AND WILD FOR TO HOLD

Nancy Kress

The demon came to her first in the long gallery at Hever Castle. She had gone there to watch Henry ride away, magnificent on his huge charger, the horse’s legs barely visible through the summer dust raised by the king’s entourage. But Henry himself was visible. He rose in his stirrups to half-turn his gaze back to the manor house, searching its sun-glazed windows to see if she watched. The spurned lover, riding off, watching over his shoulder the effect he himself made. She knew just how his eyes would look, small blue eyes under the curling red-gold hair. Mournful. Shrewd. Undeterred.

Anne Boleyn was not moved. Let him ride. She had not wanted him at Hever in the first place.

As she turned from the gallery window, a glint of light in the far corner caught her eye, and there for the first time was the demon.

It was made all of light, which did not surprise her. Was not Satan himself called Lucifer? The light was square, a perfectly square box such as no light had ever been before. Anne crossed herself and stepped forward. The box of light brightened, then winked out.

Anne stood perfectly still. She was not afraid; very little made her afraid. But nonetheless she crossed herself again and uttered a prayer. It would be unfortunate if a demon took up residence at Hever. Demons could be dangerous.

Like kings.

Lambert half-turned from her console toward Culhane, working across the room. “Culhane—they said she was a witch.”

“Yes? So?” Culhane said. “In the 1500s they said any powerful woman was a witch.”

No, it was more. They said it before she became powerful.” Culhane didn’t answer. After a moment Lambert said quietly, “The Rahvoli equations keep flagging her.”

Culhane grew very still. Finally he said, “Let me see.” He crossed the bare, small room to Lambert’s console. She steadied the picture on the central square. At the moment the console appeared in this location as a series of interlocking squares mounting from floor to ceiling. Some of the squares were solid real-time alloys; some were holo simulations; some were not there at all, neither in space nor time, although they appeared to be. The project focus square, which was there, said:

TIME RESCUE PROJECT

UNITED FEDERATION OF UPPER SLIB, EARTH

FOCUS: ANNE BOLEYN

HEVER CASTLE, KENT ENGLAND, EUROPE

1525: 645:89:3

CHURCH OF THE HOLY HOSTAGE TEMPORARY PERMIT #4592

In the time-jump square was framed a young girl, dark hair just visible below her coif, her hand arrested at her long, slender neck in the act of signing the cross.

Lambert said, as if to herself, “She considered herself a good Catholic.”

Culhane stared at the image. His head had been freshly shaved, in honor of his promotion to project head. He wore, Lambert thought, his new importance as if it were a fragile implant, liable to be rejected. She found that touching.

Lambert said, “The Rahvoli probability is .798. She’s a definite key.”

Culhane sucked in his cheeks. The dye on them had barely dried. He said, “So is the other. I think we should talk to Brill.”

The serving women had finally left. The priests had left, the doctors, the courtiers, the nurses, taking with them the baby. Even Henry had left, gone… where? To play cards with Harry Norris? To his latest mistress? Never mind—they had all at last left her alone.

A girl.

Anne rolled over in her bed and pounded her fists on the pillow. A girl. Not a prince, not the son that England needed, that she needed… a girl. And Henry growing colder every day, she could feel it, he no longer desired her, no longer loved her. He would bed with her—oh, that, most certainly, if it would get him his boy, but her power was going. Was gone. The power she had hated, despised, but had used nonetheless because it was there and Henry should feel it, as he had made her feel his power over and over again… her power was going. She was queen of England, but her power was slipping away like the Thames at ebb tide, and she just as helpless to stop it as to stop the tide itself. The only thing that could have preserved her power was a son. And she had borne a girl. Strong, lusty, with Henry’s own red, curling hair… but a girl.

Anne rolled over on her back, painfully. Elizabeth was already a month old, but everything in Anne hurt. She had contracted white-leg, so much less dreaded than childbed fever but still weakening, and for the whole month had not left her bedchamber. Servants and ladies and musicians came and went, while Anne lay feverish, trying to plan… Henry had as yet made no move. He had even seemed to take the baby’s sex well: “She seems a lusty wench. I pray God will send her a brother in the same good shape.” But Anne knew. She always knew. She had known when Henry’s eye first fell upon her. Had known to a shade the exact intensity of his longing during the nine years she had kept him waiting: nine years of celibacy, of denial. She had known the exact moment when that hard mind behind the small blue eyes had decided: It is worth it. I will divorce Katherine and make her queen. Anne had known before he did when he decided it had all been a mistake. The price for making her queen had been too high. She was not worth it. Unless she gave him a son.

And if she did not…

In the darkness Anne squeezed her eyes shut. This was but an attack of childbed vapors; it signified nothing. She was never afraid, not she. This was only a night terror, and when she opened her eyes it would pass, because it must. She must go on fighting, must get herself heavy with a son, must safeguard her crown. And her daughter. There was no one else to do it for her, and there was no way out.

When she opened her eyes a demon, shaped like a square of light, glowed in the corner of the curtained bedchamber.

Lambert dipped her head respectfully as the high priest passed.

She was tall and wore no external augments. Eyes, arms, ears, shaved head, legs under the gray-green ceremonial robe—all were her own, as required by the charter of the Church of the Holy Hostage. Lambert had heard a rumor that before her election to high priest she had had brilliant, violet-augmented eyes and gamma-strength arms, but on her election had had both removed and the originals restored. The free representative of all the hostages in the solar system could not walk around enjoying high-maintenance augments. Hostages could, of course, but the person in charge of their spiritual and material welfare must appear human to any hostage she chose to visit. A four-handed spacer held in a free-fall chamber on Mars must find the high priest as human as did a genetically altered flier of Ipsu being held hostage by the New Trien Republic. The only way to do that was to forego external augments.

Internals, of course, were a different thing.

