Work Text:
“Did I ever tell you,” says Miles, “about Raina?”
Long Lake is quiet, dark, thick and black as tar in this evening too dim for reflections and too starless for light. Cordelia’s perched herself on a decorative rock, Vor matron’s skirts rustling against her calves in the slight, biting breeze. Miles, somewhat atypically for him, had yielded the larger of the pair of boulders to her and settled on the smaller one beside, just close enough that if he wanted he could lean his head against her thigh. He doesn’t. Stares at the lake, instead.
“The name is familiar,” says Cordelia. Faintly, only- Miles exists in a swirl of names. Cordelia’s done her damndest over the years to remember at least the important ones, but the further and longer he flits away from Barrayar the harder it gets.
Existed. Flitted. Got.
The past tense, jarring for Cordelia, must be apocalyptic for him.
Miles breathes out, flicks his fingers out to the lake. “When Da sent me out to Silvy Vale, right after I graduated the Academy. To judge on the case of infanticide.”
Yes, Cordelia can place it now. A remarkably cruel thing, to so harshly remind one’s own child of the accident of resources and timing that gave him a chance at life on cannibal Barrayar. But necessary, in the end. He’d learned some lesson there, something more essential and inward-turning than the minutiae of a Barrayaran Count’s archaic judge-jury-executioner methods and duties. He hadn’t said what, hadn’t spoken of the incident at all beyond the bare-facts report he’d given Aral, but Cordelia’d come up with some pretty solid guesses.
“Raina was?” prompts Cordelia. Impinging on his monologue is a fast track to losing his confidence- defensive of the only aspect of his self he’s ever truly felt control over.
“Raina Csurik, the murdered infant, yes,” says Miles. “Small lady.” He’s still looking at the lake, but even in the dimness Cordelia can see something shutter across his face. “You were surprised that I didn’t pick the Admiral.”
Cordelia says, “I would have. Did.”
He takes a moment to digest that. Says, slowly, “I never thought of the Countess that way.”
“Of course you wouldn’t have,” says Cordelia. Frankly, not condescendingly. “Perhaps regrettably, your father and I raised you Barrayaran- you’d never consider this benighted planet an escape from anything.”
Perhaps regrettably, Cordelia once had. For one brief, dazzling moment, at any rate, until the political realities set in and the hand extended in promise became the hand holding her steady as she realized the door to the lion’s den had auto-locked behind her. Well. The people were worth it, mostly. And there’s Sergyar, vampiric jellyfish and all.
“Belike,” says Miles, flicking his hand up noncommittally. “I couldn’t abandon her. Raina. Gave her my word, y’know, back then, standing at her grave. To look out for her and hers. For hers and mine.” A hesitation. He wouldn’t say this to anyone else- Cordelia’s surprised he’s letting it slip to her. Something essential really has been shaken loose in him, the past month, the past year, perhaps more than anyone’s suspected. “For us.”
His accent is more Barrayaran, now, than it’s been since he was playing resistance forces with Ivan and Elena behind Vorkosigan Surleau; for all he’d tried to keep the little Admiral and Miles Vorkosigan separate, his Barrayaran gutturals would sometimes acquire a rather cosmopolitan drift when his guard was down, Cordelia’s own defiant Betan accent twisted back at her. Not anymore. Pure Dendarii hillman, his tones are. As backcountry as his grandfather. As his Raina’s murderers.
He adds, bleakly: “I’ve been forsworn once. There wouldn’t have been anything left of me if-”
Cordelia looks at him, shadowed with night, and feels at once proud and stricken. We raised you too well, she doesn’t say. He’d rather misinterpret it, for one. Instead, a confession for a confession- that damned Betan sense of equality, Aral might say, laughing, letting her trick him into vulnerability.
She adjusts the collar of her coat, braces herself without bracing herself. “Thirty minutes after I met your father, I’d already had cause to lament what Barrayar does to her sons. Somehow, it wasn’t until I met Princess Kareen that I really thought to wonder what Barrayar does to her daughters.”
