The Trade of Queens

Bed Rest

It was beyond belief, how far things could change in just a week.

Sir Huw, beanpole-skinny and a bit gawky, reined his horse in and dismounted painfully while he was still a hundred yards short of the farmstead. He stretched, trying to iron the kinks out of his thigh and calf muscles.

“Is this it, bro?” rumbled the man-mountain driving the cart and pair behind him. “In the middle of nowhere?”

Huw glanced around. “On the other side, we’re near Edison,” he said. “I’ll go first. We’re expected, but…” No point saying it: The guards are jumpy. Because this week and forevermore, all the guards were jumpy. Probably expecting Delta Force to drop in, Huw mused idly. Not, in his estimate, that likely just yet—although in the long run it couldn’t be ruled out. Anxiety battled caution, and set his feet in motion. “I wonder how Her Majesty is.”

“Nearly three months gone by now,” chirped another voice from the back of the cart, emanating from beneath a blanket that covered its passenger and a mound of wheeled luggage—all Tumi branded, expensive but ultralightweight ballistic nylon. “Sick as a mule on a coaster.” Huw didn’t look round: Trust Elena to interpret it as a political question. Because Miriam’s pregnancy was political—and that was all it was. “Did you pack the books?”

“Yes.” Huw had, in fact, packed the books. Two hundred kilograms of them, paper that was worth far more than its weight in gold, or cocaine, where they were going. The Rubber Bible, the Merck Manual, the US Pharmacopoeia; and more recondite references, science and engineering and medicine all, with a side order of mathematics and maps. They weighed a bundle, but when he’d messaged ahead to ask if they should go digital, the reply had been a terse no. Which made a certain sense. CD-ROMs and computers weren’t durable enough for what Miriam was planning—if, in fact, he was reading her intentions aright.

Huw walked towards the farmyard, leading his horse. It was a hedge-laird’s place; the hearth smoke of a small village rose beyond it, and he could see stooped backs in the fields, some of them pausing and turning to stare at the visitors. But then two guards stepped out in front of him from the barn, and he stopped. The middle-aged sergeant raised a hand: “Who hails?” The other stood by tensely, his rifle pointed at the ground before Huw’s feet.

“Sir Huw Thoms, lieutenant by order of his grace, accompanied by Yulius Thoms and the lady Elena of Holdt, in the service of the Council.” He halted; his horse exhaled noisily, neck drooping.

“Approach and be identified.” Huw took a step forward. The sergeant peered at him, then glanced at a clipboard cautiously. “You are welcome, sir.”

Huw stood where he was. “The password of the day is ‘banquet,’” he stated. “Now can we come in? The horses are tired.”

The armsman with the rifle relaxed visibly as his sergeant nodded. “Very good, sir, the countersign is ‘mullet.’” He gestured tiredly towards the stables. “We’ll be pleased to sort you out. Sorry about the precautions—you can’t be too careful these days.”

Huw grimaced, then waved a hand at the machine gun dug in just inside the tree line, ready to enfilade the approach to the farm. “Any rebels try you so far?”

“Not yet, sir. Ah, your companions. If you don’t mind—”

Elena and Yul climbed down from the cart and consented to be inspected and compared to their photographs. “Is it that bad?” She asked brightly, shaking out her skirts.

“Some of Lord Ganskwert’s retainers attacked the house at Doveswood last night, using a carriage and disguises to cover their approach. Three dead, plus the traitors of course. We can’t be too careful.”

“Indeed.” Elena grinned alarmingly, and flashed the sergeant a glimpse of what she had inside her capacious shoulder bag. He blanched. “Sleep tight!” She added, “We’re on your side!”

“Lightning Child, can’t you keep it to yourself for even a minute?” Huw complained. To the sergeant: “We won’t be staying overnight—we’re wanted by Her Majesty, as soon as possible.”

“Ah, we’ll do our best, sir. I’ll have to confirm that first.” His tone didn’t brook argument.

“We can wait awhile,” Huw conceded. “Got to sort out the horses first, grab something to eat if possible, that sort of thing.”

“There is bread and sausages in the kitchen. If you’d like to wait inside I can have my men deal with your mounts? I take it they’re security livery?”

“Yes,” Huw confirmed. “All yours.” He handed his reins to the man. “We’ll be inside if you need us.”

“Excellent,” added Yul, following his elder brother towards the farm building.

Huw and his small team had been well away from the excitement when the putsch by the conservatives and the lords of the Postal Service broke; following up a task assigned to him by Angbard, Duke Lofstrom, back before his stroke—the urgency of which had only become greater since. Huw had been in a rented house outside Macon, recovering from an exploration run, when Elena had erupted into the living room shouting about something on the television and waking up Yul (who had a post-walk hangover of doom). He’d begun to chastise her, only to fall silent as the mushroom cloud, red-lit from within, roiled skyward behind a rain of damaged-camera static.

They’d spent the first hour in shock, but then had come Riordan’s Plan Black; and that had presented Huw with a problem, because they were nearly a thousand miles from the nearest evacuation point. Flights were grounded; police and national guard units were hogging the highways. It had taken them three days to make the drive, avoiding interstates and major cities. Finally they’d reached the outskirts of Providence and crossed over, taking another four days to finish the journey from Huw’s family estates to this transit point, barely seventy miles away. A thousand miles—two hours by air. Or three days by back roads in the United States. Seventy miles—four days, in the Gruinmarkt. It was an object lesson in the source of the Clan’s power—and a warning.

They didn’t have long to wait; true to his word, the sergeant ducked in through the kitchen door barely half an hour later. “By your leave, sir, we have confirmed your permission to travel. If you are ready to go now…?”

“I suppose so,” said Yul, reluctantly setting aside a mug of game soup and a half-eaten cornbread roll. Elena was already on her feet, impatient; Huw set down his wine—a half-drained glass, itself exotic and valuable in this place—and stood.

“Have you got a level stage?” he asked. “We need to take the cart’s contents.”

“We have something better, sir.” The guard turned and headed towards the barn. Huw followed him. Opposite the stalls—he saw a lad busily rubbing down the horses—someone had installed a raised platform, planks stretched across aluminum scaffolding. A ramp led up to it, and at the bottom—

“That’s a good idea,” Elena said admiringly.

Three big supermarket trolleys waited for them, loaded up with bags. “The regular couriers will bring them back once you unload them,” said the sergeant. He picked up his clipboard. “In view of the current troubles we have no postmaster, but I’m keeping score. For later.”

“All right.” Huw set his hands to one of the trolleys and pushed it up the ramp. “What’s the other side like?”

