The Hidden Family

Escape Plans

He’s done what?” demanded Matthias, in a tone of rising disbelief.

The duke’s outer office in Fort Lofstrom was home to the duke’s secretary, and during Angbard’s lengthy absence it served as a headquarters from which the Clan’s operations in Massachusetts were coordinated. One of a chain of nine such castles up and down the eastern seaboard (in the Gruinmarkt, but also in the free kingdoms to the north and south), it coordinated the transshipment of Clan cargo along the entire eastern continental coast. Half a dozen junior Clan members were stationed there at any time, each shuttling back and forth at eight-hour intervals. Every three hours a message packet would arrive from Cambridge, and Matthias would be the first to open it and read any confidential dispatches.

This packet had contained a couple of letters, and a terse coded message. It was the latter that had whetted Matthias’s curiosity, then raised his ire.

The youth standing in front of his desk looked very frightened, but held his ground. “It came over the wireless just now, sir, an order to shut down. A blanket order, for the duration of the extraordinary general meeting, sir.” He cleared his throat. “Isn’t that unusual?”

“Hmm.” Matthias looked at him hard. “Well, Poul.” The lad was barely out of his teens, still afflicted by acne and a bad case of deference to authority—especially the kind of deadly, self-confident authority that Matthias exuded—but for all that he was brave. “We’ll just have to shut down the postal service, won’t we?” He allowed his expression to relax infinitesimally, determined not to give the youth any hint of the turmoil he felt.

“Are those your orders, sir?” Poul asked eagerly.

“No.” Matthias cocked his head. A Clan extraordinary meeting, held without warning…it didn’t smell good. In fact, it smelled extraordinarily bad to him. Ever since Esau’s asshole relatives had started trying to rub out the long-lost countess and another bunch of interlopers had joined in, things had looked distinctly unstable. “It sounds to me as if there’s something very big going on,” Matthias said slowly. “On that basis, I don’t think suspending the post is sufficient. We have assets on the other side who may not have got the warning. I’ll need you to make one more crossing to deliver a message, as soon as possible. Then we shut down. Meanwhile, it will be necessary to secure the fort.”

“Secure the—sir? Do you know what’s going on?”

Matthias fixed the young man with a grim stare. “I have a notion that it’s no good. The civil war, lad, that’s what this is about. Pigeons are coming home to roost and promises made thirty years ago are about to be delivered on.” He snorted. “Idiots,” he muttered bitterly. “Wait here. I have to go and get the special dispatches out of the duke’s office. Then I’ll go over what you have to do to deliver them.”

Matthias rose and let himself through the door into the duke’s inner study. Everything was as it had been when Angbard departed, a week ago. Matthias closed the door, then leaned his head against the wall and cursed silently. So close, so damned close! But he couldn’t just sit here. Not with that bitch about to spill her guts at the meeting. Esau’s confession—that the eldest had authorized repeated attempts on Helge’s life—had shaken him. He’d had Helge, Miriam, in his sights: She was a natural fellow traveler for his plans. He’d been getting positioned to bring her into his orbit until the idiot fanatics started trying to kill her, making her suspicious of everyone and everything. With no friends but that weakling Roland, she’d been easy meat before. But now—

He read through his illicit decrypt one more time. The original message wasn’t addressed to him, but that had never stopped Matthias in the past; as Angbard’s secretary he was used to reading the duke’s mail—and also mail for other people on station that passed through the mail room. People such as Sir Huw Thoms, lieutenant of the guard, who right now was over on the other side, making a delivery run. And he had access to the code books, too.

ACTION THIS DAY STOP ARREST MATTHIAS VAN HJORTH ANY MEANS NECESSARY STOP CHARGES OF TREASON TO FOLLOW STOP

Shit. Matthias crumpled the letter in his fist, his face a tight mask of anger. Bitch, he thought. Either his hold on Roland wasn’t as strong as he’d believed, or she was more ruthless than he’d thought. But the old man has made a mistake. Poul, the callow messenger, was in the next room. That gave him an edge, if he could only work out how to use it.

