Lois McMaster Bujold - 15.5 - Winterfair Gifts

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Winterfair Gifts
Lois McMaster Bujold
from Irresistible Forces
First Printing, February 2004
ISBN 0-451-21111-1
From Armsman Roic’s wrist com the gate guard’s voice reported laconically, “They’re in. Gate’s
locked.”
“Right,” Roic returned. “Dropping the house shields.” He turned to the discreet security control panel
beside the carved double doors of Vorkosigan House’s main entry hall, pressed his palm to the read-pad,
and entered a short code. The faint hum of the force shield protecting the great house faded.
Roic stared anxiously out one of the tall, narrow windows flanking the portal, ready to throw the doors
wide when m’lord’s groundcar pulled into the porte cochere. He glanced no less anxiously down the
considerable length of his athletic body, checking his House uniform: half-boots polished to mirrors,
trousers knife-creased, silver embroidery gleaming, dark brown fabric spotless.
His face heated in mortified memory of a less expected arrival in this very hall—also of Lord
Vorkosigan with honored company in tow—and the unholy tableau m’lord had surprised with the
Escobaran bounty hunters and the gooey debacle of the bug butter. Roic had looked an utter fool in that
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moment, nearly naked except for a liberal coating of sticky slime. He could still hear Lord Vorkosigan’s
austere, amused voice, as cutting as a razor-slash across his ears: Armsman Roic, you’re out of uniform.
He thinks I’m an idiot. Worse, the Escobarans’ invasion had been a security breach, and while he’d not,
technically, been on duty—he’d been asleep, dammit—he’d been present in the house and therefore on
call for emergencies. The mess had been in his lap, literally. M’lord had dismissed him from the scene
with no more than an exasperated Roic . . . get a bath, somehow more keenly excoriating than any
bellowed dressing-down.
Roic checked his uniform again.
The long silvery groundcar pulled up and sighed to the pavement. The front canopy rose on the driver,
the senior and dauntingly competent Armsman Pym. He released the rear canopy and hurried around the
car to assist m’lord and his party. The senior armsman spared a glance through the narrow window as he
strode by, his eye passing coolly over Roic and scanning the hall beyond to make sure it contained no
unforeseen drama this time. These were Very Important Off-World Wedding Guests, Pym had
impressed upon Roic. Which Roic might have been left to deduce by m’lord going personally to the
shuttleport to greet their descent from orbit—but then, Pym had walked in on the bug butter disaster,
too. Since that day, his directives to Roic had tended to be couched in words of one syllable, with no
contingency left to chance.
A short figure in a well-tailored gray tunic and trousers hopped out of the car first: Lord Vorkosigan,
gesturing expansively at the great stone mansion, talking nonstop over his shoulder, smiling in proud
welcome. As the carved doors swung wide, admitting a blast of Vorbarr Sultana winter night air and a
few glittering snow crystals, Roic stood to attention and mentally matched the other people exiting the
groundcar with the security list he’d been given. A tall woman held a baby bundled in blankets; a lean,
smiling fellow hovered by her side. They had to be the Bothari-Jeseks. Madame Elena Bothari-Jesek
was the daughter of the late, legendary Armsman Bothari; her right of entree into Vorkosigan House,
where she had grown up with m’lord, was absolute, Pym had made sure Roic understood. It scarcely
needed the silver circles of a jump pilot’s neural leads on midforehead and temples to identify the
shorter middle-aged fellow as the Betan jump pilot, Arde Mayhew—should a jump pilot look so jump-
lagged? Well, m’lord’s mother, Countess Vorkosigan, was Betan, too; and the pilot’s blinking, shivering
stance was among the most physically unthreatening Roic had ever seen. Not so the final guest. Roic’s
eyes widened.
The hulking figure unfolded from the groundcar and stood up, and up. Pym, who was almost as tall as
Roic, did not come quite up to its shoulder. It shook out the swirling folds of a gray-and-white greatcoat
of military cut and threw back its head. The light from overhead caught the face and gleamed off . . .
were those fangs hooked over the outslung lower jaw?
