"Ambitious."

"I suppose so. Mostly it was Present Miles solving the problems Past Miles had handed to him and leaving the consequences of his solutions for Future Miles in an ongoing ever-escalating cycle. The next round after we captured the station involved the Triumph's ex-commander escaping, a bunch of things going wrong, Major Daum dying in battle, and Major Daum's superiors showing up and declining to honour Daum's verbal agreement with me on his behalf. That really threw me. I thought of myself as pretty cosmopolitan by that point, but that they could just fail to redeem their dead comrade's word because it was convenient for them offended me to the depths of my extremely Barrayaran soul. I got that sorted out too, though, and convinced them to pay me. Which they did. In their local currency, which was totally valueless outside their country because they'd been losing this war for a while now. But none of the soldiers under my increasingly non-imaginary command knew that, so I paid them in it and left Future Miles to handle whatever came of that. Future Miles is a very busy person in this story, and has no one to blame for it but himself."

"Indeed."

"Anyway, I had now delivered my cargo and been paid for doing so and could theoretically have left, except that they picked up on my attitude about verbal agreements and got me to swear my word to an agreement that I would bring my army officially into the war on their side. Also, the opposing side still controlled the space surrounding the wormhole jump point, so I'd have had to fight them to leave either way. I didn't actually have enough of an army to fight the rest of the opposing mercenaries, so I solved that by hiring more people from whoever I could find among galactic travelers who'd been stranded in local space by the conflict. One of those people, by some bizarre coincidence, turned out to be Elena's mother."

"Fate has - well, not smiled on you, but whisked you along her way."

"Mm," he says.

"I was overjoyed when I noticed. Elena had been having an amazing time being part of my shiny new army - she loved everything about it; on Barrayar she would never have been allowed to join the military, because they don't let girls in - but I remembered how much she'd yearned to find out anything at all about her family. And I remembered our speculation that her mother had been an Escobaran soldier who'd met Bothari on opposite sides of a war, just like my own parents did; and now here was an Escobaran soldier of just the right age who looked exactly like Elena with the Bothari subtracted. She even had the same name. I decided I would set up a wonderful surprise for the three of them; I asked to see Elena's mother, and arranged for Elena and Bothari to be in the room when she arrived."

He plays the scene in his memory. The look on Bothari's face, and the look on Elena senior's, and the flash of the needler, and the blood.

"Another one for the list of my greatest regrets."

"...why?"

"I don't know for certain. Elena's mother spoke to me afterward. She called Bothari a monster, said he deserved it."

(The look in Bothari's eyes, when he contemplated torturing that prisoner...)

"I... don't think she was lying. I think whatever happened between them, it was not the romance Elena and I imagined. I think he hurt her very badly."

"I did not get the impression from your memories that it was a minor grievance."

"I am very sure it wasn't."

He could guess. But it seems to dishonour both of them to speculate beyond the facts. There is a wide range of possibilities for a sequence of events that could have left the results he saw: a child, a legacy of fear and horror so extreme that she killed him as soon as he spoke to her, Bothari still clearly in love up to the very moment he died.

"So a terrified woman had just murdered your bodyguard and was presumably still holding a weapon..."

"One of my other soldiers came and asked what the hell just happened. I passed it off as an accident. She didn't harm anyone else, and I didn't go after her for killing Bothari. Though I did impulsively ask her for a death-offering. A Barrayaran custom - you think of someone who died, and burn something of yours, to renew your memory of them or sometimes to get your memory of them to leave you alone. It seemed like... the best I could do for both of them. She agreed to it. We didn't see much of each other after that."

"We don't have death customs. Do they help?"

"Yes. Somewhat. I don't know if it's the same for everyone, but they've helped me."

"As I recall, you were still stranded in debt in the middle of a foreign war."

"Yes," he says. "Hiring more people helped, but didn't actually get me all the way to victory. No, what won me the war was mainly Ky Tung. The Triumph had been his ship, and when I captured it, he went back to his commander and asked for a new one, as they'd agreed would happen if the Triumph was captured in battle. But Admiral Oser was extremely annoyed about me suborning the entire crew of the Ariel. Rather than give Tung a new ship, he told him off for losing, ranted for a while, and generally made a public spectacle of it. Tung is a proud creature. This was the exact wrong way to handle him. He took a few of his best people, turned around, came right back to me, and asked if he could join my army. I happily accepted. Ky's a good man and a brilliant strategist. It was his help that made it possible to win, although I did contribute the clever idea that brought us to victory quickly - mercenaries, you see, generally like to be paid. It's a contravention of some codes of conduct among mercenaries to steal another army's pay, but not to destroy said pay. I targeted the next few shipments of money to Admiral Oser from his employers, and carefully calculated exactly how much of it I'd have to burn exactly when in order to get Oser and the Pelians into an irreconcilable disagreement over who owed how much to whom. Worked like a charm."

"..all while not sure which side of the war was justified?"

"I wasn't thinking about it at the time. The war was an obstacle between me and getting safely away with my money. Looking back, I'm at least pretty sure I got them to a state of peace faster and with fewer casualties than they'd have managed without my interference. I'm not sure how much that excuses me. But I'm also not sure either side was really justified. I think it may have been one of those situations where both sides hate each other very deeply more out of habit than anything. Where each thinks their atrocities are justified because the other side committed more of them, or committed them first, or committed worse ones, or just because they are the other side. Not that I saw any atrocities while I was there."

He smiles. "I see."

"Oh, and right as everything was finally starting to go smoothly, I collapsed and nearly died because I was under so much stress my stomach tried to eat iself. The doctors had to replace it with an artificial replica that doesn't do that."

"At the age of seventeen?"

"Yes."

He shakes his head.

"Then Ivan inexplicably showed up, while I was still recovering from that. He said he'd been woken up in the middle of the night and told to accompany a courier bearing me a parchment letter from the Council of Counts, and he was sufficiently incurious that it didn't occur to him that there was absolutely no sane reason why he should accompany that courier in the first place, let alone why he had to do it in the middle of the night without telling anyone where he was going. They stopped over on Beta Colony and he spent some time with a girl and slept in and missed their departure toward Tau Verde and had to beg a ride from a stranger who happened to be going in the right direction, and yet, somehow, he arrived before the courier ever did. I told him he was an idiot and had narrowly escaped death by jump drive sabotage."

(Death by jump drive malfunction is probably what everyone in Miles's fleet currently thinks happened to him. It's an unsettling fate. You start a jump and never finish it, and the best guess anyone has about what happens to you is that you are shredded to a fine subatomic mist and spread out across a vast region of interstellar space.)

"We're closely related enough that some of the same people would be advantaged by getting rid of both of us. One doesn't receive a parchment letter from the Council of Counts over trivial business. The only way this bizarre turn of events made sense was if someone had arranged for me to be accused of some deadly crime for their own political gain, then decided it would be tidy and efficient to erase Ivan along with the Council summons. And then whenever I came home I'd have been tried and convicted in absentia, failure to show up being considered a pretty poor defense against serious charges."

It's bizarre how much of this background information he's managed not to have explained yet despite fully intending to tell the story of his entire childhood. He may have to go back for another pass. This part of the story would make so much more sense if he had ever mentioned Vorloupulous's Law before.

"...Uh, also it's a crime punishable by death for a Vor lord to amass a private army of more than twenty individuals, ever since Dorca's day. Cuts down on the temptation to go to war with each other. I managed not to remember that one for the entire time I spent accidentally amassing a private army, but it sprang to mind with sudden force when I was confronted with the realization that someone must be plotting to have me executed without a chance to defend myself."

"Are those the traditional stakes of Barrayaran politics?"