Beside the high priest walked the director of the Time Research Institute, Toshio Brill. No ban on externals for him: Brill wore gold-plated sensors in his shaved black head, a display Lambert found slightly ostentatious. Also puzzling: Brill was not ordinarily a flamboyant man. Perhaps he was differentiating himself from Her Holiness. Behind Brill his project heads, including Culhane, stood silent, not speaking unless spoken to. Culhane looked nervous: He was ambitious, Lambert knew. She sometimes wondered why she was not.

“So far I am impressed,” the high priest said. “Impeccable hostage conditions on the material side.”

Brill murmured, “Of course, the spiritual is difficult. The three hostages are so different from each other, and even for culture specialists and historians… the hostages arrive here very upset.”

“As would you or I,” the high priest said, not smiling, “in similar circumstances.”

“Yes, Your Holiness.”

“And now you wish to add a fourth hostage, from a fourth time stream.”

“Yes.”

The high priest looked slowly around at the main console; Lambert noticed that she looked right past the time-jump square itself. Not trained in peripheral vision techniques. But she looked a long time at the stasis square. They all did; outsiders were unduly fascinated by the idea that the whole building existed between time streams. Or maybe Her Holiness merely objected to the fact that the Time Research Institute, like some larger but hardly richer institutions, was exempt from the all-world taxation that supported the Church. Real-estate outside time was also outside taxation.

The high priest said, “I cannot give permission for such a political disruption without understanding fully every possible detail. Tell me again.”

Lambert hid a grin. The high priest did not need to hear it again. She knew the whole argument, had pored over it for days, most likely, with her advisers. And she would agree; why wouldn’t she? It could only add to her power. Brill knew that. He was being asked to explain only to show that the high priest could force him to do it, again and again, until she—not he—decided the explanation was sufficient and the Church of the Holy Hostage issued a permanent hostage permit to hold one Anne Boleyn, of England Time Delta, for the altruistic purpose of preventing a demonstrable, Class One war.

Brill showed no outward recognition that he was being humbled. “Your Holiness, this woman is a fulcrum. The Rahvoli equations, developed in the last century by—”

“I know the Rahvoli equations,” the high priest said. And smiled sweetly.

“Then Your Holiness knows that any person identified by the equations as a fulcrum is directly responsible for the course of history. Even if he or she seems powerless in local time. Mistress Boleyn was the second wife of Henry the Eighth of England. In order to marry her, he divorced his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, and in order to do that, he took all of England out of the Catholic Church. Protestantism was—”

“And what again was that?” Her Holiness said, and even Culhane glanced sideways at Lambert, appalled. The high priest was playing. With a research director. Lambert hid her smile. Did Culhane know that high seriousness opened one to the charge of pomposity? Probably not.

“Protestantism was another branch of Christianity,’” the director said patiently. So far, by refusing to be provoked, he was winning. “It was warlike, as was Catholicism. In 1642 various branches of Protestantism were contending for political power within England, as was a Catholic faction. King Charles was Catholic, in fact. Contention led to civil war. Thousands of people died fighting, starved to death, were hung as traitors, were tortured as betrayers…”

Lambert saw Her Holiness wince. She must hear this all the time, Lambert thought. What else was her office for? Yet the wince looked genuine.

Brill pressed his point. “Children were reduced to eating rats to survive. In Cornwall, rebels’ hands and feet were cut off, gibbets were erected in market squares and men hung on them alive, and—”

“Enough,” the high priest said. “This is why the Church exists. To promote the holy hostages that prevent war.”

“And that is what we wish to do,” Brill said swiftly, “in other time streams, now that our own has been brought to peace. In Stream Delta, which has only reached the sixteenth century—Your Holiness knows that each stream progresses at a different relative rate—”

The high priest made a gesture of impatience.

“—the woman Anne Boleyn is the fulcrum. If she can be taken hostage after the birth of her daughter Elizabeth, who will act throughout a very long reign to preserve peace, and before Henry declares the Act of Supremacy that opens the door to religious divisiveness in England, we can prevent great loss of life. The Rahvoli equations show a 79.8% probability that history will be changed in the direction of greater peace, right up through the following two centuries. Religious wars often—”

“There are other, bloodier religious wars to prevent than the English civil war.”

“True, Your Holiness,” the director said humbly. At least it looked like humility to Lambert. “But ours is a young science. Identifying other time streams, focusing on one, identifying historical fulcra—it is such a new science. We do what we can, in the name of peace.”

Everyone in the room looked pious. Lambert hid a smile. In the name of peace—and of prestigious scientific research, attended by rich financial support and richer academic reputations.

“And it is peace we seek,” Brill pressed, “as much as the Church itself does. With a permanent permit to take Anne Boleyn hostage, we can save countless lives in this other time stream, just as the Church preserves peace in our own.”

The high priest played with the sleeve of her robe. Lambert could not see her face. But when she looked up, she was smiling.

“I’ll recommend to the All-World Forum that your hostage permit be granted, Director. I will return in two months to make an official check on the holy hostage.”

Brill, Lambert saw, didn’t quite stop himself in time from frowning. “Two months? But with the entire solar system of hostages to supervise—”

“Two months, Director,” Her Holiness said. “The week before the All-World Forum convenes to vote on revenue and taxation.”

“I—”

“Now I would like to inspect the three holy hostages you already hold for the altruistic prevention of war.”

Later, Culhane said to Lambert, “He did not explain it very well. It could have been made so much more urgent… it is urgent. Those bodies rotting in Cornwall…” He shuddered.

Lambert looked at him. “You care. You genuinely do.”

He looked back at her in astonishment. “And you don’t? You must, to work on this project!”

“I care,” Lambert said. “But not like that.”

“Like what?”

She tried to clarify it for him, for herself. “The bodies rotting… I see them. But it’s not our own history—”

“What does that matter? They’re still human!”

