The Trade of Queens

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’etat.” 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