The Trade of Queens (15 page)

“Yes.” Hildegarde looked smug. “Who do you think taunted Egon about his younger brother's marriage? Someone had to do it—otherwise we'd never have pried his useless ass off the throne! It would have set us back at least two generations.”

Patricia picked up her wineglass and drained it for the second time. “Mother, I have a confession to make. Miriam once told me she thought you were a scheming bitch, and I'm afraid I defended your honor. I take it all back. You're completely insane.”

“Let us pray that it runs in the family, then. As for your confession—consider yourself forgiven. I shall be relying on your cunning once I surrender to you, you realize.” Hildegarde reached out and pulled the bell rope—“
More wine, damn your eyes!
I insist on getting drunk with my daughter at least once before I die. Yes, I'm insane. If insanity is defined by wanting to put my great-grandchild on the throne, I'm mad. If it's crazy to want to strangle the ghouls that crowd the royal crib and break the private army that threatens our autonomy, I'm all of that. I bent the Clan and the Kingdom to serve you and your line, Patricia, and I find at the end of my days that I regret nothing. So. Once you are in charge of the Clan, what do you think you will do with it?”

“I haven't made my confession yet, Mother.” Patricia looked at the dowager oddly. “It would have been good to have had this heart-to-heart a little earlier—perhaps a year ago. I'm afraid we're both too late.…”

*   *   *

An hour after Miriam and her guards and allies arrived at the farmstead, the place was abuzz with Clan Security. There were several safe transfer locations in the state forest, and one of Earl-Major Riordan's first orders had been to summon every available soldier—not already committed to point defense or the pursuit of the renegade elements of the Postal Service and the Conservative Club—to establish a security cordon.

Miriam, sick at heart, sat in one corner of the command post, listening—the fast, military hochsprache was hard to follow, and she was catching perhaps one word in three, but she could follow the general sense of the discussion—and watching as Riordan took reports and consulted with Olga and issued orders, as often as not by radio to outlying sites. The headquarters troops had set up a whole bunch of card indexes and a large corkboard, startlingly prosaic in a field headquarters in a fire-damaged farmhouse, and were keeping a written log of every decision Riordan handed down. A hanging list of index cards had gone up on one wall, each card bearing a name: Baron Henryk, Baron Oliver, Dowager Duchess Thorold-Hjorth. Miriam carefully avoided trying to read the handwritten annotations whenever a clerk updated one of them. Ringleaders they might be, and in some cases bitter enemies, but they were all people she knew, or had known, at court. A similar list hung on the opposite wall, and it was both longer and less frequently updated—known allies and their disposition.

“Why not computerize?” she'd asked Brill, in a quiet moment when the latter had sat down on the bench beside her with a mug of coffee.

“Where are we going to get the electricity to run the computer from?” Brill replied, shrugging. “Batteries need charging, generators need fuel. Best not to make hostages to fate. Besides,” she glanced sidelong at the communications specialist bent over the radio, “computers come with their own problems. They make treachery easier. And it's a small enough squabble that we don't need them.”

“But the Clan—” Miriam stopped.

“We know all the main players. By name and by face. We know most of our associates, too.” The world-walkers, children of latent, outer-family lines, not yet fully integrated into the Clan of which they were branches. “We are few enough that this will be over—” Brill stopped. The communications specialist had stood up, hunching over his set. Suddenly he swore, and waved urgently at Olga. Olga hurried over; a moment later Riordan joined her.

“What's going on?” Miriam stood up.

“I don't know.” Brill's face was expressionless. “Nothing good by the look of it.”

Olga turned towards them, mouthed something. She looked appalled.

“Tell me,” Miriam demanded, raising her voice against the general hubbub of urgent questions and answers.

Olga took two steps towards her. “I am very sorry, my lady,” she said woodenly.

“It's Plan Blue?”

Olga nodded. “It is all over the television channels,” she added softly. “Two nuclear explosions. In Washington.”

For a moment everything in Miriam's vision was as gray as ash. She must have staggered, for Brilliana caught her elbow. “What.” She swallowed. “How bad?”

