[ Well. Not exactly a chatty, enthusiastic, verbal response, but good enough. By fishes out the bottle of mead. In Barrayaran tradition - tradition that is trained into even a useless fop who lives miles and decades away from the time in which men would casually poison one another - he takes first drink, a long draught at the end of which he gives only a delicate shudder. (He himself can hold his liquor with the best of them.) And then he wipes his sleeve across the mouth of the bottle, with the air of completing a ritual, and hands it to Maine. ]

It is nice being - hmm - mildly heroic, isn't it? I'm finding I'm getting treated a bit better around here for having helped in apprehending that traitor. Even if you did the dirty work - kind of you to keep your mouth closed and let me take more than my share of the credit.

[ He cocks his eyebrow at Maine, then, a signal that that was a joke. A joke in poor taste, because who finds ha-ha you're mute jokes funny, truly? But a joke. ]