Enrique jolted, but Ekaterin flung out a hand to bar him from rising. She was intensely aware of her stunner, strapped unreachably beneath her rad suit. This confrontation teetered on a slope no one was going to be able to scramble back from, if it came to blows.
That spider is more afraid of you than you are of it, Ekaterin’s great-aunt, who was not afraid of much, used to intone. Ekaterin fancied Ma Roga, not the man trailing her—Boris?—was the designated spider-killer here. Jadwiga would not see the danger, and Ingi would try to collect it…
“You two!” the woman cried, waving her arms as if trying to daunt a couple of goats. “The rangers didn’t bring you, I don’t see their van, so you don’t belong here. This is our place. Get along!”
Ekaterin stared up, trying to channel her husband’s iron-plated bravura. “That happens not to be the case.” She rose, as much to override Ingi’s mouth opening with some scrambled explanation as Enrique’s valiant but untrained lurch to defend her. She wheeled to face the woman, uncomfortably conscious that she was abruptly the tallest person here, so long as lanky Enrique stayed down. “Lord Vorkosigan has given me oversight of the District Department of Terraforming, under which the Vashnoi exclusion zone falls. We’re all standing on his land.”
The woman jerked back, jaw working; whatever she’d been expecting the outsider to say, this wasn’t it. She came back with, “Well, he t’ain’t using it now, is he? This is cursed ground. So go away, or I’ll curse you, too!”
She made an utterly convincing Baba Yaga, no doubt of that, with her stringy gray hair falling across her clenched, tangled eyebrows, her crow-bright glare. Jadwiga, Ingi, the fellow waving the length of log, and, yes, Ekaterin all flinched. Had that threat worked to drive off interlopers before? Ekaterin suspected so.
If Boris swung, Ekaterin must try to block it, roll and rip off her suit and reach for her stunner after all. Because the vision of that log crashing down on Enrique’s irreplaceable head was a lot more horrifying. Ekaterin’s heart drummed in dismay. If it came to the worst, this crew hiding their bodies and relocating the lightflyer wouldn’t be nearly enough; Miles would turn the zone upside down and pursue them into the next world, figuratively or literally. Which would be exactly zero consolation for anyone. Curses indeed.
It was Enrique who broke the spell, looking up and asking in perfect earnest, “Really? How would that work, precisely?” His other auditors might imagine he was challenging them, or maybe mocking them; Ekaterin expected he was mentally devising a double-blind study.
Ma Roga stared back, nonplussed, in profound mutual incomprehension.
Now or never. Ekaterin stripped off her right glove and held out her hand. “Are you Ma Roga? I’m Lady Ekaterin Vorkosigan. And lifting old curses is just what we’re here for. Ma, we need to talk.”
Briefly, Ekaterin was afraid the woman did not comprehend the gesture at all, and Jadwiga rather confused the moment by chirping, “Her fella’s a sorcerer, Ma! He makes magic bugs!”
“Scientist,” Enrique corrected glumly from his seat on the ground, as if he’d given up on being listened to.
Yes, much more dangerous.
Ekaterin held her extended hand steady. She wondered if the other woman was going to knock it away, but instead, staring at it, Ma Roga said, ” ‘T mutie lord your husband, then?” She glanced up, sharp eyes glittering through her brow-thatch.
Ekaterin thought about Miles’s weary teratogenic spiel, so often repeated and so seldom believed, and said only, “Yes.”
The old woman neither slapped away the hand nor took it, instead tucking both her own behind her back in a weirdly childish gesture of withholding. Ekaterin let her arm drift down, neither shoved out in insistence nor withdrawn as an option. The stalemate couldn’t last, but at least the upraised log, too, drooped as if in echo.
Keep talking. Miles could do this sort of thing in his sleep, and actually did, come to think, if mumbled and surreal. More surreal than this? Ekaterin inhaled. “I expect it’s going to be a long talk. Why don’t we all go sit someplace more comfortable?”
Especially Boris. Boris, still hovering in anxious menace, definitely needed to sit comfortably. Real son…? Maybe there was some faint resemblance between the pair in their bones and coloration. Boris’s da was notably not in evidence, so likely a grim tale there, too.
