"Excellent thinking. Your father is always very careful to keep his personal and Imperial funds identifiably separated. It's a good habit to start. Not that the most foolhardy Imperial Auditor would ever have dared to take him on, of course. Nor have looked anything but a fool afterwards, when the numbers were laid out." Tsipis tapped on his comconsole, and glanced aside at some data readout. "Suppose I transfer the entire accumulated unused Household fund over into your new account, for seed money. And then just send the usual weekly allotment to follow."

"Fine."

"Now, if you need any more, do call me right away."

"Sure."

"I'll send you your new account chit by courier within the hour."

"Thank you." Miles reached to cut the com, then added as an afterthought, "How much is it?"

"Five thousand marks."

"Oh, good."

"And eighty thousand marks to start," Tsipis added.

Miles did a quick mental reversal, and calculation. "This place was sucking down five thousand marks a week?"

"Oh, much more than that, with the Armsmen, and the Countess's personal account. And this does not include major repairs, which are budgeted separately."

"I . . . see."

"Now, should you take an interest, I should be happy to go over all your financial affairs with you in much more detail," Tsipis added eagerly. "There's so much that could be done with a somewhat more aggressive, entrepreneurial, and, dare I say, less conservative and more attentive approach."

"If . . . I ever have the time. Thank you, Tsipis." Miles cut the com much less casually.

Good God. He could buy . . . damn near anything he wanted. He tried to think of something he wanted.

The Dendarii.

Yeah. We know. But their price, for him, wasn't measured in money. What else?

Once, in his increasingly distant youth, he'd lusted briefly after a lightflyer, faster and redder than Ivan's. A particularly fine model, albeit several years old now, sat in the garage downstairs, only lightly used. Of course, he couldn't fly it at all now.

It was never what I wanted to buy that held my heart's hope. It was what I wanted to be.

What had that been? Well, an admiral, of course, a real one, a Barrayaran one, by age 35, one year younger than when his father had become the youngest in post-Isolation history at age 36. Despite Miles's height, and in the teeth of his handicaps. But even had he been born normal of body, his era had brought him no convenient major wars to speed promotion. ImpSec covert ops had been the best he could do, not just the one branch of the Service that would take him, but the only one that could put him in the forefront of the only significant action presently available. How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old? Too damaged.