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When Lady Alys enters the ballroom, graceful as the incoming tide in her dove grey mourning dress, all eyes turn towards her irresistibly. She has placed about herself a majesty, appearing slightly taller, subtly but terribly beautiful. It is not a beauty that invites touch. She is perfect in a way that invokes ice and marble. She is beautiful like a poisonous creature painted brightly in pronouncement of its power, like a red rose resplendent in its thorns. As she moves the whole room moves with her, she has placed upon herself a weight, a gravitational pull, and all around arrange themselves in accordance with her.
Simon, watching, sees all this, and sees her also through the objective vision of his chip. He sees the faint nervousness in her eyes, she looks younger, somehow, or rather less ageless, beneath the glamour. It does not lessen the effect, he is terrified to realize, only makes her seem less like a story, more immediate to himself, as if he is let in on a secret, as if he could be part of the same space she occupies.
Simon tears his eyes from her, and gives orders to his men to do likewise. Whatever role Lady Alys has taken upon herself, ImpSec still has its own duty to perform. Everyone else may turn in Lady Alys’s orbit, but ImpSec must not be pulled in, their role is as observers, not participants, to this High Vor dance.
Later, when the guests have all departed, Simon goes to Lady Alys.
“You have put yourself forward,” Simon says, his voice level, not a challenge, but not an endorsement either. He does not allow himself to feel small before her. He is taller than she is, barely, and as to the rest, he is Chief of ImpSec. He is beginning to feel himself to be Chief of ImpSec.
Lady Alys’s glamour shifts to its more usual mode. Simon knows no other word for its effect than poise , pure and distilled. She sighs, beneath the glamour she is very tired.
“Someone must,” Lady Alys says, “Someone will. And Cordelia can’t.”
“She could learn,” Simon says. Emperor’s wives are not always chosen for their faerie blood. They do not need to have all the talents of the Vor, only know how to manage them.
“No,” says Lady Alys, “I don’t think she could. Cordelia is… a plasma arc. She’ll remake Barrayar before she’s done, I think, but she can’t take Kareen’s place.”
She is right, Simon knows, though he does not like it. He knows how one must bend oneself, in order to flit in and out through the laws and subtleties of the Vor, and Cordelia, clear-eyed and untouched by “Vorish nonsense'', is unbending. And more than that. The Empress has not always been chosen for her arts, but now is not always. The Emperor, Crown Prince, and Dowager Princess, each of them powerful in their own right, have all died in little more than the space of a year, and the Emperor is now only a small child. What the Empire needs now is more than a Regent’s wife, Barrayar requires a Queen of Faerie.
“You do it well,” Simon says. Better even than Kareen, and Kareen was like a candle flame in the dark. If Lady Alys should choose to wield her power on her own behalf, there would be trouble.
Simon’s eyes on her are steady, and he sees her read the question which he does not ask aloud: by what authority do you make your claim?
“I’ll talk to Aral about it tomorrow,” Lady Alys says, and Simon thinks he catches through the chip the faintest blush of embarrassment, “I wanted to see if I could do it first, you see. I’ll have Aral make up a job title for me, all nice and modern and straight-forward, not something with a title. Safer that way, jobs can be retired from when it’s time.”
“Ah,” Simon says, and sees that she is being honest, (she cannot lie, of course, but he is not so foolish as to think that means she cannot deceive him), “Then, my lady, it seems we shall be working together.”
Her eyes sharpen on him, and she smiles, her shoulders relaxing almost imperceptibly.
“I shall look forward to it, Captain,” she says, and extends her hand. Simon bows and kisses it