The Hidden Family

spooks from a place where the river of history had run a radically different course, he’d sure as hell shut down their eastern seaboard operations.

Matthias had blown more safe houses and shipping networks in one month than the Clan had lost in all the previous thirty years. His psycho bagman had shot and killed Miriam’s lover during an attempt to cover up the defection by destroying a major Clan fortress. Then, a month later, Clan security had ordered Miriam back to Niejwein from New Britain, warning that Matthias’ allies in that time-line made it too unsafe for her to stay there. Miriam thought this was bullshit: but bullshit delivered by men with automatic weapons was bullshit best nodded along with, at least until their backs were turned.

Mid-morning loomed. Miriam wasn’t needed today. She had the next three days off, her corvee paid. Miriam would sleep in, and then Helge would occupy her time with education. Miriam Beckstein had two college degrees, but countess Helge was woefully uneducated in even the basics of her new life. Just learning how to live among her recently rediscovered extended family was a full-time job. First, language lessons in the hochsprache vernacular with a most attentive tutor, her lady in waiting Kara d’Praha. Then an appointment for a fitting with her dressmaker, whose on-going fabrication of a suitable wardrobe had something of the quality of a Sisyphean task. Perhaps if the weather was good there’d be a discreet lesson in horsemanship (growing up in suburban Boston, she’d never learned to ride): otherwise, one in dancing, deportment or court etiquette.

Miriam was bored and anxious, itching to get back to her start-up venture in the old capital of New Britain where she’d established a company to build disk brakes and pioneer automotive technology transfer. New Britain was about fifty years behind the world she’d grown up in, a land of opportunity for a sometime tech journalist turned entrepreneur. Helge, however, was strangely fascinated by the minutiae of her new life. Going from middle class middle American life to the rarefied upper reaches of a barely post-feudal aristocracy meant learning skills she’d never imagined needing before. She was confronting a divide of five hundred years, not fifty, and it was challenging.

She’d taken the early part of the morning off to be Miriam, sitting in her bedroom in jeans and sweater, her seat a folding aluminum camp chair, a laptop balanced on her knees and a mug of coffee cooling on the floor by her feet. If I can’t do I can at least plan, she told herself wryly. She had a lot of plans, more than she knew what to do with. The whole idea of turning the Clan’s business model around, from primitive mercantilism to making money off technology transfer between worlds, seemed impossibly utopian—especially considering how few of the Clan elders had any sort of modern education. But without plans, written studies and costings and risk analyses, she wasn’t going to convince anyone. So she’d ground out a couple more pages of proposals before realizing someone was watching her.

“Yes?”

“Milady.” Kara bent a knee prettily, a picture of instinctive teenage grace that Miriam couldn’t imagine matching. “You bade me remind you last week that this eve is the first of summer twelvenight. There’s to be a garden party at the Osthalle tonight, and a ball afterwards beside, and a card from her grace your mother bidding you to attend her this afternoon before-time.” Her face the picture of innocence she added, “shall I attend to your party?”

If Kara organized her carriage and guards then Kara would be coming along too. The memories of what had happened the last time Helge let Kara accompany her to a court event made her want to wince, but she managed to keep a straight face: “yes, you do that,” she said evenly. “Get mistress Tanzig in to dress me before lunch, and my complements to her grace my mother and I shall be with her by the second hour of the afternoon.” Mistress Tanzig the dressmaker would know what she should wear in public, and more importantly, be able to alter it to fit if there were any last-minute problems. Miriam hit the Save button on her spreadsheet and sighed. “Is that the time? Tell somebody to run me a bath; I’ll be out in a minute.”

So much for the day off, thought Miriam as she packed the laptop away. I suppose I’d better go and be Helge…

“Have you thought about marriage?” asked the duchess.

“Mother! As if!” Helge snorted indignantly and her eyes narrowed.

“It’s been about, what, ten weeks? Twelve? If you think I’m about to shack up with some golden boy so soon after losing Roland…”

“That wasn’t what I meant, dear.”

Helge drew breath. “What do you mean?”

“I meant.” The duchess Patricia glanced at her sharply, taking stock:

“the, ah, noble institution. Have you thought about what it means here? And if so, what did you think?”

“I thought—” a slight expression of puzzlement wrinkled her forehead—“when I first arrived, Angbard tried to convince me I ought to make an alliance of fortunes, as he put it. Crudely speaking, to tie myself to a powerful man who could protect me.” The wrinkles turned into a full-blown frown: “I nearly told him he could put his alliance right where the sun doesn’t shine.”

“It’s a good thing you didn’t,” her mother said diplomatically.

“Oh, I know that! Now. But the whole deal, here, creeps me out. And then.” Helge took a deep breath and looked at the duchess: “there’s you, your experience. I really don’t know how you can stand to be in the same room as her grace your mother, the bitch! How she could—”

“—Connive at ending a civil war?” The duchess asked sharply.

“Sell off her daughter to a wife-beating scumbag is more the phrase I had in mind.” Helge paused. “Against her wishes,” she added. A longer pause; “Well?”

“Well,” the duchess said quietly. “Well, well. And well again. Would you like to know how she did it?”

“I’m not sure.” A grimace.

“Well, whether you want to or not, I think you need to know,” Iris—Patricia, the duchess Patricia, said. “Forewarned is forearmed, and no, when I was your age—and younger—I didn’t want to know about it, either. But nobody’s offering to trade you on the block like a piece of horse-flesh. I should think the worst they’ll do is drop broad hints your way and make the consequences of non-cooperation irritatingly obvious in the hope you’ll give in just to make them go away. You’ve probably got enough clout to ignore them if you want to push it—if it matters to you enough. But whether it would be wise to ignore them is another question entirely.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“Aha! The right question, at last!” Iris laboriously levered herself upright on her chaise, beaming. “I told you the Clan is democratic, in the classical sense of the word. The marriage market is democracy in action, Helge, and as we all know, Democracy Is Always Right. Yes? Now, can you tell me who, within the family, provides the bride’s dowry?”

“Why, the—” Helge thought for a moment—“well, it’s the head of the household’s wealth, but doesn’t the woman’s mother have something to do with determining how much goes into it?”

“Exactly.” The duchess nodded. “Braids cross three families, alternating every couple of generations so that issues of consanguinity don’t arise but the Clan gift—the recessive gene—is preserved. To organize a braid takes some kind of continuity across at least three generations. A burden which naturally falls on the eldest women of the Clan. Men don’t count: men tend to go and get themselves killed fighting silly duels. Or in wars. Or blood feuds. Or they sire bastards who then become part of the outer families and a tiresome burden. They—the bastards—can’t world-walk, but some of their issue might, or their grandchildren. So we must keep track of them and find something useful for them to do—unlike the rest of the nobility here we have an incentive to look after our by- blows. I think we’re lucky, in that respect, to have a matrilineal succession—other tribal societies I studied in my youth, that were patrilineal, were not nice places to be born female. Whichever and whatever, the lineage is preserved largely by the old women acting in concert. A conspiracy of matchmakers, if you like. The ‘old bitches’ as everyone under sixty tends to call them.” The duchess frowned. “It doesn’t seem quite as funny now I’m sixty- two.”

“Um.” Helge leaned towards her mother. “You’re telling me Hildegarde wasn’t acting alone? Or she was being pressured by her mother? Or what?”

“Oh, she’s an evil bitch in her own right,” Patricia waved off the question dismissively. “But yes, she was pressured. She and the other ladies of a certain age don’t have the two things that a young and eligible Clan lady can bargain with: they can’t bear world-walkers, and they can no longer carry heavy loads for the family trade. So