To fall this far . . .

He glanced sidelong at the battered carpetbag that sat on the hotel room bed.

Well, what goes down can come right up again,

he reminded himself.

It was all the Beckstein women's fault, mother and daughter both. He'd first heard it from the mouth of the haughty dowager duchess herself: "The woman's an impostor of course," Hildegarde voh Thorold-Hjorth had snapped at him. "Do you really think it likely that an heiress has been living secretly in exile, in the, the barbarian world, for all these years? Just to surface

now,

when everything is finally settling down again? This is a plot, you mark my words!"

Well, the Beckstein woman

wasn't

an impostor—the dowager might not know a DNA paternity test from a rain of frogs, but he was under no such illusions—but the emergence after so long of her black-sheep mother certainly suggested that the dowager was right about it being some sort of conspiracy. And the bewildering ease with which Miriam had destroyed all the obstacles set in her path and then taken on the Clan Council like some kind of radical reformist firebrand was certainly suggestive.

Someone

was clearly behind the woman. And her exposure of the lost cousins, and this strange world which they had made their own, was a thunderbolt out of the blue. "She's a loose cannon," Baron Henryk yen Nordstrom had muttered angrily over a glass of port. "We shall have to take her out of play, Robard, or she's going to throw the board on the floor and jump on the pieces."

"Do you want me to neutralize her permanently?" ven Hjalmar had asked, cocking his head slightly to one side. "It seems unsubtle. . . ."

Henryk snorted in reply. "She's a woman, we can tie her down. If necessary, you can damage her a little." He didn't mention the other business, with the boy in the palace all those years ago; it would be gauche. "Marry her off and give her some children to keep her busy. Or, if she won't back off, a childbed accident. Hmm, come to think of it, I know a possible husband."