Helge swept past them with a brief nod—more acknowledgement of their presence than most of her rank would bother with—and paused to glance back down the hallway as her servants (a lady in waiting, a court butler, and two hard-faced, impassive bodyguards) followed her. “Wait in the hall,” she told the guards. “You can accompany me, but wait at the far end of the room,” she told her attendant ingénue. Lady Kara nodded meekly. She’d been slow to learn that Helge bore an uncommon dislike for having her conversations eavesdropped on: there had been an unfortunate incident some weeks ago, and she had not yet recovered her self-esteem.

The hall was perhaps sixty feet long and wide enough for a royal entourage. The walls, panelled in imported oak, were occupied by window bays interspersed with oil paintings and a few more recent daguerreotypes of noble ancestors, the scoundrels and skeletons cluttering up the family tree. Uniformed servants waited beside each door. Helge paced across the rough marble tiles, her spine rigid and her shoulders set defensively. At the end of the hall an equerry wearing the polished half-armor and crimson breeches of his calling bowed, then pulled the tasselled bell-pull beside the double doors. “The Countess Helge voh Thorold d’Hjorth!”

The doors opened, ushering Countess Helge inside, leaving servants and guards to cool their heels at the threshold.

The day room was built to classical proportions—but built large, in every dimension. Four windows, each twelve feet high, dominated the south wall, overlooking the regimented lushness of the gardens that surrounded the palace. The ornate plasterwork of the ceiling must have occupied a master and his journeymen for a year. The scale of the architecture dwarfed the merely human furniture, so that the chaise longue the duchess reclined on, and the spindly rococo chair beside it, seemed like the discarded toy furniture of a baby giantess. The duchess herself looked improbably fragile: gray hair growing out in intricately coiffed coils, face powdered to the complexion of a china doll, her body lost in a court gown of black lace over burgundy velvet. But her eyes were bright and alert—and knowing.

Helge paused before the duchess. With a little moue of concentration she essayed a curtsey. “Your grace, I are—am—happy to see you,” she said haltingly in hochsprache. “I—I—oh damn.” The latter words slipped out in her native tongue. She straightened her knees and sighed. “Well? How am I doing?”

“Hmm.” The duchess examined her minutely from head to foot, then nodded slightly. “You’re getting better. Well enough to pass tonight. Have a seat.” She gestured at the chair beside her.