"Ouch. Yeah," he says, smiling. That definitely strikes a chord. Only, well... "I think my parents did underestimate me a little in the way I was so sensitive to. They didn't mean to, I'm not sure they noticed they were doing it, but - they were always so careful not to expect things of me, when what I wanted most of all was to be the sort of person you expect things of. Which leads nicely into the other major theme of my childhood: the Vor."

He tries to muster a coherent unspoken explanation for this concept, but it's too big, too all-encompassing. The emotional tone comes across fine - a sense of duty, of responsibility, of authority - but he has to search for words to make sense of the details.

"It was something I learned much more by immersion than study, which is why I'm having so much trouble describing it. My family belongs to a social class called the Vor. When I was growing up, my grandfather was Count Vorkosigan, meaning the hereditary ruler of Vorkosigan District; but although it's easy to think of us that way, the Vor aren't precisely an aristocracy. We're a military caste. My Betan mother still thinks of us as a quaint collective fiction, but Da and Grandda were always very serious about it. It's... a way of approaching the world. A role to fill. And it is heavily concerned with being useful. Duties both military and feudal. None of which anyone was willing to lay on my tiny shoulders for fear they'd collapse under the weight. I mean, I can't say I blame them; I was a child, and the primary impression I gave off was not one of maturity. But it was very frustrating."

"Ah. The thing my people value is talent. Ability to do things no one else could do. The worst thing is to be redundant; to be someone who could be wholly encompassed by another person."

"Ha. My drive for that isn't culturally mediated at all; I come by it naturally. Well, I'm sure there's some contributing influence from having so many intensely accomplished and excellent people in my immediate family. But it can't all be a proximity reaction, or my cousin Ivan would have any ambition of ever amounting to anything."

Miles trusts and even values his cousin Ivan, but there's too much old resentment there to leave any room for liking him very much. Ivan Vorpatril is a nearly flawless image of the proper Barrayaran male: healthy, athletic, handsome, tall. He's also infuriatingly thoughtless, and prone to making insensitive remarks at inopportune moments.

"Ivan... I'm not at all sure how to explain my feelings on Ivan. I resented him deeply as a child, but also loved him, even though that's not the name I would've put to the feeling. He was extremely dependable within his narrow range of applicability. I... now that I think of it, any task I needed done that required healthy bones, I had neatly sorted into 'things to ask of Sergeant Bothari' and 'things to ask of Ivan'. Someone else might do in a pinch if the correct person wasn't available, but those were the categories. I couldn't begin to explain what set of rules governed the division between them, except that most of my stupidly hazardous childhood escapades were Ivan jobs because Bothari would've picked me up and hauled me away from them. Anyway. As we grew up... Ivan discovered girls, and I discovered envy of Ivan's success with girls, to pile on top of my preexisting envy of his ability to fall short distances without breaking anything and his freedom from anyone ever calling him a mutie."

"Your cousin?" Amusement, wistfulness, sadness.

"Yeah. My one and only cousin. Most Vor have more close relatives than I do, but we're both children of the survivors of Yuri's purge - my father's mother and Ivan's father's mother were sisters, both princesses, both targeted. But the Vorkosigans were never a prolific line to begin with, so Ivan has plenty of middle-distance relatives through other lines of descent and I have to go back pretty far to trace any meaningful connections."

"Your parents had no other children?"

"Ivan's father died before he was born - minutes before, actually, in the last few hours of Vordarian's War. And, well. If my parents had given me siblings, there would've been enormous pressure for my father to disinherit me. They haven't outright admitted that's what they were thinking, but... I suspect if things had gone differently for me, one way or the other, they'd have had more children. If I'd been born healthy or never been born at all, either one."

"I'm sorry."

He smiles. "Thank you," he says sincerely.

"I am very tired. Perhaps we can continue later?"

He shrugs. "Sure. Rest well."

His eyes are already closed.

So Miles leaves him be.

That was... surprisingly tiring, but he feels like he made some progress.

Where to next? He could go see how the electrical generators across the lake are doing... probably no point in checking on Curufin and Tyelperinquar this early... he should talk to Tyelcormo about the plasma arc incident but not necessarily right now... what he is in fact doing is standing just outside the library, lost in thought. This is a blatantly inefficient use of his time, come on, Miles.

"Need anything?"

"Hm? Oh. Not sure," he says. "I'm... more worn out than I expected. Telling stories isn't usually this tiring. Having trouble figuring out what I should do next. D'you have any more problems to point me at?"

"Do you want to try your hand at diplomacy? The locals probably noticed you landed, and might appreciate reassurance that you're on our side and not - well, not as unpredictable as you must currently seem to them."

He laughs softly. "Sure. What can you tell me about the locals?"

"Dozen different nomadic communities in this area, a few that were settled by the lake and abandoned it when the fighting started and were interested in coming back now that we had lots of steel protecting it, before the cousins arrived and rather disrupted that negotiation. There's a proper kingdom somewhere south but the King of that is unpopular among everyone I've spoken to. There are walled cities by the coast."

"Hm, all right. Do they speak the same language you do, or am I going to have to inhale another one? What'd this King do to piss everyone off?"

"They don't speak Quenya. I can teach you their language, it's called Thindarin and it has common roots. The King doesn't let refugees into his kingdom. That seems to be chief among their grievances."

"That would be a good way to annoy one's neighbours, under the circumstances. Sure, teach me Thindarin."

So he starts speaking in it, projecting a running translation.

Miles is half expecting learning Thindarin to be as slow as learning Russian, but happily, he picks it up every bit as fast as Quenya. Maybe it's the similarities, of which there are many, or maybe it's just that whatever bizarre switch has flipped in his head to make him such a language sponge, it hasn't yet returned to the 'off' position. Whatever, he's happy. Although he suspects he is picking up a Fëanorian accent which he'll have to work on whenever he meets a native speaker.

Maglor catches that thought. "No, we speak Thindarin almost precisely as the natives do; it'd come across as incompetence, if we didn't. It's the cousins who will tell you the language is Sindarin, never mind that the locals didn't experience a th-> s sound shift."

"Lucky me, not learning it from the cousins, then."