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Ekaterin was awake before she realized why, sitting up and blinking and trying to remember why Miles wasn’t curled up possessively on his side of the bed. Then there was a sound like thunder- but too loud, too close, and it shook the bed. Before she had completely registered it, she was on her feet and running, dressing gown in hand, to the nursery that adjoined their room. Nikki was staying the night with the Professor and Professora. Miles was somewhere, doing something at the behest of the Emperor. And one of her babies was already starting to cry.
She shrugged into her dressing gown and scooped up Helen, but then there was an explosion of teeth-chattering, earsplitting sound. Ekaterin braced against the wall, holding Helen to her chest protectively. That, she thought, was definitely an explosion. Somewhere over the babies’ wailing, she heard shouting. She managed to get Sasha onto her other shoulder when Armsman Roic appeared in the door of the nursery. “This way,” he said, a little too loud, his normally affable face hard and serious. Roic herded her into a windowless sitting room on the first floor, said “Wait here, milady,” and was gone.
Ekaterin paced, trying to comfort two squirming babies who were upset at being rudely awakened. Vorkosigan House was force shielded, she reminded herself. And there were twenty Vorkosigan armsmen on the premises with the Viceroy and Vicereine home to visit the babies, and ImpSec beside. “I’m sure we’ll be fine,” She said out loud, not quite comfortingly, while she let Sasha gnaw on a knuckle.
The door opened, and she turned to see the Viceroy- Aral, he’d insisted- stride in, a grim look on his face, barefoot, and wearing plain pyjamas. He turned and nodded to an armsman- not one of the ones she knew; it would be one of the men who served with the Count and Countess on Sergyar- and then sat heavily in a chair. The armsman disappeared, shutting the door firmly behind him. Apparently, he was also in the category of people who were to be shuffled off into a safe space while everyone else set about protecting the House. She wondered where the Vicereine was.
“I don’t suppose you know what this is about,” Ekaterin blurted out, jiggling Helen on her hip.
“Unfortunately not,” Aral said. “I don’t suppose you know where Miles is?”
She sighed. “He left with an ImpSec courier about the time I went to bed. He said not to wait up for him.”
A corner of his mouth quirked up. “It could be entirely unrelated.”
Helen chose that moment to start wailing again in earnest, and Sasha waited a beat before joining in. Ekaterin shifted Sasha up to her shoulder, swaying. “I don’t know why I thought it would be a good idea to have two babies at one time,” she said. “One never quite has enough arms.”
“I suspect Miles of talking you into it,” Aral said, smiling. “He’s always felt as though he needed to have everything now, because he couldn’t count on a tomorrow.” He paused a moment. “May I?” he asked, tentatively, reaching for Helen.
Surprised, Ekaterin surrendered her daughter. Aral looked awkward and huge next to tiny Helen. He held her carefully against his chest and hummed tunelessly. Helen blinked and coughed, her little face pink with crying. He offered her a finger, and she set to with a will. “I never held Miles much when he was this age,” he said, suddenly. “He was too delicate. He spent most of his babyhood in a hospital.”
“It’s hard to imagine him confined to a bed,” she said. Though not that hard. The memory of him, intubated and grey and losing ground to that Cetagandan hell-plague was too fresh. She shook her head. “Stuck in one place, I mean to say.”
With Helen quiet, Sasha seemed content to nuzzle her chest and babble softly. No luck there, she thought. She’d nursed Nikki herself, but it had seemed impractical this time around. She didn’t miss all the leaking and sore nipples and plugged ducts. She did sometimes miss those quiet moments when it was just you and your baby and the smell of milk, warm and together. Of course, with two babies and Miles and Nikki, those moments were probably impossible to get anyway.
“I’ve always hated this part,” Aral said, suddenly. “Sitting and waiting, blind, to find out later who lives and who dies and what it was all about.”
“If you’re ever lucky enough to find out what it was all about,” Ekaterin said, blinking.
Aral snorted. “There is that. I suppose there’s a lot Miles doesn’t tell you about his work.” He shrugged. “Though, perhaps also a great deal that he tells you when he’s not strictly supposed to. I fell into that habit now and again with Cordelia, when it seemed safe.”
“Is she not in Vorkosigan House, by the way?” Ekaterin asked.
Aral shook his head. “She’s visiting Alys Vorpatril on the Southern Continent. Conveniently, as it turns out. Though I don’t imagine she’d be much perturbed by this.” He started doing a swaying sort-of dance that looked decidedly odd on a man as important as he was. Helen seemed to like it, however, and they were both smiling.
“She does seem a formidable woman,” Ekaterin said, trying unsuccessfully to imagine the cool, regal Vicereine in a fight. “Miles is fond of referring to her ‘shopping trip’ during Vordarian’s Pretendership.”
“That always annoyed Cordelia,” Aral observed. “Not Miles referring to it, exactly. But the fact that that was what earned her respect on Barrayar. Pour out your heart raising a child and no one notices, but cut off some idiot’s head and you’re really someone,” he finished in a terrible approximation of a Betan accent.
Ekaterin smiled. “She has a point,” she said, thoughtfully. “I’ve never cut anyone’s head off, but it does seem as though it would take less time than raising a child.”
“It’s a great deal less harrowing, at least if Miles is involved,” Aral added, hitching Helen higher on his chest. He sounded as though he had enough experience to judge.
