Ashes Of Victory

'In that case,' she said, scooping Faith back up, 'let's be going. Ready, Jenny?'

'Yes, My Lady,' Jennifer LaFollet replied, and climbed out of her chair with James.

Allison had fought to the last ditch against the imposition of a proper Grayson maid, but, like the battle against personal armsmen, it had been one she was doomed to lose. That had become abundantly clear when she became pregnant and even Katherine and Elaine Mayhew began dropping pointed hints about how useful a maid would be as a nanny, especially with twins, since her and Alfred's persistent monogamy deprived her of sister wives to help carry the load.

She knew Honor had put up the same dogged resistance and suffered the same ultimate defeat, and she also knew how well Honor's relationship with Miranda LaFollet had worked out in the end. That being the case, she'd decided to keep the position in the family, as it were, and selected Miranda's cousin Jennifer for the role. Jennifer was more than ten years younger than Miranda. Indeed, at twenty-six T-years she'd received the original, first-generation prolong treatments, which Miranda had been just too old to physically accept when Grayson joined the Manticoran Alliance, but she shared a great deal of her cousin's quietly determined, competent personality. She looked a lot like Miranda and Andrew, as well, with the same auburn hair, although her eyes were green, not gray, and she was a bit taller than Miranda.

And, as Katherine and Elaine had suggested, she'd proved a godsend with the twins. Especially, Allison had discovered, when Alfred had accompanied Honor back to the Star Kingdom and left her to cope with both babies.

Now Jennifer glanced one last time around the terminal lounge, making sure they hadn't forgotten anything — as though this bunch of armed-to-the-teeth adolescents would let me do anything as normal as forgetting something in a terminal! —and joined Allison at the tube to Mattingly's car. Yet another Harrington armsman looked across from his place at the controls and smiled a greeting, and Allison sighed while the oversized cavalcade got itself organized around her.

I seem to recall thinking, once, how grateful I was that Honor's armsmen were so much less intrusive about guarding Alfred and me than they'd been about guarding her. She looked around the lounge at the eleven uniformed men surrounding her and laughed out loud. I guess God was listening. I always did figure He had a peculiar sense of humor!

Mattingly glanced questioningly at her, but she only shook her head and made a little shooing motion with her free hand. He smiled and obeyed the gesture, and Allison Harrington — and friends — filed into the two outsized air cars and headed for the modest little fifty-room mansion the Crown had deeded over to Duchess Harrington as a sign of its high regard.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

'The Prime Minister is here, Your Majesty. He wonders if he might have a moment of your time.'

'He does?' Elizabeth III looked up from the cards of her hand. 'Oh, good! I mean, shucks, it looks like I'll have to go take care of business, Justin.'

'Oh, really?' Justin Zyrr-Winton, Prince Consort of the Star Kingdom of Manticore, leaned back and regarded his wife from under lowered brows. 'I have to say this sudden urgent affair of state — I assume it is an urgent affair of state, Edward?' He glanced at the liveried servant who'd entered the card room with the announcement, and a suitably serious-looking Edward nodded solemnly. 'Thank you.' The Prince Consort returned his gimlet gaze to his wife. 'As I say, I find this sudden urgent affair of state just a tad suspicious, Beth. Don't you, Roger?'

He turned to Crown Prince Roger... who looked back as solemnly as Edward.

'I don't know, Dad,' the seventeen-T-year-old prince said in a considering sort of tone. 'It could be a genuine matter of state, I suppose. They do happen from time to time, or so I've been told. But the timing is just a little suspicious.'

'Oh, come on, Roger!' His younger sister, Princess Joanna, looked up from her book viewer. 'I'll admit Mom has all the sneaky Winton genes. And I'll admit she doesn't like to lose. I'll even admit the Opposition may have a point when they accuse her of being `devious.' But even granting all that, how could she have known ahead of time that she'd need an interruption to save her? I mean, she'd have to be psychic to know Dad was going to be dealt a double run this hand!'

'Ha!' Her father's lordly disdain could not have been bettered by the pampered scion of the most nobly born family of the Star Kingdom, despite the fact that, by law, Elizabeth had been required to marry a commoner. 'You're forgetting the security systems, Jo. Do you really think someone as underhanded as your mother would fail to have the systems on-line during a crucial operation like a pinochle game? She's probably wearing an earbug right now so that her sinister minion in the PGS can use the security cameras to read Roger's and my cards to her! And no doubt those same sinister minions commed the Prime Minister and told him to hurry right over before I trounced her.'

'That, my dear, is carrying paranoia and suspicion of those in power entirely too far.' Elizabeth managed to make her tone admirably severe despite the smile hovering on her lips. 'Besides, if it were that important to me to win — which, of course, it isn't, the drive to win in all ways and at all costs being foreign to my sweet and compliant nature — I wouldn't use Allen to get me out of the game. I'd simply have you arrested for high treason or some other trumped-up charge and flung into the Citadel to languish miserably in some cold, dark, dank cell.'

'I don't think so!' Justin told her with spirit. 'First, the Citadel is climate controlled; it doesn't have any cold, dark, dank cells. And second, even if it did, we live under a Constitution, we do, and it specifically limits what tyrannical monarchs can do to their subjects on a whim!'

'Of course it does,' his wife purred, while the treecat on the back of her chair bleeked laughter at the one on the back of Justin's. 'The problem, oh feckless one, is that before your lawyer can apply for a writ of habeas corpus and protest my tyrannical ways, said lawyer has to know you're in prison in the first place. And for all the skill with which we Wintons have played the benevolent, law-abiding monarchs for so long, there have actually been whole generations of secretly held prisoners, victims of our evil autocracy, who lingered wretchedly until their miserable deaths, forgotten and alone in the unhallowed cells of our tyrannical rule.'

'That was very good, Beth!' Justin said admiringly. 'But I doubt you could get it all out in order again.'

'I don't have to,' she told him, elevating her nose disdainfully. 'I'm the Queen, and that means I can do anything I want,' she said snippily, then grinned broadly. 'It's good to be the Queen, you know.'

'It's better to be Prince Consort,' Justin told her, reaching up and back to rub his own 'cat's ears. Monroe buzzed a happy purr and slithered bonelessly forward over his shoulder and into his lap to demand more serious petting.

'And why might that be?' Elizabeth asked suspiciously.

'Because while you go deal with whatever it is that brings Allen here, I can stay here, basking in the esteem of our devoted children and scratching Monroe's chest... while I stack the cards for the next deal.'

' `Esteem of our devoted children'? Yeah — right!' Elizabeth hooted with laughter, and the aforementioned devoted children grinned at her. 'Actually, they're both in my pay,' Elizabeth went on, rising and reaching for Ariel. 'They'll inform me instantly if you try to stack my deck. And if they don't, I'll just have PGS run the imagery from the security cameras and prove all three of you are conspiring against your monarch. With—' her tone lowered ominously '—fatal consequences for the conspirators!'

'Curses, foiled again,' Justin murmured, and his wife leaned over to kiss him before she turned back to the servant.

'All right, Edward,' she sighed. 'Lead me to the Duke.'

'Of course, Your Majesty. He's waiting in Queen Caitrin's Suite.'

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