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Under Armsman Szabo’s tutelage, Count Dono Vorrutyer had acquired a mean right hook, which he deployed, for the first time, against his cousin Byerly.
Byerly didn’t hit back. This could, of course, mean several things, ranging from you’re still a girl as far as I’m concerned, which would have been infuriating, to you’re injured (better) to I admit I deserved that. But on the whole, Dono thought it was a simple I don’t choose to engage on those terms. Byerly wiped his bleeding lip with a handkerchief, looked at the blood flecking his jacket with distaste, and said, “Being a man doesn’t mean you have to go around hitting people all the time.”
“I didn’t do that as some sort of demonstration, I did it because I’m furious with you. And I’m also beginning to think that Armsman Szabo is right that you’re not the best person to give advice on masculinity. The phrase tell me honestly, man to man comes to mind.”
“I wasn’t sure how far I could rely on your acting abilities.”
“My acting abilities? For God’s sake, By, you’ve just spent the last month watching me become another person.”
“Yes. It’s been fascinating, but I hope you’ll pardon me if I mention that the transition has had some ... awkward moments, your greeting of me tonight being a case in point.” He looked Dono over with slightly narrowed eyes. “By the way, being a man also doesn’t mean you have to dress badly. I only mention it as a matter of interest.”
“No, but it means I can dress badly. Some of us have been wishing for years that we didn’t have to think about clothes all the time, because some of us are not naturally vain and shallow.”
It was true that Lady Donna had always taken a great deal of care with her appearance, but Lady Donna hadn’t had any access to power except through men. Count Dono had other, more reliable channels.
“You’ve changed,” said Byerly, in the sort of wounded voice that was clearly calculated to wound right back. “You’re not the person I remember.”
“And you are not the person I thought you were. There was a time when I would have sworn you weren’t a complete weasel.”
He watched By to see what sort of effect the word weasel had, because in certain circles, it was a word with very particular connotations. There was a fleeting blankness of expression, the schooled-not-to-react kind; it was enough to confirm what Dono had been suspecting for some time. Oh, baby-cousin-that-I-remember-holding-in-my-arms, you haven’t just deceived me about this, you’ve been deceiving me about everything for years...
“I trusted you,” Dono went on bitterly. “I would have backed you against the world.”
“I did back you against the world,” said By quietly. “That’s worth something, isn’t it?”
“I know you did. You wouldn’t have been allowed in the door if I had any doubts about whose side you were on. But it doesn’t change the fact that you totally blind-sided me. Under old-fashioned codes of aristocratic manhood, I would have challenged you to a duel.”
“Would you? How very civilized. And very original.”
“Count yourself lucky we’re not having one, because I think I’d win. And if I set my girlfriend on you, she would definitely win.” Wait, Dono thought unexpectedly, is that even true? Probably not. They wouldn’t put him out there without teaching him to defend himself ... would they?
“I rather think we are having a duel, actually. Just – not with the traditional weapons. Words at ten paces, much more deadly.”
Dono thought back to certain epic verbal battles between his father and uncles. “Actually, I’d say this is quite in line with certain Vorrutyer traditions.”
“Don’t accuse me of holding up Vorrutyer traditions. I believe that’s the first thing you’ve said tonight that’s actually hurt.”
This, Dono realized, was actually true. He did know where to hit to draw real blood, and as much as he would have sworn he was in a towering rage with By, he’d been avoiding ... those places. Byerly had been holding back, too – a lot more so, actually, because he could be positively venom-tongued when he wanted to. “No damage yet?”
“Only to the jacket. I was fond of that jacket.”
“Give it here. It’ll be all right, you just rub some detergent in from the other side before it sets, and soak it in cold water.” It occurred to Dono that other men probably did not learn the art of removing bloodstains from fabric in adolescence. He added it to a growing mental list of things-other-men-wouldn’t-necessarily-know. Most of them were trivial, but sometimes there was unexpected power in triviality.
