It all depends on what else has been going on since I left. She sighed and began to work her other foot down the pants leg. Is Mom okay? She paused again. Brill said something about being under attack over here. Is Paulie okay? Paulette, her sometime PA, was an outsider to all this—but stuck in Cambridge, if the Clan was being attacked from outside, she could be in big trouble. Guilt by association: Some within the Clan would see her as a tool tainted by Miriam’s low stock, while whatever agency was going after the Clan would assume the worst. I’ve got to find out, Miriam decided, and stood up just as there was a tentative knock at the door.
“Come in,” she called, hastily buttoning up.
The door opened and Brilliana looked in. “Milady?”
“I’m nearly done here.” Miriam glanced around. “Where did I put my shoes?” Handmade leather ankle-boots from New Britain wouldn’t look too out of place, and shoes were the one thing Brill hadn’t been able to buy for her. “Eh.” They were hiding under the dressing table.
“I think we need to talk,” Brilliana observed.
“Yes.” Miriam bent over and began working on her left foot. “What exactly has been going on since the, the banquet?” Her brain began to catch up with her earlier thoughts: “My mother—is she alright? What about the duke? My grandmother—”
“It’s a mess,” Brill said wryly. She perched on the stool by the table. “We’re not sure exactly how long Egon had been planning it for, but he used Henryk’s scheme”—the plan to forcibly marry Miriam into the Gruinmarkt’s royal dynasty—“as leverage to get a bunch of the backwood peers behind him. He’s declared the entire Clan outlaw and placed a price on our heads, and is promising half our estates to those nobles who back him. It’s turned into a messy civil war and Angbard’s had his hands tied trying to defend individual holdings instead of going after the pretender’s army. While all that was going on, we’ve had some disturbing—well, a couple of couriers have gone missing over the past six months. Missing with no explanation, no hint of trouble. Not only did the bastard Matthias rat us out to the Drug Enforcement Agency, now there’s some sort of secret government cross-agency committee trying to hunt us down. Everyone on this side has had to activate their emergency cover plans. And the really bad news is that this agency managed to sneak a couple of agents into the Gruinmarkt, which means it’s serious.”
“Yes, I know.” Miriam sat up and took a deep breath. “I told you about meeting Mike, didn’t I?” She’d once had a thing going with Mike Fleming. Odd, it seemed an awfully long time ago. “He got me out of the palace alive.” She shrugged. “He was unexpectedly honest.” Another deep breath. “Told me that if I wanted to join the federal witness protection program . . .”
The words hung in the air for a few seconds. Finally, Brilliana nodded. “We know. And it will count for much when it comes to the Council’s attention, I think,” she said slowly. A longer pause. “Olga and your mother have been talking to him. Trying to negotiate a, a temporary ceasefire. But things are really bad. They believe we’ve stolen a nuclear weapon, and they want it back.”
“Jesus.” Miriam shook her head. “Why would they think that?” She looked at Brill, aghast. “Hang on. They believe the Clan has stolen a nuke? Why? Why would they believe that? Has Angbard—He’d have to be mad! Tell me he hasn’t?”
Brill looked uncomfortable. “Angbard hasn’t stolen a nuke. But they leave them in undoppelgangered bunkers; is that not a temptation?”
“Tell me.” Miriam shoved her hair back from her face. “Has someone in the Clan actually gone and stolen a nuclear weapon? How? I mean, I thought they were too big to carry—”
“Not one,” Brill said, then bit her lip. “Six, we think. Maybe more. They’re backpack devices, part of the inactive inventory—the CIA asked for them, originally.”
Aghast, Miriam stared at her. “Is that why they’re all over us?”
Brill nodded.
“Then who—”
“Oliver, Earl Hjorth, is the key-holder designated by the Clan committee.”
“Jesus, why him?” The thought of what might happen if the feds discovered the Clan had haunted Miriam ever since she’d learned about her own ancestry; what they might do if they thought the extradimensional narcoterrorists had nuclear weapons didn’t bear thinking about. And Baron Oliver was about the worst person she could think of to be holding them—an unregenerate backwoodsman and dyed-in-the-wool conservative faction member. “And they can get their own people into the Gruinmarkt, can’t they.”
“There’s more bad news,” Brill added after a moment. “Why don’t you come downstairs? Then Huw can deliver it himself.”
Elena sprawled across the sofa in the living room, pulling an oiled cleaning cloth through the breech of her P90. “Find another channel, minion,” she drawled without looking up. “I can’t stand Friends.”
“As you wish, my princess.” Yul, hulking and fair-haired as any Viking warrior, carefully squeezed the remote. Advertisements and sitcoms strobed across the eviscerated guts of the machine pistol on the coffee table until he arrived at MTV. “Ah, that is better.” Marilyn Manson strutted and howled through the last tour on earth; Elena pulled a face. “Manly music for martial—” an oily rag landed on his head.
“Children.”
Elena glanced round, pulled a face. “He started it!”
“Sure.” Huw stood in the doorway, trying not to smile. “Did you get the Internet working?”
“Something’s wrong with it,” Yul said apologetically.
“Ah, well.” Huw shrugged and walked over to the armchair, where a laptop trailed bits of many-colored spaghetti towards the wall. “I’ll sort it out. Got to report in.” Expecting Yul or Elena to do anything technical had been a forlorn hope. Am I the only competent person around here? he wondered. Dumb question: While he’d been studying in schools and colleges in the United States under a false identity, Yul had been bringing joy to their backwoods father’s heart, riding and hunting and being a traditional son on their country estate in the western marches of the Gruinmarkt; and Elena had been under the stifling constraints of a noble daughter, although she’d kicked up enough of a fuss that her parents had allowed her to escape into Clan Security, leaving them with one less dowry to worry about. Which left Huw as the guy who knew one end of an Internet router and a secure voice-over IP connection from another, and Yul and Elena as the armed muscle to watch over him when they weren’t engaging in risky post-adolescent high-jinks—risky because the older generation weren’t many years past fighting blood feuds over that sort of thing.
It took him a few minutes, some scrabbling with cables, and a reboot to get everything working properly, but Huw was setting up the encrypted link to the ClanSec e-mail hub and looking forward to checking in when he heard footsteps.
“Yes?” He glanced round. It was Miriam. She looked—not tired, exactly, but careworn. And something else.
“Brill tells me we need to talk,” she said, then glanced across the room at the sofa.
“She said—”Huw’s larynx froze for a few seconds as he stared at her. The first time he’d met her, gowned and bejeweled at a royal reception, she’d been turned out in the very mode of Gruinmarkt nobility; then earlier, when Lady Brilliana had so rudely yanked him (and Yul, and Elena) away from his survey, she’d been wearing an outlandish getup. Now she looked—at ease, he decided. This is her. She isn’t acting a part. How interesting. “Ah. Well, she did, did she?”