“I . . . I’ll try.” Helge fanned herself weakly in the warm, clammy air and tried to relax. “I’ll try to be me. For the evening.”
“That’s perfect!” Brilliana smiled warmly. “Now, the high points. You’ve met his royal highness, the princes Egon and Creon, and the Queen Mother. But this evening you’re also likely to encounter his grace the Prince of Eijnmyrk and his wife, Princess Ikarie—his majesty’s youngest sister—and the Duke du Tostvijk. Main thing to remember is that his grace the prince’s marriage is what you would term morganatic. Then there are the high ministers and his holiness the Autonomé du Roma, high priest of Lightning Child . . .”
An intimate informal household entertainment—by the standards of the social world of the Niejwein aristocracy it was, indeed, uncomfortably small. Helge was introduced to one smiling face after another, assessed like a prize brood mare, forced to make small talk in her halting hochsprache, and stared at in mild disbelief, like a talking horse or a counting pig. At the end of it all her head was spinning with the effort of trying to remember who everybody was and how she was meant to address them. And then the moment she’d been secretly dreading arrived: “Ah, how charmed we are to see you again,” said the short, portly fellow with the rosy bloom of broken blood vessels around his nose and the dauntingly heavy gold chain draped around his shoulders. He swayed slightly as if tired or slightly drunk. Helge managed to curtsey before him without saying anything. “Been what, half a year?”
Helge nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Last time they’d met he’d made her an offer which, in all probability, had been kindly meant.
“Walk with us,” said his royal highness, Alexis Nicholau III, in a tone of voice that brooked no objection.
There was a state dining room beyond the doors at the end of the gallery, but Alexis drifted slowly toward a side door instead. Two lords or captains or bodyguards of rank followed discreetly, while a third slipped ahead to open the door. “Haven’t seen much of you at court, these past six months,” remarked the king. “Pressure of work, we understand.” He rubbed the side of his nose morosely, then glanced at the nearest guard. “Glass of sack for the lady, Hildt.” The guard vanished. “We hear a bit about you from our man Henryk. Nothing too extreme.” He looked amused about something—amused, and determined.
Helge quailed inside. King Alexis might be plump, short, and drunk, but he was the king. “What can I do for your majesty?” she managed to ask.
“Six months.” The guard returned, extended a glass of amber fortified wine for the king—and, an afterthought, a smaller fluted glass for Helge. “Just about any situation can change in six months, don’t you know. Back then I said you were too old. Seems everyone is too old these days, or otherwise unsuitable, or married.” He raised an eyebrow at her. “Wouldn’t do to marry a young maid to the Idiot—come now, do you think I don’t know what my own subjects call my youngest son?”
“I’ve never met the . . . uh, met Creon,” Helge said carefully. “At least, not to talk to. Is he, really?” She’d seen him before, at court. Prince Creon took after his father in looks, except that his father didn’t drool on his collar. “My duties kept me away from court so much that I know too little—I mean to cause no offense—”
“Of course he’s an idiot,” Alexis said grimly. “And the worst is, he need not have been. A tragedy of birth gifted him with a condition called, by the Clan’s doctors, PKU. We knew this, for our loyal subjects render their services to the crown without stint. One can live with it, we are told, without problems, if one restricts the diet carefully.”
Aspartame poisoning? For a moment Helge was fully Miriam. Miriam, who had completed pre-med before switching educational tracks. She knew enough about hereditary diseases—of which phenylketonuria was quite a common one—to guess the rest of the story. “Someone in the kitchen added a sweetener to his diet while he was an infant?” she hazarded.
“Oh yes,” breathed the king, and for an instant Miriam caught a flicker of the rage bottled up behind his calm face. She flinched. “By the time the plot was exposed he was . . . as you see. Ruined. And the irony of it is, he is the one who inherited his grandmother’s trait. My wife”—for a moment the closed look returned—“never learned this. She died not long after, heartbroken. And now the doctors have discovered a way of knowing, and they say Creon is a carrier while my golden boy, my Egon—is not.”
“How can they tell?” Helge asked artlessly, then concealed her expression with her glass.
“In the past year, they have developed a new blood test.” Alexis was watching her expression, she realized, and felt her cheeks flush. “They can tell which child born of a world-walker and an—a, another—inherit the trait, and which do not. Creon is, the duke your uncle tells me, a carrier. His children, by a wife from the Clan, would be world-walkers. And unless the doctors conspire to make it so, they would not inherit his condition.”
“I—understand,” Helge managed, almost stammering with embarrassment. How do I talk my way out of this? she asked herself, with growing horror. I can’t tell the king to fuck off—how much does he know about me? Does he know about Ben and Rita? Ben, her ex-husband, and Rita, her adopted-out daughter. Not to mention the other boyfriends she’d had since Ben, up to and including Roland. Would that work? Don’t royal brides have to be virgins or something, or is that only for the crown prince? “It must be a dilemma for you.”
“You have become a matter of some small interest to us,” Alexis said, smiling, as he took her elbow and gently steered her, unresisting, back toward the door and the dinner party. “Pray sit at my left side and delight me with inconsequentialities over supper. You need not worry about Mother, she won’t trouble you tonight with her schemes. You have plenty of time to consider how to help us with our little headache. And think,” the king added quietly, as the door opened before them and everybody turned to bow or curtsey to him, “of the compensations that being a princess would bring you.”
INTERNMENT
It had been twelve weeks, and Matt was already getting stir-crazy.
“I’m bored,” he announced from the sofa at the far side of the room. He looked moody, as well he might. “You keep me down here for weeks, months—no news! I hear no things about how my case is progressing, just endless questions, ‘what is this’ and ‘what is that.’ And now this dictionary! What is a man to do?”
“I feel your pain.” Mike frowned. Has it only been twelve weeks? That was how long they’d been holding Matt. For the first couple of weeks they’d kept him in a DEA safe house, but then they’d transferred him here—to a windowless apartment hastily assembled in the middle of an EMCON cell occupying the top floor of a rented office block. Matt’s world had narrowed until it consisted of an efficiency filled with blandly corporate Sears-catalog furniture, home electronics from Costco, and soft furnishings and kitchenware from IKEA. A prison cell, in other words, but a comfortably furnished one.
Smith had been quite insistent on the prisoner’s isolation; there wasn’t even a television in the apartment, just a flat-screen DVD player and a library of disks. A team of decorators from spook central had wallpapered the rooms outside the apartment with fine copper mesh: there were guards on the elevator bank. The kitchenette had a microwave oven, a freezer with a dozen flavors of ready meal, and plastic cutlery in case the prisoner tried to kill himself. Nobody wanted to take any chances with losing Matthias.