Part 1
The couch was still warm.
Philip did not sit down on it. He stood and looked at the hollow her weight had left in the leather, and at a single long golden hair lying across the cushion.
Lydia had gone down the passage. She came back alone after giving some urgent instructions and did not tell him what she had seen. She did not need to.
On the far wall, the House of Lords went on.
The Marquess of Callenden was on his feet with a sheet of paper in his hand that had not been there ten minutes earlier.
"My Lords, I have been asked by the First Minister to read a short statement to the House, and with the House's leave I shall do so."
Nobody refused leave.
"The First Minister has seen what the House has seen. Before the House answers any other question, he asks it to keep four in mind. Who assembled this material, from what sources, and by what means? Has any of it been fabricated, altered, selectively omitted or distorted in its interpretation? If the allegations are true, do they not make it more urgent to legalise and control, rather than bury our heads in the sand behind a blanket ban that cannot reach the countless summoning facilities overseas where, on these allegations, such rogue Familiars are made? And most important of all: which foreign powers would benefit most from an Avalondia too divided to act, too fearful to move forward and too trapped in the past? While we hesitate, our rivals and our allies alike are pulling ahead in a summoning boom that will tip the balance of power to their advantage for good, and leave us to bear the consequences of their failures of oversight."
Callenden lowered the paper.
"The First Minister adds that the material will be examined by officers whose names this House knows, and that he will answer to this House for what they find."
The words went past Philip like traffic.
He heard sources and consequences, and somewhere far back in his mind a cooler part of him noted that Arthur had just turned the hood's question round and pointed it at whoever had sent her. The rest of him was looking at a hair on a leather cushion.
Part 2
Lilianna's mirror phone buzzed against the lid of her dispatch box.
She would not have looked at it in the chamber on any other afternoon. Aunt Clara's instructions had been precise: a peeress does not consult her correspondence under the cameras, because the cameras will want to know what it said. But the House had not been itself for a quarter of an hour, and nobody was looking at anything but her Uncle Gerald and the display mirror.
She opened the box.
Government cannot move to delay its own Bill today without appearing to do exactly what she accuses us of. Nor can Redwood. Your Grace can ask for proof before a verdict. Nernwick will support. Say nothing you do not believe. —D.
She read it twice, the way she had read the First Minister's note in the dark on Tuesday. It had come from the number of the "friend" Dianna had introduced her to over a quiet coffee a few hours before the sitting, and the D told her the rest: Arthur's words, in Dianna's hand.
She understood the first sentence at once, and it frightened her a little that she did. If Callenden rose now and asked the House to put off the vote, every paper in the Empire would print the hood's accusation beside his motion and let the readers draw the line. A government accused of hiding the truth could not be seen to hide the vote as well. Uncle Gerald could not move it either. It was his house the hood had pointed at, and anything he proposed now would read as an attempt to interfere with the inquiry.
That left the House to find someone who was neither part of the current administration nor one of the accused.
Someone new. She was a Redwood cousin, and the papers would say so by breakfast. But she had no record in this House for anyone to quote back at her, and a cousin who asked only for proof was not asking for an acquittal.
She thought of Winston House: the gnomes in the snow, the cold coffee, Arthur turning a sentence over in his hands until every clause was true and the essential thing was still unnamed. Directed by an organisation operating outside Avalondian law. The benefactor's identity must remain classified pending confirmation. She had sat by that fire and watched the government decide what the House would be told.
The hood had been right about that much. Something had been kept from them.
She thought, too, of her earlier commitment to Arthur's request.
Whatever else the House of Wetdin does with its five votes, I should be grateful if it never voted to put Her Majesty to sleep.
The hood had never said sleep, and had not needed to: she had left the bicentennial on the mirror and let her appeal to responsibility imply it. A House that voted tomorrow in this fear might throw out the Bill, and by spring it would be voting on Her Majesty. The hood had asked them to wait in fear. Someone could ask them to wait for proof.
Lilianna closed the dispatch box and stood up.
Her knees did not quite belong to her. Somewhere to her left a camera turned with a small mechanical sigh.
"My Lords."
It came out too high. She brought it down.
"I am the newest member of this House, and I know the least. I am not going to tell your Lordships that nothing has been kept from us. I think something has." A murmur went along the benches and she made herself speak over it. "I don't know all of it. Neither does anyone in this chamber who has not seen the files. That is my point."
She looked at the dead mirror above the Table.
"We have been shown a face and told a verdict, and in the same breath we have been told how to vote. I should like the verdict to wait for the proof." She had no speech written, only the print with its pencilled circles, and she held it in both hands as if it might help.