“It’s in a cellar.” The sergeant looked disapproving. “Good thing too. You don’t want to be seen coming and going over there—it’s a real zoo. But you’ll be safe enough here.” He caught Huw’s raised eyebrow and nodded. “I’ll go first, see if I don’t.” He climbed onto the platform and waited while Yulius and Elena pushed their laden trolleys up the ramp. “Here, you let me take that one, young miss. Why don’t you ride for once?” Laying one hand on the trolley’s metal frame, he reached up and tugged a cord leading to a blind on the opposite wall. The blind rose—

The basement was brick-walled, and the ceiling low, but the Clan’s surveyors had done their job well and the raised floor was a perfectly level match for the platform in the barn. As Huw hauled the first of his suitcases out of the trolley, trying to ignore the nausea and migrainelike headache, he heard voices from the top of the staircase: Elena, and someone else, someone familiar and welcome.

“My lady Brilliana,” he said. He deposited his case beside the top step—the cellar stairs surfaced in what seemed to be a servants’ pantry—and bowed. “I’m glad to see you.”

“Sir Huw! How wonderful to see you, too.” She smiled slightly more warmly than was proper: Huw held himself in check, ignoring the impulse to hug her to him. He’d been worried about her for the past week; to find her here, her hair in blond curls, dressed after last year’s New London mode, lifted a huge weight from his heart. Brilliana was an officer of the duke’s intelligence directorate and the queen-widow’s chief of staff—and something more to Huw. She held out her hand, and, somewhat daringly, he bent to kiss it. “Have you had a troublesome time?” she asked, gripping his fingers.

“Not as bad as some.” Huw straightened up, then gestured at the bags: “I bought the books Miriam wanted. And a few more besides. Yul is”—footsteps creaked on the stairs and he stepped aside as his brother hauled two more suitcases over the threshold—“here, too.”

“And all these damned bits of paper,” his brother complained, shoving the cases forward. “Lightning Child damn them for a waste of weight—” He stepped forward, out of the path of the sergeant from the other side of the transit post, who heaved another two bags towards Huw.

“Trig tables,” Huw added. “Have you any idea how hard it is to find five-digit trigonometry tables in good condition? Nobody’s printed them for years. I also threw in a couple of calculators—I found a store with old stock HP-48GXs and a thermal printer, so I bought the lot. They take rechargeable batteries so the only scarce resource is the thermal paper,” he added defensively. “I’m still running the one I bought for my freshman year—they run forever.”

“Oh, Huw.” Brill shook her head, still smiling. “Listen, I’m sure it’s a good idea! It’s just”—she glanced over her shoulder—“we may not be able to resupply at will, and you know how easily computers break.”

“These aren’t computers; they’re programmable calculators. But they might as well be mainframes, by these people’s standards.” He was burbling, he realized: a combination of post-world-walking sickness and the peculiar relief of finding Brill alive and well in the wake of the previous week’s events. “Sorry. Been a stressful time. Is Miriam—”

“She’s in bed upstairs. Resting.” An unreadable expression flickered across Brill’s face. “I’ll give you the tour, if you like. Who else…?”

“Me, ma’am.” The sergeant reappeared, carrying two more suitcases, wheezing somewhat. “One more to go, sirs, ladies.”

“No need to overdo it, Marek, the last cases will wait half an hour if you want to put your feet up.” Brill’s concern was obvious: “You’ve already been over today, haven’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am, but it needs moving and we’re shorthanded—”

“You’ll be even more shorthanded if you work yourself into a stroke! Go and sit yourself down in the parlor with a mug of beer and a pill until your head clears. Go on, I’ll get Maria to look after you—” Brill dragged the sergeant out of the servants’ stairwell, seemingly by main force of will, then returned to lead Huw into the downstairs lounge. “He’s right that they’re badly undermanned over there, but he insists on trying to do everything,” she said apologetically. “There’s too much of that around here.”

“Too much of it everywhere!” Elena said emphatically. “Why, if I hadn’t forced Huw to let me drive—but how is her royal highness?” She looked at Huw: “Won’t she want to—”

“Yes, how is she?” Huw began, then stopped. Brill’s expression was bleak. “Oh. Oh shit.”

“The lady Helge is perfectly all right.” Brilliana’s voice was emotionless. “But she’s very tired and needs time to recover.”

“Recover from what?” Yul chipped in before Elena could kick his ankle.

“Her express instructions are that you are to tell no one,” Brill continued, looking Huw straight in the eye. “Nobody is going to leave this house who cannot keep his or her mouth shut, at least until it no longer matters.”

“Until what matters?” Yul asked, head swiveling between Brilliana and Huw with ever-increasing perplexity.

“Was it spontaneous?” Huw demanded.

Brill nodded reluctantly. “The day of the putsch.”

“Let me see her?” demanded Elena. “My mother was midwife to the district nobility when I was young and she taught me—”

Yul stood by, crestfallen and lost for words. “Give me your locket,” Brill said to Elena. “And you too,” she added to Yul. She spared Huw but a brief narrow-eyed glance that seemed to say, If I can’t trust you, then who? “You’re not to tire her out, mind,” she added for Elena’s benefit. “If she’s sleeping, leave her be.” Then she turned towards the door to the owner’s rooms. “Leave the cases for now, Huw. Let me fill you in on what’s been going wrong here.…”

* * *

In the end, there was no siege: The house surrendered without a shot being fired, doors and windows flung wide, a white flag running up the pole that rose from the apex of the steeply pitched roof.

That wouldn’t have been enough to save the occupants, of course. Riordan was not inclined towards mercy: In the wake of a hard-fought civil war against the old nobility, it was quite obvious to one and all that the Clan divided must fall, and this rebellion could be seen as nothing but the blackest treachery. But by the same token, the families were weak, their numbers perilously low—and acts of gratuitous revenge would only weaken them further, and risk sowing the seeds of blood feud to boot. “Arrest everyone,” he’d instructed his captain on the ground, Sir Helmut: “You may hang Oliver Hjorth, Griben ven Hjalmar, or”—a lengthy list of confirmed conspirators—“out of hand, and you may deal as you wish with anyone who resists, but we must avoid the appearance of revenge at all costs. We can afford to spare those who did not raise arms against us, and who are guilty only of following their sworn liege—and their dependents.”

Helmut’s mustache quivered. “Is this wise, sir?” he asked.

“It may not be wise, but it is necessary,” Riordan retorted. “Unless you think we should undertake our enemies’ work for them by cutting each other’s throats to the last?”

