The soldiers at the entrance to the Presidential Compound were standing to attention; she watched a fly crawl over the face of one of them, and he didn’t move even when it reached his eyeball, merely blinked. There was a Natpol doing the actual examination of documents. Ritva smiled nervously through an impulse to sweat. These documents weren’t even improvised fakery; they were just someone else’s, quickly stolen by a Dúnedain team who’d snatched the bearer and had her tied up in a warehouse. The black-and-white picture was of a tallish blond woman of about her age, and there was about the degree of general resemblance Ritva bore to half the young women in Boise. But she wouldn’t have been fooled herself if she made an effort to compare picture to features, not even briefly. Luckily not even Boise’s obsessive devotion to order and regulation extended to using color pictures. And it was natural to be nervous around a document check outside the dwelling of a ruler.

Act like a peasant who’s bringing something to Regent Sandra at Castle Todenangst, Ritva thought. You’ve watched the poor devils sweat there, often enough.

“Pass,” the Natpol said in a tone as bored as the expression on Ritva’s face. “Next!”

The Presidential Compound bore the marks of haste in its construction. This had been the citadel from which Lawrence Thurston extended his realm, in the chaos of the first Change Years; there had been chaos and fighting in Boise, and then typhoid and cholera and the Black Death, until he came and gave men a name and a flag to rally around.

The walls were high and thick, but they’d been roughcast and smoothed only enough to give no easy handholds. They followed the lines of a block across from the State capitol, with what had been the Williams Office Building as their core; it was the Citadel now, bulking high with cranes and machicolations above. Other buildings had been incorporated into the outer wall, sometimes simply used as forms into which concrete was poured. It gave the fortifications a weird angular look, jagged and irregular. Most of the interior was a concrete-floored parade ground, where soldiers and bureaucrats and their various hybrid offspring clattered back and forth to the offices around the periphery amid the odd horse or mule-drawn cart.

It is a castle, just a strange-looking one, Ritva told herself. It does all the things a castle does.

The General-President was not at home right now. They’d checked that carefully.

I am brave. I am very brave, in fact. But I am not stupid and I don’t want to die, she thought.