Another chink of metal on stone, and a cracked chuckle: "Well, lookee here! And what's a fine girl like you doing in a place like this?"

The woman turned to stare into the darkness where the voice had spoken from, clutching her coat around her.

Another chuckle. "Let's ask her, why don't we?"

The woman-Countess Helge voh Thorold d'Hjorth, to her vast and squabbling extended family, plain Miriam Beckstein to herself-took a step backwards then stopped, brought up against the crumbling brick wall. Figures solidified out of the shadows beyond the flickering gaslight glow from the end of the alleyway. Her gaze darted across them as she fumbled with the pockets of her coat.

"Heya, pretty lady, what have you got for a growing boy?"

"Show us your tits!"

Miriam counted three of them as her eyes adapted to the darkness. It helped that she'd just stepped over, across a gap thinner than an atom-or greater than 10¹⁰²⁸ meters, depending how you measured it-from a lawn outside a burning palace, the night punctuated by the roar of cannon and the staccato cracking of the guards' pistols. Three of them, she realized, a sick tension in the pit of her stomach, one of them's on the ground, crouching, or...?

The standing figure came closer and she saw that he was skinny and short, not much more than a boy, bow-legged, his clothing ragged. At five foot six Miriam didn't think of herself as tall, but she could almost look down on the top of his head. Unfortunately this also gave her a good view of the knife clutched in his right hand.

Desperation and a silvery edge of suppressed rage broke her paralysis. "Fuck off!" She stepped forward, away from the wall, hands balling into fists in her black velvet gloves. "Right, that's it. I've had enough!"

The evening had started badly. She was already under house arrest in Niejwein, with a suspended sentence of death hanging over her head, and Miriam's great-uncle had casually informed her that she was to be married off to the king's youngest son-damaged goods, braindamaged goods at that-and the betrothal would be announced that evening.