And so: This was the third great holding of a rebel family that Sir Helmut had ridden into in two days. And they were getting the message. At the last, the house of Freyn-Hankl, a minor outer family connected with the Hjorth lineage, the servants had risen up and locked their upstart landowners in the wine cellars, and sued for mercy. Sir Helmut, mindful of his commanding officer’s advice, had rewarded them accordingly, then sent them packing to spread the word (before he discreetly executed his prisoners—who had, to be fair, poisoned the entire staff of the local Security post by treachery). Facing the open windows and doors of the summer house at Judtford, with his soldiers going in and coming out at will, he was pleased with the outcome of this tactic. Whether or not it was wise or necessary, it was certainly proving to be effective.

“Sir! If you please, to the drawing room.” A startled-looking messenger boy, barely in his teens, darted from the front door.

Sir Helmut stared at him. “In whose name?” he demanded.

“Sir! Two duchesses! One of them’s the queen’s mum, an’ the other is hers! What should we do with them, Jan wants to know?”

Sir Helmut stared some more, until the lad’s bravado collapsed with a shudder. Then he nodded and glanced over his shoulder. “Sammel, Karl, accompany me,” he snapped. The two soldiers nodded and moved in, rifles at the ready. “Lead me to the ladies,” he told the messenger. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

The withdrawing room was dark, and cramped with too much overstuffed furniture, and it smelled of face powder and death. Flies buzzed near the ceiling above the occupants, a pair whom Sir Helmut could not help but recognize. One of them was sleeping. “What happened here?” he demanded.

The younger of the pair—the one who was mother to the queen-widow—looked at him from beneath drooping eyelids. “Was ’fraid you wouldn’t get here,” she slurred.

“What—”

“Poison. In tha’ wine. Sh-she started it.” A shaking hand rose slowly, pointed at the mounded fabric, the shriveled, doll-like body within. “Tha’ coup. ’S’hers. Did it for Helge, she said.”

“But—” Helmut’s eyes took in the empty decanter, the lack of motion. “Are you drunk, or—”

“Dying, prob’ly.” She wheezed for a second or two; it might have been laughter. “Poisoned the wine with pure heroin. The trade of queens.”

“I see.” Helmut turned to the wide-eyed messenger lad: “You. Run along and fetch a medic, fast.” To the duchess: “There’s an antidote. We’ll get you—”

“No.” Patricia closed her eyes for a long moment. “Ma, Hilde-Hildegarde. Started this all. Leave her. No trial. As for me…” She subsided, slurring. A rattling snort emanated from the other chair and Helmut glanced at the door, before leaning to listen to the old woman’s chest.

Helmut rose and, turning on his heel, strode towards the door. Crone save me, he subvocalized. The messenger was coming, a corpsman following behind. “I have two heroin overdoses for you,” Helmut told him. “Forget triage; save the younger one first if at all possible.”

“Heroin overdose?” The paramedic looked startled. “But I don’t have—are you sure—”

“Deliberate poisoning. Get to it.” Helmut stepped aside as the medic nodded and went inside. Helmut breathed deeply, then turned to the messenger. “Here.” He pulled out his notepad and scribbled a brief memo. “Tell comms to radio this to Earl-Major Riordan in day code purple, stat.” The lad took the note and fled. Helmut stared after him for a moment then shook his head. What a mess. Poisoning and attempted matricide versus kidnapping: petty treason versus high treason. How to weigh the balance? “Jester’s balls, if only I’d been delayed an hour on the road.…”

* * *

Miriam lay in bed, propped up on a small mountain of pillows, staring blankly at the floral-patterned wallpaper behind the water jug on the dresser and thinking about death.

I never wanted it. So why am I feeling so bad? she wondered. What the hell is wrong with me?

It wasn’t as if she’d wanted to have a baby: Griben ven Hjalmar’s artificial insemination was, if not actual rape, then certainly morally equivalent. He—his sponsors (she shied away from thinking about them)—had wanted an heir to the throne. They’d specifically wanted her to bear the heir, and not trusting her to willingly have intercourse with the man they were forcing her to marry—a man who was so badly damaged by a poisoning incident in his childhood that he could barely talk—they had held her captive and committed a most unspeakable act upon her person. The irony of which was that her thirty-something womb was still fertile, but the marriage had been a most signal failure, disrupted by Prince Creon’s elder brother in a spectacularly bloody putsch that ignited an all-out civil war in the Gruinmarkt. By the time the dust settled, Miriam had been three weeks pregnant, the entire royal family was dead … and she was carrying the heir to the throne, acknowledged by all who had survived the lethal betrothal ceremony.

She had not taken the news well; only Huw’s cunning offer to help her obtain a termination—if that was what she willed—had kept her from running, and not stopping until she arrived at the nearest available abortion clinic. As the immediate rage and humiliation and dread faded, she began to reevaluate the situation: not from an American woman’s perspective, but with the eyes of a Clan noblewoman catapulted headlong into the middle of a fraught political dilemma. I don’t have to love it. I don’t have to raise it. I just have to put up with eight months of back pain and morning sickness and get it out of my body. And in return … they’d promised her the moon on a stick: a seat at the highest table, as much power and wealth as anyone in that godforsaken mediaeval nightmare of a country could have, and most important of all, security. Security for herself, for her mother, for her friends. A chance to fix some of the things that were wrong with the Clan, from the inside, working with allies. Even a chance to try and do something about the bigger picture: to jump-start the process of dragging the Gruinmarkt towards modernity.

She’d signed a fraught compromise with her conscience. Perhaps she was just rationalizing her situation, even succumbing to Stockholm syndrome—the tendency of the abducted to empathize with their kidnappers—and while she hated what had been done to her, she was no longer eager to dispose of the unwanted pregnancy. She’d done it before, many years ago; it had been difficult, the situation looming no less inconveniently in a life turned upside down, but she’d persevered. She’d even, a year ago, harbored wistful thoughts about finding a Mr. Right and—

Her body had betrayed her.

I’m thirty-five, damn it. Not an ideal age to be pregnant, especially in a mediaeval backwater without rapid access to decent medical care. Especially in the middle of a civil war with enemies scheming for her demise, or worse. She’d been stressed, anxious, frightened, and still in the first trimester: and when the cramps began she’d ignored them, refusing to admit what was happening. And now it’s not going to happen. The royal dynasty that had ruled the Gruinmarkt for the past century and a half had bled out in a bedpan in New Britain, while the soldiers watched their maps and the nobles schemed. It wasn’t much worse than a heavy period (aside from the pain, and the shock, and the sudden sense of horror as a sky full of cloud-castle futures evaporated). But it was a death sentence, and not just for the dynastic plans of the conservative faction.

She’d managed to hold her face together until she was away from Riordan’s headquarters, with Brill’s support. Ridden piggyback across to a farmhouse in the countryside outside small-town Framingham—not swallowed by Boston’s suburbs, in New Britain’s contorted history—that Sir Alasdair had located: abandoned, for reasons unclear, but not decayed.

