"Heroin overdose?" The paramedic looked startled. "But I don't have—are you sure—"
"Deliberate poisoning. Get to it." Helmut stepped aside as the medic nodded and went inside. Helmut breathed deeply, then turned to the messenger. "Here." He pulled out his notepad and scribbled a brief memo. "Tell comms to radio this to Earl-Major Riordan in day code purple, stat." The lad took the note and fled. Helmut stared after him for a moment then shook his head.
What a mess.
Poisoning and attempted matricide versus kidnapping: petty treason versus high treason. How to weigh the balance? "Jester's balls, if only I'd been delayed an hour on the road. . ."
Miriam lay in bed, propped up on a small mountain of pillows, staring blankly at the floral-patterned wallpaper behind the water jug on the dresser and thinking about death.
I never wanted it. So why am I feeling so bad?
she wondered.
What the hell is
wrong
with me?
It wasn't as if she'd wanted to have a baby: Griben ven Hjalmar's artificial insemination was, if not actual rape, then certainly morally equivalent. He—his sponsors (she shied away from thinking about them)—had wanted an heir to the throne. They'd specifically wanted
her
to bear the heir, and not trusting her to willingly have intercourse with the man they were forcing her to marry—a man who was so badly damaged by a poisoning incident in his childhood that he could barely talk—they had held her captive and committed a most unspeakable act upon her person. The irony of which was that her thirty-something womb was still fertile, but the marriage had been a most signal failure, disrupted by Prince Creon's elder brother in a spectacularly bloody putsch that ignited an all-out civil war in the Gruinmarkt. By the time the dust settled, Miriam had been three weeks pregnant, the entire royal family was dead . . . and she was carrying the heir to the throne, acknowledged by all who had survived the lethal betrothal ceremony.
She had not taken the news well; only Huw's cunning offer to help her obtain a termination—if that was what she willed—had kept her from running, and not stopping until she arrived at the nearest available abortion clinic. As the immediate rage and humiliation and dread faded, she began to reevaluate the situation: not from an American woman's perspective, but with the eyes of a Clan noblewoman catapulted headlong into the middle of a fraught political dilemma.
I don't have to love it. I don't have to raise it. I just have to put up with eight months of back pain and morning sickness and get it out of my body. And in return . . .
they'd promised her the moon on a stick: a seat at the highest table, as much power and wealth as anyone in that godforsaken mediaeval nightmare of a country could have, and most important of all,
security.
Security for herself, for her mother, for her friends. A chance to fix some of the things that were wrong with the Clan, from the inside, working with allies. Even a chance to try and do something about the bigger picture: to jump-start the process of dragging the Gruinmarkt towards modernity.
She'd signed a fraught compromise with her conscience. Perhaps she was just rationalizing her situation, even succumbing to Stockholm syndrome—the tendency of the abducted to empathize with their kidnappers—and while she hated what had been done to her, she was no longer eager to dispose of the unwanted pregnancy. She'd done it before, many years ago; it had been difficult, the situation looming no less inconveniently in a life turned upside down, but she'd persevered. She'd even, a year ago, harbored wistful thoughts about finding a Mr. Right and—
Her body had betrayed her.
I'm thirty-five, damn it.
Not an ideal age to be pregnant, especially in a mediaeval backwater without rapid access to decent medical care. Especially in the middle of a civil war with enemies scheming for her demise, or worse. She'd been stressed, anxious, frightened, and still in the first trimester: and when the cramps began she'd ignored them, refusing to admit what was happening.
And now it's not going to happen.
The royal dynasty that had ruled the Gruinmarkt for the past century and a half had bled out in a bedpan in New Britain, while the soldiers watched their maps and the nobles schemed. It wasn't much worse than a heavy period (aside from the pain, and the shock, and the sudden sense of horror as a sky full of cloud-castle futures evaporated). But it was a death sentence, and not just for the dynastic plans of the conservative faction.
She'd managed to hold her face together until she was away from Riordan's headquarters, with Brill's support. Ridden piggyback across to a farmhouse in the countryside outside small-town Framingham—not swallowed by Boston's suburbs, in New Britain's contorted history—that Sir Alasdair had located: abandoned, for reasons unclear, but not decayed.
"We've got to keep you away from court, my lady," Brill explained, hollow-eyed with exhaustion, as she steered her up the staircase to an underfurnished bedroom. It had been a day since the miscarriage: a day of heavy bleeding, with the added discomfort of a ride in an oxcart through the backwoods around Niejwein. She'd begun shivering with the onset of a mild fever, not taking it all in, anomalously passive. "When word gets out all hell will follow soon enough, but we can buy time first. Miriam? How do you feel?"
Miriam had licked her lips. "Freezing," she complained. "Need water." She'd pulled the bedding over her shoulders, curling up beneath without removing her clothes.
"I'll get a doctor," Brill had said. And that was about the last thing Miriam remembered clearly for the next forty-eight hours. Her fever banished by bootleg drugs—amoxycillin was
eerily effective in a world that hadn't been overexposed to antibiotics—she lay abed, weak but recovering. Brilliana had held the center of her world, drafting in her household staff as they surfaced after the coup, organizing a courier link to the Niejwein countryside, turning her muttered suggestions into firm orders issued in the name of the security directorate's highest office.
I don't deserve these people,
Miriam thought vaguely. Depression stalked her waking hours incessantly, and her mood fluctuated from hour to hour: She couldn't tell from moment to moment whether she was relieved or bereft.
Why do they put up with me? Can't do
anything
right. Can't build a business, can't have a baby, can't even stay awake—
There was a knock at the door.
She cleared her throat. "Enter." Her voice creaked like a rusting hinge, underused.
The door opened. "Miriam?"
She turned her head. "Ah! Sir Huw." She cleared her throat again. "Sorry. Not been well." Huw was still wearing Gruinmarktcasuaclass="underline" leather leggings, linen blouson. She saw another face behind him: "And, and Elena? Hello, come on in. Sorry I can't be more hos, hospitable." She tried to sit up.
"Your Majesty!" trilled Elena. Miriam tried not to wince. "Oh, you look so ill—"
"It's not that bad," she interrupted, before the girl—Girl?
By Clan standards she's overdue to be
married—started gushing. "I had a fever," she added, to Huw. "Caught something nasty while I was having the miscarriage. Or maybe I miscarried because . . ." She trailed off. "How have you been?" she added.
When at a loss for small talk, ask a leading question.
That was what her mother, Iris—or Patricia, to her long-lost family—had brought her up to do. Once, it had made for a career—
Huw took a deep breath. "We found more," he said, holding up three fingers. "And two viable knots. Then all hell broke loose and we only just got here." He grinned, much too brightly.