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the door. "Pym's running a patrol with a scanner and a stunner. Wait'll he
calls the all-clear, I think.
Your boys may be safer inside the tent."
Karal came up to the window, caught his breath, and swore.
Pym returned in a few minutes. "There's no one within a kilometer, now," he
reported shortly. He helped
Karal take the goat bucket and douse the torch. The boys, who had slept
through the fire, woke at its quenching.
"I think maybe it was a bad idea to lend them my tent," said Miles from the
porch in a choked voice.
"I am profoundly sorry, Speaker Karal. I didn't think."
"This should never . . ." Karal was spluttering with anger and delayed fright,
"this should never have happened, m'lord. I apologize for ... for Silvy
Vale." He turned helplessly, peering into the darkness. The night sky,
star-flecked, lovely, was threatening now.
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The boys, once the facts penetrated their sleepiness, thought it was all just
great, and wanted to return to the tent and lie in wait for the next assassin.
Ma
Karal, shrill and firm, herded them indoors instead and made them bed down in
the main room. It was an hour before they stopped complaining at the injustice
of it and went back to sleep.
Miles, keyed up nearly to the point of gibbering, did not sleep at all. He lay
stiffly on his pallet, listening to Dea, who slept breathing heavily, and
Pym, feigning sleep for courtesy and scarcely seeming to breathe at all.
Miles was about to suggest to Pym that they give up and go out on the porch
for the rest of the night when the silence was shattered by a shrill squeal,
enormously loud, pain-edged, from outside.
"The horses!" Miles spasmed to his feet, heart racing, and beat Pym to the
ladder. Pym cut ahead of him by dropping straight over the side of the loft
into an elastic crouch, and beat him to the door.
There, Pym's trained bodyguard's reflexes compelled him to try and thrust
Miles back inside. Miles almost bit him. "Go, dammit! I've got a weapon!"
Pym, good intentions frustrated, swung out the cabin door with Miles on his
heels. Halfway down the yard they split to each side as a massive snorting
shape loomed out of the darkness and nearly ran them down;
the sorrel mare, loose again. Another squeal pierced the night from the lines
where the horses were tethered.
"Ninny?" Miles called, panicked. It was Ninny's voice making those noises, the
like of which Miles had not heard since the night a shed had burned down at
Vorkosigan Surleau with a horse trapped inside.
"Ninny!"
Another grunting squeal, and a thunk like someone splitting a watermelon with
a mallet. Pym staggered back, inhaling with difficulty, a resonant deep
stutter, and tripped to the ground where he lay curled up around himself. Not
killed outright, apparently, because between gasps he was managing to swear
lividly. Miles dropped to the ground beside him, checked his skull -- no,
thank God it had been
Pym's chest Ninny's hoof had hit with that alarming sound. The bodyguard only
had the wind knocked out of him, maybe a cracked rib. Miles more sensibly ran
around to the front of the horse lines. "Ninny!"
Fat Ninny was jerking his head against his rope, attempting to rear. He
squealed again, his white-rimmed eyes gleaming in the darkness. Miles ran to
his head. "Ninny, boy! What is it?" His left hand slid up the rope to Ninny's
halter, his right stretched to stroke Ninny's shoulder soothingly. Fat
Ninny flinched, but stopped trying to rear, and stood trembling. The horse
shook his head. Miles's face and chest were suddenly spattered with something
hot and dark and sticky.
"Dea!" Miles yelled. "Dea!"
Nobody slept through this uproar. Six people tumbled off the porch and down
the yard, and not one of them thought to bring a light . . . no, the brilliant
flare of a cold light sprang from between Dr. Dea's fingers, and Ma Karal was
struggling even now to light a lantern. "Dea, get that damn light over here!"
Miles demanded, and stopped to choke his voice back down an octave to its
usual carefully-cultivated
deeper register.
Dea galloped up and thrust the light toward Miles, then gasped, his face
draining. "My lord! Are you shot?" In the flare the dark liquid soaking
Miles's shirt glowed suddenly scarlet.
"Not me," Miles said, looking down at his chest in horror. A flash of memory
turned his stomach over, cold at the vision of another blood-soaked death,
that of the late Sergeant Bothari whom Pym had replaced. Would never replace.
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Dea spun. "Pym?"
"He's all right," said Miles. A long inhaling wheeze rose from the grass a few
meters off, the exhalation punctuated with obscenities. "But he got kicked by
the horse. Get your medkit!" Miles peeled Dea's fingers off the cold light,
and Dea dashed back to the cabin.
Miles held the light up to Ninny, and swore in a sick whisper. A huge cut, a
third of a meter long and of unknown depth, scored Ninny's glossy neck. Blood
soaked his coat and runneled down his foreleg.
Miles's fingers touched the wound fearfully; his hands spread on either side,
trying to push it closed, but the horse's skin was elastic and it pulled apart
and bled profusely as Fat Ninny shook his head in pain. Miles grabbed the
horse's nose --
"Hold still, boy!" Somebody had been going for
Ninny's jugular. And had almost made it; Ninny --
tame, petted, friendly, trusting Ninny -- would not have moved from the touch
until the knife bit deep.
Karal was helping Pym to his feet as Dr. Dea returned. Miles waited while Dea
checked Pym over, then called, "Here, Dea!"
Zed, looking quite as horrified as Miles, helped to hold Ninny's head as Dea
made inspection of the cut.
"I took tests," Dea complained sotto voce as he worked. "I beat out twenty-six
other applicants, for the honor of becoming the Prime Minister's personal
physician. I have practiced the procedures of seventy separate possible
medical emergencies, from coronary thrombosis to attempted assassination.
Nobody --
nobody -- told me my duties would include sewing up a damned horse's neck in
the middle of the night in the
middle of a howling wilderness. . . ." But he kept working as he complained,
so Miles didn't quash him, but kept gently petting Ninny's nose, and
hypnotically rubbing the hidden pattern of his muscles, to soothe and still
him. At last Ninny relaxed enough to rest his slobbery chin on Miles's
shoulder.
"Do horses get anesthetics?" asked Dea plaintively, holding his medical
stunner as if not sure just what to do with it.
"This one does," said Miles stoutly. "You treat him just like a person, Dea.
This is the last animal that the Count my grandfather personally trained. He
named him. I watched him get born. We trained him together.
Grandfather had me pick him up and hold him every day for a week after he was
foaled, till he got too big.
Horses are creatures of habit, Grandfather said, and take first impressions to
heart. Forever after Ninny thought I was bigger than he was."
Dea sighed and made busy with anesthetic stun, cleansing solution,
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