“We’ve got to keep you away from court, my lady,” Brill explained, hollow-eyed with exhaustion, as she steered her up the staircase to an underfurnished bedroom. It had been a day since the miscarriage: a day of heavy bleeding, with the added discomfort of a ride in an oxcart through the backwoods around Niejwein. She’d begun shivering with the onset of a mild fever, not taking it all in, anomalously passive. “When word gets out all hell will follow soon enough, but we can buy time first. Miriam? How do you feel?”

Miriam had licked her lips. “Freezing,” she complained. “Need water.” She’d pulled the bedding over her shoulders, curling up beneath without removing her clothes.

“I’ll get a doctor,” Brill had said. And that was about the last thing Miriam remembered clearly for the next forty-eight hours.

Her fever banished by bootleg drugs—amoxycillin was eerily effective in a world that hadn’t been overexposed to antibiotics—she lay abed, weak but recovering. Brilliana had held the center of her world, drafting in her household staff as they surfaced after the coup, organizing a courier link to the Niejwein countryside, turning her muttered suggestions into firm orders issued in the name of the security directorate’s highest office. I don’t deserve these people, Miriam thought vaguely. Depression stalked her waking hours incessantly, and her mood fluctuated from hour to hour: She couldn’t tell from moment to moment whether she was relieved or bereft. Why do they put up with me? Can’t do anything right. Can’t build a business, can’t have a baby, can’t even stay awake—

There was a knock at the door.

She cleared her throat. “Enter.” Her voice creaked like a rusting hinge, underused.

The door opened. “Miriam?”

She turned her head. “Ah! Sir Huw.” She cleared her throat again. “Sorry. Not been well.” Huw was still wearing Gruinmarkt-casual: leather leggings, linen blouson. She saw another face behind him: “And, and Elena? Hello, come on in. Sorry I can’t be more hos, hospitable.” She tried to sit up.

“Your Majesty!” trilled Elena. Miriam tried not to wince. “Oh, you look so ill—”

“It’s not that bad,” she interrupted, before the girl—Girl? By Clan standards she’s overdue to be married—started gushing. “I had a fever,” she added, to Huw. “Caught something nasty while I was having the miscarriage. Or maybe I miscarried because…” She trailed off. “How have you been?” she added. When at a loss for small talk, ask a leading question. That was what her mother, Iris—or Patricia, to her long-lost family—had brought her up to do. Once, it had made for a career—

Huw took a deep breath. “We found more,” he said, holding up three fingers. “And two viable knots. Then all hell broke loose and we only just got here.” He grinned, much too brightly.

“Three worlds?” Miriam raised an eyebrow.

“Yes!” Elena bounced up and down on the linen press she’d taken for a seat. She, too, was wearing native dress from the Clan’s home world; she and Huw would have faded right into the background at any Renaissance Faire, if not for the machine pistol poking from her shoulder bag. “Three! It was very exciting! One of them was so warm Yul nearly fainted before he could get his oxygen mask off! The others—”

Huw cleared his throat, pointedly. “If I may? That one was subtropical, humid. Lots of cycads and ferns, very damp. We didn’t see any people, or any animal life for that matter—but insects. Big dragonflies, that big.” He held his hands a foot apart. “I was pretty light-headed by the time we left. I want to measure the atmospheric gas mix—think it’s way on the high side of normal, oxygen-wise. Like the carboniferous era never ended, or came back, or something. And then there was another cold pine-forest world. Again, no life, no radio transmissions, no sign of people.” He shook his head.

“The third?” Miriam pushed herself up against the pillows, fascinated.

“We nearly died,” Elena said very quietly.

“You nearly—” Miriam stopped. “Huw, I thought you were taking precautions? Pressure suits, oxygen, guns?”

“We were. That one’s inhabited—but not by anything alive.” He clammed up. “Miriam. Uh. Helge. My lady. What’s going on? Why are we here?”

Miriam blinked. “Inhabited? By what?”

“Robots, maybe. Or very fast minerals. Something surprised Yul so he shot it, and it ate his shotgun. After that, we didn’t stick around. Why are we here? The major said you were in charge of, of something important—”

“I need to get out of bed.” Miriam winced. “This wasn’t part of the plan. Huw, we’re here to make contact with the government. Official contact, and that means I need to be in there doing it.”

“Official contact?” His eyes widened.

“Yes.” She took a deep breath. “We’re finished in the United States. The Clan, I mean. Those mindless thugs in the postal arm, Baron Hjorth, my grandmother—they’ve completely wrecked any hope of us ever going back, much less normalizing relations. The US will follow us, to the ends of the universe. Ends of every universe, perhaps. Certainly they had agents in the Gruinmarkt … Riordan’s not stupid, he saw this coming. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re to open negotiations with the Empire of New Britain and sue for asylum. They’ve got problems too, stuff we can help with—the French, that is, the Bourbon monarchy in St. Petersburg. We’ve got access to science and technology that’s half a century ahead of anything they’ve got in the laboratory here, much less widely deployed. That gives us a bargaining tool, much better than a suitcase full of heroin.” She chuckled softly. It made her ribs hurt. “You know all the Roswell, Area 51, alien jokes? Crashed flying saucers, secret government labs full of alien technology? We’re going to be their aliens. Except there’s a slight problem.”

“A problem.” Huw’s expression was a sight. “I can see several potential problems with that idea. What kind of problem do you find worrying enough to single out?”

“We’re not the only people who’ve had a coup d’état.” Miriam sat up, bracing her arms against the headboard of the bed. “The king’s under arrest, the country is in a state of crisis, and the contacts I’d made are high up in the new government. Which may sound like a great opportunity to you, but I’m not sure I like what they’re doing with it. And before we can talk to them we need to square things with the cousins.”

“The cousins—”

“Yes. Or they’ll assume we’re breaking the truce. Tell me, Huw—have you ever met James Lee?”

* * *

The huge, wooden radio in the parlor of the safe house near Framingham was tuned permanently to Voice of England, hissing and warbling the stentorian voice of Freedom Party–approved news as and when the atmospheric conditions permitted. The morning of the day after his arrival, Huw opened it up and marveled at the bulky tubes and rat’s nest of wires within. It was a basic amplitude-modulated set, the main tuning capacitor fixed firmly in position by a loop of wire sealed with a royal crest in solder: comically easy to subvert, if the amateur engineer had been partial to five years in a labor camp. Huw shook his head, then added a crate of pocket-sized Sony world-band receivers to his next supply run shopping list, along with a gross of nicad batteries and some solar-powered chargers.