He went back out to his own office, and opened another desk drawer. He smiled to himself at the thought of Angbard’s reaction should he discover what Matthias kept in it, the use to which Matthias had put his access to the duke’s personal files. But right now there wasn’t much time for self-indulgent daydreams. What Matthias needed was a smokescreen to cover his own disappearance, and smokescreens didn’t come any thicker than this one.

First, Matthias removed the most recent addition from the safe: an anonymous CD, the enigmatic phrase “deep throat” scrawled on it in a feminine hand. Obtaining it had taken him a lot of detective work; only the hints turned up by the duke’s background checks on Miriam had kept him searching until it came to light, buried in her music collection. Next, he removed three small stamped, addressed envelopes, each containing a covering letter and a floppy disk. When he left his office a minute later, the drawer was locked and empty of incriminating evidence. And the letters were on the first stage of their journey to Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Clan courier.

Letters addressed to local FBI and DEA offices.

The huge ballroom at the back of the Clan’s palace could, when the situation demanded it, be converted into a field hospital—or a boardroom large enough to hold all the voting members of an ancient and prolific business partnership. It was only when she saw it filled that Miriam began to grasp the sheer scale of the power the Clan wielded in the Gruinmarkt.

The room was dominated by a table at one end, behind which sat a row of eight chairs: three for administrative officers of the committee, and one for each head of one of the families. Rows of green leather-topped benches had been installed facing the table, the ones farther back raised to give their occupants a view of the front. The huge glass doors that in summer would open onto the garden were closed, barricaded outside by heavy oak shutters.

The main entrance to the room was guarded by soldiers in black helmets and body armor, armed with automatic rifles. They stood impassively by as Miriam entered, Kara trailing her. “Ooh, look! It’s your uncle!” Kara whispered.

“Tell me something new. Like, where do I sit?” Angbard occupied one of the three raised chairs at the middle of the table, a black robe drawn over his suit. His expression was as grim as a hanging judge’s. The room was already beginning to fill, men and women in business attire seeking out their benches and quietly conversing. The only anomalous touch was their attendants, decked out in archaic finery.

“Excuse me, where should milady sit?” Kara simpered at a uniformed functionary who, now that Miriam was getting her bearings, seemed to be one of many who were unobtrusively directing delegates and partners to one side or another.

“Thorold-Hjorth—that would be there. Left bench, second row if she is to be called.”

Miriam drifted toward the indicated position. Like a company’s annual general meeting, she noted. It was oddly familiar, but in no way comforting. She looked up at the front table and saw that three of the high seats had already been filled—one of them by Oliver Hjorth, who caught her watching and glared at her. The other two held dusty nonentities, elderly men who looked half-asleep already as they leaned heads together to talk. I wish Roland were here, she thought uneasily. Or—no, I just wish I wasn’t facing this alone. Roland would be supportive, but he wouldn’t be much use. Would he?

“May I join you?” Someone asked. Miriam glanced up.

“Olga? Yeah, sure! Did you have a good night?”

Olga sat down next to her. “No intruders,” she said smugly. “A pity. I was rather hoping.”

“Hoping?”

“To test my new M4-Super 90. Ah well. Oh, look, it’s Baron Gruinard.” She indicated one of the dried sticks at the board table.

“Is that good or bad?”

“Depends if he’s sitting for the Royal Assizes and you’re brought up in front of him. At most other times he’s rather harmless, but one hears the most frightful things when his court is in session.”

“Um.” Miriam noticed another familiar figure, an elderly dowager in a blue twin-set and pearls. Her stomach twisted. “I spy a grandmother.”

“Don’t make a habit of it.” Olga beamed in the direction of the elderly duchess, who spotted Miriam and frowned, horribly. “Isn’t she impressive?”

“Is that meant to be a compliment?”

The duchess cast Olga a hideous glare and then diverted her attention elsewhere, to a balding middle-aged man in a suit who fawned and led her toward the far side of the room.

