The Trade of Queens

“Do it. Riordan out.”

He closed the phone with a snap and glanced sidelong at Lady Olga. She was staring across her seat back at Miriam, who was talking intently into her own phone, her face a study in strain. He opened his mouth, but she raised a finger. Half a minute passed as their driver, Alasdair, carried them ever closer to the turnpike; then Miriam held the phone away from her face and shook her head. “Trash,” she said, holding it out to Brill, who popped the battery before sliding it into a waste bag. “We are so fucked,” she said tonelessly.

“Plan Black?” Olga raised an eyebrow.

“What did Mr. Fleming say?” asked Riordan, ignoring her to focus on Miriam.

“It’s—” Miriam shook her head, punch-drunk. “Crazy talk. He says Dr. James works for the vice president! And he’s been in collusion with someone in the Clan for years! It’s insane! He said something about tapes, and about them wanting an excuse, a Pearl Harbor.”

“Can Fleming do anything for us?” Riordan stared at Miriam as she shook her head again. “Why not?”

“He says he’s disposable. He’s going to try and find someone to talk to, but there’s no point going through the chain of command. We’re trying to negotiate with people who want us dead—tell me it’s not true?”

“Figures,” Olga said tartly. Everyone stared at her—even Sir Alasdair, by way of the rearview mirror.

“What do you mean, my lady?” Riordan’s return to exaggerated courtesy was a sign of stress, screamingly clear to Miriam even in her punch-drunk state.

“We’ve been looking for a second mole, ever since Matthias went over the wall, nearly a year ago. But we haven’t been looking very hard, if you follow. And I heard rumors about there being a former politician, now retired, chief executive of a major logistics corporation, who was cooperating with us to provide doppelgangered locations and distribution hubs, back in the good years, in the late eighties and early nineties. The West Coast operation—back when WARBUCKS was out of politics. Before his comeback as VP. The crown fits, does it not?”

“But why—” This from Brilliana, unable to contain her curiosity.

“We don’t work with politicians,” Riordan said tiredly. “It’s too hard to tell good from bad—the ones who stay bought from the ones who don’t. There’s too much potential for blowback, as the CIA can attest. But WARBUCKS was out of politics, wasn’t he?”

Miriam nodded, brooding. “He was in the wilderness until…” Her eyes widened. “Oof. So, he got a second start in politics, and the duke would have pulled the plug. Am I right? But then Matthias went over the wall, and his report would have ended up where WARBUCKS—or one of his people—could read it, and he’d have to take out Matthias and then try to—oh no—”

“He’d have to try to kill us all,” Olga finished the sentence, nodding, “or not even BOY WONDER could keep him from impeachment, yes? Our mole, for whom we have not been looking with sufficient vigor, isn’t a low-level functionary; he’s the vice president of the United States. And now he fears exposure.”

Riordan reached over to tap Sir Alasdair on the shoulder. “Do you know where your Plan Black site is?” he asked.

“Yes, my lord.” Alasdair nodded, checking his side mirror as he floored the accelerator to merge with the traffic on the interstate. “I’m taking us there.”

“What’s Plan Black?” Miriam tried to make eye contact with Olga.

Riordan cleared his throat. “My lady, we need to get you to a place of safety. But it’s not just you; in light of the current situation we all need to get clear. Plan Black is a defensive measure, put in place by his grace after the mess last year. It’s a pull-out—everyone in this world is to proceed to a safe site, collect essential equipment, and cross over.”

“But that’s—” Miriam paused. “What about the conservative faction? Earl Hjorth, the duchess, whoever took the bombs and activated Plan Blue, will they—”

“No.” Riordan bared his teeth. “And I’m counting on it. Because if they disobey a directive from the acting head of Clan Security in the middle of an emergency, that’s all I need to shoot them.”

“It’s the civil war, my lady, all over again.” Olga whistled tunelessly. “They’ve been begging for it—and now they’re going to get it.”