“How do you use it?” asked Brilliana, looking at it dubiously.

“You plug it back in”—Huw demonstrated, clipping the battery wire to the bulky lead-acid cell that filled much of the radio’s plinth—“and turn it on like so.” Hissing static filled the room.

She frowned. “It sounds horrible. How do you tune it?”

“You don’t. I mean, we can adjust it slightly, within a permitted frequency range.” Huw straightened up. “But the state owns the airwaves.” Someone was talking in portentious tones through the wrong end of a trombone. “Welcome to the pre-transistor era, when radio engineers needed muscles.”

“What use is a radio you can’t—”

Miriam stopped in the doorway. “Wait!” She held up a hand, frowning. She was looking better this morning, Huw decided: There was color in her cheeks and she’d bothered to get dressed in native drag, something like an Indian shalwar suit, only with frightening amounts of embroidery. “Can you turn that up?”

“I guess.” Huw tweaked the fine-tuning pot, then cranked up the volume.

“I know that voice!” Miriam stared at the radio, her eyes wide. “It’s Erasmus!”

“Really?” Brill nodded, then cocked her head. “I suppose it might be.”

“—Our enemies. Only through unceasing vigilance can we insure our safety in the face of the brutal attacks of the aristocratic gang and their lickspittle toadies. But be of good heart: They are a minority, and they swim against the current of history. The slave owners and gangmasters and mercantilists cannot bully us if we stand firm against them. The party is the backbone of the people, and we shall bear the full weight of the struggle against totalitarian monarchism on your behalf—”

“Yes, I think you’re right,” Brilliana said thoughtfully. “He’s wordy enough.…”

“Jesus.” Miriam swayed slightly. “It’s too early for this. Is there any coffee?”

“In the kitchen, I think.” Brill raised an eyebrow at Huw. “Enough with the radio,” she said. Huw could take a hint: He switched it off, and waited for the glowing tubes to fade to gray before he followed them towards the waiting pot.

Miriam was sitting on one of the two chairs, her hands clutching an earthenware mug of black coffee. The kettle still steamed atop the coal-fired cast-iron cooking range. “He’s on the radio,” she said, as if she didn’t quite believe it. “Voice of England. That’s the official news channel, isn’t it? He must have made it to California and come back. This will make everything so much simpler.” Her hands were shaking slightly. “But it also means we need to talk to the cousins now, not later.”

“It’s too dangerous.” Brill looked mulish. “Travel, I mean! There are roving gangs, and we don’t have a car, or—”

“They don’t use cars here,” Miriam pointed out. “At least not the way they do in our—my—America. There are trains. We’re about three miles outside city limits and there’s a railway station. You can catch a train to, to—where are the Lees? Do we have an address for them in Boston? If the service is running right now, and if they aren’t demanding travel papers. But there’s a small-scale civil war going on. They don’t—neither side—have the resources to lock down travel, except across contested borders. We’re on the east coast city belt here, the paper says it’s all Freedom Party territory—”

“You’ve got newspapers?” Huw demanded, incredulity getting the better of him.

“Yes, why wouldn’t we?” Miriam was nonplussed. “They don’t have domestic television, Huw, no internet either. How do you expect they get their news?”

“But, but—there’s a civil war going on!”

“Yes, but that’s not stopping the local papers. We get visitors, Huw. We’ve had knife-grinders and pan-sellers and we get a book merchant who carries the weekly paper. As far as our neighbors know, we’re a bunch of squatters who moved in here when the farmer and his family ran away—they’re royalists, he was a snitch, apparently. They don’t mind having us around: Alasdair and Erik saw off a gang of hobos—probably deserters—the day before yesterday. So we, we try to keep informed. And we’re trying to fit in.” She frowned. “Got to get you some local clothes.”

“I’ll sort him out.” Brill rose and poked at the firebox in the range cautiously. Huw winced. Between the summer warmth and an active fire the kitchen was unpleasantly warm, although Miriam still looked as if she was cold. “There’s a lot of work involved in establishing a safe house,” she said, looking at Huw speculatively. “I’ve got a list. If you want to stick around, make yourself useful—”

“No,” said Miriam. Brill looked at her. “I need to see Erasmus. In person.” She tapped a finger on the table. “We need to send a message to James Lee, fix up a conference.” Another tap. “And we need to get as many of our people as possible over here right now. And set up identities for them.” A third finger-tap. “Which feeds back to Erasmus. If he’ll help us out, all our immediate troubles here go away.”

“And if he doesn’t?” Asked Brill.

“Then we’re so screwed it isn’t funny.” Miriam took a sip of coffee. “So we’re not going to worry about that right now. I’m not well enough to travel today, but I’m getting better. Huw? I want you and Yul—you’re the expeditionary research team, aren’t you?—to go into Framingham today. Yeah, I know, so find him some clothes, Brill. I’ll give you a couple of letters to post, Huw, and a shopping list. Starting with a steamer. We’ve got gold, yes? More of the shiny stuff than we know what to do with. So we’re going to spend some of it. Get a steamer—a truck, not a passenger car—and buy food and clothing, anything that’s not nailed down, anything you can find from thrift stores. Some furniture, too, chairs and beds if you can get them, we’re short on stuff here, but that’s a secondary consideration.” She was staring past him, Huw realized, staring into some interior space, transcribing a vision. “Along the way you’re going to post those letters, one to James Lee, one to Erasmus.”

She cleared her throat. “Now here’s the hard bit. If you’re stopped by Freedom Riders, drop my name—Miriam Beckstein—and say I’m working for Erasmus Burgeson and Lady Margaret Bishop. Remember that name: Margaret Bishop. It’ll get their attention. If it doesn’t get their attention, don’t resist if they take you into custody, but make sure you emphasize that you’re working for me and I’m working for their bosses—Lady Bishop and Erasmus know about me, and about the Clan, at least in outline. Then get the hell away. You know how to do it, you’ve got your temp tats, yes?”

Huw cleared his throat. “Do you want that to happen?” Or is this just micromanagement due to nerves?

“No.” Miriam shook her head. “We want to make contact at the highest level, which means ideally we go straight to Erasmus. But if things go wrong, we don’t want to start out with a firefight. Do you see where I’m going here?”

“Six different directions at once, it seems.” Huw rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I think I get it. These people are going to be our patrons, so don’t start the relationship by shooting the servants, right?”

“That’s about it.” Miriam paused. “If you run into real trouble, don’t hang around—just world-walk. We can afford to try again later; we can’t afford to lose you.”