“You’re still limping.” It was probably too much to expect a verbal apology from By, but the hand that had suddenly appeared under Dono’s elbow expressed a great deal, and so did the fact that he’d given over his usual attitude of detached irony. “I – didn’t plan for things to happen that way. You weren’t supposed to be hurt.”
“That’s all right, too. No, sit down. I don’t need help.” It was tempting to add I’ve had enough “help” from your particular quarter already, but ... no. That didn’t seem to be how things were playing out, after all.
Dono washed the jacket at the bathroom sink himself, the armsmen having been under orders to show m’lord-the-Count’s cousin up and then clear out and leave him to m’lord-the-Count’s tender mercies. Szabo had been the only one who had demurred at all, but even he had acknowledged this was really Dono’s fight. God, Szabo was going to be pissed when he figured out the tender-mercies part was turning out not to be ironic.
The jacket was good-quality cloth, a shade of rose-grey that almost no other Barrayaran male would be caught dead wearing, but By had always had good color sense. Very good, Dono realized when he came back; the jacket had added enough color to disguise how utterly washed-out and exhausted he looked.
“When was the last time you slept?”
“Definitely not last night. Night before? Something like that.”
“Same as the rest of us, then?”
“With bonus Imperial-Witnessing. And, ah, reprimand. From several sources, all the way up to the Emperor.” Byerly sounded as if he were rather proud of having done something egregious enough to warrant reprimand from the Emperor.
“Fast-penta hangover, too?”
“No, actually. They decided to take me at my word. God knows why.”
Hm-mm. Playing it cool, then. Or perhaps he hadn’t worked out yet that Dono knew. At any rate, he wasn’t exactly lying, even if he was leaving out one or two pertinent facts.
There were footsteps in the corridor. Dono turned and opened the door. “Theophilos, is that you? Would you please get some coffee, water, brandy, sandwiches, and painkillers for my cousin, in whatever order they come nearest to hand?”
“Very good, m’lord Count,” said Theophilos, for all the world as if m’lord Count hadn’t requested to be left alone with said cousin for the express purpose of beating him up.
“You are the man of my dreams,” Byerly breathed. “Are you sure you don’t want to reconsider that mutual non-incest pact?”
You stole that joke from me, and you didn’t even like it when I made it, thought Dono, as he settled himself next to By on the couch. “You know,” he said aloud, “you’re actually very clever except when you decide you’re going to try to be clever, in which case you tend to become irredeemably stupid. And someday, I’m afraid you’ll be clever-stupid enough to get yourself killed.”
There was a visible, physical transformation – a sort of firming up of the face and body, although it was hard to make out exactly how he’d done that. Even more confusingly, it made him look both older and younger at the same time. Now he knows I know. “There is a fair chance of that, yes,” said a voice that was very much not lazy or sneering or dissipated.
“I am glad that you did what you did, honestly. I just wish you had warned me first.”
“I couldn’t, you know. Quite apart from the fact that your reactions had to be convincing, you had to be the one who wasn’t cheating.”
There was another term that sometimes got used for Byerly’s profession, besides weasel: dirty angel. It fit.
“But in retrospect, I wish I had warned you. I’m sorry.”
“Last night was rough for you, too?”
“You might say that,” said By, in the sort of voice that conveyed considerable understatement.
Dono reached over and squeezed his shoulder.
“Don’t let Szabo see you doing that. Insufficiently masculine gesture. I believe Real Men are supposed to punch one another on the arm, or something.” That sounded like By, reassuringly, and not like some other person who was a complete stranger.
“I think I can decide for myself what counts as sufficiently masculine in my own house. It’s one of the perks of being the Count ... Oh, thank you, Theophilos.” Dono nodded to the armsman, who set down the tray and quietly left the room.
Byerly knocked back a couple of the painkillers, spiked his coffee with a liberal amount of brandy, and took a sip. “I always liked having a girl cousin when I was a kid,” he said after a moment. “When I came to you, you always tried to make things better, instead of telling me to buck up and be a man.”
What did you say to that, Dono wondered, when you’d made the choice to stop being that comforting girl cousin? “I’m sorry?” he tried.
