“Excuse me?” I gaped at them all, though I shouldn’t have been surprised. Secretary Allen and Judge Roth were brothers-in-law, and they were constantly moving money around, constantly scheming. I knew for a fact Secretary Allen had conned Lieutenant Lefevre into bailing him out of a tight spot last year. I also knew Allen hadn’t paid him back.

“We could make it worth their while for Peter to marry you. Was the problem with the family or the boy?” Roth asked, glancing around.

“How much would it take, do you think?” asked Moreau. Lieutenant Lefevre bobbed his head from side to side, as though running numbers in his brain. I thought smoke might start pouring out of his ears.

“No,” I said. “No. Absolutely not.” The only thing worse than not marrying Peter would be coercing him, and his own sense of honor would surely forbid such a thing. The councilors stared at me, displeasure clear on their faces.

I wanted to melt under the table and crawl to my room. I wanted to cry. I wanted to shake them all by the shoulders, these men who had never felt their agency or reasoning dismissed out of hand.

“You must marry, Your Grace,” said Captain Marshall, brows knit. “And soon. You are eighteen, a grown woman, and Potomac is not a large country. We rely on you to set the example for our young people, in matrimony and in bearing children. And you are ill-equipped to become seneschal without a husband to lead and advise you.”

They took my shyness, my privacy, for weakness. I gulped down my embarrassment, a bitter pill. “Captain Marshall, I fully intend—”

But once he’d gotten rolling, Marshall was loath to stop. “England abandoned Potomac because their empire grew weak at the fringes.” He eyed me sternly, as though I were a soldier who’d shown up for inspection in a wrinkled uniform. “But we survived their abandonment because our ancestors did what they must. And now, so must you.”

I knew our history as well as I knew my duty. But duty had felt different when it had looked like Peter.

I sensed clouds gathering overhead, vultures circling close. But I couldn’t read what they foretold.

Something was coming. I knew it. I just couldn’t make sense of the omens.

Once upon a time, Godmother Althea had told me, the Old World sought out the New, poachers and pilgrims and adventurers and conquerors pursuing glory and gold and space to breathe. And they had found some of what they wanted. But they hadn’t stayed forever.

The future does not roll in great waves, she’d said. It comes in a thousand tiny moments, turns on hinges too small to see, follows a winding path carved by yeses and nos that change the world.