* * *

“Conflicting mission objectives: check.” Click. Yul shoved another cartridge into the magazine he was filling. “Flashing wads of money around in the middle of a revolution while guilty of looking foreign.” Click. “Micromanaging boss trying to run things on impulse.” Clack. He squeezed down on the last cartridge with a quiet grunt, then laid the magazine aside. “Have I missed anything, bro?”

“Yes.” It was either the coffee or pre-op nerves: Huw was annoyed to find his hands were shaking slightly as he checked the battery level on the small Pentax digital camera. “We’ve got a six-month deadline to make BOLTHOLE work.” (BOLTHOLE was the name Brill had pinned on the current project; a handy identifier, and one that anticipated Miriam’s tendency to hatch additional projects.) “Then all the hounds of Hel come belling after our heels. And that’s before the Americans—”

“I don’t see what you and Her Maj are so worked up about, bro. They can’t touch us.” Yulius stood, shrugging his coat into shape.

“We disagree.” Huw slid the camera into an inner pocket of his own jacket. “You haven’t spent enough time over there to know how they think, how they work.” He stood up as Yul stowed his spare magazines in a deep pocket. “Come on, let’s go.” He slung a small leather satchel across his chest, allowed it to settle into place, then gave the strap a jerk: Nothing rattled.

It was a warm day outside, but the cloud cover threatened rain for the afternoon. Huw and Yul headed out into the run-down farmyard—now coming into a modicum of order as Helge’s armsmen cleared up after the absent owners—then down the dirt track to the highway. The road into town was metaled but only wide enough for one vehicle, bordered by deep ditches with passing places every quarter mile. “They make good roads,” Yul remarked as they walked along the side. “Not as good as the Americans, but better than us. Why is that?”

“Long story.” Huw shook his head. “We’re stuck in a development trap, back home.”

“A what trap?”

A rabbit bolted for safety ahead of them as the road curved; birds peeped and clattered in the trees to either side like misconfigured machinery. “Development. In the Americans’ world there are lots of other countries. Some of them are dirt-poor, full of peasants. Sort of like home, believe it or not. The rich folks can import automobiles and mobile phones but the poor are just like they’ve always been. The Americans were that way, two hundred years ago—somewhere along the way they did something right. You’ve seen how they live today. Turns out—they’ve tried it a lot, in their world—if you just throw money at a poor country and pay for things like roads and schools, it doesn’t automatically get better. The economists have a bunch of theories about why, and how, and what you need to do to make an entire nation lift itself up by its own bootstraps … but most of them are wrong. Not surprising, really; mostly economists say what the rich people who pay them want to hear. If they knew for sure, if there was one true answer, there’d be no underdeveloped nations. We’d have developed, in the Gruinmarkt, too, if there was a well-defined recipe. It’s probably some combination of money, and institutions like the rule of law and suppression of corruption, and education, and a work ethic, and fair markets, and ways of making people feel like they can better themselves—social inclusion. But nobody knows for sure.”

A high stone wall appeared alongside the road, boundary marker to a country estate. “People have to be able to produce a bit more than they consume, for one thing. And for another, they have to know that if they do produce it—well, what does a lord do if his peasants are growing more food than they need?”

Yul shrugged. “What do you expect me to say, bro? They’re his tenants!”

“Well, yeah, but.” They passed a spiked iron gate, head-high and closed, behind which a big house squatted with sullenly shuttered windows. The wall resumed. “Here’s the thing. Our families became rich, and bought titles of nobility, and married into the aristocracy. And after a generation or two they were noble houses. But we’re still stuck in a sea of peasants who don’t make anything worth shit, who don’t generate surpluses because they know some guy in a suit of armor can take it away from them whenever he likes. We’ve got towns and artisans and apothecaries and some traders and merchants and they’re … you’ve seen the Americans. They’re not smarter than us. They don’t work harder than the peasants on your father’s land. They’re not—most of them—rich because they inherited it. But two hundred years ago things over there took a strange turn, and now they’re overwhelmingly wealthy. These people are … they’re better off than us: not as good as the Americans, but doing well, getting better. So what are they doing right?”

Huw stopped. The wall had come to an end, and ahead of them the road ran straight between a burned-out strip of row houses and a cleared field; but a group of four men had stepped into the highway in front of them, blocking the way ahead. They had the thin faces and hungry eyes of those who had been too long between hot meals.

“Yer bag. Give it ’ere,” said the thinnest, sharpest man. He held out a hand, palm-up. Huw saw that it was missing two fingers. The men to either side of the speaker, hard-faced, held crudely carved shillelaghs close by their sides.

“I don’t think so,” replied Huw. He smiled. “Would you like to reconsider?” From behind his left shoulder he heard a rip of Velcro as Yul freed up his holster.

“They’s the strangers wot moved on ole Hansen’s farm,” the skinny man—barely more than a teenager—at the left of the row hissed sharply.

The speaker’s eyes flickered sideways, but he showed no sign of attention. “Git ’em, lads,” he drawled, and the highwaymen raised their clubs.

Yul drew and fired in a smooth motion. His Glock cracked four times while Huw was persuading his own weapon to point the right way. The two club-men dropped like sacks of potatoes. The skinny lad’s jaw dropped; he turned and bolted into the field.

“Aw, shit,” said the sharp-faced speaker. He sounded disgusted, resigned even, but he didn’t run. “Yez party men, huh?” Huw strained to make the words out through a combination of ringing ears, the thunder of his own heartbeat, and the man’s foreign-sounding accent.

“That’s right!” He kept his aim on the highwayman’s chest. Yul stayed out of his line of fire, performing an odd, jerky duck-walk as he scanned the sides of the road for further threats. “And you are…?”

“Down on me luck.” Abruptly, the highwayman sat down in the middle of the road and screwed his eyes shut fiercely. “G’wan shoot me. Better’n’ starvin’ to death like this past week. I’m ready.”

“No. You’re not worth the bullet.” Huw stared at the highwayman over the sights of his pistol. A plan came to him. “You are under arrest for attempted robbery. Now, we can do this two different ways. First way is, we take you for trial before a people’s court. They won’t show you any mercy: Why should they? You’re a highwayman. But the other way—if you want to make yourself useful to us, if you’re very useful, my colleague and I can accidentally look the other way for a few seconds.”

“Forget it, citizen. He’s a villain: Once a villain always a villain. Let’s find a rope—” Yul was just playing bad cop. Probably.

“What do ye want?” The highwayman was looking from Yul to Huw and back again in fear. “Yer playin’ with me! Yer mad!”

“Dead right.” Huw grinned. “On your feet. We’re going into town and you’re going to walk in front of us with your hands tied behind your back. The people’s foe. And you know what? I’m going to ask you for directions and you’re going to guide us truthfully. Do it well and maybe we won’t hand you over to the tribunal. Do it badly—” He jerked his neck sideways. “Understand?”

