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The door was shut, and there was no knock, but Aral sensed a presence outside it anyway. For a moment he tensed, reaching for the stunner in the drawer of his commconsole desk, but then he picked up the sound of someone shifting his weight from one foot to the next, and paused.
It came again - the half step of someone moving forward and raising his hand to knock, the pause of hesitation. The scuff as the wound-be visitor let his hand fall, and turned to leave. Or flee, Aral suspected.
“Miles,” he said, raising his voice a little, “Come in.”
The sudden absence of sound outside his door called to mind the mental image of his son freezing, eyes wide in the moment of shock at being caught. It wouldn’t last - it never did - Miles’ brain tended to speed up when he was caught by surprise, not slow down. The only problem was its tendency to go in all directions at once, some of which - a good number of which - tended towards disasters on a planetary scale. Or interplanetary, Aral thought, thinking about his son’s new, private mercenary fleet. That he had managed to collect by accident.
The knob of the door turned, and the door was pushed cautiously open. A moment later, Miles peered in. “Am I disturbing, sir?”
His son’s mood was subdued. Aral had been expecting it - Miles had, in narrating his adventures to Gregor, made it sound like quite the adventure, but Aral had caught the hints of pain beneath his words. He was almost surprised that Miles hadn’t sought him out earlier - Miles had been avoiding him for about three days, now.
“Not at all,” he said, and gestured at him to come in. Miles practically slid in, shutting the door behind him and leaning against it for a moment, gathering strength, then stepped into the room.
After Miles had been born, Cordelia had commissioned special chairs in every room of Vorkosigan House so that their son would never have to perch on the edge of one, legs swinging like a child. Miles took a seat, pressed his heels firmly down on the floor, pressed his palms firmly on his knees, and looked like he was steeling himself to render a particularly painful report. Aral schooled his expression into one of gentle patience.
“Uncle Simon said I should speak to you,” Miles said.
Aral raised an eyebrow. “You spoke to him, then.”
Miles nodded sharply, chin coming down like a knife, a sure sign that he was nervous, or riding on adrenaline, or both. “I went to apologise for landing him in trouble,” he said, and Aral noted with a swell of pride that there was no hint of evasion in his son’s voice. Simon’s incarceration in the dungeons of ImpSec was only very indirectly related to Miles’ exploits - Vordrozda would almost certainly have found some other reason to cast suspicion on the ImpSec Chief even in the absence of the Dendarii. Miles could have, if he had wanted to, argued that it would not have been fair to lay the blame for that at his doorstep. But he had, evidently, learnt the full measure of a liegelord’s duty to his liegeman - the responsibility that went beyond the finger pointing. His liegeman had suffered in his service; it didn’t matter where the blame fell.
“You look relatively intact,” Aral said, casting his gaze over Miles in theatrical fashion. “I take it he didn’t take too many chunks out of you.”
Miles’ lip twitched in a suppressed smile, some of the tension evaporating quietly from his shoulders. “Not really. He couldn’t stop the exasperated lecture about thinking through the consequences before plunging into situations, but then he got right down to debriefing me about the Dendarii after that.” Miles shuddered, just a little. “I’d almost forgotten what it’s like to be on the receiving end of Uncle Simon’s friendly interrogations.”
Aral couldn’t resist a small smile either. His Chief of ImpSec’s unofficial second job had been, for eighteen years now, cleaning up after his son’s messes. And I have always leaned on you, Simon. “And what did he ask you to speak to me about?”
Miles looked down. Curled his fingers into the fabric of his pants. And looked up again. “Life. Or rather, death.”
Aral felt the smile on his face die. Ah, he thought. “Sergeant Bothari, I take it.”
Miles nodded, the tension building again. “Yes. But there was also ... another.”
He stilled, resisting the urge to shut his eyes. He’d always known that it would be impossible to protect his son from this forever, but he had hoped to protect him from it longer. “Tell me,” he said.
“It-- he was a jump pilot,” Miles sighed. “A pilot officer. We needed codes.” He swallowed, hard. Aral’s heart twinged in sympathy, and for a moment he was tempted to tell him to stop, to say no more. He locked his jaw instead, and signalled for Miles to continue.