Sergeant Taura was the name that went with it, by process of elimination. One of m’lord’s old military
buddies, Pym had given Roic to understand, and—don’t be fooled by the rank—of some particular
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importance (if rather mysterious, as was everything connected with Lord Miles Vorkosigan’s late career
in Imperial Security). Pym was former ImpSec himself. Roic was not, as he was reminded, oh, three
times a day on average.
At Lord Vorkosigan’s urging, the whole party poured into the entry hall, shaking off snow-spotted
garments, talking, laughing. The greatcoat was swung from those high shoulders like a billowing sail, its
owner turning neatly on one foot, folding the garment ready to hand over. Roic jerked back to avoid
being clipped by a heavy, mahogany-colored braid of hair as it swept past, and rocked forward to find
himself face to . . . nose to . . . staring directly into an entirely unexpected cleavage. It was framed by
pink silk in a plunging vee. He glanced up. The outslung jaw was smooth and beardless. The curious
pale amber eyes, irises circled with sleek black lines, looked back down at him with, he instantly feared,
some amusement. Her fang-framed smile was deeply alarming.
Pym was efficiently organizing servants and luggage. Lord Vorkosigan’s voice yanked Roic back to
focus. “Roic, did the count and countess get back in from their dinner engagement yet?”
“About twenty minutes ago, m’lord. They went upstairs to their suite to change.”
Lord Vorkosigan addressed the woman with the baby, who was attracting cooing maids. “My parents
would skin me if I didn’t take you up to them instantly. Come on. Mother’s pretty eager to meet her
namesake. I predict Baby Cordelia will have Countess Cordelia wrapped around her pudgy little fingers
in about, oh, three and a half seconds. At the outside.”
He turned and started up the curve of the great staircase, shepherding the Bothari-Jeseks and calling over
his shoulder, “Roic, show Arde and Taura to their assigned rooms, make sure they have everything they
want. We’ll meet back in the library when you all are freshened up or whatever. Drinks and snacks will
be laid on there.”
So, it was a lady sergeant. Galactics had those; m’lord’s mother had been a famous Betan officer in her
day. But this one’s a bloody giant mutant lady sergeant was a thought Roic suppressed more firmly.
Such backcountry prejudices had no place in this household. Though, she was clearly bioengineered, had
to be. He recovered himself enough to say, “May I take your bag, um . . . Sergeant?”
“Oh, all right.” With a dubious look down at him, she handed him the satchel she’d had slung over one
arm. The pink enamel on her fingernails did not quite camouflage their shape as claws, heavy and
efficient as a leopard’s. The bag’s descending weight nearly jerked Roic’s arm out of its socket. He
managed a desperate smile and began lugging it . two-handed up the staircase in m’lord’s wake.
He deposited the tired-looking pilot first. Sergeant Taura’s second-floor guest room was one of the
renovated ones, with its own bath, around the corridor’s corner from m’lord’s own suite. She reached up
and trailed a claw along the ceiling and smiled in evident approval of Vorkosigan House’s three-meter
headspace.
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“So,” she said, turning to Roic, “is a Winterfair wedding considered especially auspicious, in Barrayaran
custom?”
“They’re not so common as in summer. Mostly I think it’s now because m’lord’s fiancee is between
semesters at university.”
Her thick brows rose in surprise. “She’s a student?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He had a notion one addressed female sergeants as ma’am. Pym would have known.
“I didn’t realize she was such a young lady.”
“No, ma’am. Madame Vorsoisson’s a widow—she has a little boy, Nikki—nine years old. Mad about
jumpships. Do you happen t’ know—does that pilot fellow like children?” Mayhew was bound to be a
magnet for Nikki.
“Why . . . I don’t know. I don’t think Arde knows either. He hardly ever meets any in a free mercenary
fleet.”
