Miriam swallowed. You old bastard! You’re threatening me! Servants removed her plate and refilled her wine glass. Growing anger threatened to overwhelm her. She took an overhasty mouthful to conceal her expression, leaving a bleeding ring of lip gloss on the crystal. Her heart was pounding and she couldn’t seem to get enough air.

“To set your mind at ease, my dear, you are quite safe for the time being,” said Angbard. “This is a doppelgängered house, with a secured installation on the other side, as strongly defended there as here—but if you were to venture outside of it you would be in jeopardy. I am concerned about your other relatives, such as the family Axl, and your late father’s heirs of family Wu, in the far west. A strong alliance would go a long way toward protecting you.”

“An alliance,” she said thickly. It seemed to be hot in the dining room. She finished her glass, to buy some time. “Y’-know, it seems to me that you’re taking a lot for granted. That I’ll fit in and adapt to your ways.”

“Isn’t that how it always works?” asked Olga, confused. A dessert appeared, individual plates of chocolate truffles drizzled in syrup, but Miriam had no room for food. Her meal sat heavily on the top of her stomach.

“Not always, no,” Miriam said tightly. She picked up her full wineglass, then frowned, remembering two—three?—refills before it, and put it down again, a little harder than she’d intended. Roland smiled at her indulgently. They all seemed to be smiling at her too much this evening, she noticed. As if they expected her to break down in tears and thank them for rescuing her from a life of drudgery. She forced herself to straighten her shoulders, sipped sparingly from her glass, and tried to ignore the growing pains in the small of her back. If she could just get through the remainder of the meal she’d be all right. “But we’ll worry about that when we get to it, won’t we?” She mustered a pained smile and everyone pretended she hadn’t said anything. The strange cousin’s faux pas, she thought, as Vincenze asked Roland something about cavalry maneuvers.

A few minutes later, Angbard rapped a silver dessert spoon on his glass. “If you have finished eating, by all means let the after-dinner entertainment commence,” he said.

Servants wheeled a tall trolley in and Miriam blinked in surprise. A huge thirty-inch Sony flat-panel television faced them, glassy-eyed, blocking the doorway. A black video recorder sat on a shelf below it, trailing cables. A white-gloved footman handed the remote to the duke on a silver plate. He bowed himself out as Angbard picked it up and pointed it at the set.