Captain Vorpatril's Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold Page B

impatience. She made a truncated gesture, as if to deny—what? “When we kids started to come along, my father found this book—I don’t know from where— Ten Thousand Authentic Ethnic Baby Names From Old Earth, Their Meanings and Geographical Origins . He had trouble choosing. I have a sister named Stella Antonia Dolce Ginevra Lucia, but by the time I arrived, he’d reined back a little.” She added after a moment, “We called her Star.”
    “You’re…not an only child, then?” asked By. “Not the heiress of your House?”
    Oh, there was a good question. And an appalling thought.
    Tej gave By a cold stare. Waiting for a trade?
    “I’m an only child, myself,” Ivan offered.
    “I know that.”
    “How?”
    “I looked you up on the comconsole. You’re really you, too.” She frowned at Byerly. “I wonder what I’d find if I looked you up?”
“Not much. I am a scion of an undistinguished cadet branch of my family.” By’s glance flickered to Rish, listening with those pointed turquoise elf-ears. “Disinherited, technically, but since my branch possesses nothing to inherit, that was something of an empty gesture on my father’s part.”
    “He has a younger sister, I think,” said Ivan. “Haven’t ever met her. Married and living on South Continent, isn’t she, By?”
    By’s smile, already thin, flattened further. “That’s right.”
    “There’s no point in withholding anything Captain Morozov could tell us,” Ivan pointed out helpfully to Tej. This whole deal thing was alarming, really, all too Jacksonian and adversarial. “That’ll include anything that’s public knowledge, or that’s hit the Nexus news feeds.” And likely a good bit more than that, and Ivan was now sorry that he hadn’t lingered to learn more. But it would have been bound to lead in turn to questions he hadn’t wanted to answer just then, such as, How many mysterious women are you hiding in your rental flat, Ivan?
    Tej rubbed her eyes with one slim brown hand. “I’m the second-youngest. My oldest brother was the heir, but he was reported killed in the takeover, too. I’m pretty sure my two older sisters made it out of Jacksonian local space through other jump points, but I don’t know what happened to them after that. My other brother…got out a long time ago.”
    “How did that work? Your escape?” asked By.
    Tej shrugged. “It’s been set up for ages, for all us kids in case of a House emergency. There was a drill. When we were given the code word, we weren’t supposed to ask questions or argue or delay, we were just supposed to follow our assigned handlers. I’d been through it once before, a few years back—we made it to Fell Station before the turnaround order caught up with us. I thought that’s what would happen again.”
    “So you weren’t an eyewitness to the Cordonah Station’s, er, forcible change of management?”
    “I think Star got out just as the station was being boarded, but the rest of us were hours gone by then. The evacuation drill was never something my parents took chances with.” She swallowed, her throat obviously tight with some upsetting memory. “Everything we learned, we learned later through the news feeds, though of course you can’t trust them .”
    “Twice,” said Rish, unexpectedly. “Surely you weren’t too young to remember?”
    “Was that the trip we took when I was six? Oh! No one ever told me what that was all about. Just that we were going on a ride, and a visit.”
    “We wanted to keep you calm.”
    “What, you couldn’t have been older than fifteen.” Tej turned to Ivan, though not to Byerly, and said, “Rish used to baby-sit me a lot when I was younger, in between dance practice and other chores the Baronne assigned.”
    You call your mother the Baronne? Well, the tall woman in Morozov’s scan had looked formidable, more beautiful than warm. The man…had been harder to gauge.
    “Is Rish your assigned handler?” asked By.
    Tej shook her head.