He would have to watch, then, to be sure little Nikki didn’t set himself up for a painful rebuff. M’lord
and m’lady-to-be might not be paying their usual attention to him, under the circumstances.
Sergeant Taura circled the room, gazing with what Roic hoped was approval at its comfortable
appointments, and glanced out the window at the back garden, shrouded in winter white, the snow
luminous in the security lighting. “I suppose it makes sense that he’d have to wed one of his own Vor
kind, in the end.” Her nose wrinkled. “So, are the Vor a social class, a warrior caste, or what? I never
could quite figure it out from Miles. The way he talks about them you’d half think they were a religion.
Or at any rate, his religion.”
Roic blinked in bafflement. “Well, no. And yes. All of that. The Vor are . . . well, Vor.”
“Now that Barrayar has modernized, isn’t a hereditary aristocracy resented by the rest of your classes?”
“But they’re our Vor.”
“Says the Barrayaran. Hmm. So, you can criticize them, but heaven help any outsider who dares to?”
“Yes,” he said, relieved that she seemed to have grasped it despite his stumbling tongue.
“A family matter. I see.” Her grin faded into a frown that was actually less alarming—not so much fang.
Her fingers clenching the curtain inadvertently poked claws through the expensive fabric; wincing, she
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shook her hand free and tucked it behind her back. Her voice lowered. “So she’s Vor, well and good.
But does she love him?”
Roic heard the odd emphasis in her voice but was unclear how to interpret it. “I’m very sure of it,
ma’am,” he avowed loyally. M’lady-to-be’s frowns, her darkening mood, were surely just prewedding
nerves piled atop examination stress on the substrate of her not-so-distant bereavement.
“Of course.” Her smile flicked back in a perfunctory sort of way. “Have you served Lord Vorkosigan
long, Armsman Roic?”
“Since last winter, ma’am, when a space fell vacant in the Vorkosigans’ armsmen’s score. I was sent up
on recommendation from the Hassadar Municipal Guard,” he added a bit truculently, challenging her to
sneer at his humble, nonmilitary origins. “A count’s twenty armsmen are always from his own district,
y’see.”
She did not react; the Hassadar Municipal Guard evidently meant nothing to her.
He asked in return, “Did you . . . serve him very long? Out there?” In the galactic backbeyond where
m’lord had acquired such exotic friends.
Her face softened, the fanged smile reappearing. “In a sense, all my life. Since my real life began, ten
years ago, anyway. He is a great man.” This last was delivered with unself-conscious conviction.
Well, he was a great man’s son, certainly. Count Aral Vorkosigan was a colossus bestriding the last half
century of Barrayaran history. Lord Miles had led a less public career. Which no one would tell Roic
anything about, the most junior armsman not being ex-ImpSec like m’lord and most of the rest of the
armsmen, eh.
Still, Roic liked the little lord. What with the birth injuries and all—Roic shied away from the pejorative
mutations—he’d had a rough ride all his life despite his high blood. Hard enough for him to just achieve
normal things, like . . . like getting married. Although, m’lord had brains enough, belike, in
compensation for his stunted body. Roic just wished he didn’t think his newest armsman a dolt.
“The library is to the right of the stairs as you go down, through the first room.” He touched his hand to
his forehead in a farewell salute, by way of paving his escape from this unnerving giant female. “The
dining’s to be casual tonight; you don’t need t’ dress.” He added, as she glanced down in bewilderment
at her travel-rumpled loose pink jacket and trousers, “Dress up, that is. Fancy. What you’re wearing is
fine.”
“Oh,” she replied with evident relief. “That makes more sense. Thank you.”
***
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Having made his routine security circuit of the house, Roic arrived back at the antechamber just outside
the library to find the huge woman and the pilot fellow examining the array of wedding presents
temporarily staged there. The growing assortment of objects had been arriving for weeks. Each had been
handed in to Pym to be unwrapped and to undergo a security check, rewrapped, and as the affianced
couple’s time permitted, unwrapped again and displayed with its card.