“He refused to cooperate,” Miles said, and this time his gaze was not steady, sliding away from Aral’s face to the floor, to his hands, to far wall. “Sergeant Bothari said he knew a way. I didn’t think to ask...” One hand clenched, released. “He took my knife. Put it to the pilot officer’s implant and...” he grew a breath. “...ripped it out.”
It wasn’t the description of the violence so much as the look of raw pain on Miles’ face that made Aral wince.
“And I still didn’t know,” Miles blurted out. Now that the confession had been made, the dam seemed to have broken, and the words came rushing out in a tide. “I still didn’t think. We left him there, tied up, when we went to take over the Ariel. If I had thought about it, if I had gotten a medtech to look at him, if I’d asked Bothari what he meant to do...” he seemed to realise that he was ranting, and stopped abruptly, breathing hard. “It was my fault. I ordered it. It was my responsibility.” He looked up, eyes wide, slightly wild. “Was it wrong? Did I …”
This time he did close his eyes, just for a second. I am sorry, he thought, and the words were echoes of the ones that Cordelia had said to him, another lifetime ago. I can love you. I can grieve for you, or with you. I can share your pain. But I cannot judge you.
“What would have happened if you hadn’t gotten those codes?” he asked, in the gentlest tones he could manage.
Miles blinked, look at him. “We would have taken on the Ariel without the codes. We might have died. Elena, Baz, Bothari... but I don’t know that. I’ll never know that. A life against a life, does it balance out?”
Thus is the measure of time, Aral thought. His own father would not have hesitated in giving this answer. Before Escobar, neither would he.
How things changed.
“Can it ever?” he said, at last, and Miles, for a moment, looked absolutely crushed. “All I can tell you is that - he has passed on. You live. What you do with that chance that he has given you - is now up to you.”
Miles glanced up, sharply. “You can’t be asking me to live his life for him. That would be...” he waved a hand. “... sacrilege.”
Isn’t it? Aral thought, seeing again in his mind’s eye the list of the deceased from Escobar. Five thousand men, to light a funeral pyre for one. The combined weight of their lives had very nearly crushed him.
“You can only live your own life,” Aral said, feeling like the words were coming from too far away. “And that is both the blessing and the curse of those who survive - that they must go on.”
At last, he saw the shimmer of the light of understanding in his son’s eyes, breaking through the clouds of despair. It was just a spark, at this point, the beginning of a beginning, something that would grow over the years, over a lifetime. May you find your answers faster than I did, son, and in less blood and fire...
“It wasn’t clean,” Miles said, the shadow of guilt and horror darkening his voice. “I wish it could have been clean, at least. A warrior’s death. Even a nerve disruptor. It’s like this is the most senseless thing of all, that he wasn’t charging us with a plasma arc. I didn’t shoot him in self defence. Not directly, anyway.”
“I was thirteen years old when I conducted my first execution,” Aral said softly.
Miles gave him a curious look.
Aral paused, a moment’s hesitation. It seemed, for a second, that he saw double - Miles of eighteen, staring at him solemnly, and Miles of five, chattering nonstop, leg bracers clicking as he swung his legs. He’s not ready for this, his heart cried out, wanting to reach out, to preserve that shining innocence for a little longer. But even as that thought echoed through his head, he knew it for folly.
Miles had left here a boy, and had returned - not quite a man, but a youth, lost and desperately in need of guidance. No amount of wistful thinking would turn the clock back.
“It was raining,” he said at last. “And I remember thinking - naively - that maybe the water would wash the blood away...”
*
“Kill him,” his father said. His father-the-Count. It wasn’t a request. And Aral Vorkosigan had been trained since birth not to disobey orders.
Still, he hesitated. He shifted his grip on his sword. The hilt was slick with rain or blood - he couldn’t tell, in the darkness that smothered them. His father (the Count-his-father), didn’t exactly want him to kill the man who stood before him, restrained by Vorkosigan and Vorbarra armsmen, baring his teeth and laughing in his face. His father wanted him to start the process of killing, but not to end it. There would be no clean death for Mad Emperor Yuri.
A clean death would have been easier. Aral had shot and stabbed any number of enemies during this blood drenched campaign. (Revolution. Rebellion. Treason.) He’d stopped remembering their faces after the first two. He’d stopped hesitating after the first three.
