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One summer day, a baby appears on the literal doorstep of the Imperial Residence's west servants' entrance. She is in a basket. She doesn't look Barrayaran; while Barrayar is not uniformly Caucasian, it has very few people of east Asian extraction, and that is where this baby appears to have been toted from by more or less circuitous routes of migration and inheritance.
It is not terribly difficult for ImpSec to find the person who put her there - recent hire to the kitchen staff, competent but not overwhelmingly concerned with security when it was literally just a baby and not an explosive and he was offered a large chunk of change. Tracing back this chunk of change leads through a long meandering trail of people, variously shady, none of whom acted with particular malice beyond greed and the sort of vague dishonorableness of putting packages on the doorstep of the Imperial Residence.
The trail ends at someone who - under fast-penta - has no memory whatever of having interacted with the baby, the cash, the shady person who druggedly identified her, or anything else about the affair. She doesn't even have a similar-looking sister to explain the mixup. She has nothing in her background to explain how she would come by an offplanet baby or why she would convey it by such a circuitous method to the Imperial Residence. It's definitely not her baby - the lady's six months pregnant and the baby isn't that old.
In the meantime, the baby is parked with Droushnakovi, who found her in the first place; Cordelia, who was the first person she went to; and Gregor, as Drou is his personal bodyguard.
The baby and her basket are searched and found to be: a baby, and a basket. There is no note, it's the middle of summer and the child wasn't even in a blanket, the basket itself and the baby's onesie turn out to be local products that a Vorbarr Sultana thrift shop didn't even bother reporting stolen.
The baby babbles in her sleep. She's very cute.
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hatchedplan
"Maybe you could! It's mostly sitting. You sit."
"Maybe..." He gets his speculative look.
"You could be sat on a horse, I think," says Nika, with more authoritativeness than ought to exist in a three-year-old.
"And then I could ride the horse."
"Yeah! And, the horse knows how to do four entire feet, so it's not complicated unless you do fancy horse dancing things."
"Is four feet less complicated than two? Or is it that the horse is doing them instead of you?"
"The horse is doing it."
"That makes sense."
"Yes. I want my own horse to do feet for me all the time."
"We should both have them. And then I could go places and you could fall down less."
"Yeah! What would you name your horse? Horses have to have names."
"I dunno yet. What would you name yours?"
Nika thinks about this, then says, "Magic."
"That's a good name for a horse," says Miles.
"Yes. It is the best horse name. It has to be the best horse name because I want the best horse."
"What if I get the best horse?"
"Then you should give it to me so I can name it Magic. You can have the next best horse."
"But I want the best horse too," says Miles.
"Then, you have to think of a horse name as good as Magic. And then we can get the same bestness horses."
"I'll think about it," he says.
Nika nods. "And our horses will dance together so it should be a name that sounds good with Magic."
"Yeah."
"If I think of a good name I will tell you it."
"Okay. And if I think of a good name I'll tell you. And then I'll have a horse with a good name and we'll both have the best horse."
"Yes. They can be best horses together."