"I beg to move that further consideration of the Bill be now adjourned; that the division appointed for tomorrow be postponed; and that the House resume when it has received a report from the proper authorities on whether what was shown this afternoon is genuine, and on what it does and does not establish."
She sat down before her knees could give way.
For a moment nothing happened. Then the Duke of Nernwick rose from the far end of the benches, slipping his own mirror phone into his waistcoat pocket as he stood.
"My Lords, I support the noble Duchess." His voice was heavier than she remembered from the courtyard, and slower. "A decision of such historical significance must not rest on unverified material."
The Lord Chancellor put the question.
"As many as are of that opinion will say Content."
"Content!" came back like weather. It came from the government benches and from the benches opposite, from Durnevell's corner, from places Lilianna could not see.
"To the contrary, Not-Content."
A handful of voices, scattered and half-hearted.
"I think the Contents have it."
Nobody called for a division. Lilianna could see why, now that she had stopped shaking long enough to look. The Bill's opponents had just been handed a delay and would not vote against it. Its supporters wanted the proof as badly as she did. And nobody in the chamber wished to be the man on the Collective Space tonight who had voted against verification.
"The Contents have it."
It was over. From the buzz of her phone to the Lord Chancellor's last word, it had taken eleven minutes.
Only then did she understand that every camera in the chamber was pointing at her. Though she had not suggested anything at all except that the verdict should wait, the cameras had decided her face was iconic enough to serve as the perfect visual supplement to the day's headline news.
Part 3
"The Contents have it."
Philip looked at the clock above the double doors. Thirty-one minutes past three.
She had gone at fourteen minutes past.
"Seventeen minutes," he said.
Lydia was standing beside him. He had not heard her come.
"It is a postponement, Master Philip," she said quietly. "It is not an acquittal."
"She'd have stayed for it."
Lydia did not answer, which was its own answer, and not the one he wanted.
The rest of the afternoon happened to him in pieces.
The house closed. The Agency's young men took up positions at the gate with perfect courtesy and turned back two motorcars of journalists and one hired carriage before five o'clock. The telephone in the hall rang and was not answered. The household mirror rang and was.
At half past four the family's counsel in Albecaster came through on the secure line with a draft statement, and read it aloud in the voice of a man who had already been told it would be refused.
Captain Redwood is profoundly shocked and distressed to learn of the allegations concerning a member of his household, and of the deception that appears to have been practised upon—
"No," Philip said.
"Lord Philip, if you would allow me to explain the advantage—"
"I know the advantage. I'd look like a fool instead of an accomplice." He found that he was standing again. "I wasn't deceived. Not about her. I won't say I was."
There was a pause on the line.
"Then I would advise the family to say nothing whatever about the relationship while the investigation is ongoing," counsel said. "And to state it firmly."
At six o'clock the household issued two sentences to every paper that had asked, and to several that had not.
While the public investigation is ongoing, the family will not comment on private relationships. Evidentiary matters are being addressed through the inquiry.
It made no difference to the evening editions. The Herald had its story on the streets by six, and the Collective Space had settled on it two hours earlier: a rich, trusting heir; a beautiful and talented stranger with a ridiculous scholarship and an impossible devotion; a romance the whole Empire had applauded, which turned out to have been an operation. POOR PHILIP, said one of the more charitable headlines. The less charitable ones used other words.
Lydia read them all aloud from the household mirror, in order.
She did not soften anything; Philip noticed that particularly. Then she went through the east study with a tray and a list, and everything on the long table went into the study's strongroom exactly as it lay: the divided print, the builder's elevation with empty crossed out, his notebook, the January Army List with Natalia's light pencil ticks in its margins.
Margaret rang at a quarter past seven.
"You will come to Albecaster tomorrow," she said, without greeting. "You and Lydia. Counsel needs you, the Bobbies will want your statement, and you will be safer here than in a house at the end of a cliff road with half the newspapers in the Empire camped at the bottom of it. The staff at Long Stones will stay. If anything comes for you there—anything, from anyone—they will send it on the same day. And if she comes back there, they will tell her where you are."
"Grandmother—"
"I know." The line was quiet for a moment. "I have my book open in front of me, Philip. Before three o'clock this afternoon it said nine hundred and three votes to one hundred and ninety-seven. More than five hundred of those nine hundred came over to us only this winter, and I have never managed to learn what your grandfather paid in political capital for them." Paper turned at her end. "I do not know how many of them are still ours tonight. Neither, I suspect, does he."
"Have you spoken to him?"
"I have told him there are things he had better hear from counsel than from me, so that whatever he says in that House is true. He was not pleased." A pause. "He was not surprised either. And I have told the First Minister's office that Natalia is no longer in our house. I will not have it said by anyone, next week or next year, that we were hiding her."