“What are you waiting for?” the voice in his ear hissed. In that moment, it didn’t sound like his father (his father-the-General), the stern but loving father that Aral had known. But he was hardly surprised; they’d all changed, ever since that death squad had broken down the door and the entire world had dissolved in fire and blood.
He didn’t respond, shifting his grip again. The first cut. Why had they given him the first cut? And where was he to start?
“He can’t do it,” Yuri said, voice dripping with scorn. “He’s just a pup, Piotr. A squirming little rat that I should have drowned at birth--”
“Enough,” Ezar said from somewhere off his right, harshly cutting through Yuri’s tirade. Aral sensed movement behind him - an aborted move by his father (the General-his-father), a move by Ezar (usurper. emperor.) to restrain him. “Lord Vorkosigan, in your own time.”
“Yes, sire,” Aral said, just to watch the way Yuri’s face twisted, mockery turning into fury, scorn turning into hatred. The power to command another man’s emotions in this way burned through his veins, intoxicating and sickening all at the same time. It seemed to thrum through him, in time with the pounding of his heart, down the slender, silvered blade of his rapier.
They’d chosen this sword precisely because it was a duelling sword. Because its sharp, slender edge wasn’t meant for cutting, which meant that the cut it inflicted wouldn’t be too deep, too lethal. Not on its own, anyway. Not until it was joined by a thousand others.
His brother’s duelling sword. His brother’s revenge. This was honour. This was just.
But if it was honourable, why did it make him feel sick to the stomach?
Yuri sneered. “You see? He fails, at the last, because he knows what this is. Treason.”
Despite himself, he flinched at the word, at the way it echoed around the balcony, multiplying until it sounded like the voices of a million accusers.
“Treason,” Ezar said evenly, “Would be to fail to end the reign of blood of a man who would drown Barrayar in it.”
Yuri flung his head back and laughed.
“Enough,” Aral said, through gritted teeth, but his voice didn’t have the power that Ezar’s did, and Yuri just. kept. laughing.
“Finish it,” his father said (the General-his-Count), and the words were almost a snarl.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this, he thought faintly. It was supposed to be great and glorious... it wasn’t...
He walked forward. Lightning flashed overhead, illuminating and splitting the night. Thunder rolled, just as Yuri sneered at him. “Strike, little boy,” he said, his words hissing, sibilant, yet somehow audible over the crash of the thunder. “If you dare while you wear my uniform. My uniform on a child.”
It was the taunt that did it. Anger boiled up, anger and grief and seering hatred, even as lightning split the sky again, closer this time. “You killed all the children in that room,” he snarled, and Yuri’s sneer grew, morphing horribly into laughter. His fingers tightened around the hilt of the rapier, and he swung. His cut took Yuri across the stomach, turning laughter into a shriek. It went down his nerves like claws.
His ears were ringing. He stepped back, managed not to stumble, and wondered what he had just done. Long training made him wipe the blood off his blade and resheathe it, and his hands somehow did not shake as he walked back towards his father and Ezar were waiting.
“Well done,” his father said, and Ezar put a hand on his shoulder. “Leave the rest to us.”
He might have nodded. He wasn’t entirely sure - the rain was turning into ice, freezing all the way down to the depth of his soul.
The screams, like the laughter, seemed to go on forever. He forced himself to stand there, though in truth he wondered how much of it was because he didn’t trust himself to move. He felt frozen in place, a statue, a silent witness to this execution. His father moved, unsheathing his own blade, and there was no joy in his face, just grim efficiency. The same look was mirrored on Ezar’s face. There was no glory here, not in this place, he realised. It was a job they had to do. No, not a job. Duty. Honour.
“Remember this, boy,” his father said, as he walked back to him, blood dripping black off his blade. “We are Vor. This is our duty. This is our place.”
To stand in the breach between our people, and madness, Aral thought faintly, and nodded. But in the end, are we not all mad?
*
Miles’ lips were compressed into a thin line as Aral’s words wound to a close. He knew, of course - Mad Yuri’s execution was a subject taught to every young Vor lord. But there was a vast difference between the sanitised version that the textbooks spoke of, and the reality.
“I didn’t know you were there,” Miles’ voice was very soft.
“I didn’t want it known,” he sighed. The shadows in the room seemed longer than ever.