“Where’s—”

“Hush,” said Olga. Angbard had produced a gavel from somewhere. He rapped it on the edge of the table peremptorily.

“We are gathered today for an extraordinary meeting,” Angbard announced conversationally. He frowned and tapped the elderly looking microphone. “We are gathered…state of emergency.” The sound system cut in properly and Miriam found that she no longer had to make an effort to hear him. “Thirty-two years ago, Patricia Thorold-Hjorth and Alfredo Wu were attacked on their way to this court. The bodies of Alfredo and his guards were found, but that of Patricia remained lost. Until very recently it was believed that she and her infant daughter had perished.”

A quiet ripple of conversation swept the hall. Angbard continued after a brief pause. “Four months ago an unknown woman appeared in the wilds of Nether Paarland. She was apprehended, and a variety of evidence—backed up by genetic fingerprinting, which my advisors tell me is infallible for this purpose—indicated that she was the long-lost infant, Helge Thorold-Hjorth, grown to majority in the United States.”

The conversational ripple became a cascade. Angbard brought his gavel down again and again. “Silence, I say silence! I will have silence.”

Finally the room was quiet enough for him to continue. “A decision was taken to bring Helge into the Clan. I personally took responsibility for this. Her, ah, induction, was not an immediate success. Upon her arrival here a number of unexpected events transpired. In particular, it appears that someone wanted her dead—someone who couldn’t tell the difference between a thirty-two-year-old countess and a twenty-three-year-old chatelaine, traveling together. In the interests of clarity I must add that nobody in this room is presently under suspicion.”

Miriam’s scalp prickled. Glancing aside she realized that half the eyes in the room were pointed at her. She sat up and looked back at Angbard.

“I believe we now have evidence enough to confirm the identity of the parties behind the attacks on Patricia and Alfredo, and on Patricia’s daughter, Helge. These same parties are accused of fomenting the civil war that split this Clan into opposing factions fifty-seven years ago—” Uproar. Angbard sat back and waited for almost a minute, then brought his gavel down again—“Silence, please! I intend to present the witnesses that Clan Security has uncovered before you in due course. The floor will then be opened for motions bearing on the matter at hand.” He turned to his neighbor, an elderly gentleman who until this point appeared to have been half asleep on his throne. “Julius, if you please?…”

“Aha!” The old scarecrow bolted upright, raised a wobbling hand, and declaimed: “calling the first witness—” He peered at a paper that Angbard slid before him, and muttered—“can’t call her, she’s dead, dammit!”

“No, she isn’t,” retorted Angbard.

“Oh, alright then. Think I’m senile, do you?” Julius stood up. “Calling Patricia Thorold-Hjorth.”

Half the room were on their feet shouting as the side door behind the table opened. Miriam had to stand, too, to see over heads to where Brilliana was entering the room, pushing a wheelchair containing her mother. Who looked bemused and rather nervous at being the focus of such uproarious attention.

“Did they take her motorized chair away to stop her running?” Miriam asked Olga.

“Oh, no—”

“Order! Order or I shall have the guards—order I say!”

Slowly order was restored. “That’s odd,” quavered Julius, “I was sure she was dead.” A ripple of laughter spread.

“So was I,” Iris—Patricia—called from her chair. Brill steered her over to one side of the table.

“Why did you run away?” asked Oliver Hjorth, leaning sideways so he could see her, an unpleasant expression of impatience on his face.

“What, uns gefen mine mudder en geleg’hat Gelegenheit, mish’su ’em annudern frau-clapper weg tu heiraten?” Iris asked dryly. There was a shocked titter from somewhere in the audience: “obviously not. And if you have to ask that question I also doubt very much that you’ve ever had a gang of assassins trying to murder you. A pity, that. You could benefit from the experience.”

“What’s she saying?” Miriam nudged Olga. I really must try to learn the language, she thought despairingly.

“Your mother is convincingly rude,” Olga replied, sotto voce.