Philip closed his eyes.
"Go to bed early," Margaret said. "You won't sleep. Go anyway."
She rang off.
He sat in the east study with the empty table in front of him, and a question he had been carrying for a fortnight finally came up out of the dark and stood in front of him.
"Lydia. How much mana did she have?"
Lydia, who had been making a list at the window, set down her pencil.
He had meant to ask it on New Year's morning, with Natalia warm and strange in his arms. He had meant to ask it the next morning too, watching her sleep in the sunlight. Both times he had decided it could wait.
"As much as I could give her," Lydia said. "I have kept her topped up since the conversion. The last time was Tuesday night. When she left, she was near full."
"How long does full last?"
"About a fortnight, at a human pace. Ordinary living, ordinary walking, sleeping when she chooses to." Lydia came and sat across the table from him, which she almost never did. "Everything else costs more. Running costs more. Listening the way she listens costs more. Fighting, reading at speed, anything that uses what she is rather than what she pretends to be. A day of hard use can cost what a week of ordinary living would."
"And when it runs low?"
"She conserves. The senses go first—she told you as much after the bombing, I believe. Then speed. Then strength. At the bottom—" Lydia chose the words with care. "At the bottom she is not unmade, Master Philip. Her seal is her own now, and it is intact. Running dry will not end her. But it will leave her in a state of dormancy."
"She can charge, though." He heard how it sounded—as if he were asking about a mirror phone—and did not care. "She told me. Anything on the grid. She doesn't need me for it any more. She doesn't even need your kit."
"She can replenish herself, Master Philip." Lydia held his eyes. "That does not mean she can safely replenish herself wherever she happens to be. She needs a supply she can use, time to use it, and no one watching while she does. A large draw in the wrong place shows up on somebody's meter. I know what she left with. I do not know how fast she is spending it, or whether she has a plan for how to take more when needed."
"Then we send her the kit."
"Where?"
He had no answer to that.
"The household channel carries words and pictures," Lydia said, more gently, "and she knows how to read it from any public mirror in the Empire. What it cannot carry is a battery. If she told us where she was, I would take the kit to her myself, tonight. She has not."
She rose, crossed to the desk, unlocked a drawer, and came back with a single folded sheet.
"You asked her to write this down," she said. "On New Year's Day. She did it that same day, and revised it twice. I thought you ought to read it."
The hand was Natalia's: small, level, perfectly legible.
Objective: Identify the woman who resembles me.
Three hypotheses: a Republican asset; an Arussian asset; a private assassin.
Action, pending approval: Bring the impostor to Master. Dead or alive. In whole or in part.
Restore his trust.
The back of the sheet held the method, in a smaller hand: the trap she had laid out on New Year's Day, every detail of it, as he had asked. He had heard her describe the trap. He had never seen its purpose written down.
As Philip read, a chill went down his spine one vertebra at a time.
In whole or in part.
He folded the sheet back along its creases and held it for a long time.
Part 4
The evening papers were waiting in Aunt Clara's car.
It was one car tonight instead of a column, with the hood up and no lamps lit, and it had been waiting at the western arch when the House finally rose at seven, after three more hours of business nobody would remember. Clara sat inside with the Herald across her knees and the Imperial Times folded beside her, and she did not stand up to wave this time. She said, "Get in, darling, before they get a better angle," and Lilianna got in.
THE HEIR AND THE SPY, said the Herald. Beneath it, a photograph of Philip from the bicentennial, wet and stunned, with his arms around a woman whose face had been on the great mirror that afternoon. The Imperial Times was more careful and therefore worse. It is widely feared in society that the young heir's trust has been cruelly exploited.
Widely. Lilianna wondered by whom. She knew the Redwoods' own answer; it had come through on her phone at six, two flat sentences that said nothing about anything. The Imperial Times had reframed it as the Redwoods' commitment to non-interference, rather than what it was: a refusal to say anything at all.
She looked at the photograph for a long time.
She did not know what Natalia was. She had wondered, at Margaret's table last year, watching the way the woman checked a room's exits before she sat down. She knew now that the government had kept things from the House. She did not know what Philip had known, or what the two of them had been to each other behind the closed doors of that cliff house. She knew only what Aunt Margaret had told her over tea in December, and what she had seen at the bicentennial: a man covered in filth turning to receive an embrace as if nothing else in the world existed.
If that had been an operation, then the kind hero she yearned for had been taken for a fool in front of the entire Empire.
The papers were laughing at him.
He really needs someone now.
"I should like to call on him," she said. "Not tonight. When he can bear it. If it would help."
