"Milady? If it would please you to take my hand-" he answered in English, accented but comprehensible.
She made it down the steps without embarrassing herself. "Sieur Huw, how kind of you." She managed to smile. Huw was another of those interchangeable youngbloods who infested Clan security, hot-headed adolescent duelists who would have been quite intolerable had Angbard not the means to tame them. When they grew up sufficiently to stop seeking any excuse for a brawl they could be useful: those who had two brain cells to rub together, doubly so. Huw was one of the latter, but Helge had only met him in passing and barely had his measure. Beanpole thin and tall, with brown hair falling freely below his shoulders and a receding chin to spoil what might otherwise have been rugged good looks, Huw moved with a dangerous economy of motion that suggested to those in his path that they had best find business elsewhere. But he wore neither sword nor gun at his belt today. Bearing arms in the presence of the king was a privilege reserved for the royal household and its guards. "Where's everything happening?" she asked him out of the side of her mouth.
"Around the garden at the back. Most notables have arrived already but you are by no means late. We can go through the north wing, if you want to give the impression you've been here discreetly all along," he offered.
"I suppose you were looking for me," she said, half-jokingly.
"As a matter of fact"-his gaze slid across the footmen holding the huge doors open for them-"I was." He nodded, a minute gesture toward a bow, as he crossed the threshold, then paused to bow fully before the coat of arms displayed above the floor. Miriam-remembering her manners as Helge-dropped a brief curtsey. Are we being watched? she wondered. Then, sharply, Who told Huw to wait for me? Huw waited for her politely, then offered his arm. She took it, and they walked together into the central hall of the north wing of the Östhalle.
The hall was a hollow cube, the walls supporting a wide staircase that meandered upward past three more floors beneath a ceiling glazed with a duke's fortune in lead crystal. Other rooms barely smaller than aircraft hangars opened off to either side, their windows open to admit the last of the evening sunlight. Discreet servants were already moving around the edges, lighting lamps and chandeliers. Others, bearing platters loaded with finger food, moved among the guests. More youngbloods, looking slightly anxious without their swords. Clusters of women in silks and furs, glittering with jewelry, enthusiastic girls shepherded by cynical matrons, higher orders attended by their ladies-in-waiting. Countess Helge paid barely any attention to her own retinue beyond a quick check that Lady Kara and Lady Souterne and Kara's maid Jenny and Souterne's maid whoever-she-was were following. "I'm sure there are more interesting people for you to wait upon," she said quietly, pitching her voice so that only Huw might hear it over the chatter of conversations around them. "I'm just a boring dried-up old countess with poor manners and a sideline in business journalism."
"Ha-ha. I don't think so. Your ladyship is modest beyond reproach. Would your ladyship care for an aperient?" He snapped his fingers at a servant bearing a salver laden with glasses.
"Obviously my company is so boring that it's driving you to drink already," she said with a smile.
"Milady?" He held a glass out for her.
"Thank you." Helge accepted the offered glass and sniffed. Sherry, or something not unlike it. A slight undertone of honeysuckle. Would they serve fortified wines here? "You were looking for me," she said, gently steering him back toward the far side of the hall and the garden party beyond. "Are you going to keep me on tenterhooks, wondering why?"
Huw sniffed, his nostrils flaring. "I do confess that you would have to ask her grace the duchess for an explanation," he said blandly. "It was at her urging that I made myself available. I'm sure she has her reasons." He smiled, trying for urbanity and coming dangerously close to a smirk. "Perhaps she thought that a, ah, 'boring dried-up old countess with poor manners and a sideline in business journalism' might need a young beau on whose arm she might lean, thereby inducing paroxysms of jealousy among the youngsters who feel themselves snubbed, or among those pullets who would imagine her a rival for their roosters?"
He repeated me word-perfect, she thought, so astonished that she forgot herself and half-drained her glass instead of sipping from it. (It was a dry sherry, or something very similar. Too dry for her taste.) He looks like a chinless wonder with a line of witty patter but he's got a memory like a computer. She raised one eyebrow at him. "I'm not in the market," she said, slowly and clearly.