“And maybe,” Ekaterin added, “a long listening.”
Ma Roga just said, “Huh.” But one hand came out of hiding, if only to motion toward the hut.
* * *
Under Ma Roga’s barked directions, the children were set to unlading the pony, and Boris to lugging the armchair around front, where tall Enrique was drafted to help boost it up onto the porch. Spoils of a shopping trip to some zone rubbish tip, apparently. After sending Ingi to round up the goats and contain them in their pen, Ma took the new seat as a rightful throne. She did not invite the interlopers inside, though Jadwiga darted within and returned clutching a couple of musty cushions for their visitors’ behinds. Having captured her own princess, or at least real lady, the girl seemed as loth to let her go as her beloved flower bugs. The youngsters—all three of them, since despite his size Ekaterin was not at all sure Boris counted as a functional grownup—sat with their legs dangling over the edge.
The radbug project took a lot of explaining, not necessarily helped by Enrique’s technical corrections. Ingi at last fetched a bug for an illustrative sample, which led to the whole lot of them dismounting again from the porch and trooping around to the shed. Boris left his log behind; progress?
This was clearly the first Ma had learned of Ingi’s thefts, or gifts, as he insisted. She cuffed him, though not Jadwiga, hard on the head, and snapped, “Idiot. This led them here.” It was hard to read her expression through her smoldering stare—heartbreak, fury, despair? Nothing like hope or relief, anyway.
“Yes,” agreed Ekaterin, “but it was going to happen soon regardless. If the project works, changes are coming for the whole zone.” This can’t go on might pass unsaid, since it was plainly understood.
There was plenty to take its place. “How long have you lived here?” Ekaterin’s wave around took in the whole encampment. And the graveyard. “Because I think Vadim is going to have a whole lot of explaining to do.” And his supervisor, and whatever other of his fellow rangers had colluded in this concealment.
Jadwiga, not really following all this but sensing threat, defended hotly. “Vadim’s all right! He’s my big brother! He takes care of us all.”
A little silence followed this damning praise, till Ma Roga jerked her head at Ekaterin. “You and me. Let’s take a walk.”
Ekaterin quashed any hint of hesitation. “Very well.”
Enrique, waved off, turned instead to conscripting the youngsters to helping him capture, count, and contain his stray bugs, science lecture thrown in gratis. Ekaterin followed Ma Roga out of earshot into the woods, where the old woman pointed to a couple of stumps. Ekaterin sank onto one, reflecting on the quip, You can turn a tragedy into a comedy just by sitting down. She had a feeling it wouldn’t prove true here.
Ma Roga sat opposite, seeming to turn thoughts over in her mind. Ekaterin waited.
She finally leaned forward, hands clasped between her skirted knees, gaze on the ground, and said, “You ever hear of the Vashnoi marauders?”
“If it’s that bandit gang that plagued these parts thirty years ago, and hid out in the zone, yes.” Theft had led to more daring theft, then, inevitably, murder by accident, then by design. The pointless torture-murders of all the inhabitants of a poor outlying homestead had brought down fully-equipped retribution from the district, zone or no zone.
A short nod. “Old Count Piotr hanged the lot of us, in the end.”
Galactic-style therapy and criminal rehabilitation not being even on the horizon, at that point. From the nightmarish bits she’d heard about the case, Ekaterin could scarcely regret this.
“Save one. I pleaded my belly.” A shar
p look upward.
Ekaterin blinked. Right. Back in the Time of Isolation, pregnant women were never executed, a custom that had lingered right into times that made more modern provisions for crime. And Piotr had certainly been Old Vor, or at least had been made so by the passage of his many decades. Most of the marauders’ case would have been handled at a lower district judicial level, but execution orders would have been sent up to the Count’s Court for final review.
“Old Piotr gave me a choice of hanging or prison. I asked to come back to the zone, instead. And he said, So be it, and the bailiff-boy banged his spear-butt in the clacker. And so I did.”
All the gruesome details were doubtless available in court records in Hassadar, should Ekaterin muster the nerve to feed her curiosity. No need to make the old woman—old, hell, she could scarcely be done with her fifties, but she looked a proper ancient hag—relive that in her memory now, or re-confess it all either. Ekaterin’s rightful business was with what had happened next. She mustered a Go on nod.