"Of course you must," Clara said at once. "Darling, of course. The poor boy will be desperately lonely. Somebody familiar ought to make sure he keeps well, and that he doesn't fall prey to some social climber who sees an opening."
She touched Lilianna's wrist. "Kindness should not have to wait for an occasion. Ring Aunt Margaret now. She'll know whether he is fit to be seen."
Lilianna rang.
"He comes up to town tomorrow," Margaret said. Her voice sounded older on the line than it did across a tea table. "Saturday, if your duties allow. An hour. Not more—he will not manage more, and neither will you, I expect." A pause. "Thank you for this afternoon, my dear. That was well done."
Lilianna put her mirror phone away and found that her hands had begun to shake again, as if they had been waiting for permission.
"As for the Herald interview," Clara went on, as though nothing had interrupted her, "we'll move it to Monday. They won't want the regiment now. They'll want the motion, and whether a Redwood cousin moved it for the Redwoods." She studied her niece's face in the dim car. "Wear the grey, not the green. Green is for being liked. Grey is for being taken seriously."
She set Lilianna down at her own door at twenty to eight, kissed the air beside her cheek, and rode on alone.
Clara did not open the Herald again. She did not need to. She had read both papers twice before the House rose, and she had read them as a woman reads a map rather than a story.
Nor had she needed to ask whose idea the motion was. Lilianna had rung her before the sitting to report a quiet coffee with the First Minister's Miss Dianna, and the friend Miss Dianna had brought along, whose number her niece had been asked to keep. After last night's careful glad, Clara had half expected to hear of it from Pell. Instead the girl had rung her herself: a duchess now, with five votes and a First Minister's private line, and still telling her aunt. That pleased Clara more than the news did.
A First Minister did not give a duchess a private line on the eve of a division for the pleasure of her company, and Nernwick had been pocketing his mirror phone as he rose. The motion was Arthur's, and that pleased her more still. If nobody had stood up, she would have had to send her niece that message herself, and the Prince's fingerprints would have been on it instead of Arthur's.
His Highness wanted the Empress collared one day, gently and on his own timetable; he did not want a hood frightening the House into talk of putting her to sleep. Arthur had done His Highness's work for him, and if anyone ever traced the motion, they would find Arthur.
A young man of enormous expectations had lost, in a single afternoon, the woman who had stood between him and the world. Whether she was arrested, ran or was quietly sent away by his own family, she could not stand there again. For a while he would face that world alone, and it had turned hostile. A man in that condition remembered who came.
One day he would be the Duke of Redwood.
None of this needed saying to her niece. Lilianna's kindness was real, and for these purposes real kindness was always the best kind. It was what a man remembered.
Part 5
Far to the east, the Neva lay frozen under its lamps, and in the billiard room above it Crown Prince Mikhail was not playing billiards.
He stood at one window with a glass. Livona stood at the other, grey dress, brown hair, the obsidian device in her left hand pulsing blue in the slower pattern Arkady had learned to read as listening.
A month ago there had been seven operators on seven links at once. Today there had been none. No operators meant no links, and nothing for anyone to follow home. There had been only Livona, playing someone called Robinhoodie.
Arkady had watched it on the mirror above the fireplace: the warm, unhurried voice, the laughter in the chamber dying under it. Her lips had not moved once.
"Status," Mikhail said, without turning.
"Success." Her voice was flat again, each word filed and stamped before release. The warmth had been borrowed for the afternoon, like the facts. "Collective Space copies: approximately thirteen thousand and rising."
"And the House?"
"Adjourned consideration on a procedural motion. Agreed without a division. The motion was moved by the Duchess of Wetdin."
Mikhail turned, pleased as a man whose cue ball had stopped exactly where he wanted it, and lifted his glass to her.
"Beautiful work, my love."
"Always a pleasure to serve," Livona said.
"Sooner or later they will trace the credential to a consultancy that never sent it," Arkady said. "Within a month their Bobbies will prove the woman on the road is not the woman in the profile. None of it will hold, Highness."
"I never needed it to hold, Arkady," Mikhail said. He set down his glass and picked up the chalk. "I only need them to know that the Republic's own instrument was altered, and never to learn who altered it. Let them wonder what else can be reached. Let them be afraid: of Familiars, of their Guardian, of progress itself." He turned the chalk in his fingers. "A nation gripped by fear is a nation ready to distrust its own Guardian."
Arkady smiled. He understood.
"And I am buying time for my dear brother Vlan," Mikhail went on, "who always overplans and underdelivers."
He put the chalk down harder than he needed to and turned back to the frozen river.
"I can buy him months," he said. "I cannot buy him years. What is taking him so long?"