The Trade of Queens (2 page)

“It's the civil war, my lady, all over again.” Olga whistled tunelessly. “They've been begging for it—and now they're going to get it.”

*   *   *

In another world, in a mansion overlooking a lawn that swept downhill to the banks of a small river, an elderly man sat at a writing desk in a room off to one side of the great hall. It was a small room, walled in bare stone and floored with planks, which the tapestries and rugs failed to conceal; the large window casements, built for light but featuring heavy oak shutters with peepholes and iron bolts, suggested the architect had been more concerned with security than comfort. Despite the summer heat he held his robes of office tight about his shoulders, shivering as he stared at the ledger before him with tired eyes. It was a balance sheet of sorts, but the items tallied in its columns were not quantities of coin but the living and the dead. And from time to time, with the slow, considered strokes of his pen, Baron Julius Arnesen moved names from one column to the other.

Arnesen was a survivor of seventy-some years, most of which he had experienced in a state of barely suppressed existential terror. Even now, in a house his security chief assured him was securely doppelgangered from both the known alternate worlds (in the United States by a convenient interstate off-ramp, and in New Britain by a recently acquired derelict warehouse), and at the tail end of yet another civil war (this one between the Clan and the rival noble houses, rather than between Clan families) and at the tail end of his years, he could not bring himself to sit with his back to door or window. Besides, an instinct for trouble that had served him well over the decades whispered warnings in his ears: Not all was right in the Gruinmarkt, or within the uneasy coalition of Clan radicals and conservatives who had agreed to back the baroness Helge Thorold-Hjorth and her claim to bear the heir to the throne.
It's all going to come apart again, sooner or later,
he told himself gloomily, as he examined the next name in the ledger.
There are too many of them.
…

The civil war in the Gruinmarkt, torched off by the conservative Baron Henryk's scheme to marry the troublesome Helge—who had grown up in the United States, calling herself Miriam—to the king's second son, had left an enormous mess in its wake. Crown Prince Egon, paranoid by disposition, had sensed in the betrothal the first stirring of a plot to assassinate him; he'd moved against the Clan with vicious speed and ruthless determination, and in the three months they'd run wild his followers had destroyed the work of decades.

Egon was dead now, blown to bits along with most of his army when they tried to take a Clan castle, and Helge—pregnant as a result of the gynecological skullduggery of one of the Clan's own doctors—was acknowledged as the dead Prince Creon's widow. But a goodly chunk of the backwoods nobility wouldn't believe a word of it, even if she presented them with a baby who was the very spitting image of Creon in six months' time. To them, Helge was simply an impostor, willing puppet for the Clan's avarice and ambition. They were keeping their mouths shut right now, out of fear, but that wouldn't last forever; and weeding out the goats from the sheep was proving to be a well nigh impossible task. As magister of the royal assizes, Julius had considerable freedom to arraign and try hedge-lords whom he might suspect of treasonous intent; but he also had to walk a fine line between rooting out threats and conducting a witch hunt that might itself provoke another uprising.

Here in the countryside eight miles outside the capital Niejwein, in a house seized from the estate of the lord of Ostrood—conveniently missing with his sons since the destruction of the royal army at the Hjalmar Palace—Julius had established a crown court to supervise the necessary unpleasantness. To arraign and execute nobles in the capital would be inflammatory; better by far to conduct the grim job beyond the city walls, not so far out of sight as to invite accusations of secrecy, but distant enough to deter casual rubbernecking. With selected witnesses to testify to the fairness of the proceedings, and a cordon secured by imported American security devices as well as armed guards, he could proceed at his leisure without fear of the leading cause of death among judges in the Gruinmarkt—assassination by an angry relative.

Take the current case in hand, for example. Sir Euaunt ven Pridmann was a hedge-knight, titular liege lord to a village of some ninety souls, a house with a roof that leaked, three daughters with dowries to pay, one son, and a debt run up by his wastrel grandfather that exceeded the village's annual surplus by a factor of fifteen. Only a writ of relief from usury signed by the previous king's brother had spared him the indignity of being turfed out of his own home.