"I beg your pardon?" He sounded genuinely confused, so that for a moment Helge almost relented. But the setup was too perfect.
"I said, I'm not in the marriage market," she repeated. "So I'm no threat to anyone." With some satisfaction she noticed his cheeks flush. "Nice wine. Fancy another one?" If I'm going to be a boring dried-up old countess with poor manners I might as well make the most of it, she resolved. Otherwise the evening promised to drag.
"I think I will," he said hesitantly. "I beg your pardon, I intended no disrespect."
"None taken." She finished her glass. Better drink the next one more slowly.
"Her grace observed that you were looking for gentles with an interest in the sciences," Huw commented, half-turning to snag a fresh glass so that she had to strain to hear him. "Is that so?"
Oh. The penny dropped and Miriam felt like kicking Helge for a moment. Trying to be two people at once was so confusing! "Maybe," she said guardedly. "I'm thinking about trying to get a discussion group going. Just people talking to each other. Why do you ask?"
He shrugged. "I was hoping-well. I'm going stale here. You know about the heightened security state, I believe? I don't know much about your background-I was forced to interrupt my studies and return here." He grimaced. "It's summer recess on the other side, so I'm not losing much ground-except access to the labs and to the college facilities-but if it goes on much longer I'm going to have to take a year out. And you're right in one supposition, my father's been pressing me to complete my studies and settle down, take a wife, and accept a postal rank. It's only the generosity of the debatable society that's allowed me to keep working on my thesis this far."
"Uh-huh." Miriam, wearing the Helge identity like a formal dress, steered her interviewee around a small knot of talkative beaux and through a wide-open doorway, through a state dining room where a table set for fifty waited beneath a chandelier loaded with a hundred candles. "Well, I don't know that I could say anything on your behalf that would help you-but if it's any consolation, I know the feeling. We're cut off and isolated here. For all that we're a social elite, the intellectual climate isn't the most stimulating. I was hoping to find people who'd be interested in helping organize a series of monthly lectures and weekly study group meetings. What were-are-you studying?"
"I'm midway through a master's in media arts and sciences," Huw admitted, sounding slightly bashful about it. "Working on fabrication design templates."
"Oh." It sounded deathly boring. Miriam switched off as they threaded their way around a gaggle of female courtiers attending on some great lady. "What does that involve? What college did you say you were studying at?"
"The MIT Media Lab. We're working on a self-contained tool kit for making modern electronic devices in the field-I say! Are you all right?"
Miriam wordlessly passed him her glass then fumbled with a silk handkerchief for a few seconds. "I'm. Okay. I think." Apart from the aftereffects of wine inhalation. She dabbed at her sleeve, but the worst seemed to have missed it. "Tell me more . . ."
"Sure. I'm doing a dissertation project on the fab lab-it's a workbench and tool kit that's designed to do for electronics what a blacksmith's forge or a woodworking shop does for ironmongery or carpentry. You'll be able to make a radio, or an oscilloscope, or a protocol analyzer or computer, all in the field. Initially it'll be able to make all of its own principal modules from readily available components like FPGAs and PCB stock-we're working with the printable circuitry team who're
trying to use semiconductor inks in bubble-jet printers to print on paper, for example. I was looking into some design modularity issues-to be blunt, I want to be able to take one home with me. But there's a long way to go-"
By the time they fetched up in the huge marquee at the rear of the palace, two drinks and forty-something invitations later, Miriam was feeling more than a little light-headed. But her imagination was running full tilt; Huw had taken to the idea of monthly seminars like a duck to water and suggested half a dozen names of likely participants along the way, all of them young inner family intellects, frustrated and stifled by the culture of conservativism that infused the Clan's structures. Most of them were actively pursuing higher education in America, but had been blocked off from their studies by the ongoing security alert. Most of them were names she'd never heard of, second sons or third daughters of unexceptional lineage-not the best and the brightest whose dossiers Kara was familiarizing her with. Huw knew them by way of something he called the debating society, which seemed to be a group of old drinking buddies who occasionally clubbed together to sponsor a gifted but impecunious student. It was, Miriam reflected, absolutely typical of the Clan that the sons and daughters with an interest in changing the way their society worked were the ones who were furthest from the levers of power, their education left to the grace and charity of dilettantes.