“We do not know yet, my lady. That news is still in the pipeline. We have”—she gestured at the radio bench—“other urgent priorities right now. But there are reports of many casualties.”

Miriam swallowed again. Her stomach clenched. “Was this definitely the work of, of the conservative faction?”

“It is reasonable to suppose so, but we can't be certain yet.” Olga was peering at her, worried. “My lady, what do you—”

“Because if it was their doing, if it was anything to do with the Clan, then we are
fucked
.” She could see it in her mind's eye, mushroom clouds rising over the Capitol, and a bleak vision of a future far more traumatic than anything she'd ever imagined. “We're about to lose all access to the United States. They won't rest until they've found a way to come over here and chase us down and kill us. There won't be anywhere we can run to in their world or this one that's far enough away for safety.”

“Even if it was not Baron Hjorth's doing, even if we had nothing to do with it, we would not be secure,” Brilliana pointed out. “We know that the vice president has reason to want us dead. This could be some other's work, and he would still send his minions to hunt us.”

“Shit.” Miriam swallowed again, feeling the acid tang of bile at the back of her mouth. “Think I'm going to throw up.”

“This way, milady”—everyone was solicitous towards the mother-to-be, Miriam noted absentmindedly, up to and including making decisions on her behalf, as if she were a passive object with no will of her own—

It was raining outside, and the stench from the latrines round the side of the house completed the job that the news and the anxiety and the morning sickness had started. Her stomach cramped as she doubled over, spitting bile, and waited for the shooting pain in her gut to subside. Brill waited outside, leaving her a token space.
I'm alone,
she realized despondently.
Alone, surrounded by allies and sworn vassals, some of whom consider themselves my friends. I don't think any of them truly understand.
… Her thoughts drifted back towards the sketchily described horrors unfolding down south, and her stomach clenched again. By the time she finished, she found she had regained a modicum of calm.
They don't know what's going to happen,
she realized.
But I do.
Miriam had been living in Boston through the crazy days that followed 9/11. And she'd seen the glassy-eyed lockstep to the drumbeat of war that followed, seen the way everybody rallied to the flag. In the past few weeks and months, a tenuous skepticism had been taking hold, but nothing could be better calculated to extinguish it than a terrorist outrage to dwarf the fall of the Twin Towers. The only question was how long it would take the US military to gear up for an invasion, and she had an uneasy feeling that they were already living on borrowed time.

“Milady?” It was Brill.

“I'm better. For now.” Miriam waved off her offered hand and took a deep breath of rain-cleansed air. “I'm going to lie down. But. I need to know how bad it is, what the bastards have done. And as soon as Riordan and Olga have a free minute I need to talk to them.”

“But they're going to be—” Brill stopped. “What do you need to distract them with?”

“The evacuation plan,” Miriam said bluntly.

“What plan—”

“The one we need to draw up
right now
to get everyone across to New Britain. Because if we don't”—she raised her head, stared across the seared fields towards the tree line at the edge of the cleared area—“we're dead, or worse. I know what my people—sorry, the Americans—are capable of. We don't stand a chance if we stay here. One way or another, the Clan is finished with the Gruinmarkt; this whole stupid cockamamie scheme to put a baby on the throne is pointless now. The only question is which direction we run.”

*   *   *

A steady stream of couriers, security staff, and refugees trickled into the farmstead over the hours following Miriam's evacuation. By midafternoon, Earl Riordan had sent out levies to round up labor from the nearest villages, and by sunset a large temporary camp was taking shape, patrolled by guards with assault rifles. The farm itself was receiving a makeover in the shape of a temporary royal residence: However humble it might be by comparison with the palaces of Niejwein, it was far better than the tents and improvised bivouacs of the soldiers.

Despite her ongoing nausea, Miriam followed Riordan and Olga and their staff when they moved into a pavilion beside the farmhouse. “You should be lying down, taking things easy,” Brilliana said, halfheartedly trying to divert her.

“The hell with that.” Miriam glared at her. “These are my people, aren't they? I need to be here.”
And I need to know
 … The sense of dread gnawing at her guts was beyond awful.

