Read Online Shards of Honor (Vorkosigan Saga) by Lois McMaster Bujold - Free Book Online Page A

arrested. He imagined he was dishonored, you see. He arranged to have each meet him at a deserted place, about half an hour apart."
    He paused for a long time. Cordelia waited, barely breathing, uncertain whether to encourage him to go on or not. He continued eventually, but his voice went flatter and he spoke in a rush.
    "The first was another pigheaded young aristocrat like himself, and he played out the game by the rules. He knew the use of the two swords, fought with flair, and almost killed m—my friend. The last thing he said was that he'd always wanted to be killed by a jealous husband, only at age eighty."
    By this time, the little slip was no surprise to Cordelia, and she wondered if her story had been as transparent to him. It certainly seemed so.
    "The second was a high government minister, an older man. He wouldn't fight, although he knocked him down and stood him up several times. After—after the other, who had died with a joke in his mouth, he could hardly bear it. He finally slew him outright in the middle of his begging, and left them there.
    "He stopped at his wife's apartment, to tell her what he'd done, and returned to his ship to wait for arrest. This all happened in one afternoon. She was enraged, full of wounded pride—she would have dueled with him, if she could—and she killed herself. Shot herself in the head, with his service plasma arc. I wouldn't have thought it a woman's weapon. Poison, or cutting the wrists, or something. But she was true Vor. It burned her face entirely away. She'd had the most beautiful imaginable face. . . .
    "Things worked out very strangely. It was assumed the two lovers had killed each other—I swear, he never planned it that way—and that she'd killed herself in despondency. No one ever asked him the first question about it."
    His voice slowed, and intensified. "He went through that whole afternoon like a sleepwalker, or an actor, saying the expected lines, going through the expected motions, and at the end his honor was no better for it. Nothing was served, no point was proved. It was all as false as her love affairs, except for the deaths. They were real." He paused. "So you see, you Betans have one advantage. You at least permit each other to learn from your mistakes."
    "I'm—grieved, for your friend. Does it seem very long ago?"
    "Sometimes. Over twenty years. They say that senile people remember things from their youth more clearly than those of last week. Maybe he's getting senile."
    "I see." She took the story in like some strange, spiked gift, too fragile to drop, too painful to hold. He lay back, silent again, and she took another turn around the glade, listening at the wood's edge to a silence so profound the roaring of the blood in her ears seemed to drown it out. When she'd completed the round, Vorkosigan was asleep, restless and shivering in his fever. She filched one of the half-burned bedrolls from Dubauer and covered him up.

 
    Chapter Four
     
    Vorkosigan woke about three hours before dawn, and made her lie down to snatch a couple hours sleep. In the gray before sunup he roused her again. He had evidently bathed in the stream, and used the single-application packet of depilitory he had been saving in his belt to wipe away the itchy four-day growth on his face.
    "I need some help with this leg. I want to open and drain it and cover it back up. That will hold until this afternoon, and after that it won't matter."
    "Right."
    Vorkosigan stripped off boot and sock, and Cordelia had him hold his leg under a rushing spout at the edge of the waterfall. She rinsed his combat knife, then laid open the grossly swollen wound in a deep, quick stroke. Vorkosigan went white around the lips, but said nothing. It was Cordelia who winced. The cut squirted blood and pus and odd-smelling clotted matter which the stream washed away. She tried not to think about what new microbes they might be introducing by the procedure. It only needed to be a temporary