In person, it was true-so Jozef had been told, anyway-the new king was a charming fellow. In that regard, quite unlike his sour and gloomy father. But what difference did that make? Where the Jagiellonian dynasty that had previously ruled the Commonwealth had taken care to ally with the middling classes against the great noblemen-much as the Swedish Vasas had done-the Polish branch of the Vasa family showered favors and largesse on those same magnates. The end result, after Zygmunt's long reign of forty-five years, was that the Commonwealth was now completely under the thumb of the great landowning families. In the real world, once you stripped away the pretensions of the szlachta, it was the magnates who dominated the Sejm.

How likely was it, then, that such a Sejm and such a king would agree to begin dismantling serfdom?

The Americans had a clever saying that applied. A snowball's chance in hell.

But, in truth, Jozef couldn't say he was disappointed. He hadn't really expected the Grand Hetman of the Commonwealth to react any differently. For all of Stanislaw Koniecpolski's undoubted virtues, the man was very much the product of his class. Nor was he a man whose temperament inclined him toward questioning his background and upbringing, or his own attitudes. He was a brilliant soldier, certainly; an upstanding and-by his lights-honest man, just as certainly. But a reflective man? Someone capable of analyzing his own biases objectively?

Not in the least. No more so than a lion. Or a brick wall, for that matter.

So be it. At some point, Jozef would probably have to start making difficult decisions of his own. For the moment, however, his personal loyalty to Koniecpolski remained. The world was an imperfect place, after all.