“This is an imposter!” someone called from the floor. Miriam craned her neck; it might be the dowager duchess, but she couldn’t be certain. “I demand to see—”

“Order!” Angbard whacked his hammer down again. “You will be polite, madam, or I will have you escorted out of this room.”

“I apologize to the chair,” Iris responded. “However, I assure you I’m no imposter. Mother dearest, by way of proof of my identity, would you like me to repeat what I overheard you telling Erich Wu in the maze at the summer palace gardens at Kvaern when I was six?”

“You—you!” The old dowager stumbled to her feet, shaking with rage.

“I believe I can prove my case adequately, with or without blood tests,” Iris said dryly, addressing the gallery. “As any of you who have consulted the register of proxies must be aware, my mother has a strong motive for refusing to acknowledge me. Unfortunately, as in so many other circumstances, I must disobey her wishes.”

“Nonsense!” blurted the duchess, an expression of profound horror settling on her face. She sat down quickly.

“I can attest that she is no imposter,” said Angbard. “If anyone requests independent verification, this can be arranged. Does any party to this meeting so desire?” He glanced around the room, but no hands went up. “Very well.” He rapped on the table again with his gavel. “I intend to bring up the issue of Lady Thorold-Hjorth’s absence again, but not at this session. Suffice to say, I am convinced of her authenticity. As you have just seen, her mother appears to be convinced, too.” Spluttering from the vicinity of the dowager failed to break his poise. “Now, we have more urgent matters to consider. My reason for reintroducing Lady Patricia to this body was to, ah, make it clear where the next matter is coming from.”

“Clear as mud,” the elderly Julius remarked to nobody in particular.

“I’d like to call the next witness before the committee,” Angbard continued, unperturbed. “Lady Olga Thorold has been the subject of outrageous attempts upon her person, and has had her lady-in-waiting murdered, very recently—while traveling in the company of Lady Helge. All of this has occurred in the past six months. Please approach the table.”

Olga rose and walked to the front of the table. The room was silent.

“In your own words, would you please tell us about the series of attacks on your person, when and where they began, and why they were unsuccessful?”

Olga cleared her throat. “Last December I was summoned to spend time with Duke Lofstrom at his castle. I had for a year before then been petitioning him for an active role, in the hope that he could find a use for me in the trade. He asked me to escort Helge Thorold-Hjorth, newly arrived and ignorant of our ways, both to educate her and to ensure that no harm came to her. I do not believe he anticipated subsequent events when we arrived at this house—” She continued to enumerate intrusion after intrusion, outrage by outrage, pausing only when interrupted from the floor by a burst of voices demanding further explanation.

Miriam watched in near-astonishment. “Is everyone here something to do with Clan Security?” she asked Kara quietly.

“Not me, milady!” Kara’s eyes were wide.

Olga finished by recounting how Miriam had brought her to a new world, and how they had been assaulted there, too, by strangers. A voice from the floor called out. “Wait! How do you know it was another world? Can’t it possibly have been another region of ’Merica?”

“No, it can’t,” Olga said dismissively. “I’ve seen America, and I’ve seen this other place, and the differences are glaringly obvious. They both sprang from the same roots, but clearly they have diverged—in America, the monarchy is not hereditary, is it?” She frowned for a moment. “Did I say something wrong?”

Uproar. “What’s all this nonsense about?” demanded Earl Hjorth, red-faced. “It’s clear as day that this can’t be true! If it was, there might be a whole new world out there!”

“I believe there is,” Olga replied calmly.

The gavel rose and fell on the resulting babble. “Silence! I now call Helge Thorold-Hjorth, alias Miriam Beckstein. Please approach the table.”

Miriam swallowed as she stood up and walked over.

“Please describe for the Clan how you come to be here. From the day you first learned of your heritage.”

“We’ll be here all day—”

“Nevertheless, if you please.”

“Certainly.” Miriam took a deep breath. “It started the day I lost my job with a business magazine in Cambridge. I went to visit my mother—” a nod to Iris “—who asked me to fetch down a box from her attic. The box was full of old papers…”

She kept going until she reached her patent filing in New Britain, the enterprise she was setting up, and Olga’s shooting. Her throat was dry and the room was silent. She shook her head. “Can I have a glass of water, please?” she asked. A tumbler appeared next to her.

