Gregor and his accompanying security personnel depart to do other imperial things. Linya is on time for her video call economics lesson and business planning session with Tsipis, which she enjoys enormously. He wants a nicely packaged concept report on her pen - obviously she can't part with the existing prototype itself, but to get electronics companies bidding on its construction and investors to foot the bill for the initial run, he needs to tell them what they'd be making. She gets some details about what format he wants that in, spends the rest of the day less dinner and midnight snack time and an hour on the piano putting that together, sends it in, and goes to bed with her tiny Barrayaran. He is so snuggly.

Linya is underburdened with clothes for a haut-woman, even one who has only had her adult height for about a year, which means that she only has an excessive number instead of a preposterous number, but she's not sure it's a good long-term plan to go around in her Cetagandan clothes. They aren't recognizable as Cetagandan, exactly - haut styles overlap little with the ghem and prole fashions even on the same planet, and technically every garment she owns is unique if only in color, embroidery, and tailoring and not entire concept; and to the extent there is a coherent aesthetic among haut-ladies, it is not the sort of thing that would have ever filtered to Barrayaran public consciousness. She does not, however, look like she's trying very hard to fit in with Barrayar. When she mentions this over breakfast the following day Cordelia introduces her to Ivan's mother, Alys, who is only cordial on a personal level but actively intent on being helpful as far as clothes are concerned. She seems to consider Linya an interesting canvas on which to ply her art, and Linya is all too willing to let her.

After that long shopping trip (again accompanied by an Armsman, again uneventful except for strange looks, and interrupted in the middle by dinner) Linya hasn't brought home any Barrayaran garments except for one midnight-blue bolero jacket and a pair of black shoes, as everything else needs to be nipped in or let out or remade from new cloth to meet Alys's fit standards. She does, however, wear that jacket and those shoes with one of her existing dresses the next day, after she has - eventually - rolled out of bed with her tiny Barrayaran to put clothes on. Any time today she doesn't spend meeting Count Vorkosigan or otherwise being sociable, she plans to divide between refining the gesture-assignment interface for the consumer pen and studying Greek.