Most of the introductions were not Clan-related in any way, however. As the evening continued, both her smile and her ability to stay in character as the demure blue-blooded Countess Helge became increasingly strained. Huw had other obligations of a social nature to fulfill and took his leave sooner than she'd have liked, leaving her to face the crowds with only occasional support from Kara. Sieur Hyvert of this and Countess Irina of that bowed and curtseyed respectively and addressed her in hochsprache (and once, in the case of a rural backwoods laird in loewsprache, confusing her completely), and as the evening wore on she was gripped with a worrying conviction that she was increasingly being greeted with the kindly condescension due an idiot, a mental defective-by those who were willing to speak to her at all. There were political currents here that she was not competent to navigate unaided. English was not the language of the upper class but the tongue the Clan families used among themselves, and her lack of fluency in hochsprache marked her out as odd, or stupid, or (worst of all) alien. Some of the older established nobility seemed to take the ascendancy of the Clan families as a personal affront. After one particularly pained introduction, she stifled a wince and turned round to hunt for her lady-in-waiting.
"Kara? Where are-" she began, sticking to hochsprache, that particular phrase coming more easily than most, when she realized that a knot of courtiers standing nearby was coming her way. They were mostly young, and all male, and their loud chatter and raucous laughter caught Miriam's attention in a way that was at once naggingly familiar and unwelcome. Shit, Kara, you pick your time to go missing beautifully. She glanced round, ready to retreat, but there was no easy way out of the path of the gaggle of jocks-
One of whom was speaking to her. "What?" she said blankly, all vestiges of hochsprache vanishing from her memory like the morning dew.
He glanced over his shoulder and said something: more laughter, with an unfriendly edge to it. "You are-wrong, the wrong, place," he said, staring down his nose at her. "Go home, grovel, bitch." Someone behind him said something in hochsprache.
Miriam glared at him. Rudeness needed no translation. And backing down wouldn't guarantee safety. Her heart hammering, she fumbled for words: "What dog, are, belong you, do you belong to? I am offense-"
Almost too late she saw his hand tightening on the hilt of his sword. A sword? Surprise almost drowned her fear-swords were forbidden in the royal presence, except by the bodyguard. But this wasn't the king's party. The arrogant young asshole began to turn to one side and she realized hazily that he wasn't about to draw on her-not in public-as she got a glimpse past his shoulder of a bored, half-amused golden-boy profile she'd seen once before, saying something to her assailant. Oh shit, it's him. Egon. The crown prince, handsome and perfect in form and a spoiled hothead by upbringing. The bottom threatened to drop out of her world: this perfect jock could literally get away with murder, if he was so inclined.
"He says, you bed him, maybe he not kill you when he king, bitch." Two other bravos, brilliantly dressed, managed to interpose themselves between the self-appointed translator and his pack leader. "With the others."
A black fury threatened to cut off Miriam's vision. "Tell him to get lost," she said sharply, in English, dropping all pretense of politeness. If you surrender they'll own you, she thought bleakly, forcing her momentarily treacherous knees to hold her upright. And if you won't surrender they'll try to break you. "I'm not his-"
"You are the Countess Helge voh Thorold d'Hjorth?" someone behind her shoulder asked in stilted English. She glanced round, her heart hammering in barely suppressed anger. While the jocks made sport she'd completely missed the other group that appeared to want something of her: two gentlemen with the bearing of bodyguards, shepherding four maids who clustered around a stooped figure, moving with exaggerated caution.
"I-" Trapped between the two factions she summoned up Helge, who racked her brain for the correct form of response. "I am that one," she managed, flustered.
