La danse du miroir

This book is the book where Mark comes into his own; but he certainly hits the lowest of the low points before he can come back out the other side on his own merits. The setup of this plot here is that Mark cons the Dendarii pretending to be Miles into a personal heroic mission of his own to rescue some clones; he fucks up, Miles comes to save him, and Miles gets killed(?!). Mark then has to go back to Barrayar and tell his and Miles's parents about this.

It's a great move to kill off your protagonist (who takes up SO much space) to create room for Mark to figure out who he is. This is also a series that has cryochambers where you can place severely injured people and maybe revive them later with better medical facilities. Here, the cryochamber with Miles gets lost and so it's less of a question of "will Miles live" but more "where did Miles get off to" and "what lasting effects will Miles have from this death". So, it's not like [I can't mention the name of these books here because it's a major spoiler] where the point of view character from book one is literally killed in a multi-book series, but it's still a fun narrative move.

His belly shivered with a terrible longing, restrained by a terrible fear. Progenitors. Parents. He was not sure he wanted parents, at this late date. They were such enormous figures. He felt obliterated in their shadow, shattered like glass, annihilated.

The part that is the biggest delight to me is Mark having to go to Barrayar for the first time. He's royally fucked up and has to tell their parents about it; but also it's that he was trained to assassinate Miles's parents, he knows the layout of the Vorkosigan house, and he kind of doesn't want anything to do with Barrayar. It's a delightful awkwardness of everybody having such sharp edges but also earnestly trying to connect with each other.

It was another strange reciprocity, that Miles should have things he wanted to to remember, and couldn't, while Mark had things he wanted to forget. And couldn't.

Thematically, I think this book is one of the strongest in the series. We learn from Mark dancing with Kareen Koudelka that a mirror dance is one where one partner copies the other's movements, and this book is all about the parallels between Miles and Mark. Miles comes to rescue Mark; Mark comes back to rescue Miles. They both have multiple selves (although Mark realizes more here, and in the next book Miles loses them). They both are knight errants in their own right. There's also plenty of mirror imagery here as well.

Finally, I would be very curious to hear what plural systems make of this book. To my eyes, this feels like some internal family systems situation becoming multiple headmates (my word) via trauma. I feel like there's some groundwork for this earlier in the novel, and that it's not just trauma-generated, as Mark identifies some of his actions as having been unknown headmates previously. (That said, I do think that this feels some like a hamhanded attempt to write off an almost rape scene by pinning it on a headmate.) In the end, like Mark is left fronting and from other people's view is treated like a singlet; I'll be interested how a Civil Campaign reads when we get back to their perspectives again.