He’d entered that shop knowing the odds were not in his favor; a pool with only one fish required a fellow to get it right the first time. Well, he might have got lucky; it wasn’t unprecedented. He wriggled his wrists against his scarf bonds, which were unexpectedly unyielding for such soft, feminine cloth. Some sort of metaphor, there. This is not my fault.

It was By’s fault, he decided. Ivan was a victim of poor intel from his own side, like many a forlorn hope before him. Ivan had encountered overprotective duennas before, but never one who’d shot him from ambush the first time he walked through the door. The unfriendly blue woman…was a puzzle. He disliked puzzles. He’d never been good at them, not even as a child. His impatient playmates had generally plucked them out of his hands and finished them for him.

Rish was incredibly beautiful-sculpted bones, flowing muscles, stained-glass skin shimmering as she moved-but not in the least attractive, at least in the sense of someone he’d want to cuddle up to. Sort of a cross between a pixie and a python. She was shorter and slimmer than Nanja, and very bendy, but, he had noticed when the two women were dragging him up here, much the stronger. He also suspected genetically augmented reflexes, and the devil knew what else. Best appreciated from several meters’ distance, like a work of art, which he suspected she was.

Whose work? That degree of genetic manipulation on humans was wildly illegal on all three planets of the Barrayaran Imperium. Unless one had it done to oneself, offworld, in which case it might still be better to go live somewhere else, after. Nanja was certainly neither Komarran nor Barrayaran, or she’d have had a more visible reaction to that famous name and address where he’d shipped the ghastly vase. Not only Not From Around Here, but also Not Been Here Long.