Charles Stross - MP 6 -The Trade of Queens

"Sir! If you please, to the drawing room." A startled-looking messenger boy, barely in his teens, darted from the front door. Sir Helmut stared at him. "In whose name?" he demanded.

"Sir! Two duchesses! One of them's the queen's mum, an' the other is hers! What should we do with them, Jan wants to know?"

Sir Helmut stared some more, until the lad's bravado collapsed with a shudder. Then he nodded and glanced over his shoulder. "Sammel, Karl, accompany me," he snapped. The two soldiers nodded and moved in, rifles at the ready. "Lead me to the ladies," he told the messenger. "Let's see what we've got."

The withdrawing room was dark, and cramped with too much overstuffed furniture, and it smelled of face powder and death. Flies buzzed near the ceiling above the occupants, a pair whom Sir Helmut could not help but recognize. One of them was sleeping.

"What happened here?" he demanded.

The younger of the pair—the one who was mother to the queen-widow—looked at him from beneath drooping eyelids. "Was 'fraid you wouldn't get here," she slurred.

"What—"

"Poison. In tha' wine. Sh-she started it." A shaking hand rose slowly, pointed at the mounded fabric, the shriveled, doll-like body within. "Tha' coup. 'S'hers. Did it for Helge, she said."

"But—" Helmut's eyes took in the empty decanter, the lack of motion. "Are you drunk, or—"

"Dying, prob'ly." She wheezed for a second or two; it might have been laughter. "Poisoned the wine with pure heroin. The trade of queens."

"I see." Helmut turned to the wide-eyed messenger lad: "You, run along and fetch a medic,

fast."

To the duchess: "There's an antidote. We'll get you—"

"No." Patricia closed her eyes for a long moment. "Ma, Hilde-Hildegarde. Started this all. Leave her. No trial. As for me . . ." She subsided, slurring. A rattling snort emanated from the other chair and Helmut glanced at the door, before leaning to listen to the old woman's chest.

Helmut rose and, turning on his heel, strode towards the door.

Crone save me,

he subvocalized. The messenger was coming, a corpsman following behind. "I have two heroin overdoses for you," Helmut told him. "Forget triage; save the younger one first if at all possible."

"Heroin overdose?" The paramedic looked startled. "But I don't have—are you sure—"

"Deliberate poisoning. Get to it." Helmut stepped aside as the medic nodded and went inside. Helmut breathed deeply, then turned to the messenger. "Here." He pulled out his notepad and scribbled a brief memo. "Tell comms to radio this to Earl-Major Riordan in day code purple, stat." The lad took the note and fled. Helmut stared after him for a moment then shook his head.

What a mess.

Poisoning and attempted matricide versus kidnapping: petty treason versus high treason. How to weigh the balance? "Jester's balls, if only I'd been delayed an hour on the road. . ."

Miriam lay in bed, propped up on a small mountain of pillows, staring blankly at the floral-patterned wallpaper behind the water jug on the dresser and thinking about death.

I never wanted it. So why am I feeling so bad?

she wondered.

What the hell is

wrong

with me?

It wasn't as if she'd wanted to have a baby: Griben ven Hjalmar's artificial insemination was, if not actual rape, then certainly morally equivalent. He—his sponsors (she shied away from thinking about them)—had wanted an heir to the throne. They'd specifically wanted

her

to bear the heir, and not trusting her to willingly have intercourse with the man they were forcing her to marry—a man who was so badly damaged by a poisoning incident in his childhood that he could barely talk—they had held her captive and committed a most unspeakable act upon her person. The irony of which was that her thirty-something womb was still fertile, but the marriage had been a most signal failure, disrupted by Prince Creon's elder brother in a spectacularly bloody putsch that ignited an all-out civil war in the Gruinmarkt. By the time the dust settled, Miriam had been three weeks pregnant, the entire royal family was dead . . . and she was carrying the heir to the throne, acknowledged by all who had survived the lethal betrothal ceremony.

She had not taken the news well; only Huw's cunning offer to help her obtain a termination—if that was what she willed—had kept her from running, and not stopping until she arrived at the nearest available abortion clinic. As the immediate rage and humiliation and dread faded, she began to reevaluate the situation: not from an American woman's perspective, but with the eyes of a Clan noblewoman catapulted headlong into the middle of a fraught political dilemma.

I don't have to love it. I don't have to raise it. I just have to put up with eight months of back pain and morning sickness and get it out of my body. And in return . . .

they'd promised her the moon on a stick: a seat at the highest table, as much power and wealth as anyone in that godforsaken mediaeval nightmare of a country could have, and most important of all,

security.

Security for herself, for her mother, for her friends. A chance to fix some of the things that were wrong with the Clan, from the inside, working with allies. Even a chance to try and do something about the bigger picture: to jump-start the process of dragging the Gruinmarkt towards modernity.

She'd signed a fraught compromise with her conscience. Perhaps she was just rationalizing her situation, even succumbing to Stockholm syndrome—the tendency of the abducted to empathize with their kidnappers—and while she hated what had been done to her, she was no longer eager to dispose of the unwanted pregnancy. She'd done it before, many years ago; it had been difficult, the situation looming no less inconveniently in a life turned upside down, but she'd persevered. She'd even, a year ago, harbored wistful thoughts about finding a Mr. Right and—

Her body had betrayed her.

I'm thirty-five, damn it.

Not an ideal age to be pregnant, especially in a mediaeval backwater without rapid access to decent medical care. Especially in the middle of a civil war with enemies scheming for her demise, or worse. She'd been stressed, anxious, frightened, and still in the first trimester: and when the cramps began she'd ignored them, refusing to admit what was happening.

And now it's not going to happen.

The royal dynasty that had ruled the Gruinmarkt for the past century and a half had bled out in a bedpan in New Britain, while the soldiers watched their maps and the nobles schemed. It wasn't much worse than a heavy period (aside from the pain, and the shock, and the sudden sense of horror as a sky full of cloud-castle futures evaporated). But it was a death sentence, and not just for the dynastic plans of the conservative faction.

She'd managed to hold her face together until she was away from Riordan's headquarters, with Brill's support. Ridden piggyback across to a farmhouse in the countryside outside small-town Framingham—not swallowed by Boston's suburbs, in New Britain's contorted history—that Sir Alasdair had located: abandoned, for reasons unclear, but not decayed.

"We've got to keep you away from court, my lady," Brill explained, hollow-eyed with exhaustion, as she steered her up the staircase to an underfurnished bedroom. It had been a day since the miscarriage: a day of heavy bleeding, with the added discomfort of a ride in an oxcart through the backwoods around Niejwein. She'd begun shivering with the onset of a mild fever, not taking it all in, anomalously passive. "When word gets out all hell will follow soon enough, but we can buy time first. Miriam? How do you feel?"

Miriam had licked her lips. "Freezing," she complained. "Need water." She'd pulled the bedding over her shoulders, curling up beneath without removing her clothes.