"The last twenty-four hours have been better than the last six weeks combined," Sonia confirms heartily, lifting her chin to give Byerly a pointed look, "and it's been lovely to see all my friends and family. I'm doing very well, Byerly, thank you, but I'm not nearly drunk enough for my short-term memory to be that impaired."

Which isn't to say she isn't working on correcting that, but he played the whiplash subject change card a little too early in this game. She is, at this moment, the perfect level of drunk to have lost all regard for any inhibition toward total honesty without having completely lost her critical thinking. Sonia purses her lips at him and leans forward, giving him a Look that he's probably quite familiar with by now. "You contradict yourself, Byerly. Not often, but I've noticed a trend toward it whenever there's something you don't want to talk about. You want to serve Barrayar. I know you do. You would have died for it back there. But as soon as it was all over, what? You're done, out of the game, because you played what you think is your only card? God, you Vor men can be so one-track sometimes. You know that isn't how it works. It's bred in you, Byerly, as much as it is in me, and I'm not even wholly Barrayaran. You'll serve Barrayar until the day you die, and you'll always want to. You just haven't bothered to figure out how."

She takes the bottle, inspects its dwindling contents with a squint, and then downs the rest of it on her own. She knows where to get more.