“If Barrayar were my right arm, I’d take a plasma arc and burn it off. Your father and mother knew what he was all the time, and yet they sheltered him. What are they, then?” “The Sergeant was doing all right—doing well, even, until . . . You were to be his expiation, don’t you see it—” “What, a sacrifice for his sins? Am I to form myself into the pattern of a perfect Barrayaran maiden like trying to work a magic spell for absolution? I could spend my whole life working out that ritual and not come to the end of it, damn it!” “Not the sacrifice,” he tried to tell her. “The altar, perhaps.”
