“Of course, my lord.” The minister inclined his head toward his monarch. “As soon as we have something more than rumor and suspicion I will place it before your majesty.”

“Now if we may return to the agenda?” The prime minister suggested.

“Certainly.” The king nodded his assent, and Lord Douglass cleared his throat, to continue with the next point on the afternoon-long agenda. The meeting continued, and in every way beside the sneezing fit it seemed a perfectly normal session of the Imperial Intelligence Oversight Committee, held before his imperial Majesty John the Fourth, king of New Britain and dominions, in the Brunswick Palace on Long Island in the early years of the twenty-first century.

Time would show otherwise…

On the other side of a flipped coin’s fall, in an office two hundred miles away in space and perhaps two thousand years away from the court of King John in terms of historical divergence, another meeting was taking place.

“A shoot-out.” The duke’s tone of voice, normally icily deliberate, rose slightly as he abandoned his chair and began to pace the confines of his office. With close-cropped graying hair, and wearing an immaculately tailored dark suit, he might have been mistaken for an investment banker or a high-class undertaker—but appearances were very deceptive. The duke, as head of the Clan’s security apparat, was anything but harmless. He paused beneath a pair of steel broadswords mounted on the wall above a battered circular shield. “In the summer palace?” His tone hardened. “I find it hard to believe that this was allowed to happen.” He looked up at the swords. “Who was supposed to be in charge of her guard?”

The duke’s secretary—his keeper of secrets—cleared his throat. “Oliver, Baron Hjorth is of course responsible for the well-being of all beneath his roof. In accordance with your orders I requested that he see to Lady Helge’s security.” A moment’s pause to let the implication sink in. “Whether he complied with your orders bears investigation.”

The duke stopped pacing, standing in front of the broad picture windows that looked out across the valley below the castle. Heavily forested and seemingly empty of human habitation, the river valley ran all the way to the coast, marking the northern border of the sprawling kingdom of Gruinmarkt from the Nordmarkt neighbors to the north. “And the lady Olga?”

“She protests in the strongest terms, my lord.” The secretary shrugged slightly, his face expressionless. “I sent Roland to attend to her personally, to ensure she is adequately protected. For what it’s worth, there were no identifying marks on the bodies. No tattoos, no indications of who they were. Not Clan. But they had weapons and equipment from the other side and I am—startled—that Lady Olga, even with help from our runaway, survived the incident.”

“Our runaway is my niece, Matthias,” the duke reminded his secretary.