"Good. You are-" Then she lost him. The guard spoke too fast for her to track his words, syllables sliding into one another.
She forced a smile, tense and ugly, then stole a glance back over her shoulder, lest one of Egon's thugs was about to stick a knife in her back. But they were talking and joking about something else, their attention no longer focused on her like hunting dogs. "I beg your pardon. Please to repeat this?"
The guard stepped around her. "I'll take care of the boys," he said quietly. Louder: "This is her royal highness, the Queen Mother. She would have words with you."
"I, ah-" hope she's not as rude as her eldest grandson. Numb with surprise, Helge managed a curtsey. "Am it pleased by your presence, your royal high! Highness," she managed before she completely lost her ability to stay in character.
The stooped figure reached out a hand to her. "Rise."
Shit, she swore to herself. How much worse can it get? The one situation where I need backup-a royal audience-comes up twice, and what's Kara doing? "Your majesty," she said, bending to kiss the offered hand.
The Queen Mother resembled Mother Theresa of Calcutta-if the latter had ever sported a huge Louis Quinze hairdo and about a hundred yards of black silk taffeta held together with large ruby- and sapphire-encrusted lumps of gold. Her eyes were sunken and watery with rheum, and her face was gaunt, the skin drawn tight over her beak of a nose. She looked to be eighty years old, but having been presented before her son, Miriam reckoned she couldn't be much over sixty. "Rise, I said," the Queen Mother croaked in hochsprache. Then in English: "You shall call me Angelin. And I shall call you Helge."
"I-" Miriam blanked for a moment. It was just one shock too many. "Yes, Angelin." You're the king's mother-you can call me anything you like and I'm not going to talk back. She took a deep breath. (As Roland had put it, his majesty Alexis Nicholau III of the Kingdom of Gruinmerkt liked to collect jokes about his family-he had two dungeons full of them.) "What can I-I'm at your service-I mean-"
The Queen Mother's face wrinkled. After a moment Miriam realized she was smiling. At least she isn't howling, "Off with her head!" "What you're wondering is, why do I speak this language?" Miriam nodded mutely, still numb and shaken by the confrontation with Egon's bravos. "It's a long story." The older woman sighed breathily. "Walk with me, please."
Angelin was stooped, her back so bent that she had to crane her neck back to see the ground ahead of her. And she walked at a painful shuffle. Miriam matched her speed, feeling knuckles like walnuts in an empty leather glove clutch at her arm. I'm being honored, she realized. Royalty didn't stoop to using just anyone as a walking frame. After a moment a long-dormant part of her mem
ory kicked into life: Ankylosing spondylitis? she wondered. If so, it was a miracle Angelin was out of bed without painkillers and antiinflammatory drugs.
"I knew your mother when she was a little girl," said the queen. Shuffle, pant. "Delightful girl, very strong-willed." She said "I." That means she's talking personally, doesn't it? Or is it only the reigning monarch who says 'we'? If that applies here? Miriam puzzled as the queen continued: "Glad to see they haven't drowned it out of her. Have they?"
That seemed to demand a reply. "I don't think so, your royal highness." Shuffle.
"Oh, they'll try," Angelin added unreassuringly. "Just like last time."
Like what? Miriam bit her tongue. Her head was spinning with questions, fear and anger demanding attention, and the small of her back was slippery-cold with sweat. Angelin was steering her toward a side door in the palace, and her ladies-in-waiting and guards were screening her most effectively. If Kara had noticed anything-but Kara wasn't in sight and Miriam didn't dare create a scene by looking for her. "Is there anything I can do for you?" Miriam asked, desperately looking for a tactful formula, something to help her steer the conversation toward waters she was competent to navigate.
"Perhaps." The door opened before them as if by magic, to reveal a small vestibule. Four more guards waited on either side of a thronelike chair. A padded stool sat before it. "Please be seated in our presence." Two of the guards stepped forward to cradle the old queen's shoulders, while a third positioned the stool beneath her. "Take the chair; I cannot use it."
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