of Princess-and-Countess Olivia Vorbarra Vorkosigan."

"Then delightfully bloody, I daresay."  Raven's sweeping hand gesture invited m'lord to go on, not that he needed any encouragement.  Johannes, too, was listening in apparent fascination.

"Very.  If you'd learned your Barrayaran history, not that you would be expected to, you'd know that once upon a time—all the best stories start that way, you realize—that once upon a time, the death squads of Mad Emperor Yuri attempted to erase most of my family, thereby triggering the civil war that ended, eventually, in Yuri's dismemberment.  So many people wanted a piece of him by then, they were forced to share, y'see.  The death squad shot my grandmother in front of my father, messily.  He was eleven at the time, which is part of why Jin keeps reminding me of it.

"But you see . . . for all the horrors of that day, and of the war that followed it, nobody, I'm not sure how to put this, nobody denied my father his experience.  Jin's mother was just as abruptly and unjustly taken from him, but he's not been permitted his grief.  No funeral, no mourning, no protest, even.  No revenge—certainly not whatever satisfaction there might be of knowing she was escorted down into death by a procession of her enemies.  For Jin and Mina, there's just . . . silence.  Frozen silence."

A rather frozen silence followed this, among the Barrayarans in the room.

Vorlynkin cleared his throat, leaned on his hand, stared into the comconsole.  "So.  Lord Auditor.  And, um . . . just how are we planning to give this woman her voice back . . . ?"

Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten