"I swear it wouldn't a' been half so bad if I'd had my briefs on backwards and my stunner holster on frontways. I can still hear Pym's voice . . ." He mimicked the senior armsman's driest tones: "'Your weapon is worn on the right, Armsman.'"

She laughed out loud then, and looked him up and down in somewhat unsettling appreciation. "That's a pretty amazing word picture, Roic."

Despite himself, he smiled a little. "I guess so. I dunno if m'lord's forgiven me, but I'm right sure Pym hasn't." He sighed. "If you see one of those damned vomit bugs still around, squash it on sight. Hideous bioengineered mutant things, kill 'em all before they multiply."

Her laughter stopped cold.

Roic re-ran his last sentence in his head, and made the unpleasant discovery that one could do far worse things to oneself with words than with dubious food products, or possibly even with needlers. He hardly dared look up to see her face. He forced his eyes right.

Her face was perfectly still, perfectly pale, perfectly blank. Perfectly appalling.

I meant those devil-bugs, not you! He managed to stop that idiocy on his lips before it escaped to do even more damage, but only just. He couldn't think of any way to apologize that wouldn't make it worse.

"Ah, yes," she said at last. "Miles did warn me that Barrayarans had some pretty ugly issues about gene manipulation. I just forgot."

And I reminded you. "We're getting better," he tried.

"Good for you." She inhaled, a long breath. "Let's go in. I'm getting cold."

Roic was frozen straight through. "Um. Yeah."

They walked back to the gate in silence.

* * *

Roic slept the day through, trying to force his body back onto the boring night shift cycle that by the duty roster was to be his junior armsman's fate this Winterfair. He was quite sorry to thus miss seeing m'lord take his galactic guests and a selection of his in-laws-to-be on a tour of Vorbarr Sultana. He'd have been fascinated by what the two disparate parties made of each other. Madame Vorsoisson's family, the Vorvaynes, were solid provincial Vor types of the sort Roic had always regarded as normal to the class, before he'd taken up his duties in Vorkosigan House's high Vor milieu. M'lord, well . . . m'lord wasn't standard by anybody's standard. The four Vorvayne brothers, though dutifully pleased with their widowed sister's upward social leap, plainly found m'lord an unnerving catch. Roic wished he could see what they would make of Taura. He melted into sleep with a vague scenario drifting through his reeling brain of somehow imposing his body between her and some undefined social insult. Maybe then she would see that he hadn't meant anything by his awful gaffe . . . .