He was so earnest. Intensity burned on him like skin tinglers. Did Culhane even use skin tinglers? Lambert wondered. Fellow researchers spoke of him as an ascetic, giving all his energy, all his time to the project. A woman in his domicile had told Lambert he even lived chaste, doing a voluntary celibacy mission for the entire length of his research grant. Lambert had never met anyone who actually did that. It was intriguing.

She said, “Are you thinking of the priesthood once the project is over, Culhane?”

He flushed. Color mounted from the dyed cheeks, light blue since he had been promoted to project head, to pink on the fine skin of his shaved temples.

“I’m thinking of it.”

“And doing a celibacy mission now?”

“Yes. Why?” His tone was belligerent: A celibacy mission was slightly old-fashioned. Lambert studied his body: tall, well-made, strong. Augments? Muscular, maybe. He had beautiful muscles.

“No reason,” she said, bending back to her console until she heard him walk away.

The demon advanced. Anne, lying feeble on her curtained bed, tried to call out. But her voice would not come, and who would hear her anyway? The bedclothes were thick, muffling sound; her ladies would all have retired for the night, alone or otherwise; the guards would be drinking the ale Henry had provided all of London to celebrate Elizabeth’s christening. And Henry… he was not beside her. She had failed him of his son.

“Be gone,” she said weakly to the demon. It moved closer.

They had called her a witch. Because of her little sixth finger, because of the dog named Urian, because she had kept Henry under her spell so long without bedding him. But if I were really a witch, she thought, I could send this demon away. More: I could hold Henry, could keep him from watching that whey-faced Jane Seymour, could keep him in my bed… She was not a witch.

Therefore, it followed that there was nothing she could do about this demon. If it was come for her, it was come. If Satan, Master of Lies, was decided to have her, to punish her for taking the husband of another woman, and for… How much could demons know?

“This was all none of my wishing,” she said aloud to the demon. “I wanted to marry someone else.” The demon continued to advance.

Very well, then, let it take her. She would not scream. She never had— she prided herself on it. Not when they had told her she could not marry Harry Percy. Not when she had been sent home from the court, peremptorily and without explanation. Not when she had discovered the explanation: Henry wished to have her out of London so he could bed his latest mistress away from Katherine’s eyes. She had not screamed when a crowd of whores had burst into the palace where she was supping, demanding Nan Bullen, who they said was one of them. She had escaped across the Thames in a barge, and not a cry had escaped her lips. They had admired her for her courage: Wyatt, Norris, Weston, Henry himself. She would not scream now.

The box of light grew larger as it approached. She had just time to say to it, “I have been God’s faithful and true servant, and my husband, the king’s,” before it was upon her.

“The place where a war starts,” Lambert said to the faces assembled below her in the Hall of Time, “is long before the first missile, or the first bullet, or the first spear.”

She looked down at the faces. It was part of her responsibility as an intern researcher to teach a class of young, some of whom would become historians. The class was always taught in the Hall of Time. The expense was enormous: keeping the hall in stasis for nearly an hour, bringing the students in through the force field, activating all the squares at once. Her lecture would be replayed for them later, when they could pay attention to it. Lambert did not blame them for barely glancing at her now. Why should they? The walls of the circular room, which were only there in a virtual sense, were lined with squares that were not really there at all. The squares showed actual, local-time scenes from wars that had been there, were there now, somewhere, in someone’s reality.

Men died writhing in the mud, arrows through intestines and neck and groin, at Agincourt.

Women lay flung across the bloody bodies of their children at Cawnpore.

In the hot sun the flies crawled thick upon the split faces of the heroes of Marathon.

Figures staggered, their faces burned off, away from Hiroshima.

Breathing bodies, their perfect faces untouched and their brains turned to mush by spekaline, sat in orderly rows under the ripped dome on Io-One.

Only one face turned toward Lambert, jerked as if on a string, a boy with wide violet eyes brimming with anguish. Lambert obligingly started again.

“The place where a war starts is long before the first missile, or the first bullet, or the first spear. There are always many forces causing a war: economic, political, religious, cultural. Nonetheless, it is the great historical discovery of our time that if you trace each of these back— through the records, through the eyewitness accounts, through the entire burden of data only Rahvoli equations can handle—you come to a fulcrum. A single event or act or person. It is like a decision tree with a thousand thousand generations of decisions: Somewhere there was one first yes/no. The place where the war started and where it could have been prevented.

“The great surprise of time rescue work has been how often that place was female.

“Men fought wars, when there were wars. Men controlled the gold and the weapons and the tariffs and sea rights and religions that have caused wars, and the men controlled the bodies of other men who did the actual fighting. But men are men. They acted at the fulcrum of history, but often what tipped their actions one way or another was what they loved. A woman. A child. She became the passive, powerless weight he chose to lift, and the balance tipped. She, not he, is the branching place, where the decision tree splits and the war begins.”

The boy with the violet eyes was still watching her. Lambert stayed silent until he turned to watch the squares—which was the reason he had been brought here. Then she watched him. Anguished, passionate, able to feel what war meant—he might be a good candidate for the time rescue team when his preliminary studies were done. He reminded her a little of Culhane.

Who right now, as project head, was interviewing the new hostage, not lecturing to children.

Lambert stifled her jealousy. It was unworthy. And shortsighted: She remembered what this glimpse of human misery had meant to her three years ago, when she was an historian candidate. She had had nightmares for weeks. She had thought the event was pivotal to her life, a dividing point past which she would never be the same person again. How could she? She had been shown the depths to which humanity, without the Church of the Holy Hostage and the All-World Concordance, could descend. Burning eye sockets, mutilated genitals, a general who stood on a hill and said, “How I love to see the arms and legs fly!” It had been shattering. She had been shattered, as the orientation intended she should be.

