It would take a major Ege family disaster to put the succession back into the hands of the Electors.

Lothar stated, "The Council Advisory has cautioned us, and we are in agreement, that the world today presents our reign with unprecedented challenges."

This was the first time Helspeth heard Mushin use the royal "we." It took her aback. She was not accustomed to her little brother being anything else. And, studying him closely, she suspected that this Emperor Lothar was a creation of the Grand Duke and his cronies. An eventuality she had feared increasingly as Hilandle and his flock circled more closely round the Emperor and isolated him ever more from his family and the world.

Lothar understood what was happening. A minor, he had little hope of halting the process. He had to remain strong and play one Councilor off against another. He managed that with some success.

"It has been demonstrated that our present style of life is inappropriate for a family of Imperial dignity. The daughters of our father should not be inviting scandal and disaster by roving like common men-at-arms."

Helspeth glared at Lothar. Half the nobility had spent the past ten years appalled and scandalized because the old Emperor not only permitted but encouraged his maiden daughters to accompany him to the field, to risk the life of the camp, and to come into regular contact with coarse, crude common soldiers.

So the Council was about to end all that.

The boy Emperor wilted under Helspeth's glare. And was no happier when he turned to his older sister.

Katrin was less inclined to the scandalous life. Helspeth had taken up arms and armor during the Calziran Crusade, getting into desperate straits under al-Khazen's wall. Katrin was more willful, more determined to preserve her prerogatives and independence.

Lothar was strong of mind, if not of flesh. He did not remain cowed. "We have decided that our princess sisters shall withdraw into their households till suitable marriages can be negotiated. Silence! Both of you." Helspeth had been about to explode. She did not see Katrin's reaction because her own focus had become so narrow. She was sure her sister was equally outraged.

The Grand Duke all but sneered behind his short, gray-tinged beard. His eyes were icy. "It's the Emperor's will." Meaning Lothar had been bullied until he gave in.

Helspeth reminded herself that Hilandle, till Johannes forced his Act of Will and Succession upon the Electors, had counted himself the leading candidate to succeed.

The boy Emperor then demonstrated that his advisers did not have him as neatly under thumb as they might want to believe. "Katrin, we convey to you the Imperial holdings at Grumbrag, with all the rights of Eathered and Arnmagil."

Members of the Council were so aghast they failed to sputter. There were snickers amongst the lesser lights.

The boy continued. "To our sister Helspeth we convey the City of Plemenza and its dependencies and trust that she will lake the opportunity to further her education."

Plemenza was much the lesser prize. Eathered and Arnmagil, now unified into a single Imperial province, had been kingdoms in their own rights scarcely a century gone. But Plemenza had been Johannes's favorite city. He would have shifted his capital there from Alten Weinberg had the Firaldian city not been so far from the heart of the Grail Empire. He had spent a lot of time in Plemenza, often for his own pleasure, not just because Imperial policy focused on Firaldia and the difficult behaviors of Sublime V and the Church. Johannes's daughters had enjoyed much of their schooling there.

Helspeth flashed a grin. Lothar flashed right back.

Hilandle had been outmaneuvered. Two score witnesses, few congenial to the Grand Duke, had seen the Emperor convey Imperial holdings to members of his family. If Lothar was clever indeed, the patents were ready now, prepared by someone he knew was not Hilandle's tool.

The Grand Duke's face turned stony. He would never underestimate the boy Emperor again.

Helspeth glanced sideways. Katrin seemed pleased. Eathered and Arnmagil was a plum, a fine, fruitful country – and Grumbrag was known for its craftsmen and ingenious artificers. A suitable city and province for the Crown Princess of the New Brothen Empire.

The fleeting look Katrin sent Helspeth's way was only slightly less venomous than the one she had given Hilandle.

She was jealous! Of Plemenza! Because her time there was filled with happy memories, too. Perhaps the only such memories she had accumulated in her twenty-three years.

Johannes Ege – variously known as Johannes Blackboots, Hansel Blackboots ("Little Hans" because he was not a man of great physical stature), or Hansel the Ferocious – had been elected Emperor of the New Brothen Empire before the birth of any of his children. Katrin's mother, Hildegrun of Machen, had just turned nineteen when she married the new Emperor. She was tall, blond, and beautiful. Gossip at the time suggested she had caught Johannes's eyes when she was just fifteen. The Imperial nuptials antedated the birth of the Princess Katrin by a scant five months.

The alliance with Hildegrun's family solidified Johannes's hold on the Grail Empire. She was a devoted wife with numerous knightly brothers who served the Emperor faithfully all his years, remaining friends and allies through several bouts with misfortune. Hildegrun often accompanied Hansel on his progresses through the Empire. She made herself beloved immediately everywhere, even by the wives of the Emperor's enemies.

When Katrin was four months old, while her father was campaigning amongst the countless states of Firaldia, Hildegrun died in a riding accident.

An accomplished equestrian, Hildegrun loved to gallop with the bolder women of her household. On the evil day her mount stumbled as she raced along the bank of a canal. The Empress was unable to leap clear. The horse fell on her. The animal thrashed its way down the bank into the water, rider unconscious and still entangled in harness. Horse and rider drowned before they could be dragged out.

Patriarch Clemency III, the Collegium, and the Five Families of Brothe sent up praises to God. The Patriarch's forces had been defeated in detail everywhere that summer. The Emperor was marching on the Mother City itself when the news reached him.

Hildegrun was not in her tomb many months when Hansel wed Helspeth's mother, the Dowager Princess of Nietzchau. The Princess Terezia was his senior by ten years. The alliance further strengthened Johannes's position among the Electors. The Dowager Princess, at thirty-four, had been a woman possessed of considerable carnal appetites. Her new husband satisfied them sufficiently to subject her to two miscarriages, a son, Willem, born live but who died within two weeks, and, finally, Helspeth. Who never knew her mother.

The Dowager Princess died of childbed fever three days after Helspeth's birth. She was interred beside Willem in the family tomb of her first husband in Wortburg, in Nietzchau.

Before her death the Dowager Princess transferred all her family honors and obligations to the Emperor. Leaving him, in his twenty-seventh year, the third most powerful man in the Chaldarean world, exceeded only by the Brothen Patriarch and the overlord of the Eastern Empire. Among the tasks she left him was the humbling of the worldly power of Brothe. That he prosecuted with skill and success.

But never again did he come as close to breaking the temporal power of the Church as he had before Hildegrun's death. In part, that was due to despondency over his own losses, in part because he had to cope with pro-Brothen sentiment among his own nobility. He did not show much vigor in the field for nine years after Terezia's passing. By then bribery and treachery had undone half his earlier successes.