“Thank you. By this time I had some ideas. The people who kept trying to murder Iris—sorry, Patricia—and who kept going after me, or getting at Olga by mistake—they had to be relatives. But apart from one attempt, there was never any sign of them on the other side, in America that is. I remembered being told about a long-lost brother who headed west in the earliest days of the Clan. You know—we learned—that they, too, use a pattern to let them world-walk, however they can travel only from here to New Britain, to the place I’ve just been telling you about.

“What I’ve pieced together is something like this. A very long time ago one of the brothers headed west. He fell on hard times and lost his amulet. In fact, he ended up as an indentured slave and took nearly ten years to save the cash to buy his freedom. Once free, he had to reconstruct the knot design from memory. Either that, or his was deliberately sabotaged by a sibling. Whichever, the knot he painted was different. I can’t emphasize that strongly enough; where you go when you world-walk depends on the design you use as a key. We now know of two keys, but there’s another fact—the other one, this lost brother’s knot, doesn’t work in America. Our America. The one we go to.

“Anyway. he crossed over repeatedly, because it had been arranged that at regular intervals he should check for his brothers. They evidently intended to send a trade caravan to meet him, somewhere in Northern California perhaps. But he never found his business partners waiting for him, because they were elsewhere, traveling to another world where, presumably, they interpreted his absence as a sign that he’d died. He was cut off completely, and put it down to betrayal.”

“Preposterous!” Someone in the front row snorted, prompting Angbard to bring down the gavel again. Miriam took the opportunity to help herself to a glass of water.

“This brother, Lee, had a family. His family was less numerous, less able to provide for themselves, than the Clan. Just as the ability was lost to your ancestors for a generation or two, so it was with his descendants—and it took longer before some first cousins or cousins married and had an infant with renewed ability. They prospered much as you have, but more slowly. The New British don’t have a lot of time for Chinese merchants, and as a smaller family they had far fewer active world-walkers to rely on.

“Now, the Lees only found the Clan again when the family Wu moved west, less than a century ago. The Lees reacted—well, I think it was out of fear, but they basically conducted the campaign of assassinations that kicked off the feud. Everyone in the Clan knew that the murders could only have been carried out by world-walkers, so the attacks on the western families were blamed—understandably—on their cousins back east.”

She paused. The level of conversation breaking out in the benches made continuing futile. Angbard raised his gavel but she held up a hand. “Any questions?” she asked.

“Yes! What’s this business—”

“—How did you travel—”

“—We going to put up with these lies?”

Bang. Miriam jumped as Angbard brought down the gavel. “One at a time,” he snapped. “Helge, if you please. You have the floor.”

“The new world, where the other family—the Lees—go, is like the one I grew up in, but less well developed. There are a number of reasons for this, but essentially it boils down to the apparent fact that it diverged historically from my own about two hundred and fifty years ago. If you want evidence of its existence I have witnesses, Lady Olga and Brilliana d’Ost, and video recordings. I can even take you over there, if you are willing to accept my directions—remember, it is a very different country from the United States, and if you don’t bear that in mind you can get into trouble very easily. But let me emphasize this. I believe anyone who is sitting in this room now can go there quite easily, by simply using a Lee family talisman instead of a Clan one. You can verify this for yourselves. I repeat: It appears that if you have the ability to world-walk, you can go to different worlds simply by using a different kind of talisman.

“New Britain only had an industrial revolution a century ago. I’ve established a toehold over there, by setting up an identity and filing some basic engineering patents on the automobile. They’ll be big in about five to ten years. My business plan was to leverage inventions from the U.S.A. that haven’t been developed over there, rather than trading in physical commodities or providing transportation. But by doing this, I attracted the Lee family’s attention. They worked out soon enough that I’d acquired one of their lockets and was setting up on their territory. As Olga told you, they attempted to black-bag my house and we were waiting for them.” She glanced at Angbard for approval. He nodded to her, so she went on. “We took a prisoner, alive. He was in possession of an amulet and he’s indisputably a world-walker, but he’s not of the Clan. I asked for some medical tests. Ah, my lord?”