In late afternoon, despite the apparent defection of most of the Clan postal office's lords to the traitors' side—at least, it was hard to put any other interpretation on their total failure to comply with the executive head of Clan Security's increasingly heated orders to report—they managed to establish a solid radio network with the other security sites in the Gruinmarkt; and the New York office was still sufficiently functional to arrange a three-hourly courier run with digital video tapes from the Anglischprache world's news feeds. Shortwave and FM didn't have the bandwidth to play back video, but the headlines off the wire services were more than enough to make Miriam sick to her stomach and leave Brilliana and Sir Alasdair anxious for her health.

REUTERS: THIRD ATOMIC WEAPON FAILS TO DETONATE AT PENTAGON

AP: FLIGHTS, STOCK MARKET TRADING SUSPENDED INDEFINITELY

REUTERS: VICE PRESIDENT SWORN IN AS WHITE HOUSE CONFIRMED DESTROYED: PRESIDENT WAS “AT HOME”

UPI: IRAN CONDEMNS “FOOLISH AND ILL-ADVISED” ATTACK

REUTERS: SADR LEADS NIGHTTIME DEMONSTRATION IN BAGHDAD: MILLION PROTESTORS IN FIRDOS SQUARE

AP: PRESIDENT TO ADDRESS NATION

But there was even more important news.

At first there was nothing more than a knot of turmoil around the table where Olga and three clerical assistants were coordinating intelligence reports and updating the list of known survivors and victims of the coup attempt. “I don't believe it,” said Sir Alasdair, making his way back towards Miriam. “It can't be a coincidence!” His expression was glazed, distant.

“What's happened?” Brill, who had been leaning over a clipboard crossing off the names of couriers who had made too many crossings for the day, looked up at the tone in Miriam's voice.

“The duke,” said Sir Alasdair. He cleared his throat. “I am very sorry, my lady. Your uncle. The latest report from the clinic says. Um. He went into cardiac arrest this morning.”

“This
morning
?” Miriam caught Brilliana staring at her. She clutched the arm of her folding director's chair. “Can't be. Can't possibly be. Are they
sure
?” She swallowed. Angbard, the thin white duke: For over thirty years he'd been the guiding will behind the Clan Security operation, the hand that held the reins binding the disparate squabbling families together. Since his stroke two months ago his duties had been carved up and assigned to Olga and Riordan, but not without question or challenge: The Clan Council was not eager to see any individual ever again wield that much power. “He's dead?” She heard her voice rising and raised a hand to cover her mouth.

“If it's a coincidence I'll eat this table. I'm sorry, my lady,” Sir Alasdair added, “but it can't possibly be an accident. Not with a revolt in progress and, and the other news. From the Americans.”

“Brill, I'm sorry—” Miriam's voice broke. Angbard hadn't
felt
like an uncle to her—more like a scary Mafia godfather who, for no obvious reason, had taken a liking to her—but he'd been a huge influence on Brilliana.
And Olga,
Miriam reminded herself.
Shit.
“Is there any word on who killed him? Because when we find them—”

“It wasn't a killing, according to the clinic,” Sir Alasdair reminded her. “Although it beggars belief to suppose it a coincidence, for now it must needs be but one more insult to avenge at our convenience. One of our doctors was in attendance, Dr. ven Hjalmar—”

“Shit.
Shit.
” Miriam clenched her fist. Brill was watching her, a dangerous light in her eyes.

Sir Alasdair paused. “Is there a problem?” he asked.

“Dr. ven Hjalmar is a wanted man,” Brilliana said, her tone colorless.

“Very,” Miriam added, her voice cracking. “Sir Alasdair. Should you or your men find Dr. ven Hjalmar … I will sleep better for knowing that he's dead.”

Sir Alasdair nodded. “I'm sure that can be arranged.” He paused. “Is there a reason?”

Brilliana cleared her throat. “A necessary and sufficient one that need not concern you further. Oh, and his murder of Duke Angbard should be sufficient, should it not?”

“Ah—really?” Sir Alasdair's eyebrow rose. “Well, if you say so—” He noticed Miriam's expression. “You're sure?”

“Very sure,” she said flatly.