She sighed. This would have to do. She went downstairs and called loudly for the carriage. Her estate had sat by the edge of Priekule for centuries, long before all the ley lines around the power point at the heart of the city were charted and exploited, and so stood near none of them.

Even if it had, she would not have cared to ride a public caravan to the palace and subject herself to the stares of barmaids and booksellers and other vulgar, common folk.

She got more stares riding in the carriage, but she didn't have to notice those; they weren't so intimate as they would have been in the cramped confines of a caravan coach. The horses clopped along the cobblestones past square modem buildings of brick and glass (at which she sneered because they were modem); past others whose marble colonnades and painted statues inuitated fornis amp;orn the days of the Kaunian Empire (at which she sneered because they were limitations); past some a couple of hundred years old, when the omate Algarvian architectural influence was strong (at which she sneered because they looked Algarvian); and past a few true Kaunian relics (at which she sneered because they were decrepit).

The carriage had just passed the famous Kaunian Column of Victory - now at last fully restored after fire damage during the Six Years' War - when a green-uniformed fellow held up a hand to bar the way. "What is the meaning of this?" Krasta demanded of her driver. "Never mind that oaf - go on through."

"Milady, I had better not," he answered cautiously.

She started to rage at him, but then the first Valmieran footsoldiers started tramping through the street from which she'd been barred. The river of men in dark green trousers and tunics seemed to take forever to flow past. "If I am late to the palace because of these soldiers, - shall be very unhappy - and so shall you," she told the driver, tapping her foot on the carpeted floor. She smiled to see him shiver; all her servants knew she meant what she said when she said things like that.