The boy with the violet eyes was crying. Lambert wanted to step down from the platform and go to him. She wanted to put her arms around him and hold his head against her shoulder… but was that because of compassion, or was that because of his violet eyes?

She said silently to him, without leaving the podium, you will be all right. Human beings are not as mutable as you think. When this is over, nothing permanent about you will have changed at all.

Anne opened her eyes. Satan leaned over her.

His head was shaved, and he wore strange garb of an ugly blue-green. His cheeks were stained with dye. In one ear metal glittered and swung. Anne crossed herself.

“Hello,” Satan said, and the voice was not human.

She struggled to sit up; if this be damnation, she would not lie prone for it. Her heart hammered in her throat. But the act of sitting brought the Prince of Darkness into focus, and her eyes widened. He looked like a man. Painted, made ugly, hung around with metal boxes that could be tools of evil—but a man.

“My name is Culhane.”

A man. And she had faced men. Bishops, nobles, Chancellor Wolsey. She had outfaced Henry, Prince of England and France, Defender of the Faith.

“Don’t be frightened, Mistress Boleyn. I will explain to you where you are and how you came to be here.”

She saw now that the voice came not from his mouth, although his mouth moved, but from the box hung around his neck. How could that be? Was there then a demon in the box? But then she realized something else, something real to hold on to.

“Do not call me Mistress Boleyn. Address me as Your Grace. I am the queen.”

The something that moved behind his eyes convinced her, finally, that he was a mortal man. She was used to reading men’s eyes. But why should this one look at her like that? With pity? With admiration?

She struggled to stand, rising off the low pallet. It was carved of good English oak. The room was paneled in dark wood and hung with tapestries of embroidered wool. Small-paned windows shed brilliant light over carved chairs, table, chest. On the table rested a writing desk and a lute. Reassured, Anne pushed down the heavy cloth of her nightshift and rose.

The man, seated on a low stool, rose, too. He was taller than Henry—she had never seen a man taller than Henry—and superbly muscled. A soldier? Fright fluttered again, and she put her hand to her throat. This man, watching her—watching her throat. Was he then an executioner? Was she under arrest, drugged and brought by some secret method into the Tower of London? Had someone brought evidence against her? Or was Henry that disappointed that she had not borne a son that he was eager to supplant her already?

As steadily as she could, Anne walked to the window.

The Tower Bridge did not lie beyond in the sunshine. Nor the river, nor the gabled roofs of Greenwich Palace. Instead there was a sort of yard, with huge beasts of metal growling softly. On the grass naked young men and women jumped up and down, waving their arms, running in place and smiling and sweating as if they did not know either that they were uncovered or crazed.

Anne took firm hold of the windowsill. It was slippery in her hands, and she saw that it was not wood at all but some material made to resemble wood. She closed her eyes, then opened them. She was a queen. She had fought hard to become a queen, defending a virtue nobody believed she still had, against a man who claimed that to destroy that virtue was love. She had won, making the crown the price of her virtue. She had conquered a king, brought down a chancellor of England, outfaced a pope. She would not show fear to this executioner in this place of the damned, whatever it was.

She turned from the window, her head high. “Please begin your explanation, Master…”

“Culhane.”

“Master Culhane. We are eager to hear what you have to say. And we do not like waiting.”

She swept aside her long nightdress as if it were court dress and seated herself in the not-wooden chair carved like a throne.

“I am a hostage,” Anne repeated. “In a time that has not yet happened.”

From beside the window, Lambert watched. She was fascinated. Anne Boleyn had, according to Culhane’s report, listened in silence to the entire explanation of the time rescue, that explanation so carefully crafted and revised a dozen times to fit what the sixteenth-century mind could understand of the twenty-second. Queen Anne had not become hysterical. She had not cried, nor fainted, nor professed disbelief. She had asked no questions. When Culhane had finished, she had requested, calmly and with staggering dignity, to see the ruler of this place, with his ministers. Toshio Brill, watching on monitor because the wisdom was that at first new hostages would find it easier to deal with one consistent researcher, had hastily summoned Lambert and two others. They had all dressed in the floor-length robes used for grand academic ceremonies and never else. And they had marched solemnly into the ersatz sixteenth-century room, bowing their heads.

Only their heads. No curtsies. Anne Boleyn was going to learn that no one curtsied anymore.

Covertly Lambert studied her, their fourth time hostage, so different from the other three. She had not risen from her chair, but even seated she was astonishingly tiny. Thin, delicate bones, great dark eyes, masses of silky black hair loose on her white nightdress. She was not pretty by the standards of this century; she had not even been counted pretty by the standards of her own. But she was compelling. Lambert had to give her that.

“And I am prisoner here,” Anne Boleyn said. Lambert turned up her translator; the words were just familiar, but the accent so strange she could not catch them without electronic help. “Not prisoner,” the director said. “Hostage.”

“Lord Brill, if I cannot leave, then I am a prisoner. Let us not mince words. I cannot leave this castle?”

“You cannot.”

“Please address me as ‘Your Grace.’ Is there to be a ransom?”

“No, Your Grace. But because of your presence here thousands of men will live who would have otherwise died.”

With a shock, Lambert saw Anne shrug; the deaths of thousands of men evidently did not interest her. It was true, then. They really were moral barbarians, even the women. The students should see this. That small shrug said more than all the battles viewed in squares. Lambert felt her sympathy for the abducted woman lessen, a physical sensation like the emptying of a bladder, and was relieved to feel it. It meant she, Lambert, still had her own moral sense.

“How long must I stay here?”

“For life, Your Grace,” Brill said bluntly.

Anne made no reaction; her control was aweing.

“And how long will that be, Lord Brill?”

“No person knows the length of his or her life, Your Grace.”

“But if you can read the future, as you claim, you must know what the length of mine would have been.”

Lambert thought: We must not underestimate her. This hostage is not like the last one.

