"It's fine," he says cheerfully. "Yeah, so, I'm the result of a clone substitution plot. I was supposed to impersonate Miles, kill his father, and then murder my way to becoming Emperor of Barrayar, which was sold to me as a valid possible outcome but was actually supposed to activate cultural tensions about visible deformity and lead to a nastily divisive civil war so Galen could take back Komarr while the Barrayarans were busy killing each other. And I don't in fact have my brother's bone disorder, but for obvious reasons I was surgically altered to look exactly like him, which is why it's not quite accurate to say I 'don't have the bone thing'."