“Look, here’s yours, Arde,” said Sergeant Taura. “And here’s Elli’s.”
“Oh, what did she finally decide on?” asked the pilot. “At one point she told me she was thinking of
sending the bride a barbed-wire choke chain for Miles, but was afraid it might be misinterpreted.”
“No . . .” Taura held up a thick fall of shimmering black stuff as long as she was tall. “It seems to be
some sort of fur coat. No, wait—it’s a blanket. Beautiful! You should feel this, Arde. It’s incredibly soft.
And warm.” She held a supple fold up to the side of her head, and a delighted laugh broke from her long
lips. “It’s purring!”
Mayhew’s eyebrows climbed halfway to his receding hairline. “Good God! Did she . . . ? Now, that’s a
bit edgy.”
Taura stared down at him in puzzled inquiry. “Edgy? Why?”
Mayhew made an uncertain gesture. “It’s a live fur—a genetic construct. It looks just like one Miles
once gave to Elli. If she’s recycling his gifts, that’s a pretty pointed message.” He hesitated. “Though I
suppose if she bought a fresh new one for the happy couple, that’s a different message.”
“Ouch.” Taura tilted her head to one side and frowned at the fur. “My life’s too short for arcane mind
games, Arde. Which is it?”
“Search me. In the dark, all cat blankets are . . . well, black, in this case. I wonder if it’s intended as an
editorial?”
“Well, if it is, don’t you dare let on to the poor bride, or I swear I’ll turn both your ears into doilies.” She
held up her clawed fingers and wriggled them. “By hand.”
Judging by the pilot’s brief grin, the threat was a jest, but by his little bow of compliance, not an entirely
empty one. Taura observed Roic, just then, refolded the live fur into its box, and tucked her hands
discreetly behind her back.
The door to the library swung open, and Lord Vorkosigan stuck his head out. “Ah, there you two are.”
He strolled into the antechamber. “Elena and Baz will be down in a little—she’s feeding Baby Cordelia.
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You must be starving by now, Taura. Come on in and try the hors d’oeuvres. My cook has outdone
herself.”
He smiled up affectionately at the enormous sergeant. While the top of Roic’s head barely came up to
her shoulder, m’lord just about faced her belt buckle. It occurred to Roic that Taura towered over
himself in almost exactly the same proportions that ladies of average height towered over Lord
Vorkosigan. This must be what women looked like to m’lord all the time.
Oh.
M’lord waved his guests through to the library but, instead of following them, shut the door and
motioned Roic to his side. He looked thoughtfully up at his tallest armsman and lowered his. voice.
“Tomorrow morning, I want you to drive Sergeant Taura to the Old Town. I’ve prevailed upon Aunt
Alys to present Taura to her modiste and fix her up with a Barrayaran lady’s wardrobe suitable for the
upcoming bash. Figure to hold yourself at their disposal for the day.”
Roic gulped. M’lord’s aunt, Lady Alys Vorpatril, was in her own way more terrifying than any woman
Roic had ever encountered, regardless of height. She was the acknowledged social arbiter of the high
Vor in the capital, the last word in fashion, taste, and etiquette, the official hostess for Emperor Gregor
himself. And her tongue could slice a fellow to ribbons and tie up the remains in a bowknot before they
hit the ground.
“How t’ devil did you—” Roic began, then cut himself off.
M’lord smirked. “I was very persuasive. Besides, Lady Alys relishes a challenge. With luck, she may
even be able to part Taura from that shocking pink she favors. Some damned fool once told her it was a
nonthreatening color, and now she uses it in the most unsuitable garments—and quantities. It’s so wrong
on her. Well, Aunt Alys will be able to handle it. If anyone asks for your opinion—not that they’re likely
to—vote for whatever Alys picks.”
I shouldn’t dare do otherwise, Roic managed not to blurt aloud. He stood to attention and tried to look as
though he were listening intelligently.