“I liked it here. Everyone finally left me alone. Didn’t know how much I’d like that, till I had it to try, for the first time in my stupid young life. Piotr’s old ranger fellows kept an eye. They’d have scorned those dosimeter-hickeys that Vadim frets about so, in those days. Boris was about three when I first found the clearing in the woods, and the secrets that were left there.” Her gaze flicked up at last. “It wasn’t only muties exposed, you know. Back in the Time of Isolation, there was starvation, or just one baby too many to deal with. Or no man, though I’d say a girl could be better off without one of those. I sure was.”
Ekaterin said, “I understand.” Partly to indicate she was still listening. Mostly because it was true.
“It’d become a hobby of mine, picking up things thrown away in the zone. That was the first thrown-away baby I found. Not the last, though they got fewer and fewer, till Ingi, thirteen years ago. None after that, o’ course.”
“What happened thirteen years ago?”
A shrug. “Countess Vorkosigan’s lift-van clinics reached the last outlying hamlets west of t’ ridge.”
Ah. Yes. Ekaterin reflected on her normally cheery mother-in-law’s rants about modernizing education and medicine in the district. Piotr had at first given his son’s galactic bride access only to the lower-level schools, children for the woman. But when the district fell fully into her hands at the old man’s death seventeen years back, Countess Vorkosigan had pressed forward with her wave of eager young people all ready for the new technical schools. The larger towns had been served first, hoping to reach the most people the fastest; from that base, pushing outward with mobile clinics as the solution to the last and hardest part of the distribution problem.
“So this is already ended, lady,” said Ma Roga. “Years gone. We’re all ended, here.”
“No. It’s a new beginning.”
“Not for me.” Ma Roga shook her head. “I know your kind. You think you can do anything, but you can’t.”
Ekaterin set this aside for now, though she thought, You should meet Miles. “So what’s the story with Vadim and Jadwiga?”
Another shrug. “Vadim was fifteen when she was born. His parents sent him to me with her. A few folks around here knew about me by then, see. He wasn’t any too happy with the job, for all his da argued it was for his protection, too. Worse’n being set to drown kittens, y’know.”
“Ah.”
“He’d come by to check up on her, time to time, even before he got old enough to join the rangers. Then his da died, road accident, and then his ma took the one-way free passage to Sergyar that was on offer back then, when the new count was took away to be viceroy. Happy to leave all her sorrows behind, I suppose, b’cause last I heard she was still alive there.”
“You all”—Ekaterin glanced at her bare hand—”we all are going to have to go first to Hassadar General, for evaluation and treatment. After that we can make decisions with real information.”
“You can get to make t’em, don’t you mean,” said Ma Roga with a flash of sarcasm. “It’s too late for Jaddie. It was always meant to be that way, for her.”
“Maybe,” Ekaterin conceded. “Maybe not. That’s not for you or me to say, it’s for the doctors. But Ingi seems pretty healthy so far. Boris, too.”
“You can’t just fling these children on the outside world after all these years, and expect them to swim for it. Jaddie just can’t, Boris, well, he ran away once but dragged back smartin’, and poor Ingi—the boys his age would tear him to pieces. His heart if not his body, though maybe his body too. You can’t imagine it, how cruel they can be in a gang.”
Ekaterin’s lips thinned. “I’m married to the mutie lord. I don’t have to imagine it. I can just have Miles tell me.”
Ma Roga’s chin jerked. Not daunted, this was not a woman who did daunted, but maybe taken aback a trifle. Any little crack in her hopeless certainties was to the good.
“You’re not wrong to be concerned,” Ekaterin went on, “but it’s better out there than it was thirty years ago, I promise you. Once the children aren’t getting any more exposed and sicker, there will be time to take thought. Nobody’s flinging anyone anywhere without looking out to see where they’d land.”
And Ekaterin could guess whose job that was likely to be. Adding another task to her overflowing plate. I will cope. It’s what I do. She raised her chin. “I can’t know, and turn away.”
“I wish you would,” growled Ma Roga. “We were just fine out here, till you came. People left us alone.”
Ekaterin shook her head.
