“Yes, yes, I know. And do you think he has been sleeping well lately? I’m led to believe he’s frantically busy right now. Losing Roland was the least of our problems, if you’ll permit me to be blunt, and Angbard has a major crisis to deal with. Your affair with him can be ignored, if it comes to it, by the Council. It’s not as if you’re a teenage virgin to be despoiled, damaging some aristocratic alliance by losing your honor—and you’d better think about that some more in future, because honor is the currency in the circles you move in, a currency that once spent is very hard to regain—but the deeper damage to the Clan that Matthias inflicted—”

“Tell me about it,” Miriam said bitterly. “As soon as I was back on my feet they told me I could only run courier assignments to and from a safe house. And I’m not allowed to go home!”

“Matthias knows you,” her mother pointed out. “If he mentioned you to his new employers—”

“I understand.” Miriam subsided in a sullen silence, arms crossed before her and back set defensively. After a moment she started tapping her toes.

“Stop that!” Moderating her tone, the duchess added: “if you do that in public it sends entirely the wrong message. Appearances are everything, you’ve got to learn that.”

“Yes, mother.”

After a couple of minutes, the duchess spoke. “You’re not happy.”

“No.”

“And it’s not just—him.”

“Correct.” Her hem twitched once more before Helge managed to control the urge to tap.

The duchess sighed. “Do I have to drag it out of you?”

“No, Iris.”

“You shouldn’t call me that here. Bad habits of thought and behavior, you know.”

“Bad? Or just inappropriate? Liable to send the wrong message?”

The duchess chuckled. “I should know better than to argue with you, dear!” She looked serious. “The wrong message in a nutshell. Miriam can’t go home, Helge. Not now, maybe not ever. Thanks to that scum-sucking rat-bastard defector the entire Clan network in Massachusetts is blown wide open and if you even think about going—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, there’ll be an FBI SWAT team staking out my back yard and I’ll vanish into a supermax prison so fast my feet don’t touch the ground. If I’m lucky,” she added bitterly. “So everything’s locked down like a code red terrorist alert, the only way I’m allowed to go back to our world is on a closely supervised courier run to an underground railway station buried so deep I don’t even see daylight, if I want anything—even a box of tampons—I have to requisition it and someone in the Security Directorate has to fill out a risk assessment to see if it’s safe to obtain, and, and…” Her shoulders heaved with indignation.