The duke cleared his throat. “Blood tests confirm that the prisoner is a very distant relative. And a world-walker. It appears that there are six families, after all.”

Now he resorted to his hammer again, in earnest—but to no avail. After five minutes, when things began to quieten down, Angbard signaled for the sergeant at arms to bring order to the hall. “Order!” he shouted. “We will recess for one hour, to take refreshments. Then the meeting will resume.” He rose, scowling ominously at the assembled Clan shareholders. “What you’ve heard so far is the background. There is more to come.”

Morning on the day shift in Boston. The office phones were already ringing as Mike Fleming swiped his badge and walked in past security.

“Hi, Mike!” Pete Garfinkle, his officemate, waved on his way back from the coffee machine.

“’Lo.” Mike was never at his best, early in the morning. Winter blues, one of his ex-girlfriends had called it in a forgiving moment. (Blues so deep they were ultraviolet, the same girlfriend had said as she was moving out—blues so deep she’d gotten radiation burns.) “Anything in?”

“What? On the—” Pete waved a finger.

“Office. Okay, give me five minutes.”

Mike wandered along to the vending machine, passing a couple of suits from the public liaison office, and collected a mug of coffee. Traffic was bad this morning, really bad. And he hadn’t shaved properly either. It was only nine but he already had a five o’clock shadow, adding to his bearish appearance. Don’t mess with me.

Pete was already nose-deep in paperwork that had come in the morning mail when Mike finally made it to his desk. Pete was a morning guy, always frazzled by six o’clock—when Mike was just hitting his stride. “Tell me the news,” Mike grunted. “Anything happening?”

“On the Hernandez case? Judge Judy has it on her docket.” Pete grinned humorlessly.

“Judge Judy couldn’t find his ass with a submarine’s periscope and a map.” Mike pulled a face, put his mug of coffee down, and rubbed his eyes. The urge to yawn was nearly irresistible. “Judge Judy is about the least likely to sign a no-knock—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know all about your pissing match with hizonner Stephen Jude. Can it, Mike, he works for Justice, it’s his job to gum up the works. No point taking it personal.”

“Huh. That fucker Julio needs to go down, though. I mean, the goddamn Pope knows what he’s at! What the hell else do we need to convince the DA he’s got a case?”

“Fifty keys of crack and a blow job from the voters.” Pete leaned his chair perilously far back—the office was so cramped that a sideswipe would risk demolishing piles of banker’s boxes—and snorted. “Relax, dude. We’ll get him.”

“Huh. Give me that.” Mike held out a huge hand and Pete dumped a pile of mail into it. “Ack.” Mike carefully put it down on his desk, then picked up his coffee and took a sip. “Bilge water.”

“One of these days you’d better try and kick the habit,” Pete said mildly. “It can’t be doing your kidneys any good.”

“Listen, I run on coffee,” Mike insisted. “Lessee—”

He thumbed rapidly through the internal mail, sorting administrative memos from formal letters—some branches still ran on paper, their intranets unconnected to the outside world—and a couple of real, honest, postal envelopes. He stacked them in three neat piles and switched on his PC. While he waited for it to boot he opened the two letters from outside. One of them was junk, random spam sent to him by name and offering cheap loans. The other—

“Holy shit!”

Pete started, nearly going over backwards in his chair. “Hey! You want to keep a lid—”

“Holy shit!”

Pete turned around. Mike was on his feet, a letter clutched in both hands and an expression of awe on his face. “What?” Pete asked mildly.

“Got to get this to forensics,” Mike muttered, carefully putting the letter down on his desk, then carefully peering inside the envelope. A little plastic baggie with something brown in it—

“Evidence?” asked Pete, interestedly: “Hey, I thought that was external?”