Brill said, with the same bluntness that honored Anne’s comprehension— did she realize that?—“If we had not brought you here, you would have died May nineteenth, 1536.”

“How?”

“It does not matter. You are no longer part of that future, and so now events there will—”

“How?”

Brill didn’t answer.

Anne Boleyn rose and walked to the window, absurdly small, Lambert thought, in the trailing nightdress. Over her shoulder she said, “Is this castle in England?”

“No,” Brill said. Lambert saw him exchange glances with Culhane.

“In France?”

“It is not in any place on Earth,” Brill said, “although it can be entered from three places on Earth. It is outside of time.”

She could not possibly have understood, but she said nothing, only went on staring out the window. Over her shoulder Lambert saw the exercise court, empty now, and the antimatter power generators. Two technicians crawled over them with a robot monitor. What did Anne Boleyn make of them?

“God alone knows if I had merited death,” Anne said. Lambert saw Culhane start.

Brill stepped forward. “Your Grace—”

“Leave me now,” she said without turning.

They did. Of course she would be monitored constantly—everything from brain scans to the output of her bowels. Although she would never know this. But if suicide was in that life-defying mind, it would not be possible. If Her Holiness ever learned of the suicide of a time hostage… Lambert’s last glimpse before the door closed was of Anne Boleyn’s back, still by the window, straight as a spear as she gazed out at antimatter power generators in a building in permanent stasis.

“Culhane, meeting in ten minutes,” Brill said. Lambert guessed the time lapse was to let the director change into working clothes. Toshio Brill had come away from the interview with Anne Boleyn somehow diminished. He even looked shorter, although shouldn’t her small stature have instead augmented his?

Culhane stood still in the corridor outside Anne’s locked room (would she try the door?). His face was turned away from Lambert’s. She said, “Culhane… You jumped a moment in there. When she said God alone knew if she had merited death.”

“It was what she said at her trial,” Culhane said. “When the verdict was announced. Almost the exact words.”

He still had not moved so much as a muscle of that magnificent body. Lambert said, probing, “You found her impressive, then. Despite her scrawniness, and beyond the undeniable pathos of her situation.”

He looked at her then, his eyes blazing: Culhane, the research engine. “I found her magnificent.”

She never smiled. That was one of the things she knew they remarked upon among themselves: She had overheard them in the walled garden. Anne Boleyn never smiles. Alone, they did not call her Queen Anne, or Her Grace, or even the Marquis of Rochford, the title Henry had conferred upon her, the only female peeress in her own right in all of England. No, they called her Anne Boleyn, as if the marriage to Henry had never happened, as if she had never borne Elizabeth. And they said she never smiled.

What cause was there to smile, in this place that was neither life nor death?

Anne stitched deftly at a piece of amber velvet. She was not badly treated. They had given her a servant, cloth to make dresses—she had always been clever with a needle, and the skill had not deserted her when she could afford to order any dresses she chose. They had given her books, the writing Latin but the pictures curiously flat, with no raised ink or painting. They let her go into any unlocked room in the castle, out to the gardens, into the yards. She was a holy hostage.

When the amber velvet gown was finished, she put it on. They let her have a mirror. A lute. Writing paper and quills. Whatever she asked for, as generous as Henry had been in the early days of his passion, when he had divided her from her love Harry Percy and had kept her loving hostage to his own fancy.

Cages came in many sizes. Many shapes. And, if what Master Culhane and the Lady Mary Lambert said was true, in many times.

“I am not a lady,” Lady Lambert had protested. She needn’t have bothered. Of course she was not a lady—she was a commoner, like the others, and so perverted was this place that the woman sounded insulted to be called a lady. Lambert did not like her, Anne knew, although she had not yet found out why. The woman was unsexed, like all of them, working on her books and machines all day, exercising naked with men who thus no more looked at their bodies than they would those of fellow soldiers in the roughest camp. So it pleased Anne to call Lambert a lady when she did not want to be one, as Anne was now so many things she had never wanted to be. “Anne Boleyn.” Who never smiled.

“I will create you a Lady,” she said to Lambert. “I confer on you the rank of baroness. Who will gainsay me? I am the queen, and in this place there is no king.”

And Mary Lambert had stared at her with the unsexed bad manners of a common drab.

Anne knotted her thread and cut it with silver scissors. The gown was finished. She slipped it over her head and struggled with the buttons in the back, rather than call the stupid girl who was her servant. The girl could not even dress hair. Anne smoothed her hair herself, then looked critically at her reflection in the fine mirror they had brought her.

For a woman a month and a half from childbed, she looked strong. They had put medicines in her food, they said. Her complexion, that creamy dark skin that seldom varied in color, was well set off by the amber velvet. She had often worn amber, or tawny. Her hair, loose since she had no headdress and did not know how to make one, streamed over her shoulders. Her hands, long and slim despite the tiny extra finger, carried a rose brought to her by Master Culhane. She toyed with the rose to show off the beautiful hands, and lifted her head high.

She was going to have an audience with Her Holiness, a female pope. And she had a request to make.

“She will ask, Your Holiness, to be told the future. Her future, the one Anne Boleyn experienced in her own time stream, after the point we took her hostage to ours. And the future of England.” Brill’s face had darkened; Lambert could see that he hated this. To forewarn his political rival that a hostage would complain about her treatment. A hostage, that person turned sacred object through the sacrifice of personal freedom to global peace. When Tullio Amaden Koyushi had been hostage from Mars Three to the Republic of China, he had told the Church official in charge of his case that he was not being allowed sufficient exercise. The resulting intersystem furor had lost the Republic of China two trade contracts, both important. There was no other way to maintain the necessary reverence for the hostage political system. The Church of the Holy Hostage was powerful because it must be, if the solar system was to stay at peace. Brill knew that.

So did Her Holiness.

