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looked up at him in sudden suspicion. “Miles, where did you get these?”
    He flushed, faintly guilty. “Borrowed ‘em from Grandfather. Believe me, they’ll never be missed. It’s a jungle down there.”
    She shook her head helplessly. “You’re incorrigible.” But she smiled.
    “You don’t mind?” he asked anxiously. “I thought you’d get more enjoyment from them than he would, at this point.”
    “Just so nobody thinks I filched them myself!”
    “Refer them to me,” he offered grandly. He jerked up his chin. She was gazing into the flowers delicate structure more somberly. “Now what are you thinking? Sad thoughts?”
    “Honestly, my face might as well be a window.”
    “Not at all. Your face is more like—like water. All reflections and shifting lights—I never know what’s lurking in the depths.” He dropped his voice at the end, to indicate the mystery of the depths.
    Elena smiled derisively, then sighed seriously. “I was just thinking—I’ve never put flowers on my mother’s grave.”
    He brightened at the prospect of a project. “Do you want to? We could slip out the back—load up a cart or two—nobody’d notice...”
    “Certainly not!” she said indignantly. “This is quite bad enough of you.” She turned the flowers in the light from the window, silvered from the chill autumn cloudiness. “Anyway, I don’t know where it is.”
    “Oh? How strange. As fixated as the Sergeant is on your mother, I’d have thought he’d be just the pilgrimmage type. Maybe he doesn’t like to think about her death, though.”
    “You’re right about that. I asked him about it once, to go and see where she’s buried and so on, and it was like talking to a wall. You know how he can be.”
    “Yes, very like a wall. Particularly when it falls on someone.” A theorizing gleam lit Miles’s eye. “Maybe it’s guilt. Maybe she was one of those rare women who die in childbirth—she did die about the time you were born, didn’t she?”
    “He said it was a flyer accident.”
    “Oh.”
    “But another time he said she’d drowned.”
    “Hm?” The gleam deepened to a persistent smoulder. “If she’d ditched her flyer in a river or something, they could both be true. Or if he ditched it...”
    Elena shivered. Miles caught it, and castigated himself inwardly for being an insensitive clod. “Oh, sorry. Didn’t mean to—I’m in a gruesome mood today, I’m afraid,” he apologized. “It’s all this blasted black.” He flapped his elbows in imitation of a carrion bird.
    He lapsed into introspective quiet for a time, meditating on the ceremonies of death. Elena fell in with his silence, gazing wistfully down on the darkly glittering throng of Barrayar’s upper class, passing in and out four floors below her window.
    “We could find out,” he said suddenly, startling her from her reverie.
    “What?”
    “Where your mother’s buried. And we wouldn’t even have to ask anyone.”
    “How?”
    He grinned, swinging to his feet. “I’m not going to say. You’d go all wobbly on me, like that time we went spelunking down at Vorkosigan Surleau and found the old guerilla weapons cache. You’ll never get another chance in your life to drive one of those old tanks, you know.”
    She made doubtful noises. Apparently her memory of the incident was vivid and awful, even though she had avoided being caught in the landslide. But she followed.
    They entered the darkened downstairs library cautiously. Miles paused to brace the duty guard outside it with an off-color smirk, lowering his voice confidentially. “Suppose you could sort of rattle the door if anyone comes, Corporal? We’d, ah— rather not have any surprise interruptions.”
    The duty guard’s return smirk was knowing. “Of course, Lord Mi—Lord Vorkosigan.” He eyed Elena with fresh speculation, one eyebrow quirking.
    “Miles,” Elena whispered furiously as the door swung closed, cutting off the steady murmur of voices, clink of