“You needn’t be. That isn’t what I meant.” By swallowed some more of the coffee-brandy mixture, took a bite of one of the sandwiches, and began to look perkier almost at once. “What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that I didn’t bet on you out of sentiment. I mean, I would have been on your side no matter what, but I wouldn’t have risked that much if I didn’t think you were going to be a very good Count. And, well, I figured there was a good chance I’d be gaining a Count and losing a friend, but I thought it was a fair trade. Still, I’m glad it doesn’t seem to have worked out that way.”
“Me, too.” There was something else that needed to be said – possibly, several other somethings – and Dono wrestled with how to open up the topic. “I’m going to ask you one question, and I think you owe me an absolutely honest answer.”
“Fair enough,” said Byerly, but his eyes were wary.
“Are you going to be all right, financially?”
“Mm-what?” said By, around a mouthful of sandwich. This clearly wasn’t the question he had been expecting.
Dono tried to figure out how to put it more clearly. You couldn’t very easily ask someone whether you’d gotten him fired from a job you weren’t supposed to know he had. “Look, I know you pretty much always owe money to five or six different tradesmen, and I also happen to know you always pay them, eventually. What I’m asking is, do you anticipate having any difficulty doing that in the future?”
“Oh.” He’d caught the full set of implications, this time, and he was looking at Dono straight on, with a friendly-conspiratorial expression in his eyes. “No, I don’t. Maybe a little more difficulty paying them off quickly, but – nothing inextricable.”
Dono translated this, without difficulty, as docked a pay grade, but not fired. He must be good at what he did. Well, that was ... evident, really, after the events of the last few weeks. “Is there ... anything else I can do?”
“You know, as of today I think you can do anything you want to ... Was there something in particular you meant?”
“One of the things I’ve discovered very quickly about being the Count is that people start asking you for favors. Particularly people who think they’ve helped you become the Count. I’ve had about seventeen requests so far, including two from people who voted against me. But none yet from your particular quarter.”
“Ah. Are you in touch with Julia?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good. Stay in touch.” Dono was not absolutely certain, but he thought the translation on that one was: If I ever am clever-stupid enough to get myself killed, tell my sister who I was and what I died for.
Oh, By. “I would have done that anyway.” I mean, Julia is the whole reason we’ve been having this conversation without actually naming the thing we’re having the conversation about, right? Because if you have to report to your superiors that I know about you, somebody drops by my house to swear me to secrecy, and... God, this whole conversation was making his head hurt, but he supposed it would be good practice for party politics. “You can ask for something bigger.”
“Try to make things better. For everyone, I mean. That’s all.”
That was ... big, all right. Baby-cousin had grown up, and had turned into someone alarmingly earnest. It was, Dono feared, more than a single lifetime’s worth of big, especially when half of that lifetime had already been frittered away without access to real power.
He reached for something smaller and lighter, and said, on impulse, “How’d you like to go to the Emperor’s wedding? I get to bring a guest, and Olivia’s already invited because of her family.”
By’s first, purely nonverbal, reaction clearly translated as ooh, yes please, and what should I wear? – which was a relief, because Dono would have felt entirely adrift if none of the vanity and shallowness had turned out to be real. But he shook his head. “It’s probably not advisable for us to be seen in public together, at least not anytime soon. It would give the whole game away, wouldn’t it? And that wouldn’t be the best thing for your political career.”
Right, his political career. Which he only had because he’d appeared to be the one who wasn’t cheating, while in reality ... Good Lord, By had just handed him a whole clusterfuck of complications along with the Countship. Would an honorable loss have been better than this kind of victory? Well, at any rate, it was clearly too late to hand the whole thing back, and probably too late to slug By again, although the prospect was tempting.
He decided that he needed a drink at least as badly as By did, and poured a generous measure of brandy into the empty water-glass. He also helped himself to a roast-beef sandwich before By could scarf them all down. “What am I supposed to do about you, then?”