*   *   *

In another world, in a mansion overlooking a lawn that swept downhill to the banks of a small river, an elderly man sat at a writing desk in a room off to one side of the great hall. It was a small room, walled in bare stone and floored with planks, which the tapestries and rugs failed to conceal; the large window casements, built for light but featuring heavy oak shutters with peepholes and iron bolts, suggested the architect had been more concerned with security than comfort. Despite the summer heat he held his robes of office tight about his shoulders, shivering as he stared at the ledger before him with tired eyes. It was a balance sheet of sorts, but the items tallied in its columns were not quantities of coin but the living and the dead. And from time to time, with the slow, considered strokes of his pen, Baron Julius Arnesen moved names from one column to the other.

Arnesen was a survivor of seventy-some years, most of which he had experienced in a state of barely suppressed existential terror. Even now, in a house his security chief assured him was securely doppelgangered from both the known alternate worlds (in the United States by a convenient interstate off-ramp, and in New Britain by a recently acquired derelict warehouse), and at the tail end of yet another civil war (this one between the Clan and the rival noble houses, rather than between Clan families) and at the tail end of his years, he could not bring himself to sit with his back to door or window. Besides, an instinct for trouble that had served him well over the decades whispered warnings in his ears: Not all was right in the Gruinmarkt, or within the uneasy coalition of Clan radicals and conservatives who had agreed to back the baroness Helge Thorold-Hjorth and her claim to bear the heir to the throne. It’s all going to come apart again, sooner or later, he told himself gloomily, as he examined the next name in the ledger. There are too many of them.…

The civil war in the Gruinmarkt, torched off by the conservative Baron Henryk’s scheme to marry the troublesome Helge—who had grown up in the United States, calling herself Miriam—to the king’s second son, had left an enormous mess in its wake. Crown Prince Egon, paranoid by disposition, had sensed in the betrothal the first stirring of a plot to assassinate him; he’d moved against the Clan with vicious speed and ruthless determination, and in the three months they’d run wild his followers had destroyed the work of decades.

Egon was dead now, blown to bits along with most of his army when they tried to take a Clan castle, and Helge—pregnant as a result of the gynecological skullduggery of one of the Clan’s own doctors—was acknowledged as the dead Prince Creon’s widow. But a goodly chunk of the backwoods nobility wouldn’t believe a word of it, even if she presented them with a baby who was the very spitting image of Creon in six months’ time. To them, Helge was simply an impostor, willing puppet for the Clan’s avarice and ambition. They were keeping their mouths shut right now, out of fear, but that wouldn’t last forever; and weeding out the goats from the sheep was proving to be a well nigh impossible task. As magister of the royal assizes, Julius had considerable freedom to arraign and try hedge-lords whom he might suspect of treasonous intent; but he also had to walk a fine line between rooting out threats and conducting a witch hunt that might itself provoke another uprising.

Here in the countryside eight miles outside the capital Niejwein, in a house seized from the estate of the lord of Ostrood—conveniently missing with his sons since the destruction of the royal army at the Hjalmar Palace—Julius had established a crown court to supervise the necessary unpleasantness. To arraign and execute nobles in the capital would be inflammatory; better by far to conduct the grim job beyond the city walls, not so far out of sight as to invite accusations of secrecy, but distant enough to deter casual rubbernecking. With selected witnesses to testify to the fairness of the proceedings, and a cordon secured by imported American security devices as well as armed guards, he could proceed at his leisure without fear of the leading cause of death among judges in the Gruinmarkt—assassination by an angry relative.

Take the current case in hand, for example. Sir Euaunt ven Pridmann was a hedge-knight, titular liege lord to a village of some ninety souls, a house with a roof that leaked, three daughters with dowries to pay, one son, and a debt run up by his wastrel grandfather that exceeded the village’s annual surplus by a factor of fifteen. Only a writ of relief from usury signed by the previous king’s brother had spared him the indignity of being turfed out of his own home.

For such a man to show up in the army of the late pretender to the throne might be nothing more than simple desperation, for Egon had promised his followers a half share in the Clan lands that they took for him—not that ven Pridmann had done much looting and pillaging. With gout and poor eyesight he’d spent three-quarters of the war in