For such a man to show up in the army of the late pretender to the throne might be nothing more than simple desperation, for Egon had promised his followers a half share in the Clan lands that they took for him—not that ven Pridmann had done much looting and pillaging. With gout and poor eyesight he'd spent three-quarters of the war in his sickbed, and another fourth groaning with dysentery. That was why he hadn't been present at the destruction of the Hjalmar Palace by the god-cursed “special weapon” Clan Security had apparently detonated there, and his subsequent surrender and protestations of loyalty to the true heir were just another footnote to the whole sordid affair. But.
But.
Julius squinted at the ledger: How could you be
sure
? Might ven Pridmann be what the otherworld Americans called a
werewolf
, one who stayed behind to fight on in secret, after the war? Or might he have lied about his culpability, claiming innocence of very real crimes?

Julius sighed and laid his pen down beside the ledger. You couldn't be sure; and speculation about intangibles like loyalty in the absence of prior evidence was a good way to develop a raging case of paranoia. You could end up hanging thousands, as a preventative measure or in the hope of instilling a healthy fear in the survivors—but in the end, would it work? Would fear make them keep their heads down, or provoke a further uprising?
He's got gout,
Julius reasoned.
And he's too poor to buy a gun or pay a lance of infantry. Low risk.
And reasoning thus, he crossed ven Pridmann off the death list.

There was a knock.

“Yes? Yes?” Julius said querulously, looking up.

An apologetic face peeped round the door. “Sorry to bother you, my lord, but you have a visitor? Philip ven Holtz-Hjalmar from the Office of the Post, with dispatches from the Crown.”

“Tell him to leave them—” Julius paused.
That's funny, I wonder what it is?
The post office in question was the Clan's courier service, manned by members of the six families and their close relatives who held in common the talent of walking between worlds. Normally he could expect at most one courier delivery a day, and today's had arrived some hours ago. “Show him in.”

“At once, my lord.”

The manservant withdrew. After a moment's muted conversation, the door opened again.

“My lord Arnesen.” Julius didn't recognize the courier. He was a young fellow, wearing a dark business suit, conservatively cut, standard uniform for the couriers who had to travel in public in American cities. The briefcase he held was expensive and flashy: brushed aluminum with a combination lock and other less obvious security measures. “May we speak in private?”

“Of course.” Julius waved at his servant: “Be off, and keep everyone away from the door.”

“Thank you, my lord.” The courier didn't smile.

“Well? What is it?” Julius strained to sit up, pushing back against the weight of his years.

“Special message, for your eyes only, from her grace the dowager Thorold Hjorth.” He put the briefcase down on the side table.

This should be good,
Julius thought. The duchess Hildegarde, Helge's grandam, one of the mainstays of the conservative faction, hadn't had the time of day for him since the disaster at the Summer Palace three months ago.
If she's decided to kiss and make up now it must mean
—

He was still trying to articulate the thought when the messenger shot him in the face, twice. The gun was fitted with a suppressor, and Baron Arnesen was seated; there was barely any noise, and the second bullet was in any case unnecessary.

“She sent her best wishes,” said the courier, sliding his pistol back into the padded sleeve and picking up his briefcase in his left hand. “Her
very
best wishes.”

Then he rolled his left sleeve up, focused his eyes on the temporary tattoo on the back of his wrist, and vanished into the locked and derelict warehouse that Julius Arnesen had been so reassured to hear of from his chief of security.

*   *   *

Meanwhile in another world, a doctor of medicine prepared himself for his next house call—one that would destroy families, rewrite wills, and quite possibly generate blood feuds.
They deserve it,
he thought, with a bitter sense of anticipation.
Traitors and bastards, the lot of 'em.