She wore full state robes today, gorgeous with hundreds of tiny mirrors sent to her by the grateful across all worlds. Her head was newly shaved. Perfect, synthetic jewels glittered in her ears. Listening to Brill’s apology-in-advance, Her Holiness smiled. Lambert saw the smile, and even across the room she felt Brill’s polite, concealed frustration.

“Then if this is so,” Her Holiness said, “why cannot Lady Anne Boleyn be told her future? Hers and England’s?”

Lambert knew that the high priest already knew the answer. She wanted to make Brill say it.

Brill said, “It is not thought wise, Your Holiness. If you remember, we did that once before.”

“Ah, yes, your last hostage. I will see her, too, of course, on this visit. Has Queen Helen’s condition improved?”

“No,” Brill said shortly.

And no therapeutic brain drugs or electronic treatments have helped? She still is insane from the shock of finding herself with us?”

“Nothing has helped.”

“You understand how reluctant I was to let you proceed with another time rescue at all,” Her Holiness said, and even Lambert stifled a gasp. The high priest did not make those determinations; only the All-World Forum could authorize or disallow a hostage-taking—across space or time. The Church of the Holy Hostage was responsible only for the inspection and continuation of permits granted by the Forum. For the high priest to claim political power she did not possess…

The director’s eyes gleamed angrily. But before he could reply, the door opened and Culhane escorted in Anne Boleyn.

Lambert pressed her lips together tightly. The woman had sewn herself a gown, a sweeping, ridiculous confection of amber velvet so tight at the breasts and waist she must hardly be able to breathe. How had women conducted their lives in such trappings? The dress narrowed her waist to nearly nothing; above the square neckline her collarbones were delicate as a bird’s. Culhane hovered beside her, huge and protective. Anne walked straight to the high priest, knelt, and raised her face.

She was looking for a ring to kiss.

Lambert didn’t bother to hide her smile. A high priest wore no jewelry except earrings, ever. The pompous little hostage had made a social error, no doubt significant in her own time.

Anne smiled up at Her Holiness, the first time anyone had seen her smile at all. It changed her face, lighting it with mischief, lending luster to the great dark eyes. A phrase came to Lambert, penned by the poet Thomas Wyatt to describe his cousin Anne: And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

Anne said, in that sprightly yet aloof manner that Lambert was coming to associate with her, “It seems, Your Holiness, that we have reached for what is not there. But the lack is ours, not yours, and we hope it will not be repeated in the request we come to make of you.”

Direct. Graceful, even through the translator and despite the ludicrous imperial plural. Lambert glanced at Culhane, who was gazing down at Anne as at a rare and fragile flower. How could he? That skinny body, without muscle tone let alone augments, that plain face, the mole on her neck… This was not the sixteenth century. Culhane was a fool.

As Thomas Wyatt had been. And Sir Harry Percy. And Henry, king of England. All caught not by beauty but by that strange elusive charm.

Her Holiness laughed. “Stand up, Your Grace. We don’t kneel to officials here.” Your Grace. The high priest always addressed hostages by the honorifics of their own state, but in this case it could only impede Anne’s adjustment.

And what do I care about her adjustment? Lambert jeered at herself. Nothing. What I care about is Culhane’s infatuation, and only because he rejected me first. Rejection, it seemed, was a great whetter of appetite—in any century.

Anne rose. Her Holiness said, “I’m going to ask you some questions, Your Grace. You are free to answer any way you wish. My function is to ensure that you are well treated and that the noble science of the prevention of war, which has made you a holy hostage, is also well served. Do you understand?”

“We do.”

“Have you received everything you need for your material comfort?”

“Yes,” Anne said.

“Have you received everything you’ve requested for your mental comfort? Books, objects of any description, company?”

“No,” Anne said. Lambert saw Brill stiffen.

Her Holiness said, “No?”

“It is necessary for the comfort of our mind—and for our material comfort as well—to understand our situation as fully as possible. Any rational creature requires such understanding to reach ease of mind.”

Brill said, “You have been told everything related to your situation. What you ask is to know about situations that now, because you are here, will never happen.”

“Situations that have happened, Lord Brill, else no one could know of them. You could not.”

“In your time stream they will not happen,” Brill said. Lambert could hear the suppressed anger in his voice and wondered if the high priest could. Anne Boleyn couldn’t know how serious it was to be charged by Her Holiness with a breach of hostage treatment. If Brill was ambitious— and why wouldn’t he be?—such charges could hurt his future.

Anne said swiftly, “Our time is now your time. You have made it so. The situation was none of our choosing. And if your time is now ours, then surely we are entitled to the knowledge that accompanies our time.” She looked at the high priest. “For the comfort of our mind.”

Brill said, “Your Holiness—”

No, Queen Anne is correct. Her argument is valid. You will designate a qualified researcher to answer any questions she has—any at all—about the life she might have had, or the course of events England took when the queen did not become a sacred hostage.”

Brill nodded stiffly.

“Good-bye, Your Grace,” Her Holiness said. “I shall return in two weeks to inspect your situation again.”

Two weeks? The high priest was not due for another inspection for six months. Lambert glanced at Culhane to see his reaction to this blatant political fault-hunting, but he was gazing at the floor, to which Anne Boleyn had sunk in another of her embarrassing curtsies, the amber velvet of her skirts spread around her like gold.

They sent a commoner to explain her life to her, and the life she had lost. A commoner. And he had as well the nerve to be besotted with her. Anne always knew. She tolerated such fellows, like that upstart musician Smeaton, when they were useful to her. If this Master Culhane dared to make any sort of declaration, he would receive the same sort of snub Smeaton once had. Inferior persons should not look to be spoken to as noblemen.

He sat on a straight-backed chair in her tower room, looking humble enough, while Anne sat in the great carved chair with her hands tightly folded to keep them from shaking.

“Tell me how I came to die in 1536.” God’s blood! Had ever before there been such a sentence uttered?