Lord Vorkosigan tapped his fingers on his trouser seam, his smile fading. “I’m also relying on you to see
that Taura is not, um, offered insult, or made uncomfortable, or . . . well, you know. Not that you can
keep people from staring, I don’t suppose. But be her outrider in any public venue, and be alert to steer
her away from any problems. I wish I had time to squire her myself, but this wedding prep has gone into
high gear. Not much longer now, thank God.”
“How is Madame Vorsoisson holding up?” Roic inquired diffidently. He had been wondering for two
days if he ought to report the crying jag to someone, but m’lady-to-be had surely not realized her
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muffled breakdown in one of Vorkosigan House’s back corridors had included a hastily retreating
witness.
Judging by m’lord’s suddenly guarded expression, perhaps he knew. “She has . . . extra stresses just
now. I’ve tried to take as much of the organizing off her shoulders as possible.” His shrug was not as
reassuring as it might be, Roic felt.
M’lord brightened. “Anyway, I want Sergeant Taura to have a great time on her visit to Barrayar, a
fabulous Winterfair season. It’s probably the only chance she’ll ever have to see the place. I want her to
look back on this week like, like . . . dammit, I want her to feel like Cinderella magicked off to the ball.
She’s earned it, God knows. Midnight tolls too damned soon.”
Roic tried to wrap his mind around the concept of Lord Vorkosigan as the enormous woman’s fairy
godfather. “So . . . who’s t’ handsome prince?”
M’lord’s smile went crooked; something almost like pain sounded in his indrawn breath. “Ah. Yes. That
would be the central problem, now. Wouldn’t it.”
He dismissed Roic with his usual casual half-salute, a vague wave of his hand in the vicinity of his
forehead, and joined his guests in the library.
***
Roic had never in his whole career as a Hassadar municipal guardsman been in a clothing store
resembling that of Lady Vorpatril’s modiste. Nothing betrayed its location in the Vorbarr Sultana
thoroughfare but a discreet brass plaque, labeled simply ESTELLE. Cautiously, he mounted to the
second floor, Sergeant Taura’s massive footsteps creaking on the carpeted stairs behind him, and poked
his head into a hushed chamber that might have been a Vor lady’s drawing room. There was not a
garment rack nor even a mannequin in sight, just a thick carpet, soft lighting, and tables and chairs that
looked suitable for offering high tea at the Imperial Residence. To his relief Lady Vorpatril had arrived
before them and was standing chatting with another woman in a dark dress.
The two women turned as Taura ducked her head under the lintel behind Roic and straightened up again.
Roic nodded a polite greeting. He couldn’t imagine what m’lord had said to his aunt, but her eyes
widened only slightly, looking up at Taura. The second woman didn’t quail at the fangs, claws, or height
either, but when her glance swept down the pink trouser outfit, she winced.
There was a brief pause; Lady Alys shot Roic an inquiring look, and he realized it must be his job to do
the announcing, as when he brought a visitor into Vorkosigan House. “Sergeant Taura, my lady,” he said
loudly, then stopped, hoping for more cues.
After another moment, Lady Alys abandoned further hope of him and came forward, smiling, her hands
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held out. “Sergeant Taura. I am Miles Vorkosigan’s aunt, Alys Vorpatril. Permit me to welcome you to
Barrayar. My nephew has told me something about you.”
Uncertainly, Taura stuck out one huge hand, engulfing Lady Alys’s slender fingers, and shook with care.
“I’m afraid he hasn’t told me too much about you,” she said. Shyness made her voice a gruff rumble. “I
don’t know many aunts. I somehow thought you would be older. And . . . and not so beautiful.”
Lady Vorpatril smiled, not without approval. Only a few streaks of silver in her dark coiffure and a
slight softening of her skin betrayed her age to Roic’s eyes; she was trim and elegant and utterly self-
possessed, as always. She introduced the other woman, Madame Somebody—not Estelle, though Roic
promptly dubbed her that in his mind—apparently the senior modiste.