“Was it difficult for her to adjust?” Ekaterin asked. “Komarr was so different from Barrayar, and Beta seems even more so, from what Kareen and Mark say.”
“Particularly back then,” Aral agreed. “She used to make these lists of Rules for Correct Barrayaran Behavior. They were enlightening, to say the least. I used to keep them in mind for Council meetings.” He hooked his hand under Helen’s butt and bounced her against his hip while she giggled. It was remarkably cute. “It was very difficult for her, I believe,” he said, thoughtfully. “Part of that was the times- the soltoxin attack, and Vordarian’s bloody, idiotic treason. Part of it was me, too, I’m sorry to say. The peril of marrying a man in his forties is that he’s guaranteed to have all sorts of old pain that you have to contend with.”
Miles’s seizures. Her fear of marriage. “I don’t think you need be in your forties to deal with that particular problem,” she said, softly.
“No,” Aral said, looking over at her. “I suppose not.” He paused. “I understand that your previous marriage was a particular sort of awful.” She looked up sharply, and he tilted his head. “It’s none of my business, but I hear hints of it from Miles, and from the reports on the Komarr incident. One learns to read between the lines of Miles’ reports, over the years.”
“It was bad enough,” she said. Sasha was blinking his eyes sleepily. She chose her words carefully. “After Tien died, I was certain that I didn’t want to marry again. I couldn’t imagine a marriage that didn’t mean losing myself completely.”
“Ah,” he said, and paused. “I was pleased that you asked Miles. He needed someone who would have him on her own terms. Surprised, as well,” he reflected. “We’d only seen you in that very justified retreat, and it wasn’t at all clear that he hadn’t managed to damage your relationship beyond repair.”
“He apologized very effectively,” she said. She’d stopped carrying that letter around with her sometime after their marriage, but it was still set in a safe place, and she still took it out and read it from time to time. The power of your eyes, she thought.
Aral nodded. “Cordelia and I advised him to effect as unconditional, complete and abject a surrender as he could. I’m glad he managed it; he seemed confused about it at the time.” He sat, perching Helen on his knee. “To be fair to him, part of that was probably the hangover.”
“Really?” she asked, dismayed. “But he does so poorly with alcohol…”
“As I recall, that was much of the point.” Aral said, bemused.
“You were married before, as well,” she said, trying to think of him as her father-in-law and her son’s namesake, rather than as Admiral Count Viceroy Vorkosigan. It was disconcerting to have that much history in her family tree all of a sudden.
“Yes,” he said. “Most people have forgotten that. It was a very long time ago, now.”
“It came up during all that ugliness about Tien’s death,” she said, almost apologetically.
“Ah, of course,” he said, nodding. “There are still people who think that I killed her, so I thought it might.”
She shook her head, dismissing that slander. “Did you-” She pulled Sasha closer, resting her nose against his head. “Did you find it difficult to trust yourself again, after that first marriage?”
“After a disaster like that, you mean?” he said. He was half-smiling, but his eyes were sad.
“Even so,” she said, firmly. “After a disaster like that. After a disaster like… Tien, and all the ugly stupidity of his death.” And all the ugly stupidity of their marriage, on both their parts.
Aral nodded. “Of course,” he said. “And you, I assure you, were far more sensible after your disaster than I was. I did… a great many things that I came to regret, later.” Helen squawked and grabbed insistently at his nightshirt. He shifted her to his shoulder, patting her back soothingly. “But she trusted me. Persistently. And I found that… even if I could not trust myself, I could trust her judgment of me.”
She closed her eyes, breathing in Sasha’s scent. “Captain Illyan told me once that Miles had a particular gift for choosing personnel,” she said. “I might be able to believe in that.” Miles is not Tien, she thought. And I need not make the same mistakes that I did before. She exhaled sharply. “Are they going to leave us in here all night without telling us why?”
Aral cocked his head. “I would be surprised if it was too much longer. If Vorkosigan House was actually under attack, we would know it by now. The, ah, fighting would make noise. I imagine it’s a matter of cleaning up whatever mess is left.”
“Well, at some point, someone’s going to need to find diapers,” she said, grumpily.
“Various messes, then,” Aral allowed, smiling. “I’ll try to make sure we aren’t reduced to using the curtains.”
She was trying to formulate a response to that that didn’t involve horrified commentary on the cost of those curtains when Aral’s face went serious. He pulled her to one side, a stunner suddenly in his hand. The door opened, and there was a moment where Aral was tense and ready before Miles came into view, and he relaxed, making the stunner disappear.
“Milady,” Miles said, his voice tired. He embraced her, patting Sasha’s sleeping back. “Sir,” he said, nodding to Aral.
“Is everything alright?” she asked. “What happened?”
“Paranoia and idiocy,” he said, shaking his head. “A gas main blew outside the Residence- we’re still investigating, but it looks like an accident at the moment- and five different Counts’ Armsmen, plus Impsec, took it as an attack. Ended up shooting at each other in the confusion, god help us all. Barrayarans,” he said, almost as an afterthought. “At least no one died. I’ll be up all night sorting this out, though.”
Ekaterin thought she might laugh, if it wasn’t so dangerous. Miles leaned against her shoulder. “Shall I see you back to bed before I leave again?” he asked.
“If you please,” she said.