For Dr. Griben ven Hjalmar, the past six months had brought about a disastrous and unplanned fall from grace and privilege. A younger child of the same generation as the duchess Patricia, or Angbard ven Lofstrom, born without any great title or fortune to his outer-family-derived name, Griben had been quick-witted and ambitious enough to seize for himself the opportunity to study needful skills in the land of the Anglischprache, a decade before it became the common pattern of the youth of the six families. In those days, the intelligent and scholarly were viewed with circumspection, if not outright suspicion: Few paths were open, other than the military—a career with direct and useful benefits to the Clan's scions.

Griben aimed higher, choosing medicine. In the drafty palaces of the Gruinmarkt, the allure of Western medicine held a mesmeric attraction to the elders and the high ladies. With open sewers in the streets, and middens behind many houses, infection and disease were everyday killers: Childbed morbidity and infant mortality robbed the Clan of much of its vigor. Griben had worked hard to convince Angbard's dour predecessor of his loyalty, and in return had been given some slight experience of life in America—even a chance to practice medicine and train after graduation, so long as he packed his bag and scurried home at the beck and call of his betters.

Antibiotics and vaccines raised many a soul from death's bed, but the real returns were quite obviously to be found in obstetric medicine. He realized this even in premed; the Clan's strength lay in its numbers, and enhancing that would find favor with its lords. As for the gratitude of its noblewomen at being spared a difficult or even fatal labor … the favors so endowed were subtler and took longer to redound, but no less significant for all that. One day, Griben reasoned, it was likely that the head destined to wear the crown would be there solely by his intervention—and the parents of that prince would know it. So for two decades he'd worked at his practice, patiently healing the sick, attending to confinements, delivering the babies (and on occasion discreetly seeing to the family-planning needs of their mothers), while keeping abreast of the latest developments in his field.

As his reputation burgeoned, so did his personal wealth and influence. He bought an estate in Oest Hjalmar and a private practice in Plymouth, growing plump and comfortable. Duke Lofstrom sought his advice on certain technical matters of state, which he dealt with discreetly and efficiently. There was talk of an earldom in his future, even a petty barony; he began considering the social advantages of taking to wife one of the ladies-in-waiting who graced the court of Her Majesty the queen-widow.

Then everything inexplicably and rapidly turned to shit.

Dr. ven Hjalmar shrugged, working his left shoulder in circles to adjust the hang of the oddly styled jacket he wore, then glanced at the fly-specked mirror on the dresser. His lip curled.
To fall this far
 … He glanced sidelong at the battered carpetbag that sat on the hotel room bed.
Well, what goes down can come right up again,
he reminded himself.

It was all the Beckstein women's fault, mother and daughter both. He'd first heard it from the mouth of the haughty dowager duchess herself: “The woman's an impostor of course,” Hildegarde voh Thorold-Hjorth had snapped at him. “Do you really think it likely that an heiress has been living secretly in exile, in the, the barbarian world, for all these years? Just to surface
now
, when everything is finally settling down again? This is a plot, you mark my words!”

Well, the Beckstein woman
wasn't
an impostor—the dowager might not know a DNA paternity test from a rain of frogs, but he was under no such illusions—but the emergence after so long of her black-sheep mother certainly suggested that the dowager was right about it being some sort of conspiracy. And the bewildering ease with which Miriam had destroyed all the obstacles set in her path and then taken on the Clan Council like some kind of radical reformist firebrand was certainly suggestive.
Someone
was clearly behind the woman. And her exposure of the lost cousins, and this strange world which they had made their own, was a thunderbolt out of the blue. “She's a loose cannon,” Baron Henryk ven Nordstrom had muttered angrily over a glass of port. “We shall have to take her out of play, Robard, or she's going to throw the board on the floor and jump on the pieces.”

“Do you want me to neutralize her permanently?” ven Hjalmar had asked, cocking his head slightly to one side. “It seems unsubtle.…”

Henryk snorted in reply. “She's a woman, we can tie her down. If necessary, you can damage her a little.” He didn't mention the other business, with the boy in the palace all those years ago; it would be gauche. “Marry her off and give her some children to keep her busy. Or, if she won't back off, a childbed accident. Hmm, come to think of it, I know a possible husband.”