The Family Trade

The camera was set to grab one frame per second. She fast-forwarded through it at thirty FPS, two seconds to the minute, two minutes to the hour. After ninety seconds, she saw the door open. Pausing, she backed up then single-stepped through the footage. Someone, an indistinct blur, moved from the main door to her bedroom. Then a gray blur in front of the laptop itself, then nothing. She had a vague impression of a dark suit, a man’s build. But it wasn’t Roland, and she felt a moment of fear at the realization.

But she’d gone into the bedroom safely. Nobody had tampered with her aluminium suitcase, and her chests of clothing were already stashed in the main room. So before daring to go to bed, Miriam spent a fruitless half-hour searching her bedroom from top to bottom, peering under the bed and lifting mattresses, checking behind the curtains.

Nothing. Which left a couple of disturbing possibilities in mind. Don’t try world-walking in your bedroom, she sternly warned herself, and check the computer for back doors in the morning. She packed the computer and its extras—and the gun—in her suitcase. Then she lay down and drifted into sleep disturbed by surprisingly explicit, erotic phantoms that left her aching and sore for something she couldn’t have.

She was awakened in the dim predawn light by a clattering of serving maids. “What’s going on?” she mumbled, lifting her head and wincing at her hangover. “I thought I said—”

“Duke’s orders, ma’am,” Meg apologized. “We’ve to dress you for travel.”

“Oh hell.” Miriam groaned. “He said that?”

He had. So Miriam did her waking up that morning with three other women fussing over her, haphazardly cramming her into a business suit—about the most inappropriate travel garb she could think of—and then from somewhere they produced a voluminous greatcoat that threatened her with heat stroke while she already felt like death warmed over.

“This,” she said through gritted teeth, “is excessive.”

“It’s cold outside, ma’am,” Meg said firmly. “You’ll need it before the day is out.” She held out a hat to Miriam. Miriam looked at it in disbelief, then tried to balance it on her head. “It goes like this,” said Meg, and seconds later it did. With a scarf to hold it in place, Miriam felt cut off from the world almost completely. Are they trying to hide me? she wondered, anxious about what that could mean.

They led her downstairs, with a trail of grunting porters hefting her trunks—and incongruous metal suitcase—and then out through a pair of high double doors. Meg was right. Her breath hung steaming in the air before her face. In the past week, autumn had turned wintry with the first breath of air rushing down from the Arctic. A huge black wooden coach balanced on wheels taller than Miriam stood waiting, eight horses harnessed before it. A mounting block led up to the open door, and she was startled to see the duke standing beside it, wearing a quite incongruous Burberry overcoat.

“My dear!” he greeted her. “A final word, if I may, before you depart.”

She nodded, then glanced up as the porters hoisted her trunks onto the roof and a small platform at the back of the carriage.

“You may think my sending you to court is premature,” he said quietly, “but my agents have intercepted messages about an attempt on your life. You need to leave here, and I think it best that you be among your peers. You’ll be staying at the Thorold Palace, which is maintained as a common residence in the capital by the heads of the families; it’s doppelgängered and quite safe, I assure you. It will be possible for you to return later.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” she said sarcastically.

“Indeed.” He looked at her oddly. “Well, I must say you look fine. I do commend Olga to you; she is not as stupid as she appears and you will need to learn the high speech sooner rather than later—English is only spoken among the aristocracy.”

“Well, uh, okay.” She shuffled nervously. “I’ll try not to trip over any assassins, and I may even meet an appropriate husband.” She glanced at the coach as one of the horses snorted and shook its harness. She felt even more peculiar when she realized that she was not entirely lying. If marrying Roland—even having another child with him—would get him into her bed on a regular basis, she was willing to at least contemplate the possibility. She needed an ally—and friend—here, and he had the potential to be more than that.

“Indeed.” He nodded at her, and for the first time she noticed that there was a certain translucency to his skin, as if he wasn’t entirely well. “Good hunting.” And then he turned and strode away, leaving her to climb into the carriage and wait for departure.

Court Appearance

Miriam's first unpleasant surprise—after  finding that the Tylenol was all packed in  her trunks and inaccessible—was that the carriage was unheated and the leather seats hard. Her second, as she shivered and tried to huddle into one corner under a thick blanket, came as Olga swept up the steps and into the seat opposite her. Olga’s blonde hair was gathered up under a scarf and hat, and she wore a wool coat over a suit that made her look like a brokerage house yuppie. “Isn’t this wonderful?” she cooed as plump Lady Margit, in twinset and pearls by day, huffed and puffed up and into the seat next to Miriam, expanding to flow over two-thirds of it.

“It’s wonderful.” Miriam smiled weakly as the coachman cracked his whip overhead and released the hand brake. The noise and vibration of wooden wheels turning on cobblestones shuddered through her hangover as the coach creaked and swayed forward.

Olga leaned toward her. “Oh dear, you look unwell!” she insisted, peering into Miriam’s eyes at close range. “What could it be?”

“Something I drank, I think,” Miriam mumbled, turning away. Her stomach was distinctly rough, her head pounded, and she felt too hot. “How long will we be on the road?”

“Oh, not long!” Olga clapped her hands briskly and rubbed them together against the cold. “We can use the duke’s holdings to change teams regularly. If we make good time today and keep driving until dusk, we could be at Ode-mark tomorrow evening and Niejwein the next afternoon! All of two hundred miles in three days!” She glanced at Miriam slyly. “I hear over on the other side you have magical carriages that can travel such a distance much faster?”

“Oh, Olga,” muttered Margit, a trifle peevishly.

“Um.” Miriam nodded, pained. Two hundred miles in three days, she thought. Even Amtrak can do better than that! “Yes, but I don’t think they’d work too well over here,” she whuffed out, as a particularly bad rut in the road threw her against the padded side of the carriage.

“What a shame,” Olga replied brightly. “That means we’ll just have to take a little longer.” She pointed out of the carriage door’s open window. “Oh, look! A squirrel! On that elm!”

It was at this point that Miriam realized, with a sickly sinking feeling, that taking a carriage to the capital in this world might be how the aristocracy travelled, but in comfort terms it was the equivalent of an economy-class airline ticket to New Zealand—in an ancient turboprop with malfunctioning air-conditioning. And she’d set off with a hangover and a chatterbox for a fellow traveller, without remembering to pack the usual hand luggage. “Oh god,” she moaned faintly to herself.

“Oh, that reminds me!” Olga sat upright. “I nearly forgot!” From some hidden pocket she pulled out a small, neatly wrapped paper parcel. She opened it and removed a pinch of some powdery substance, then cast it from the window. “Im nama des’Hummelvat sen da’ Blishkin un’ da Geshes des’reeshes, dis expedition an’ all, the mifim reesh’n,” she murmured. Then Olga noticed Miriam looking at her blankly. “Don’t you pray?” she asked.