"You're welcome!"

"And I think I'm going to suggest that you meet Gregor sooner rather than later. All evidence certainly seems to imply that you're the most helpful and benign magical demon we could have dreamed of."

"I really, really am, you're, uh, very lucky you got me."

...Illyan makes a 'do please elaborate' gesture.

"Demons don't as a species deserve all the bad press we get back in the mortal world I'm accustomed to, but the demons who answer summons aren't a nice subset, by and large. The usual arrangement is that you get a daeva in a circle and you offer them something in exchange for some magic. Demons are for obvious reasons hard to pay and the ones who show up looking for work instead of sitting around in Hell with interesting cocktails and going stuntflying are looking for intangibles of some kind. ...Are any of the people you intend on having me interacting with going to freak out if I get my wings and tail back? I miss them. Anyway, also the usual arrangement involves bindings preventing your summon from doing things besides the task you agree on. I did not have any of those in the circle that brought me here. So if you hadn't gotten me you'd have gotten some other demon who wants intangibles and was expecting constraints on their behavior and had a pleasant surprise."

"...I wouldn't advise you to go out in public on Barrayar with wings and a tail," says Illyan, not looking at Miles. "I would in fact strongly advise you not to do that. But if you're more comfortable that way, and don't mind being strictly limited in who is allowed to see you or interact with you, well. Miles certainly won't object, and neither will Gregor, and neither will I, and that's all the Barrayarans you have to interact with directly if you want to do things along the lines of terraform Komarr. But you might want to wait until you are out of the second most intensely surveilled building on the planet before you acquire extra limbs."

"I mean, I can take them off whenever, it's just messy," shrugs Cam. "Maybe when I know more about my schedule over a few weeks or so."

"...Messy...?"

"I make 'em without any nerves in the joints, but they still need a blood supply."

"Ick," says Miles. "All right. I assume I'm assigned to 'find lodgings for the nice time-travelling magical demon' duty, Captain?"

"You assume correctly."

"We could put you up in Vorkosigan House, God knows there's room."

"Pros and cons of that?"

"It's a big house. Lots of servants and guards and so on underfoot. Surprisingly easy to isolate yourself in despite same. A bit of a maze. You'd get to meet my mother. We have a decent library including some real print books."

"Well, I'll try it out if it's convenient, but if I don't like it much I may just want a bit of nowhere to park my lightflyer on and put a house in."

"I also happen to know where you can find some nice nowhere," he says. "I own some nice nowhere, for that matter, but it was bombed to bits in my grandda's day and I'll probably have grandchildren by the time the radiation dies down enough for anyone to live there."

"Oh, that won't matter for me if I'm not going to have guests."

"...Good to know," says Miles, eyeing him. "Really?"

"I am indestructible. I am not invulnerable, just indestructible, but radiation poisoning doesn't get a chance to do anything."

"All right then. I'll show you my house and we'll see how you like it. It's very close by, that's another advantage it has over nowhere."

"All right."

"How much Barrayaran history and politics have you absorbed in two weeks of eavesdropping, by the way...? I'm wondering whether to take the half-hour walk so I can brief you on what to absolutely avoid bringing up about Komarr if you happen to meet my father. And other miscellaneous points of interest. You know the emperor's name, that's a start."

"It's surprisingly hard to figure out common knowledge by listening to what people consider worth mentioning in conversation. Do explain."

"All right... This story starts - I'm going to say this story starts in the year twenty-two-twenty-something. Six? I want to say six but I'm not sure. Anyway. Humanity discovers wormhole jump technology. There's a massive explosion of space colonization in a short span of time. People are throwing together stations at likely-looking jump points and shoveling microbes onto any planet with likely-looking soil. Barrayar was right there in the first wave, with a mixed group of British, Russian, French, and Greek colonists in the first batch. We never got a second batch, because that was when humanity discovered that wormholes can spontaneously collapse. Then we had six hundred years to lose hold of all the complicated technology we no longer had the infrastructure to maintain, rediscover feudalism, and claw our way back up from there. That period is known as the Time of Isolation. We were just figuring out gunpowder again when the wider galaxy rediscovered us, at the end of a five-jump route from Komarr. They were and are our sole gateway to the wormhole nexus at large."