The highwayman nodded fearfully. It was, Huw reflected, a hell of a way to hire a tour guide.

* * *

Framingham was a mess. From burned-out farmsteads and cottages on the outskirts of town to beggarmen showing their war wounds and soup kitchens on the curbsides, it gave every indication of being locked in a spiral of decline. But there were no further highwaymen or muggers; probably none such were willing to risk tangling with two openly armed men escorting a prisoner before them. Huw kept his back straight, attempting to exude unconscious authority. We’re party men, Freedom Riders. If nobody here’s seen such before … well, it would work right up until they ran into the real thing; and when that happened, they could world-walk.

“We’re going to the main post office,” Huw told the prisoner. “Then to”—he racked his memory for the name they’d plucked from a local newssheet’s advertising columns—“Rackham’s bookmaker. Make it smart.”

The main post office was a stone-fronted building in a dusty high street, guarded by half a dozen desperadoes behind a barricade of beer casks from a nearby pub. Rackham’s was a quarter mile past it, down a side street, its facade boarded over and its door barred.

They turned into an alleyway behind the bookmaker’s. “You have ten seconds to make yourself invisible,” Huw told his shivering prisoner, who stared at him with stunned disbelief for a moment before taking to his heels.

“Was that clever?” asked Yul.

“No, but it had to be done,” Huw told him. “Or were you really planning on walking into a people’s tribunal behind him?”

“Um. Point, bro.” Yul paused. “What do we do now?”

“We sell this next door.” Huw tightened his grip on the satchel, feeling the gold ingots inside. “And then we go to the post office and post a letter.”

“But it’s not running! You saw the barricades? It’s the Freedom Party headquarters.”

“That’s what I’m counting on,” Huw said calmly—more calmly than he felt. “They’ve got a grip on the mass media—the phones, the email equivalents, the news distribution system. They’re not stupid, they know about controlling the flow of information. Which means they’re the only people who can get a message through to that friend of Miriam’s—the skinny guy with the hat. Remember the railway station?” Brilliana had coopted Huw and his team, dragged them on what seemed at first like a wild goose chase to a one-platform stop in the middle of nowhere. They’d arrived in the nick of time, as Miriam’s other pursuers—a political officer and a carload of police thugs—had surrounded the ticket office where she and Erasmus Burgeson were barricaded inside. “The problem is getting their attention without getting ourselves shot. Once we’ve got it, though…” He headed towards the bookmaker’s, where a pair of adequately fed bouncers were eyeing the passersby. “… we’re on the way.”

* * *

The committee watched the presidential address, and the press conference that followed it, in dead silence.

The thirty-two-inch plasma screen and DVD player were alien intrusions in the wood-and-tapestry-lined audience room at the west of the royal palace. The portable gasoline generator in the antechamber outside throbbed loudly, threatening to drown out the recorded questions, played through speakers too small for a chamber designed for royal audiences in an age before amplification. The flickering color images danced off the walls, reflecting from the tired faces of the noble audience. Many of them still wore armor, camouflage surcoats over bulletproof vests and machine-woven titanium chain mail. They were the surviving officers of the Clan’s security organization, and such of the Clan’s other leaders as were deemed trustworthy, ignorant of or uninvolved in the abortive putsch mounted by the lords of the postal corvee. Wanted men, one and all.

Finally, Olga paused the DVD—recorded off-air by one of the few communications techs Riordan had ordered to stay behind in Cambridge. She looked around the semicircle of faces opposite, taking in their expressions, ranging from blank incomprehension to shock and dismay. “Does anyone have any questions, or can I move on to present our analysis?” she asked. “Strictly questions, no comment at this time.”

A hand went up at the back. Olga made eye contact and nodded. It was Sir Ulrich, one of the progressive faction’s stalwarts, a medic by training. “Can they do it?” he asked.

“You heard him.” Olga’s cheek twitched. Dread was a sick sensation in the pit of her stomach. “Let me remind you of WARBUCKS’s history; he’s a hawk. He was one of the main sponsors of the Project for a New American Century, he’s the planner behind the Iraq invasion, and he’s an imperialist in the old model. What most of you don’t know is that back in the 1980s he was one of our main commercial enabling partners in the Western operation. And he’s gone public about our existence. Getting back to your question: He’s defined the success of his presidency in terms of his ability to take us down. The Americans will follow their king-emperor unquestioningly—as long as he delivers results. BOY WONDER used Iraq as a rallying cry after 9/11; WARBUCKS has pinned the target on us.”

“So you think—” Ulrich paused. “Sorry.”

“It’s quite all right.” Olga gestured at the front rank. “My lord Riordan, I yield the floor.”

Riordan walked to the front of the room. “Thank you, Lady voh Thorold,” he started. Then he paused, and looked around at his audience. “I’m not going to tell you any comforting lies. We have lost”—he raised a folio and squinted at it—“thirty-nine world-walkers of our own, and sixty-six of the conservative faction. Eleven more are in custody, awaiting a hearing. Most of them we can do naught with but hang as a warning. Remaining to us in the five great families”—he swallowed—“we have a total of four hundred and sixteen who can world-walk regularly, and another hundred and nineteen elderly and infants. Twenty-eight womenfolk who are with child and so must needs be carried. In our offshoots and cadet branches there are perhaps two thousand three hundred relatives, of whom one thousand and seven hundred or thereabouts are married or coming into or of childbearing age. One hundred and forty one of their children are world-walkers.”

He stopped, and exchanged the folio for a hip flask for a moment.

“The American army is largely occupied overseas, for which we should be grateful. They have more than six hundred thousand men under arms, and five hundred warships, and with their navy and air forces their military number two warriors for every peasant in the Gruinmarkt. Our account of Baron Hjorth’s treachery is that he purloined no less than four but certainly no more than six of their atomic bombs. That leaves them with”—he consulted the folio—“ah, six thousand or thereabouts, almost all of which are more powerful than those Oliver Hjorth absconded with.” He closed the folio and stared at his audience.

“In strategic terms, the technical term for our predicament is: fucked.

“The only ray of hope is the possibility that their new king-emperor is bluffing about their ability to visit destruction upon our heads. But our analysis is that there is no way that he could afford to threaten us politically unless he has the capability to follow through, so the Anglischprache probably do have a world-walking ability. It might be a matter of captured cousins, but I doubt it. There’s the destruction of the Hjalmar Palace to consider, and they had Special Forces soldiers scouting around Niejwein as long ago as the betrothal feast between Prince Creon and Her Majesty. We know therefore that they had the ability to maintain a small scouting force over here four months ago. That implies they could not, back then, send a major expeditionary force across at that time. What they can do now—”

A hand went up in the front row. Riordan stopped. “Your grace,” he said, with labored and pointed patience.

