A Brother's Price

thankfully unnamed gentry. Odelia’s condition, however, was speculated on wildly, putting her at death’s door. Worse, the article raised concerns about Rennsellaer’s safety, and went on to repeat rumors about Halley’s dropping out of the public eye. The article finished with an unsubtle reminder that Trini, at age twenty, and Lylia, who recently turned sixteen, were the only other adult princesses; Ren’s other five sisters were clustered around age eight.
    Had her report via Queens Justice reached her mothers before this hysteria? The article noted that no information was forthcoming from the palace.
    “Is there a more recent paper?” Ren asked.
    “Not yet. They say it normally takes two days for it to travel up from Mayfair.”
    Ren swore, spotting at last a copy of Wellsbury’s memoirs and plucking it up. “See if our ship can be moved to the head of the lock queue. I want to get to
    Mayfair as quickly as possible. The noble houses are probably up in arms about this. We need to get home.“ The paper was two days old. and it would be another two days, at safe speeds, before they reached Mayfair, meaning the nobles would have four days to panic. Hopefully her mothers would have received her report and released some kind of calming news. Still, she and Odelia would both have to make public appearances as soon as possible.
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    Chapter 5

     
    Mayfair first appeared in the distance as a haze on what had been a perfect summer morning sky. Great billowing plumes coughed up from the smokestacks of a score of steamboats joined with hundreds of smaller smudges from the kitchen chimneys and businesses ranging from bakeries to wheelwrights. Later in the summer, when the heat would trap in what the winter winds scoured away, the smoke would hang like a permanent fog over the city.
    Ren’s ancestors built their summer palace on fairgrounds located at the confluence of rivers. For a hundred years or more, the area remained fairly bucolic, a royal park reserved for ambles through groves of live oaks and foxhunts over the downs. The sprawling city of Portsmouth was the capital at that time, and the royal family spent three seasons at the badly named winter palace. During the War of the False Eldest, though, Portsmouth proved vulnerable to enemy ships, and swamp fever outbreaks spread from the poor to the noble families. Ren’s mothers were sent to the summer palace when they were young; when they became Queens, they moved the capital to them.
    Unfortunately, much of the surrounding land had been sold to finance the war. The groves of live oaks were leveled for sprawling city blocks. Soon factories and mills hugged the riverbanks, gathered to Mayfair by the gravity of power. The irony being, of course, that the capital had been moved to a healthier clime, only to have squalor close in around it.
    The royal stern-wheeler had stopped at Annaboro the night before to let off a messenger. Because the river made numerous lazy turns, a woman on a fast horse could reach Mayfair before the ship traveling at night speeds. As the ship docked at Mayfair, the princesses’ court uniforms and royal carriage would be waiting.
    The city bells were ringing seven when the royal stern-wheeler steamed up to the landing. As usual, ships jockeyed for the limited docking space. Raven got the princesses’ uniforms onboard somehow, then went off to see to the boat’s docking. Ren dressed quickly; Summer Court would open within the hour.
    As she stepped out of her cabin, a large stern-wheeler crawling upriver toward them let out a series of quick, urgent-sounding blasts on its steam whistle.
    “Hoy!” the pilot of the stern-wheeler shouted. “Sister!”
    Ren tensed until she recognized it as her sisters-in-law’s Destiny . Cotton bales stacked the Destiny’s decks, clear evidence it was returning to Mayfair from the south. The whistle tooted again, and Kij Porter waved from the pilothouse. Seeing that Ren spotted her, she turned the stern-wheeler over to a younger sister and hurried to the railing as the ship came along Ren’s.
    Like herself, Kij hadn’t been born Eldest of her family. The blast that killed Ren’s sisters and husband also killed several of Kij’s oldest mothers, and her Eldest. That common point formed a bond of friendship between Ren and the older woman, much stronger than it could have been if their sisters had survived.
    Shaggy and rumpled, Kij didn’t look like the Duchess of Avonar. Apparently returning