Archive of Our Own ^beta

Cordelia pried Aral away from the capitol for two weeks at Vorkosigan Surleau, just after Midsummer. Miles met them there, practically vibrating out of his skin after weeks cooped up on a series of jump ships. Cordelia hugged the stuffing out of him, complimented him on his new galactic veneer, and said when prompted that yes, she could just see the difference in the two centimeters he'd grown over the past year. This last wasn't entirely true, but in her defense he wasn't holding still long enough for her to get a good look.

He thundered off to the stables after a mere ten minutes reacquaintance on the terrace, and Cordelia forestalled Piotr before he could correct this impoliteness. Miles would be much better company after he'd ridden about twenty miles, gotten a gallon of lake water up his nose, and thoroughly stomped someone who should know better in forest war games up the hill.

He reappeared before dinner with preternatural good timing, stinking to high heaven and tracking reddish mud across the foyer. He trailed a half dozen assorted armsmen and ImpSec watchdogs – the new batch, who of course didn't know better yet – and Sergeant Bothari, all in various states of impressive dishabille. He appeared at the table scrubbed pink, bolted a quarter of his body weight in vat protein, then passed out cold on the sofa about ninety seconds after they'd moved into the parlor.

"Efficient little animal, isn't he?" Aral asked, grinning, and went off to his nightly security briefing, cut down to a mere hour and a half in deference to his vacationing status. Piotr excused himself to his study to toast his bones before the fire that was too hot for anyone else to stand, and doubtless drink four or five fingers of the whiskey he wasn't supposed to have anymore.

This left Cordelia alone with her boy, snoring gently in a contorted little bundle. The year on Beta had been kind to him, by her mother's account – Miles had broken only three fingers and his wrist, all healed now. He'd let his hair grow out a bit, and leaning close she could see the tiny puncture in his ear where he'd affixed his sexual expression earring. Other than that -- and the prized two centimeters -- he seemed exactly the same.

Surely not, though. At fifteen, a year was practically an eternity. He was a greedy little sponge, sucking up the world in enormous gulps and working madly to process it all. Which was why the year of school on Beta was so vital, and particularly right now. It must have changed the blooming inner cosmos. At that age the soul was like a complexifying nautilus shell, doubled and trebled at every turn. Cordelia wanted, quite desperately, to pry into him and see. Are you all right, dear heart? Are you wiser, more resilient? Cleverer, God help us all?

A shadow moved in the corner of her eye. Cordelia jumped, suppressed a shriek.

"Milady," Sergeant Bothari said, coming to stand at the other end of the sofa.

""Sergeant," Cordelia acknowledged, taking a calming breath. "Have you seen your daughter?"

"Just now, Milady," he said. His rough, atonal voice was somehow disturbing when hushed to a murmur. Like what one of the treacherous, needle-articulated stone walls of Dendarii Gorge would sound like, if it could speak. She'd overheard him sometimes grating out quiet lullabies to Miles, sleepless with pain but already unwilling at three years old to cry about it. The memory had made her uncharacteristically brusque with one of Lady Alys's friends, who had asked wide-eyed if it was really safe to trust the fragile Lord Miles to Bothari's care. It's safe because I trust him, she'd snapped, and ended the conversation there, though there were a thousand things she could have followed that with.

They brooded in silence over their mutual charge, who slept on, face scrunched up in the crook of his arm. Cordelia found herself glancing over to Bothari, but it wasn't until she consciously processed the clench of his hands and the rhythmic twitch in his jaw that she realized why. Bothari's mind, when troubled, was a boiling river under very thin ice – you could always see it, if you knew what you were looking at.

"Would you mind accompanying me for a walk, Sergeant?" Cordelia asked.

"Yes, Milady," he said, moving at once to open the terrace doors for her. They left Miles to his dreams of Vorthalia the Bold, and strolled off on a wide circuit around the house. Bothari was silent, eyes flickering from the sky to the lake to his plodding feet, and Cordelia left him to it for the moment. Young Elena, unlike Miles, had outwardly changed in startling ways over the past year, as teenage girls did. It really wasn't surprising if Bothari had been disturbed by confronting the ghost of the woman he'd loved and raped, refracted and distorted through his own genes.

