Helge nodded. “Yes, Iris.”
The duchess reached over and swatted her lightly on the arm. “Patricia! Say my full name.”
“Ah—” Helge met her gaze. “Alright. Your grace is the honorable duchess Patricia voh Hjorth d’Wu ab Thorold.” With mild rebellion: “also known as Iris Beckstein, of 34 Coffin Street—”
“That’s enough!” Her mother nodded sharply. “Put the rest behind you for the time being. Until—unless—we can ever go back, the memories can do nothing but hurt you. You’ve got to live in the present. And the present means living among the Clan and deporting yourself as a, a countess. Because if you don’t do that, all the alternatives on offer are drastically worse. This isn’t a rich world, like America. Most women only have one thing to trade: as a lady of the Clan you’re lucky enough to have two, even three if you count the contents of your head. But if you throw away the money and the power that goes with being of the Clan, you’ll rapidly find out just what’s under the surface—if you survive long enough.”
“But there’s no limit to the amount of shit!” She burst out, then clapped a hand to her face as if to recall the unladylike expostulation.
“Don’t chew your nails, dear,” her mother said automatically.
It had started in mid-morning. Miriam (who still found it an effort of will to think of herself as Helge, outside of social situations where other people expected her to be Helge) was tired and irritable, dosed up on ibuprofen and propranolol to deal with the effects of a series of courier runs the day before when, wearing jeans and a lined waterproof jacket heavy enough to survive a north-east passage, she’d wheezed under the weight of a backpack and a walking frame. They’d had her ferrying fifty kilogram loads between a gloomy cellar of undressed stone and an equally gloomy sub-basement of an underground car park in Manhattan. There were armed guards in New York to protect her while she recovered from the vicious migraine that world-walking brought on, and servants and maids in the palace quarters back home to pamper her and feed her sweetmeats from a cold buffet and apply a cool compress for her head. But the whole objective of all this attention was to soften her up until she could be cozened into making another run. Two return trips in eighteen hours. Drugs or no drugs, it was brutaclass="underline" without guards and flunkies and servants to prod her along she might have refused to do her duty.
She’d carried a hundred kilograms in each direction across the space between two worlds, a gap narrower than atoms and colder than light-years. Lightning Child only knew what had been in those packages. The Clan’s mercantilist operations in the United States emphasized high-value, low-weight commodities. Like it or not, there was more money in smuggling contraband than works of art or intellectual property. It was a perpetual sore on Miriam’s conscience, one that only stopped chafing when for a few hours she managed to stop being Miriam Beckstein, journalist, and to be instead Helge of Thorold by Hjorth, Countess. What made it even worse for Miriam was that she was acutely aware that such a business model was stupid and unsustainable. Once, mere weeks ago, she’d had plans to upset the metaphorical apple cart, designs to replace it with a fleet of milk tankers. But then Matthias, secretary to the Duke Angbard, captain-general of the Clan’s Security Directorate, had upset the apple cart first, and set fire to it into the bargain. He’d defected to the Drug Enforcement Agency of the United States of America. And whether or not he’d held his peace about the real nature of the Clan, a dynasty of world-walking spooks from a place where the river of history had run a radically different course, he’d sure as hell shut down their eastern seaboard operations.
Matthias had blown more safe houses and shipping networks in one month than the Clan had lost in all the previous thirty years. His psycho bagman had shot and killed Miriam’s lover during an attempt to cover up the defection by destroying a major Clan fortress. Then, a month later, Clan security had ordered Miriam back to Niejwein from New Britain, warning that Matthias’ allies in that time-line made it too unsafe for her to stay there. Miriam thought this was bullshit: but bullshit delivered by men with automatic weapons was bullshit best nodded along with, at least until their backs were turned.
Mid-morning loomed. Miriam wasn’t needed today. She had the next three days off, her corveé paid. Miriam would sleep in, and then Helge would occupy her time with education. Miriam Beckstein had two college degrees, but countess Helge was woefully uneducated in even the basics of her new life. Just learning how to live among her recently rediscovered extended family was a full-time job. First, language lessons in the hochsprache vernacular with a most attentive tutor, her lady in waiting Kara d’Praha. Then an appointment for a fitting with her dressmaker, whose on-going fabrication of a suitable wardrobe had something of the quality of a Sisyphean task. Perhaps if the weather was good there’d be a discreet lesson in horsemanship (growing up in suburban Boston, she’d never learned to ride): otherwise, one in dancing, deportment or court etiquette.
Miriam was bored and anxious, itching to get back to her start-up venture in the old capital of New Britain where she’d established a company to build disk brakes and pioneer automotive technology transfer. New Britain was about fifty years behind the world she’d grown up in, a land of opportunity for a sometime tech journalist turned entrepreneur. Helge, however, was strangely fascinated by the minutiae of her new life. Going from middle class middle American life to the rarefied upper reaches of a barely post-feudal aristocracy meant learning skills she’d never imagined needing before. She was confronting a divide of five hundred years, not fifty, and it was challenging.
She’d taken the early part of the morning off to be Miriam, sitting in her bedroom in jeans and sweater, her seat a folding aluminum camp chair, a laptop balanced on her knees and a mug of coffee cooling on the floor by her feet. If I can’t do I can at least plan, she told herself wryly. She had a lot of plans, more than she knew what to do with. The whole idea of turning the Clan’s business model around, from primitive mercantilism to making money off technology transfer between worlds, seemed impossibly utopian—especially considering how few of the Clan elders had any sort of modern education. But without plans, written studies and costings and risk analyses, she wasn’t going to convince anyone. So she’d ground out a couple more pages of proposals before realizing someone was watching her.
“Yes?”
“Milady.” Kara bent a knee prettily, a picture of instinctive teenage grace that Miriam couldn’t imagine matching. “You bade me remind you last week that this eve is the first of summer twelvenight. There’s to be a garden party at the Östhalle tonight, and a ball afterwards beside, and a card from her grace your mother bidding you to attend her this afternoon before-time.” Her face the picture of innocence she added, “shall I attend to your party?”
If Kara organized her carriage and guards then Kara would be coming along too. The memories of what had happened the last time Helge let Kara accompany her to a court event made her want to wince, but she managed to keep a straight face: “yes, you do that,” she said evenly. “Get mistress Tanzig in to dress me before lunch, and my complements to her grace my mother and I shall be with her by the second hour of the afternoon.” Mistress Tanzig the dressmaker would know what she should wear in public, and more importantly, be able to alter it to fit if there were any last-minute problems. Miriam hit the Save button on her spreadsheet and sighed. “Is that the time? Tell somebody to run me a bath; I’ll be out in a minute.”