Ma Roga turned her face up, listening. Ekaterin heard it too, the distinctive whine and throb of a lift van.
“Yah, here’s more trouble, right in train,” Ma Roga sighed, and shoved to her feet with a grunt.
Ekaterin followed her back to the clearing in front of the hut in time to see the familiar lift van the rangers flew, the Vorkosigan mountains-and-maple-leaf markings distinctive on its sides, jounce on its landing feet and settle. She was by this time entirely unsurprised when Vadim hopped out.
Wearing civilian clothes, not his regulation rad suit, and carrying a couple of grocery bags. He turned and dropped them in shock when he took in Ekaterin, trailing Ma Roga. His breath hissed, he scrabbled for his stunner, pulled it, and froze.
They stared at each other for a long, teetering moment.
Ekaterin crossed her arms and said dryly, “If you pretend you never drew that, I’ll pretend I never saw it.”
Vadim’s blocky face seemed drained to clay. His hand twitched once, then, slowly, reholstered his sidearm. Ekaterin tried to let her pent breath out unobtrusively.
She straightened her spine and walked forward. “Am I right in guessing you have some of Enrique’s bug-transport canisters in the back of the van?”
“How did you…?”
“Fetch them along. We found the missing radbugs. They’re in the goat shed, along with Enrique.” She eyed his missing rad suit. “I trust you have some spare gloves back there as well. You’ll need a pair, and I need a clean right.” She held up her bare hand and wriggled it.
“Er, er… yes, Lady Vorkosigan.” Some simple orders to follow seemed to steady him, providing a replica of routine to cling to.
While Ma Roga gathered up her groceries, Vadim opened the back of the van and retrieved the canisters and gloves. Ekaterin hitched hers on, wondering if it was really going to do any good—well, at least it would allow her to help handle the loaded bugs. Vadim passed her two canisters to carry, then took the other pair himself.
Ma Roga watched this in sullen silence, then hoisted her bags and headed for the hut. “Send the kids back to me,” she told Vadim. “We got things to settle.”
He nodded warily and led off, needing no directions to the goat shed. Right.
“Ah, Vadim!” Enrique straightened up with a smile as they rounded the shed. “Glad you’re here. Oh, excellent, the canisters. I was just wondering what to use. Er… w
here’s your suit?” He glanced down. “And, er, your dosimeter?”
“I don’t wear t’em when I’m just visiting here,” Vadim replied in a mumble.
So as to prolong his employment as a ranger? Which was looking plenty dodgy at the moment anyway. Add that to the set of worries that must be coursing through his mind just now.
Sunnily, Jadwiga skipped up and hugged him; with a discomforted glance at Enrique and Ekaterin, he ruffled her hair in what looked a habitual gesture. “Hey, brat.”
“You met the lady! Isn’t she pretty?”
“Yeah, I uh… work with her.”
“You do? And you didn’t tell us?” Indignation was as open on her round face as any other of Jadwiga’s emotions.
“It’s a recent job,” Vadim excused himself. “Anyway, Ma wants you all back at the house. Chores.” He jerked a gloved thumb over his shoulder.
“And after that,” Ekaterin put in, “we’re all going, well, first we’re all going for a ride in the ranger’s lift van to the decontamination station, and then some people will pick us all up and take us to Hassadar General Hospital.” And, oh dear, wasn’t that going to supply some culture shock. She must take thought how to cushion it as best they could. “We’ll all be spending the night there, and getting some simple treatments, and some doctors will be looking at Jadwiga’s growth”—she touched her throat—“to see if there’s anything they can do to fix it.”
“Oh.” Jadwiga looked more confused than thrilled at this news, though Ingi, who had brightened at the mention of the van, shot Ekaterin a sudden sharp look, beseeching hope muted by who-knew-what harsh experiences of disappointment and frustration. Ekaterin bit her lip on promises she could not yet guarantee.
“But what about the goats and ponies?” Jadwiga turned to Vadim. “You’ll come back ‘n take care of them while we’re gone, right?”
Vadim exchanged a grim look with Ingi. “I probably won’t be able to come back here.”
“But who will take care of them?”
Boris said glumly, in the tone of one who knew just who won the dirty jobs, “I s’ppose Vadim and I have got to shoot t’em.”