She looked at him again, wondering if he was working up one of the old, awful headaches. Brutal, this Barrayaran memory surgery. It offended her on his behalf, and also on a broader, philosophical level. Trauma wasn't a cancer to be excised; it was a transmutation that touched every corner of the soul with either filth or grace. Both, usually. Attempting to carve it all away took only the grace and left the filth – you knew something awful had happened, but lacked the saving benediction of knowing just what it was you'd survived. It stole the chance of learning from the unwilling use of your own strength, which was a crime just as awful as anything Sergeant Bothari had ever done.

Not that Beta Colony didn't have similar techniques, though rarely used. The first article of the Betan Constitution proclaimed that "access to information shall not be abridged." Even when it's about yourself. Even when it's awful. But Betan memory technology buried the past under a drift of gently-fallen snow; the Barrayarans blasted it out with a nuclear bomb.

Bothari paused as they approached the terrace after their first circuit. Cordelia stopped with him, expectant. But Bothari said nothing. Instead, he withdrew something from his pocket, something that flashed red metallic in the setting sun, which he offered to her formally over his arm. Cordelia took it from him, puzzled. Ah, it was Miles's dagger, the one Piotr had given him. It had been accompanied by an extraordinary amount of fuss from every male Barrayaran they knew, universally delighted by baby's first deadly weapon.

This wasn't about Elena.

"Sergeant?" Cordelia asked, hand convulsing around the hilt.

"I took it away from M'lord Miles," Bothari said. "Four months ago, now." He cited up the hill into the distance. "Had to wrestle him for it. He fought like mad."

Oh, my heart . . . Cordelia's fingers went numb, one hand clenched in her skirts, the other on the dagger. She spent an interval breathing, and very slowly recollected herself, here and now, with her boy sleeping peacefully thirty feet away. There wasn't a word for that. 'Widow,' yes, and 'orphan,' but there was no word for a parent who had lost a child. And if anyone was going to come up with one, it would be the Barrayarans.

"Thank you," she said to Bothari. "And bless you."

He shifted uneasily, awkward under her gratitude. He never knew what to do with it, probably because it clashed so incongruously with his self-image. "My duty, Milady," he said. "I didn't know what the right thing to do was."

Cordelia clenched the dagger again, made herself relax. "Oh, I think you got it exactly right," she said, and began to walk again.

"No, I meant . . ." Bothari paced her, face working unhappily. "I didn't know what to do after. Whether it was proper to tell you, even."

"It was," she assured quickly. "Not that I'm an expert in the intricacies of loyalty oaths but. Yes. You've done everything right."

He relaxed fractionally. Poor Bothari, carrying this around for the past four months. His moral sense had been so warped by Ges and Serg, and whatever organic abnormalities had initially attracted them, that he didn't trust himself to care properly for another human being. He was the sanest psychopath she knew, that way. How this must have terrified him.

And Miles – what was he feeling? Despair, obviously. Ironic that he'd had to leave this rotting planet, where he'd wanted to take knives to the schoolyard to protect himself, in order to feel the full impact of what it was doing to him.

"I was wondering if it might not be a good idea to suggest university on Beta," Cordelia said, continuing the thought out loud. "As an alternative to this blinkered mania for the military academy, I mean."

"No, Milady," Bothari said at once.

Cordelia shook her head. "Oh, I quite agree. Better he stay here for now." Here where she could see him every morning at the breakfast table. Here on Barrayar, that didn't want him, and Barrayar that he loved.

"Is there anything I ought to do, Milady?" Bothari asked. He might as well have said 'orders, please.'

They were coming around the corner to the quiet, walled-off family graveyard. Cordelia paused there, resting her forearms on the wall. The stone was cool, sheltered from the summer heat by the thick tree canopy. She held the dagger between her two hands, tip pinched in finger and thumb. Miles had tried to cut his own life out with this. What had he been thinking, in the months since he'd failed. Are you wiser, more resilient?

"There isn't much we can do," Cordelia said slowly. "Because Miles needs to do it for himself." She took a careful breath. Trust was its own miracle of creation – it was worthless unless you gave it, but once you did it could be worth everything.It's safe because-- "But there is one thing you can do," she said, and handed the dagger to Bothari. "Please return this to my son for me, Sergeant."

He accepted it into his huge, scarred hands. "Yes, Milady."