Miriam was bored and anxious, itching to get back to her start-up venture in the old capital of New Britain where she’d established a company to build disk brakes and pioneer automotive technology transfer. New Britain was about fifty years behind the world she’d grown up in, a land of opportunity for a sometime tech journalist turned entrepreneur. Helge, however, was strangely fascinated by the minutiae of her new life. Going from middle class middle American life to the rarefied upper reaches of a barely post-feudal aristocracy meant learning skills she’d never imagined needing before. She was confronting a divide of five hundred years, not fifty, and it was challenging.

She’d taken the early part of the morning off to be Miriam, sitting in her bedroom in jeans and sweater, her seat a folding aluminum camp chair, a laptop balanced on her knees and a mug of coffee cooling on the floor by her feet. If I can’t do I can at least plan, she told herself wryly. She had a lot of plans, more than she knew what to do with. The whole idea of turning the Clan’s business model around, from primitive mercantilism to making money off technology transfer between worlds, seemed impossibly utopian—especially considering how few of the Clan elders had any sort of modern education. But without plans, written studies and costings and risk analyses, she wasn’t going to convince anyone. So she’d ground out a couple more pages of proposals before realizing someone was watching her.

“Yes?”

“Milady.” Kara bent a knee prettily, a picture of instinctive teenage grace that Miriam couldn’t imagine matching. “You bade me remind you last week that this eve is the first of summer twelvenight. There’s to be a garden party at the Östhalle tonight, and a ball afterwards beside, and a card from her grace your mother bidding you to attend her this afternoon before-time.” Her face the picture of innocence she added, “shall I attend to your party?”

If Kara organized her carriage and guards then Kara would be coming along too. The memories of what had happened the last time Helge let Kara accompany her to a court event made her want to wince, but she managed to keep a straight face: “yes, you do that,” she said evenly. “Get mistress Tanzig in to dress me before lunch, and my complements to her grace my mother and I shall be with her by the second hour of the afternoon.” Mistress Tanzig the dressmaker would know what she should wear in public, and more importantly, be able to alter it to fit if there were any last-minute problems. Miriam hit the Save button on her spreadsheet and sighed. “Is that the time? Tell somebody to run me a bath; I’ll be out in a minute.”