“Believe them,” Patricia Thorold-Hjorth called tiredly from her wheelchair. She clasped her hands on top of her walking stick and frowned, her face still haggard. The medic’s intervention had kept her breathing, but the poisoning had taken its toll. “During the late civil war, I was—with the express consent of my late brother—negotiating with the current president. His agent broke off communications with a sudden ultimatum: our immediate surrender in return for our lives. He spoke of a mechanical contrivance for world-walking, for moving vehicles. One of my daughter’s protégés was tasked by my brother with investigating the nature and limitations of world-walking, and has made a number of discoveries; in particular, some wheeled contrivances can—under some circumstances—be carried along.” A muttering spread through her audience. “And to this date, four more worlds have been discovered, and two new knots.” The muttering grew louder.

“Silence!” shouted Riordan. “Damn you, I will hear one speaker at a time!” He looked at the dowager. “You have more?”

“Not much.” She looked pensive. “Wheelbarrows—it was suppressed by the lords of the post, I presume, during the civil war. Too much risk of a few young things going over the wall, if they realized how few bodies it would take to start a rival operation; we would have faced dissolution within months. But there is no obvious size limit; the limit was imposed by the exclusion problem, the risk of wheels intersecting with matter in the other world. Given a suitably prepared staging area, machined to high precision, who knows what they could send. Tanks? Helicopters? And we are on their doorstep. These people sent a hundred thousand soldiers halfway around the world. What can they send an hour’s drive down the road?”

“I don’t think we need worry about that just yet,” Riordan declared, trying to regain control of the briefing. “But.” He paused a moment, looking around the anxious faces before him. “At a minimum, we face teams of special forces and possibly backpack atomic bombs, like the ones that have already been used. At worst, if they have truly worked out how to travel between worlds, we may see a full-scale invasion. I think the latter is a very real threat, and we have the example of their recent adventure in the distant land of Iraq to learn from. If we sit and wait for them to come to us, we will be defeated—they outnumber all the Eastern kingdoms, not just the Gruinmarkt, by thirty bodies to one, and look what they did to Iraq. This is not a matter for chivalrous denial; it is a fight we cannot win.”

He gestured in the direction of Baron Horst of Lorsburg, one of the few conservatives to have been conclusively proven to have been on the outside of the coup attempt—a tiresomely business-minded fellow, fussy and narrowly legalistic. “Sir, I believe you wish to express an opinion?”

Lorsburg removed his bifocals and nervously rubbed them on his shirt sleeve. “You appear to be saying that Clan Security can’t protect us. Is that right?”

“Clan Security can’t take on the United States government, no, not if they develop world-walking machines.” Riordan nodded patiently. “Do you have something more to say?”

Lorsburg hunkered down in his seat. “If you can’t save us, what good are you?” he asked querulously.

“There’s a difference between saying we can’t win a direct fight, and not being able to save you. We probably can save the Clan—but not if we sit and wait for the Anglischprache to come calling. What we can’t save are the fixed assets: our estates and vassals. Anything we can’t carry. We are descended from migrant tinkers and traders, and I am afraid that we will have to become such again, at least for a while. Those of you who think the American army will not come here are welcome to go back to your palaces and great houses and pretend we can continue to do business as usual. You might be right—in which case, the rest of us will rejoin you in due course. But for the time being, I submit that our best hope lies elsewhere.

“We could cross over to America, and live in hiding among a people who hate and fear us. The Clan has some small accumulated capital; the banking committee has invested heavily in real estate, investment banks, and big corporations over the past fifty years. We would be modestly wealthy, but no longer the rulers and lords of all we survey, as we are here; and we would live in fear of a single loose-tongued cousin unraveling our network, by accident or malice. Our modest wealthy existence could only survive if all of us took a vow of silence and held to it. And I leave to your imagination the difficulty of maintaining our continuity, the braids—

“But there is a better alternative. My lady voh Thorold?”

Olga stood up. “I speak not as the director of intelligence operations, but as a confidant of the queen-widow,” she said, turning to face the room. “As we have known for some time, there are other worlds than just this one and that of the Anglischprache. Before his illness, Duke Lofstrom detailed a protégé of Helge’s to conduct a survey. Helge has continued to press for these activities—we now know of four other worlds beyond the initial three, but they are not considered suitable for exploitation. If you desire the details, I will be happy to describe them later. For the time being, our best hope lies in New Britain, where Her Majesty is attempting to establish negotiations with the new revolutionary government—” Uproar.

“I say! Silence!” Riordan’s bellow cut through the shouting. “I’ll drag the next man who interrupts out and horse-whip him around the walls! Show some respect, damn you!”

The hubbub subsided. Olga waited for the earl to nod at her, then continued. “Unlike the Anglischprache of America, we have good contacts with the revolutionaries who have formed the provisional government of New Britain. We have, if nothing else, a negotiable arrangement with our relatives there; I’m sure a diplomatic accommodation can be reached.” She stared at Lorsburg, who was looking mulishly unconvinced. “Her Majesty is a personal friend of the minister of propaganda. We supplied their cells in Boston with material and aid prior to the abdication and uprising. Unlike the situation in the United States, we have no history of large-scale law-breaking to prejudice them against us; nothing but our aristocratic rank in the Gruinmarkt, which we must perforce shed in any case if we abandon our way of life here and move to a new world.” She paused, voluntarily this time: Lorsburg had raised a hand. “Yes? What is it?”

“This is well and good, and perhaps we would be safe from the Americans there—for a while. But you’re asking us to abandon everything, to take to the roads and live like vagabonds, or throw ourselves on the mercy of a dubious cabal of regicidal peasants! How do you expect us to subsist in this new world? What shall we do?”

“We will have to work.” Olga smiled tightly. “You are quite right; it’s not going to be easy. We will have to give up much that we have become accustomed to. On the other hand, we will be alive, we will be able to sleep without worrying that the next knock on the door may be agents of the state come to arrest us, and, as I said, there is a business plan. Nobody will hold a gun to your heads and force you to join those of us who intend to establish first a refuge and then a new trade and source of wealth in New Britain—if you wish to wait here and guard your estates, then I believe the Council will be happy to accede to your desires. But there is one condition: If the Americans come, we don’t want you spilling our plans to their interrogators. So I am going to ask everyone to leave the room now. Those of you who wish to join our plan, may come back in; those who want no truck with it should go home. If you change your minds later, you can petition my lord the earl for a place. But if you stay for the next stage of this briefing you are committing yourselves to join us in New Britain—or to the silence of the grave.”