The Trade of Queens

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