“It’s called disinformation, and I happen to be very good at it. The first thing to do is decide on your story; I think it goes something like this. You had a cousin once who had never amounted to much, but you had a soft spot for him – you were fond of him when he was a kid, and you trusted him. Well, you were wrong about him and the world was right, and you found that out the hard way when he betrayed you to your worst enemy for the proverbial thirty pieces of silver. Now you don’t have a cousin, at least not one you’re willing to acknowledge. And then you do exactly what you did when I first came here tonight, only in public, and I think I must ask you not to call me a weasel – there are plenty of other metaphorical animals in the menagerie, and rats and snakes are much better ones. Give them a big show of ‘I know thee not, young man.’ And if you choose to send for me in private afterwards – that can be our secret.”
But I’ve just been reading that play, and he doesn’t get sent for in private. “No. I don’t play those kinds of games.”
“Now that you’re the Count, I think you do play those kinds of games. You have to. Think about Vorhalas, for example.”
So much for as of today, I think you can do anything you want to, thought Dono. That hadn’t lasted very long at all. “I am not Count Vorhalas.”
“Well, I should hope not, because I don’t think he would be a very comfortable person to share a couch with. But you do ... owe him a great deal. And that probably means you need to put up a plausible show of integrity.”
It was a fair point, and maybe not worth arguing. It was a real risk to take for a toy, a treat, a trifle. An Imperial wedding happened to be the kind of trifle that the old By would have enjoyed immensely, and Dono had loved his witty, frivolous, and utterly self-centered cousin too, but – maybe it was time to acknowledge that person had never actually existed.
No. Taking By’s advice would be clever-stupid, if anything ever was. If he was planning to survive this crazy game he was playing for any length of time, he was going to need some actual allies. Ones who didn’t mind being seen with him in public.
“I’ve got a better idea,” said Dono. “Let me play the fool.”
“Playing the fool is usually a good idea. Um, what exactly did you have in mind in this case?”
“I have a cousin. I’ve always had a soft spot for him, soft enough to count as a blind spot. He betrayed me to my worst enemy – and then he double-crossed my enemy. And because he’s a convincing little rat with a plausible tongue, and because I’m a bit of a fool, I bought it when he said that was his plan all along, and decided to forgive and forget. And, now that I’ve got a reputation for being softhearted, and maybe softheaded as well – oh, screw the maybe, these people already believe the double-X chromosome means I can’t have a mind – people are going to assume that I’m easily influenced. And that’s not a bad reputation to have in the political sphere. Look at how much everyone courts the fence-sitters. They get things in trade for their Districts, and people forgive them the occasional last-minute vote switch, because it’s assumed they just couldn’t help themselves.”
“I’ll be damned,” said Byerly. “That could work.”
Dono considered it, and decided that it actually could work, which was a pleasant surprise since he’d really just been trying to come up with a plausible excuse on the fly. “So. Did you want to go to that wedding?”
“Of course I do. And you may rely on me to play the backstabbing schemer to the hilt, and convince everyone that you’re my dupe. But – what do you think backstabbing schemers wear when they go to Imperial weddings?”
Dono smiled. “I’m sure you’ll come up with something.”
A few other things that he had heard and observed began to come together, and became part of a startlingly clear pattern. He wasn’t sure how much he was allowed to ask, but it was hard to resist the urge to know.
“So, um, out of curiosity. This good-looking blond boy you’re always drinking with in prole bars. Boyfriend or contact?”
“Alain? Contact. And very good friend.”
So they let you have one of those. Good. “And ... Lady Alys Vorpatril?”
“Lady Alys is my boyfriend. Obviously.”
I think I might like this new person. He’s all right.
Byerly finished the last sandwich, washed it down with the last few drops of brandy-laced coffee, and said, “I’d better be going.” He reclaimed his jacket from the towel rack where Dono had hung it, and walked to the door, then paused for a moment with his hand on the doorknob. “Are we – all right?”
“Yes. It’s just – a bit discombobulating when someone you’ve known your whole life turns into an entirely different person.”
“Well,” said By with a slightly crooked smile, “how do you think I’ve been feeling for the last month?” And he turned and walked out into the night.