propranolol to deal with the effects of a series of courier runs the day before when, wearing jeans and a lined waterproof jacket heavy enough to survive a northeast passage, she'd wheezed under the weight of a backpack and a walking frame. They'd had her ferrying fifty-kilogram loads between a gloomy cellar of undressed stone and an equally gloomy subbasement of an underground car park in Manhattan. There were armed guards in New York to protect her while she recovered from the vicious migraine that world-walking brought on, and there were servants and maids in the palace quarters back home to pamper her and feed her sweetmeats from a cold buffet and apply a cool compress for her head. But the whole objective of all this attention was to soften her up until she could be cozened into making another run. Two return trips in eighteen hours. Drugs or no drugs, it was brutal: without guards and flunkies and servants to prod her along she might have refused to do her duty.
She'd carried a hundred kilograms in each direction across the space between two worlds, a gap narrower than atoms and colder than light-years. Lightning Child only knew what had been in those packages. The Clan's mercantilist operations in the United States emphasized high-value, low-weight commodities. Like it or not, there was more money in smuggling contraband than works of art or intellectual property. It was a perpetual sore on Miriam's conscience, one that only stopped chafing when for a few hours she managed to stop being Miriam Beckstein, journalist, and to be instead Helge of Thorold by Hjorth, Countess. What made it even worse for Miriam was that she was acutely aware that such a business model was stupid and unsustainable. Once, mere weeks ago, she'd had plans to upset the metaphorical applecart, designs to replace it with a fleet of milk tankers. But then Matthias, secretary to the Duke Angbard, captain-general of the Clan's Security Directorate, had upset the applecart first, and set fire to it into the bargain. He'd defected to the Drug Enforcement Agency of the United States of America. And whether or not he'd held his peace about the real nature of the Clan, a dynasty of world- walking spooks from a place where the river of history had run a radically different course, he had 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's allies in that timeline 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 ongoing 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 postfeudal 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 afterward beside, and a card from her grace your mother bidding you to attend her this afternoon beforehand.' Her face the picture of innocence she added, 'Shall I attend to your party?'
If Kara organized Helge's 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 compliments 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 Helge should wear in public and, more important, would 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 Helge's 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 horseflesh. I should think the worst they'll do is drop broad hints your way and make the consequences of noncooperation 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?'
