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The day of the party approaches. Linya learns a Barrayaran-original solo piano symphony, adds some flourishes of her own where the composer has marked that it may be played "freely", memorizes the whole thing, and arranges to be playing it on the grand piano when party guests file in on the day of. She smiles and nods at them and takes note of how they arrange themselves in the room; there are thirteen minutes in the piece unless she decides she needs an extra three (if there seem to be a lot of stragglers; if there isn't a good path to the people she wants to meet and around the people she wants to avoid) and takes the repeat at the end to prolong it.
She doesn't wind up taking the repeat; the end of the symphony without it has her playing the final chord when Lord Auditor Vorthys is nearer than anyone she's hoping to evade. She counts out the beats, holds for a moment longer, and then lifts her hands from the keyboard. She has decided that given her choice of titles she's going to address this particular guest as -
"Professor Vorthys."
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isthisart
first-loyalty
"But no one who was - family? I suppose you might not know what I mean by that... I suppose I might not know what I mean by that."
isthisart
"The only family I've watched up close is Miles's. I didn't have any of those, it's true - but if I had, it would likely have been much more of a wrench to leave."
first-loyalty
"Yes... I've never even been as far as Komarr. I can't imagine."
isthisart
"I'll miss some things about Eta Ceta, but I was looking for a way off the planet when I was as young as eight, so I don't have any regrets about it per se."
isthisart
"I didn't want to leave when I was eight, I started looking for ways to leave later, when I was eight," clarifies Linya. "It was a lovely place to grow up in most ways. But I didn't want to stay there, dedicating my life to relatively useless hobbies and a small handful of slow genetics projects."
isthisart
"I was very fortunate with respect to Miles's - availability, though."
isthisart
"I am literally the first haut-lady to marry a non-ghem-lord. I needed a favor from the Empress haut Lisbet to manage it."
isthisart
"And of course Miles had to do something plausibly worthy of a haut-wife, since that's how that works."
first-loyalty
"I don't know anything at all about that," Madame Vorsoisson admits.
isthisart
"Usually if one is born a haut one stays within the sort of - sphere, that implies. Haut women are sometimes awarded as brides to ghem-lords who have accomplished valuable things - to rid the haut of anyone who isn't up to their exacting standards, to incentivize doing valuable things, to get haut genes into the ghem population in a controlled manner. If Miles hadn't come along, one likely possibility for me looked like remaining in my constellation until I was thirty or so and then marrying some ghem-general or similar."
isthisart
"I probably could have stayed and not married a ghem-lord if I'd really wanted, since Lisbet was disposed to do me favors by then, but I preferred to come here with Miles."
