Had the woman read his mind? Mark's shoulders bowed with the weight of her scorn. And his doubt. "I," he breathed, "don't . . ." know. He could not finish the sentence aloud.

The Countess laced her long fingers. "I don't doubt your heart," she said, looking at him steadily.

Hell, and she could break that heart more thoroughly with her trust than Illyan ever could with his suspicion. He crouched in his seat.

"But—you are my second chance. My new hope, all unlooked-for. I never thought I could have another child, on Barrayar. Now Jackson's Whole has eaten Miles, and you want to go down there after him? You, too?"

"Ma'am," he said desperately, "Mother—I cannot be your consolation prize."

She crossed her arms and rested her chin in one hand, cupped over her mouth. Her eyes were gray as a winter sea.

"You of all people have to see," Mark pleaded, "how important a second chance can be."

She pushed back her chair and stood up. "I'll . . . have to think about this." She exited the little dining room. She'd left half her meal on her plate, Mark saw with dismay.

Bothari-Jesek saw it too. "Good job," she snarled.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry. . . .

She rose to run after the Countess.

Mark sat, abandoned and alone. And, blindly and half-consciously, proceeded to eat himself sick. He stumbled up to his room's level by the lift tube, afterward, and lay wishing for sleep more than for breath. Neither came to him.

After an interminable time his stunned headache and hot abdominal pain were just starting to recede, when a knock sounded on his door. He rolled over with a muffled groan. "Who is it?"

"Elena."

He keyed on the light and sat up in bed against the carved headboard, stuffing a pillow under his spine against some killer solid walnut acanthus leaves in high relief. He didn't want to talk to Bothari-Jesek. Or to any other human being. He refastened his shirt as loosely as it would go. "Enter," he muttered.

She came cautiously around the doorframe, her face serious and pale. "Hello. Are you feeling all right?"

"No," he admitted.

"I came to apologize," she said.

"You? Apologize to me? Why?"

"The Countess told me . . . something of what was going on with you. I'm sorry. I didn't understand."

He'd been dissected again, in absentia. He could tell by the horrified way Bothari-Jesek was looking at him, as if his swollen belly were laid open and spread wide in an autopsy with a cut from here to there. "Aw, hell. What did she say now?" He struggled, with difficulty, to sit up straighter.