So much for the day off, thought Miriam as she packed the laptop away. I suppose I’d better go and be Helge…

“Have you thought about marriage?” asked the duchess.

“Mother! As if!” Helge snorted indignantly and her eyes narrowed.

“It’s been about, what, ten weeks? Twelve? If you think I’m about to shack up with some golden boy so soon after losing Roland…”

“That wasn’t what I meant, dear.”

Helge drew breath. “What do you mean?”

“I meant.” The duchess Patricia glanced at her sharply, taking stock:

“the, ah, noble institution. Have you thought about what it means here? And if so, what did you think?”

“I thought—” a slight expression of puzzlement wrinkled her forehead—“when I first arrived, Angbard tried to convince me I ought to make an alliance of fortunes, as he put it. Crudely speaking, to tie myself to a powerful man who could protect me.” The wrinkles turned into a full-blown frown: “I nearly told him he could put his alliance right where the sun doesn’t shine.”

“It’s a good thing you didn’t,” her mother said diplomatically.

“Oh, I know that! Now. But the whole deal, here, creeps me out. And then.” Helge took a deep breath and looked at the duchess: “there’s you, your experience. I really don’t know how you can stand to be in the same room as her grace your mother, the bitch! How she could—”

“—Connive at ending a civil war?” The duchess asked sharply.

“Sell off her daughter to a wife-beating scumbag is more the phrase I had in mind.” Helge paused. “Against her wishes,” she added. A longer pause; “Well?”

“Well,” the duchess said quietly. “Well, well. And well again. Would you like to know how she did it?”

“I’m not sure.” A grimace.

“Well, whether you want to or not, I think you need to know,” Iris—Patricia, the duchess Patricia, said. “Forewarned is forearmed, and no, when I was your age—and younger—I didn’t want to know about it, either. But nobody’s offering to trade you on the block like a piece of horse-flesh. I should think the worst they’ll do is drop broad hints your way and make the consequences of non-cooperation irritatingly obvious in the hope you’ll give in just to make them go away. You’ve probably got enough clout to ignore them if you want to push it—if it matters to you enough. But whether it would be wise to ignore them is another question entirely.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“Aha! The right question, at last!” Iris laboriously levered herself upright on her chaise, beaming. “I told you the Clan is democratic, in the classical sense of the word. The marriage market is democracy in action, Helge, and as we all know, Democracy Is Always Right. Yes? Now, can you tell me who, within the family, provides the bride’s dowry?”