“What the fuck?” she asked through the haze of her headache and anxiety, then she pulled out a round sealed locket, utterly unadorned and plain. “Clan.” She put it in her pocket and glanced at Margit’s cooling body. “What on earth possessed you to come down here at midnight?” she asked aloud. “Was it a message for—” she trailed off.

They’re after Olga, too, she realized, and with that realization came both a sick fear. I have to warn Olga!

Miriam left the orangery and headed toward the palace, half-empty for the evening with its noble residents enjoying the king’s hospitality. She wouldn’t be able to world-walk from her own rooms any more, but if Brilliana was in, they’d have a little chat. She knows more than she’s saying, Miriam realized. Slowing. What a mess! The implication was just beginning to sink in. “Wheels within wheels,” she muttered. Her hands were shaking violently and the small of her back was icy cold with sweat from the adrenaline surge when she’d shot the assassin. She paused, leaning against the cold outside wall of the orangery while she tried to gather her composure. “He was here to kill me.” The chill from the wall was beginning to penetrate her jacket. She dug around in her pocket for spare cartridges, fumbling as she reloaded the revolver. Got to find Olga. And Brill.

And then she’d have to go undercover.

One way of looking at it was that there was a story to dig up, a story about her long-dead mother, blood feuds, and civil war, a tale of assassins who came in the night and drug-dealing aristocrats who would brook no rival. Just like any other undercover investigativeexpose—not that Miriam was used to undercover jobs, but she’d be damned if she’d surrender to the editorial whims of family politics before she broke that story all over them—at the Clan gathering on Beltaigne night.

“Get moving, girl,” she told herself as she pushed off the wall and headed back toward the palace. “There’s no time to lose…”

Part 5

Runaway

Encounter

Encounter

The snow was falling thickly when Miriam reached the wall of the orangery, and she was shivering despite her leather jacket. It was dark, too, in a way that no modern city ever was—No streetlights to reflect off the clouds, she realized, fumbling with her pocket torch. The gate was shut, and she had to tug hard to open it. Beyond the gate, the vast width of the palace loomed out of the snow, row upon row of shuttered windows at ground level.