“I’m very happy to have a chance to visit Miles’s—Lord Vorkosigan’s homeworld,” Taura told them.
“Although, when he invited me to come for the Winterfair season, I wasn’t sure if it was hunting or
social, and whether I should pack weapons or dresses.”
Lady Vorpatril’s smile sharpened. “Dresses are weapons, my dear, in sufficiently skilled hands. Permit
us to introduce you to the rest of our ordnance team.” She gestured toward a door at the far end of the
room, through which presumably lay more utilitarian workrooms, full of laser scanners and design
consoles and bolts of exotic fabrics and expert seamstresses. Or magic wands, for all Roic knew.
The other woman nodded. “Do please come this way, Sergeant Taura. We have a great deal to
accomplish today, Lady Alys tells me . . .”
“My lady?” Roic called in faint panic to their disappearing forms. “What should I do?”
“Wait here a few moments, Armsman,” Lady Alys murmured over her shoulder to him. “I’ll be back.”
Taura, too, glanced back at him, just before the door eased silently closed behind her, the expression
flitting over her odd features seeming for a moment almost beseeching—Don’t abandon me.
Did he dare sit on one of the chairs? He decided not. He stood for a few moments, walked around the
chamber, and finally took up a guardsman’s stance, which by dint of much recent practice he could hold
for an hour at a stretch, his back to one delicately decorated wall.
In a while Lady Vorpatril returned, a pile of bright pink cloth folded over her arm. She shoved it at Roic.
“Take these back to my nephew and tell him to hide them. Or better, burn them. Or anything, but do not
under any circumstances allow them to fall into that young woman’s hands again. Come back in about,
oh, four hours. You are by far the most ornamental of Miles’s armsmen, but there’s no need to have you
lurking about cluttering up Estelle’s reception room till then. Run along.”
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He looked down on the top of her perfectly groomed head and wondered how she could always make
him feel four years old, or as though he wanted to hide in a large bag. For his consolation, Roic reflected
as he made his way out, she seemed to have the same effect on her nephew, who was thirty-one and
ought to be immune by now.
He reported again for duty at the appointed time, only to cool his heels for another twenty minutes or so.
A sub-modiste of some sort offered him a choice of tea or wines while he waited, which he politely
declined. At last, the door opened; voices drifted through.
Taura’s vibrant baritone was unmistakable. “I’m not so sure, Lady Alys. I’ve never worn a skirt like this
in my life.”
“We’ll have you practice for a few minutes, sitting and standing and walking. Oh, here’s Roic back,
good.”
Lady Alys stepped through first, folded her arms, and looked, oddly enough, at Roic.
A stunning vision in hunter green stepped through behind her.
Oh, it was still Taura, certainly, but . . . the skin that had been sallow and dull against the pink was now
revealed as a glowing ivory. The green jacket fit very trimly about the waist. Above, her pale shoulders
and long neck seemed to bloom from a white linen collar; below, the jacket skirt skimmed out briefly
around the upper hips. A narrow skirt continued the long green fall to her firm calves. Wide linen cuffs
decorated with subtle white braid made her hands look, if not small, well-proportioned. The pink nail
polish was gone, replaced by a dark mahogany shade. The heavy braid hanging down her back had been
transformed into a mysteriously knotted arrangement, clinging close to her head and set off with a
green . . . hat? feather? anyway, a neat little accent tilted to the other side. The odd shape of her face
seemed suddenly artistic and sophisticated rather than distorted.
“Ye-es,” said Lady Vorpatril. “That will do.”
Roic closed his mouth.
With a lopsided smile, Taura stepped carefully forward. “I am a bodyguard by trade,” she said, evidently
continuing a conversation with Lady Vorpatril. “How can I kick someone’s teeth in wearing this?”
“A woman wearing that suit, my dear, will have volunteers to kick in annoying persons’ teeth for her,”
said Lady Alys. “Is that not so, Roic?”
“If they don’t trample each other in the rush,” gulped Roic and turned red.
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