He won’t appreciate it, Cordelia doesn’t think, if she were to reach out and run her hand through his hair. Later. More for her than him.
“Eats them,” she clarifies, “eats them all. Sons mowed down in the streets; daughters strangled into silence.” Very quietly: “Mutant infants with their throats cut. And there was Princess Kareen, dead in front of me, fading into history with no-one willing to remember her courage of endurance because she didn’t chop off anyone’s head. And then there you were. And I had cause to wonder: What will Barrayar do to my son?”
“Did you know?” Miles’s voice is high, distant. “About the duty of infanticide.”
“Not then,” answers Cordelia. She rather suspects Aral and Alys had conspired to keep her ignorant until Piotr was removed from the equation and Miles was well and truly guaranteed to live. She can’t deny that the imaginary possibility of her father-in-law pressing a knife into her hand wouldn’t have given her nightmares. More nightmares.
“But you learned,” says Miles.
She touches him, now, hand solid on his shoulder. He’s bony in her grasp, even through the winter coat, just recovering from skeletal. Her first son, torn to pieces in Barrayar’s service, in the service of the Emperor Cordelia raised. Torn apart long before that, and never put back together right. Cordelia lets a wry smile turn her mouth. “Why do you think I bet on your choosing the Admiral? I know you. I must have known better. I suppose I’ll just have to ask you to forgive a parent’s selfish hope for her son to be delivered from the lion’s den, no matter the cost to the lion.”
A long silence. The breeze sweeps across the lake, carves up little wavelets that smash themselves to death on the banks. God, Cordelia hates Barrayar. But she’ll never go back to Beta Colony.
“I wanted it too,” says Miles, voice come back down from that terrible height to low, quiet agony. “More than anything. A strength of desire that made my name’s oath seem as nothing. Except- Raina.”
“Raina,” repeats Cordelia, quietly. And here Cordelia’d spent years assuming she was the only one with a dead girl nailing her feet to the ground.
Well, that’s uncharitable. To all four of them.
“And- Vorkosigan Vashnoi. My inheritance. My blighted-” His voice hitches. Barely. “Mutant lands. What right do I have to abandon them? What right…”
He lapses into bitter silence. Cordelia considers him, considers Piotr’s last, ironic whim. For the grandson he’d once have liked to murder, the radioactive legacy of Barrayar’s gruesome birth and the Vorkosigan seal dagger he’d carried to his death, the only one- as far as Cordelia knows- to have survived the Time of Isolation. Whose duty, and for whose throat? A mixed message, to be certain.
Should they have done more to prevent Miles identifying himself with Barrayar’s greatest, most painful scars? Might he have escaped, then, fled the lion’s den, if he only hadn’t seen the lion’s ribs arcing like ballistic trajectories beneath patchy, stretched fur, the missing eye and broken leg? If he hadn’t known sacrifice as his blood’s duty? Would it have been worth it?
It was not so long ago that Cordelia held Aral’s hand through the painful, bloody afterbirth of a planet. It had been a wretched, mutant thing, that Barrayar, made abhorrent to all principled observers by the traumas of its gestation. Sensible, civilized replicator birth would never have produced something like this. Should she, then, have handed him the knife?
Maybe it should have worried her more that everything she’d ever learned about midwifery was from Bothari.
“Ma?” says Miles. God, he sounds like his grandfather. Like he’s never left the hills in his life. “If- When I have children.” Her son is so small, against the lake and the clouded sky. The breeze strengthens into a cutting wind, swallows her breath and flash-freezes her ankles. She tightens her hand on his shoulder. Plastic bones. “You’ll understand, when I feed them to Barrayar too?”
Not asking forgiveness. He never will. And there’s only one answer. Anything else would be more than hypocritical.
Cordelia imagines her own bones breaking, one by one. “Of course.”