“It was necessary,” Miles said.
“Necessary? Perhaps. We’ll never know. And it wasn’t clean.” Far from it.
“But he was guilty, at least,” Miles argued. “He was a murderer. He chose the consequences when he chose his actions.”
Aral smiled, very bitterly. “You could say that. But we didn’t execute him only for what he’d done. No... we executed him for what he would potentially do, if he was allowed to go unchecked.” He leaned forward. “We will never know, in that time and place, if we could have said the right words to bring him back to his senses. We will never know if he may come round somehow, and become an Emperor greater than Ezar ever was. We too - chose the consequences when we chose our actions.”
Miles didn’t answer, but there was a new thoughtfulness that creased his brow. His boy, his bright, shining boy, born in the fires of war, on the very cusp of change. He had hoped, foolishly, perhaps, that Miles would never have to make these choices, to stand in the breach between his people and madness. But perhaps that was the way it was - that true change had to be wrought in its own time and season. And perhaps Miles’ children, or his children’s children, would not have to wade through oceans of blood to reach the light.
“What to do with this chance that he has given me...” Miles murmured, thoughtful, and when he looked up, Aral could once again see the bright, steadfast determination that burned incandescent through his son. And thus they struggled on, in the ever lasting quest for answers. A little more battered, a little more bruised, but stronger in will, for it.
“Thank you,” Miles said, straightening as much as he could.
Aral inclined his head. One day, he thought, he would tell Miles about Escobar, of a choice mired in even more darkness and confusion than Yuri’s. Of a strike far more vicious and preemptive than had been struck, on that balcony in the rain. But that was a secret that was still too dark, too deeply buried, to be aired in the light of day. Miles wasn’t ready for it, not now, not yet. Perhaps not ever.
And perhaps there would never be any need to.
*
Miles was gone, a new determination in his step, and a new maturity in his gaze. Aral leaned back in his chair, his thoughts spinning back into the past, to thoughts of bloodshed. Yuri first. Then the rest of the loyalists. A blur of years - gaining his Captaincy, his Admiralty. He had thought himself so wise at the time, in possession of all the answers. Barrayar’s youngest admiral. The strategic genius. Believing that surely, he was at the top of his game.
Another duelling sword in his hand, and two corpses at his feet. The stink of burning flesh as his wife pressed his plasma arc to her head and pulled the trigger.
The crunch of cartilage and fragile bones beneath his hands as he crushed the life from a political officer, helpless rage venting itself in an unauthorised execution.
The aching, hollow feeling afterwards, again and again. How many times had he drained that cup to the dregs before he realised that the only thing he was drinking was death?
“That was well handled,” a familiar voice said, recalling him from memories. He surfaced, feeling vaguely like a man being rescued from the grip of a nightmare. His Captain, his dear, beloved Captain, slipped through the door that Miles had recently departed through, treading silently across the room to perch on the arm of his chair.
“Not well enough, I fear,” he sighed. “I don’t think he got any of the answers he came here to find.”
“You gave him what he needed,” Cordelia said firmly.
“I can only hope,” Aral said softly, “That it will not take him as long to find his answers as I did. And that he will not repeat the mistakes that I did.”
“All of life is a journey,” Cordelia replied. “A journey for answers, and a journey to live out the answers that we find.”
“And in those journeys, sometimes we get lost.” He captured her hand, planted a kiss to the back of it. “If you hadn’t found me - if you hadn’t shown me a new road to walk down, I fear I may never have found those answers.”
“Oh, Aral,” she said, and the corner of her mouth curled into a tiny smile - victorious, or sad, or perhaps both. “You found your own answers. I just gave you a little nudge, on occasion.”
“You called me a cannibal, I recall,” he said dryly.
“I called Barrayarans cannibals.”
“And I’m not a Barrayaran?”
She folded her hands over his, and they were gloriously warm. “Barrayar’s finding its own answers. In no small part due to the nudges you gave it. And the occasional shove.”
He chuckled then, feeling the tension and the shadows of the past starting to drain out of him. “As is Miles.”
“As is Miles,” she agreed, and her gaze turned towards the door. “And all we can do is to give him little nudges along the way.” She smiled. “As you said to me, once - I believe he’ll soar high.”
finis.