“You’re not kidding!” Mike put it down as delicately as if it was made of fine glass. “Anonymous tip-offs ‘R’ us!”

“Explain.”

“This letter.” Mike pointed. “It’s fingering the Phantom.”

“You’re sure about that?” Pete looked disbelieving. Mike nodded.

“Jesus, Mike, you need to learn some new swear words, holy shit doesn’t cut it! Show me that thing—”

“Whoa!” Mike carefully lifted the envelope. “Witness. You and me, we’re going down to the lab to see what’s in this baggie. If it’s what the letter says, and it checks out, it’s a sample from that batch of H that hit New York four months ago. You know? The really big one that coincided with that OD spike, pushed the price down so low they were buying it by the ounce? From the Phantom network?”

“So?” Pete looked interested. “Somebody held onto a sample.”

“Somebody just sent us a fucking tip-off that there’s an address in Belmont that’s the local end of the distribution chain. Wholesale, Pete. Name, rank, and serial number. Dates—we need to check the goddamn dates. Pete, this is an inside job. Someone on the inside of the Phantom wants to come in from the cold and they’re establishing their bona fides.”

“We’ve had falsies before. Anonymous bastards.”

“Yeah, but this one’s got a sample, and a bunch of supplementaries. From memory, I think it checks out—at least, there’s not anything obviously wrong with it at first glance. I want it dusted for fingerprints and DNA samples before we go any further. What do you think?”

Pete whistled. “If it checks out, and the dates match, I figure we can get the boss to come along with us and go lean on Judge Judy. A break on the Phantom would be just too cool.”

“My thoughts exactly.” Mike grinned ferociously. “How well do you think we can resource this one?”

“If it’s the Phantom? Blank check time. Jesus, Mike, if this is the Phantom, I think we’ve just had the biggest break in this office in about the last twenty years. It’s going to be all over Time Magazine if this goes down!”

In the hallway outside the boardroom, the palace staff had busied themselves setting up a huge buffet. Cold cuts from a dozen game animals formed intricate sculptures of meat depicting their animate origins. Jellied larks vied with sugar-pickled fruit from the far reaches of the West Coast, and exotic delicacies imported at vast expense formed pyramids atop a row of silver platters the size of small dining tables. Hand-made Belgian truffles competed for the attention of the aristocracy with caviar-topped crackers and brightly colored packets of M&Ms.

Despite the huge expanse of food, most of the Clan shareholders had other things in mind. Though waiters with trays laden with wine glasses circulated freely—and with jugs of imported coffee and tea—the main appetite they exhibited seemed to be for speech. And speech with one or two people in particular.

“Just keep them away from me, please,” Miriam said plaintively, leaning close to Olga. “They’ll be all over me.”

“You can’t avoid them!” Olga insisted, taking her arm and steering her toward the open doors onto the reception area. “Do you want them to think you’re afraid?” she hissed in Miriam’s ear. “They’re like rats that eat their own young if they smell weakness in the litter.”

“It’s not that—I’ve got to go.” Miriam pulled back and steered Olga in turn, toward the door at the back of the boardroom where she’d seen Angbard pushing her mother’s wheelchair, ahead of the crush. Kara, her eyes wide, stuck close behind Miriam.

“Where are you going?” asked Olga.

“Follow.” Miriam pushed on.

“Eh, I say! Young woman!”

A man Miriam didn’t recognize, bulky and gray-haired, was blocking her way. Evidently he wanted to buttonhole her. She smiled blandly. “If you don’t mind, sir, there’ll be time to talk later. But I urgently need to have words with—” She gestured as she slid past him, leaving Kara to soothe ruffled feathers, and shoved the door open.

“Ma!”

It was a small side room, sparsely furnished by Clan standards. Iris looked around as she heard Miriam. Angbard looked round, too, as did a cadaverous-looking fellow with long white hair who had been hunched slightly, on the receiving end of some admonition.

“Helge,” Angbard began, in a warning tone of voice.

“Mother!” Miriam glared at Iris, momentarily oblivious.

