Arnesen was a survivor of seventy-some years, most of which he had experienced in a state of barely suppressed existential terror. Even now, in a house his security chief assured him was securely doppelgangered from both the known alternate worlds (in the United States by a convenient interstate off-ramp, and in New Britain by a recently acquired derelict warehouse), and at the tail end of yet another civil war (this one between the Clan and the rival noble houses, rather than between Clan families) and at the tail end of his years, he could not bring himself to sit with his back to door or window. Besides, an instinct for trouble that had served him well over the decades whispered warnings in his ears: Not all was right in the Gruinmarkt, or within the uneasy coalition of Clan radicals and conservatives who had agreed to back the baroness Helge Thorold-Hjorth and her claim to bear the heir to the throne.

It's all going to come apart again, sooner or later,

he told himself gloomily, as he examined the next name in the ledger.

There are too many of them. . . .

The civil war in the Gruinmarkt, torched off by the conservative Baron Henryk's scheme to marry the troublesome Helge who had grown up in the United States, calling herself Miriam—to the king's second son, had left an enormous mess in its wake. Crown Prince Egon, paranoid by disposition, had sensed in the betrothal the first stirring of a plot to assassinate him; he'd moved against the Clan with vicious speed and ruthless determination, and in the three months they'd run wild his followers had destroyed the work of decades.