Culhane said, “You were beheaded. Found guilty of treason.” He stopped and flushed.

She knew, then. In a queen, there was one cause for a charge of treason. “He charged me with adultery. To remove me, so he could marry again.”

“Yes.”

“To Jane Seymour.”

“Yes.”

“Had I first given him a son?”

“No,” Culhane said.

“Did Jane Seymour give him a son?”

“Yes. Edward the Sixth. But he died at sixteen, a few years after Henry.”

There was vindication in that, but not enough to stem the sick feeling in her gut. Treason. And no son… There must have been more than desire for the Seymour bitch. Henry must have hated her. Adultery…

“With whom?”

Again the oaf flushed. “With five men, Your Grace. Everyone knew the charges were false, created merely to excuse his own cuckoldry— even your enemies admitted such.”

“Who were they?”

“Sir Henry Morris. Sir Francis Weston. William Brereton. Mark Smeaton. And… and your brother George.”

For a moment she thought she would be sick. Each name fell like a blow, the last like the ax itself. George. Her beloved brother, so talented at music, so high-spirited and witty… Harry Norris, the king’s friend. Weston and Brereton, young and lighthearted but always, to her, respectful and careful… and Mark Smeaton, the oaf made courtier because he could play the virginals.

The long, beautiful hands clutched the sides of the chair. But the moment passed, and she could say with dignity, “They denied the charges?”

“Smeaton confessed, but he was tortured into it. The others denied the charges completely. Harry Norris offered to defend your honor in single combat.”

Yes, that was like Harry: so old-fashioned, so principled. She said, “They all died.” It was not a question: If she had died for treason, they would have, too. And not alone; no one died alone. “Who else?”

Culhane said, “Maybe we should wait for the rest of this, Your—”

“Who else? My father?”

“No. Sir Thomas More, John Fisher—”

“More? For my…” She could not say adultery.

“Because he would not swear to the Oath of Supremacy, which made the king and not the pope head of the church in England. That act opened the door to religious dissension in England.”

“It did not. The heretics were already strong in England. History cannot fault that to me!”

“Not as strong as they would become,” Culhane said almost apologetically. “Queen Mary was known as Bloody Mary for burning heretics who used the Act of Supremacy to break from Borne— Your Grace! Are you all right… Anne?”

“Do not touch me,” she said. Queen Mary. Then her own daughter Elizabeth had been disinherited, or killed… Had Henry become so warped that he would kill a child? His own child? Unless he had come to believe…

She whispered, “Elizabeth?”

Comprehension flooded his eye. “Oh. No, Anne! No! Mary ruled first, as the elder, but when she died heirless, Elizabeth was only twenty-five. Elizabeth became the greatest ruler England had ever known! She ruled for forty-four years, and under her England became a great power.”

The greatest ruler. Her baby Elizabeth. Anne could feel her hands unknotting on the ugly artificial chair. Henry had not repudiated Elizabeth, nor had her killed. She had become the greatest ruler England had ever known.

Culhane said, “This is why we thought it best not to tell you all this.”

She said coldly, “I will be the judge of that.”

“I’m sorry.” He sat stiffly, hands dangling awkwardly between his knees. He looked like a plowman, like that oaf Smeaton… She remembered what Henry had done, and rage returned.

“I stood accused. With five men… with George. And the charges were false.” Something in his face changed. Anne faced him steadily. “Unless… were they false, Master Culhane? You who know so much of history. Does history say…” She could not finish. To beg for history’s judgment from a man like this… no humiliation had ever been greater. Not even the Spanish ambassador, referring to her as “the concubine,” had ever humiliated her so.

Culhane said carefully, “History is silent on the subject, Your Grace. What your conduct was… would have been… is known only to you.”

“As it should be. It was… would have been… mine,” she said viciously, mocking his tones perfectly. He looked at her like a wounded puppy, like that lout Smeaton when she had snubbed him. “Tell me this, Master Culhane. You have changed history as it would have been, you tell me. Will my daughter Elizabeth still become the greatest ruler England has ever seen—in my ‘time stream’? Or will that be altered, too, by your quest for peace at any cost?”

“We don’t know. I explained to you… We can only watch your time stream now as it unfolds. It had only reached October 1533, which is why after analyzing our own history we—”

“You have explained all that. It will be sixty years from now before you know if my daughter will still be great. Or if you have changed that as well by abducting me and ruining my life.”

“Abducting! You were going to be killed! Accused, beheaded—”

“And you have prevented that.” She rose, in a greater fury than ever she had been with Henry, with Wolsey, with anyone. “You have also robbed me of my remaining three years as surely as Henry would have robbed me of my old age. And you have mayhap robbed my daughter as well, as Henry sought to do with his Seymour-get prince. So what is the difference between you, Master Culhane, that you are a saint and Henry a villain? He held me in the Tower until my soul could be commended to God; you hold me here in this castle you say I can never leave where time does not exist, and mayhap God neither. Who has done me the worse injury? Henry gave me the crown. You—all you and my Lord Brill have given me is a living death, and then given my daughter’s crown a danger and uncertainty that without you she would not have known! Who has done to Elizabeth and me the worse turn? And in the name of preventing war! You have made war upon me! Get out, get out!”

“Your—”

“Get out! I never want to see you again! If I am in hell, let there be one less demon!”

Lambert slipped from her monitor to run down the corridor. Culhane flew from the room; behind him the sound of something heavy struck the door. Culhane slumped against it, his face pasty around his cheek dye. Lambert could almost find it in herself to pity him. Almost.

She said softly, “I told you so.”

“She’s like a wild thing.”

“You knew she could be. It’s documented enough, Culhane. I’ve put a suicide watch on her.”

“Yes. Good. I… she was like a wild thing.”

Lambert peered at him. “You still want her! After that!”

