A different, blacker anger joined the rage already rumbling through MASON. “Kraye killed your entire family?”

“I have a great-great-aunt who is one hundred and sixty-six years old and succumbing fast.” Isabel Carlos II turned back toward us, composed again and perfect as a marble bust. “You have your continuity in law, MASON.” He held his hand out. “Ours is this blood. It flowed through queens, saints, emperors, and it flows through my one surviving child. I cannot change this fact, not even if it means breaking my word to you.”

Even optimism sounded rough in Caesar’s throat. “You’re not too old to have another child.”

“True”—Spain nodded toward the Lady—“and we will try to have another child, Joyce has promised that, and if we succeed that could solve everything. But I could also be assassinated tomorrow. I’m holding the European Hive together with nothing but residual family trust. Neither Spain nor Europe can feel safe unless I have a successor.”

MASON’s stance solidified, his left foot’s imagined weakness eclipsed as danger eclipses pain. Martin’s grip solidified at the same time, his hand and arm supporting me as I slumped against him, bracing me—for what?

“I will not let you make Jehovah your heir,” MASON pronounced.

“They are my heir.”

“I will not let you make Jehovah take the Crown Prince’s oath of loyalty to you and the Spanish people.”

My stomach heaved, but Martin’s support kept me from writhing hard enough to strain my wound. An oath? Jehovah take an oath? The manacle that bound my arm to Martin’s could be broken or, in desperate times, the hand gnawed off, but to the Great Scroll’s Addressee words are more real and more unalterable than breathing, fact, or matter. The stuff that His Peer’s world is made of. Prison wraiths surged around me, dense as Tully’s war-cancer, weaving their spiral bonds of smoke-ribbon like maypole dancers in my mind. A God sworn vassal to the King of Spain? Divine Infinity and all His Goodness yoked to the self-interest of one arbitrary nation-strat? You did not see Him, reader, in the weeks before He was sworn in as Romanovan Tribune, how He pored over its oath of office with linguists, lawyers, sensayers, family, strangers, performing desperate and stubborn exegesis on every word until he satisfied himself that He could understand and execute the pledge to “exercise My judgment to identify and oppose laws which strip too much of human liberty.” So much thought He gave to an oath He could shed with resignation any second, as crabs shed their cramped shells. That was nothing to this—a lifelong oath of loyalty to the Spanish people? I retched again, and lost myself in a maze of insane solutions. Have Spain annex the whole Earth? Replace Jehovah’s bone marrow to purge him of the blood of kings? Travel back in time and murder Charlemagne before he could bear children? Surely, reader, you have wandered in the mire of half-sleep, and forged from dream logic plans that waking must call mad.