“Um. Okay.” Miriam nodded, reduced to silence by a sudden sense of cultural indigestion. This is so alien! “So what about you? The Clan, I mean. Where do you—we—fit into the picture?”

“The Clan families are mostly based in Gruinmarkt, which is roughly where Massachusetts and New York and Maine are over here. But we, the Clan families, were ennobled only in the past six generations or so—the old land-holders won’t ever let you forget it. The Clan council voted to make children of any royal union full members—that way, the third generation will be royalty, or at least nobility, and have the talent. But nobody’s married into one of the royal families yet—either in the Gruinmarkt, or north or south for that matter.

“In the Outer Kingdom, to the west, things are different again—there are civil service exams. Again, we’ve got an edge there. We have schools over here and ways to cheat. But I was talking about the population trap, wasn’t I? The council has a long arm. They won’t let you go. And it’ll take more than just one person on the inside, pushing, to make them change. I’ve tried. I got a whole huge reform program mapped out that’d break their dependency, begin developing the Gruinmarkt—but the council tore it up and threw it out without even reading it. Only Duke Angbard kept them from going further and declaring me a traitor.”

“Let me get this straight,” Miriam said, leaning forward. “You lived with Janice until she couldn’t put up with you not telling her what you were doing for two hours a day, couldn’t put up with not knowing about your background, and until your elders began leaning on you to get married. Right?”

“Wrong,” he said. “I told Uncle Angbard where he could shove his ultimatum.” He hunched over, a picture of misery. “But she moved out, anyway. She’d managed to convince herself that I was some kind of gangster, drug smuggler, whatever, up to my ears in no good. I was trying, trying, to get permission to go over for good, to try to make it up to her, to make everything all right. But she was killed by a car. A hit-and-run accident, the police said.”

He fell silent, story run down.

Well, she thought. Words failed her for a minute. “Were the two things connected? Causally, that is?”