“You’re—” he swallowed. “Miriam.” He held out his arms to her. “You’re strong, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve been trying to resist the pressure for years. It doesn’t work. The Clan will get you to do what they want you to do in the end. I spent years trying to get them to do something—land reform on their estates, educating the peasants, laying the groundwork for industrialization. All I got was shit. There are deeply entrenched political groupings within the Clan who don’t want to see any modernization, because it threatens their own source of power—access to imported goods. And outside the Clan, there are the traditional nobility, not to mention the Crown, who are just waiting for the Clan nobility to make a misstep. Jealousy is a strong motivating force, especially among the recently rich. If Angbard hadn’t stood up for me, I’d have had my estate forfeited. I might even have been declared outlaw—don’t you see?” There was anguish in his eyes.

“Frankly, no. What I see is a lot of frightened people, none of whom particularly like the way things work, but all of whom think they’ll lose out if anyone else disrupts it. And you know something? They’re wrong and I don’t want to be part of that. You’ve been telling me that I can’t escape the Clan, and I’m afraid you’re right—you’ve convinced me—but that only means I’ve got to change things. To carve out a niche I can live with.” She stood up and walked toward him. “I don’t like the way the families live like royalty in a squalid mess that doesn’t even have indoor plumbing. I don’t like the way their law values people by how they can breed and treats women like chattels. I don’t like the way the outer family feel the need to defend the status quo in order to keep from being kicked in the teeth by the inner families. The whole country is ripe for modernization on a massive scale, and the Clan actually has the muscle to do that, if they’d just realize it. I don’t like the dehumanizing poverty the ordinary people have to live with, and I don’t like the way the crazy fucked-up feudal inheritance laws turn an accident of birth into an excuse for rape and murder. But most of all, I don’t like what they’ve done to you.”

She leaned down and pulled him up by the shoulders, forcing him to stand in front of her. “Look at me,” she insisted. “What do you see?”

Roland looked up at her sceptically. “Do you really think you can take them all on?”

“On my own?” She snorted. “I know I can,” she said fiercely. “All it takes is a handful of people who believe that things can change to start the ball rolling. And that handful has to start somewhere! Now are you with me or against me?”

He hugged her right back, and she felt another response: He was stiffening against her, through his robe. “You’re the best thing that’s happened to me in years. If ever. I don’t want to lose you.”^

“Me too, love.”

“But how do you think you’re going to make it work?” he asked. “And stop whoever’s trying to kill you.”

“Oh, that.” She leaned into his arms, letting him pull her back in the direction of the bed. “That’s going to be easy. When you strip away the breeding program, the Clan is a business, right? Family-owned partnership, private shareholdings. Policy is set at annual meetings twice a year, next one at Beltaigne, that sort of thing.”

“So?” He looked distracted, so she stopped fumbling at his belt for a moment.

“Well.” She leaned her chin against the hollow of his neck, licked his pulse spot slowly. “It may have escaped your attention, but I am an expert in one particular field—I’ve spent years studying it, and I think I probably know more about it than anyone else in the family. The Clan is an old-fashioned unlimited-liability partnership, with a dose of family politics thrown in. The business structure itself is a classic variation on import/export trade, but it’s cash-rich enough to support a transition to some other model. All I need is a lever and an appropriate fulcrum and then a direction to make them move in. Business restructuring, baby, that’s where it’s at. A whole new business model. The lever we need is one that will convince them that they have more to lose by not changing than by sticking with the status quo.

Once we’re in the driver’s seat, nobody is going to tell us we can’t shack up on this side and live the way we want to.”

He lifted her off her feet and lay down beside her. “What leverage do you need?” he asked alertly. “I spent years looking and didn’t find anything that powerful…”

“It’s going to be something convincing.” She smiled hungrily up at him. “And they’ll never know what hit them. We need to establish a power base by Beltaigne. A pilot project that demonstrates massive potential for making money in some way that relies on the Clan talent without falling into the classic mercantilist traps. It’ll make me worth much more to them alive than dead, and it’ll give us the beginning of a platform to recruit like-minded people and start building.” She looked pensive. “A skunk works within an established corporation, designed to introduce new ways of thinking and pioneer new business opportunities. I’ve written up enough stories about them—I just never thought I’d be setting one up myself.”

She stopped talking. There’d be time to work out the details later.

Miriam dozed fitfully, unable to relax her  grip on consciousness. She kept turning  events over in her mind, wondering what she could have done differently. If there was anything in the past two weeks that she could have changed, what might have come of it? She might not have accepted the pink and green shoebox. She wouldn’t be in this mess at all.

But she wouldn’t have met Brill, or Roland, or Angbard, or Olga, or the rest of the menagerie of Clan connections who were so insistently cluttering up her hitherto-straightforward family life with politics and feuds and grudges and everything else that went with the Clan. Her life would be simpler, emptier, more predictable, and safer, she thought sleepily. With nobody trying to exploit me because of who I am.

Who I am? She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling in the dark. Is it me they’re after or someone else? she wondered. If only I could ask my mother. Not the mother who’d loved her and raised her, not Iris—the other one, the faceless woman who’d died before she’d had a chance to remember her. The woman who’d borne her and been murdered, her only legacy a mess of—

She glanced sideways. Roland was asleep next to her, his face smooth and relaxed, free of worry. I’ve gone from being completely independent to this in just two weeks. Never mind Brill and Kara back in the palace, the weight of Angbard’s expectations, the Clan’s politics … Miriam wasn’t used to having to think about other people when planning her moves, not since the divorce from Ben.

She glanced at the alarm clock. It was coming up to seven o’clock—too late to go back to sleep. She leaned over toward Roland’s ear. “Wake up, sleepyhead,” she whispered.

Roland mumbled something into the pillow. His eyelids twitched.

“Time to be getting up,” she repeated.

He opened his eyes, then yawned. “I hate morning people,” he said, looking at her slyly.

“I’m not a morning person, I just do my best worrying when I should be asleep.” She took a deep breath. I’m going to have to go find that lever to move the Clan,” she told him. “The one we were talking about last night. While that’s going on, unless we can find out who’s really got it in for me, we may not be able to meet up very often.”

“We can’t talk about this publicly,” he said. “Even if Olga keeps her mouth shut—”

“No.” She kissed him. “Damn, I feel like they’re all watching us from behind the bed!”