“Hiya, kid.” Iris grinned tiredly. “Allow me to introduce you to another of your relatives. Henryk? I’d like to present my daughter.” Iris winked at Angbard: “Cut her a little slack, alright?”

The man who’d been listening to Angbard tilted his head on one shoulder. “Charmed,” he said politely.

The duke coughed into a handkerchief and cast Miriam a grim look. “You should be circulating,” he grumbled.

“Henryk was always my favorite uncle,” Iris said, glancing at the duke.

“I mean, there had to be one of them, didn’t there?”

Miriam paused uncomfortably, unwilling to meet Angbard’s gaze. Meanwhile, Henryk looked her up and down. “I see,” she said after a moment. “Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?”

“Helge.” Angbard refused to be ignored. “You should be out front. Mixing with the guests.” He frowned at her. “You know how much stock they put in appearances.” Harrumph. “This is their first sight of you. Do you want them to think you’re a puppet? Conspiring with the bench?”

“I am conspiring with you,” she pointed out. “And anyway, they’d eat me alive. You obviously haven’t done enough press conferences. You don’t throw the bait in the water if you want to pull it out intact later, do you? You’ve got to keep these things under control.”

Angbard’s frown intensified. “This isn’t a press conference; this is a beauty show,” he said. “If you do not go out there and make the right moves they will assume that you cannot. And if you can’t, what are you good for? I arranged this session at your request. The least you can do is not make a mess of it.”

“There’s going to be a vote later on,” Iris commented. “Miriam, if they think you’re avoiding them it’ll give the reactionary bastards a chance to convince the others that you’re a fraud, and that won’t go in your favor, will it?”

Miriam sighed. “That’s what I like about you, Ma, family solidarity.”

“She’s right, you know,” Henryk spoke up. “Motions will go forward. They may accept your claim of title, but not your business proposals. Not if names they know and understand oppose it, and you are not seen to confront them.”

“But they’ll—” Miriam began.

“I have a better idea!” Olga announced brightly. “Why don’t you both go forth to charm the turbulent beast?” She beamed at them both. “That way they won’t know who to confront! Like the ass that starved between two overflowing mangers.”

Iris glanced sidelong at Miriam. Was it worry? Miriam couldn’t decide. “That would never do,” she said apologetically. “I couldn’t—”

“Oh yes you can, Patricia,” Angbard said with a cold gleam in his eye.

“But if I go out there Mother will make a scene! And then—”

Miriam caught herself staring at Iris in exasperation, sensing an echo of a deeper family history she’d grown up shielded from. “The dowager will make a scene, will she?” Miriam asked, a dangerous note in her voice: “Why shouldn’t she? She hasn’t seen you for decades. Thought you were dead, probably. You didn’t get along with her when you were young, but so what? Maybe you’ll both find the anger doesn’t matter anymore. Why not try it?” She caught Angbard’s eye. Her uncle, normally stony-faced, looked positively anesthetized, as if to stifle an image-destroying outburst of laughter.

“You don’t know the old bat,” Iris warned grimly.

“She hasn’t changed,” Angbard commented. “If anything, she’s become even more set in her ways.” Harrumph. He hid his face in his handkerchief again.

“She’s been getting worse ever since she adopted that young whipper-snapper Oliver as her confidante,” Henryk mumbled vaguely. “Give me Alfredo any day, we’d have straightened him out in time—” He didn’t seem to notice Iris’s face tightening.

“Ma,” Miriam said warningly.

“Alright! That’s enough.” Iris pushed herself upright in her wheelchair, an expression of grim determination on her face. “Miriam, purely for the sake of family solidarity, you push. You, young lady, what’s your name—”

“Olga,” Miriam offered.

“—I know that, dammit! Olga, open the doors and keep the idiots from pushing me over and letting my darling daughter sneak away. Angbard—”

“I’ll start the session again in half an hour,” he said, shaking his head.

“Just remember.” He turned a cool eye on Miriam, all trace of levity gone: “It cost me a lot to set this up for you. Don’t make a mess of it.”