“That’s enough!” Her mother nodded sharply. “Put the rest behind you for the time being. Until—unless—we can ever go back, the memories can do nothing but hurt you. You’ve got to live in the present. And the present means living among the Clan and deporting yourself as a, a countess. Because if you don’t do that, all the alternatives on offer are drastically worse. This isn’t a rich world, like America. Most women only have one thing to trade: as a lady of the Clan you’re lucky enough to have two, even three if you count the contents of your head. But if you throw away the money and the power that goes with being of the Clan, you’ll rapidly find out just what’s under the surface—if you survive long enough.”

“But there’s no limit to the amount of shit!” She burst out, then clapped a hand to her face as if to recall the unladylike expostulation.

“Don’t chew your nails, dear,” her mother said automatically.

It had started in mid-morning. Miriam (who still found it an effort of will to think of herself as Helge, outside of social situations where other people expected her to be Helge) was tired and irritable, dosed up on ibuprofen and propranolol to deal with the effects of a series of courier runs the day before when, wearing jeans and a lined waterproof jacket heavy enough to survive a north-east passage, she’d wheezed under the weight of a backpack and a walking frame. They’d had her ferrying fifty kilogram loads between a gloomy cellar of undressed stone and an equally gloomy sub-basement of an underground car park in Manhattan. There were armed guards in New York to protect her while she recovered from the vicious migraine that world-walking brought on, and servants and maids in the palace quarters back home to pamper her and feed her sweetmeats from a cold buffet and apply a cool compress for her head. But the whole objective of all this attention was to soften her up until she could be cozened into making another run. Two return trips in eighteen hours. Drugs or no drugs, it was brutal: without guards and flunkies and servants to prod her along she might have refused to do her duty.