That sobered him; he straightened and looked at her coldly. “She is a holy hostage, Lambert.”

“I remember that. Do you?”

“Don’t insult me, intern.”

He moved angrily away; she caught his sleeve. “Culhane—don’t be angry. I only meant that the sixteenth century was so different from our own, but—”

“Do you think I don’t know that? I was doing historical research while you were learning to read, Lambert. Don’t instruct me.”

He stalked off. Lambert bit down hard on her own fury and stared at Anne Boleyn’s closed door. No sound came from behind it. To the soundless door she finished her sentence: “—but some traps don’t change.”

The door didn’t answer. Lambert shrugged. It had nothing to do with her. She didn’t care what happened to Anne Boleyn, in this century or that other one. Or to Culhane, either. Why should she? There were other men. She was no Henry VIII, to bring down her world for passion. What was the good of being a time researcher if you could not even learn from times past?

She leaned thoughtfully against the door, trying to remember the name of the beautiful boy in her orientation lecture, the one with the violet eyes.

She was still there, thinking, when Toshio Brill called a staff meeting to announce, his voice stiff with anger, that Her Holiness of the Church of the Holy Hostage had filed a motion with the All-World Forum that the Time Research Institute, because of the essentially reverent nature of the time rescue program, be removed from administration by the Forum and placed instead under the direct control of the Church.

She had to think. It was important to think, as she had thought through her denial of Henry’s ardor, and her actions when that ardor waned. Thought was all.

She could not return to her London, to Elizabeth. They had told her that. But did she know beyond doubt that it was true?

Anne left her apartments. At the top of the stairs she usually took to the garden, she instead turned and opened another door. It opened easily. She walked along a different corridor. Apparently even now no one was going to stop her.

And if they did, what could they do to her? They did not use the scaffold or the rack; she had determined this from talking to that oaf Culhane and that huge ungainly woman, Lady Mary Lambert. They did not believe in violence, in punishment, in death. (How could you not believe in death? Even they must one day die.) The most they could do to her was shut her up in her rooms, and there the female pope’ would come to see she was well treated.

Essentially they were powerless.

The corridor was lined with doors, most set with small windows. She peered in: rooms with desks and machines, rooms without desks and machines, rooms with people seated around a table talking, kitchens, still rooms. No one stopped her. At the end of the corridor she came to a room without a window and tried the door. It was locked, but as she stood there, her hand still on the knob, the door opened from within.

“Lady Anne! Oh!”

Could no one in this accursed place get her name right? The woman who stood there was clearly a servant, although she wore the same ugly gray-green tunic as everyone else. Perhaps, like Lady Mary, she was really an apprentice. She was of no interest, but behind her was the last thing Anne expected to see in this place: a child.

She pushed past the servant and entered the room. It was a little boy, his dress strange but clearly a uniform of some sort. He had dark eyes, curling dark hair, a bright smile. How old? Perhaps four. There was an air about him that was unmistakable; she would have wagered her life this child was royal.

“Who are you, little one?”

He answered her with an outpouring of a language she did not know. The servant scrambled to some device on the wall; in a moment Culhane stood before her.

“You said you didn’t want to see me, Your Grace. But I was closest to answer Kiti’s summons…”

Anne looked at him. It seemed to her that she looked clear through him, to all that he was: Desire, and pride of his pitiful strange learning, and smugness of his holy mission that had brought her life to wreck. Hers, and perhaps Elizabeth’s as well. She saw Culhane’s conviction, shared by Lord Director Brill and even by such as Lady Mary, that what they did was right because they did it. She knew that look well: It had been Cardinal Wolsey’s, Henry’s right-hand man and chancellor of England, the man who had advised Henry to separate Anne from Harry Percy. And advised Henry against marrying her. Until she, Anne Boleyn, upstart Tom Boleyn’s powerless daughter, had turned Henry against Wolsey and had the cardinal brought to trial. She.

In that minute she made her decision.

“I was wrong, Master Culhane. I spoke in anger. Forgive me.” She smiled and held out her hand, and she had the satisfaction of watching Culhane turn color.

How old was he? Not in his first youth. But neither had Henry.

He said, “Of course, Your Grace. Kiti said you talked to the Tsarevitch.”

She made a face, still smiling at him. She had often mocked Henry thus. Even Harry Percy, so long ago, a lifetime ago… No. Two lifetimes ago. “The what?”

“The Tsarevitch.” He indicated the child.

Was the dye on his face permanent, or would it wash off?

She said, not asking, “He is another time hostage. He, too, in his small person, prevents a war.”

Culhane nodded, clearly unsure of her mood. Anne looked wonderingly at the child, then winningly at Culhane. “I would have you tell me about him. What language does he speak? Who is he?”

“Russian. He is—was—the future emperor. He suffers from a terrible disease: You called it the bleeding sickness. Because his mother, the empress, was so driven with worry over him, she fell under the influence of a holy man who led her to make some disastrous decisions while she was acting for her husband, the emperor, who was away at war.”

Anne said, “And the bad decisions brought about another war.”

“They made more bloody than necessary a major rebellion.”

“You prevent rebellions as well as wars? Rebellions against a monarchy?”

Yes, it—history did not go in the direction of monarchies.”

That made little sense. How could history go other than in the direction of those who were divinely anointed, those who held the power? Royalty won. In the end, they always won.

But there could be many casualties before the end.

She said, with that combination of liquid dark gaze and aloof body that had so intrigued Henry—and Norris, and Wyatt, and even presumptuous Smeaton, God damn his soul—“I find I wish to know more about this child and his country’s history. Will you tell me?”

“Yes,” Culhane said. She caught the nature of his smile: relieved, still uncertain how far he had been forgiven, eager to find out. Familiar, all so familiar.

She was careful not to let her body touch his as they passed through the doorway. But she went first, so he could catch the smell of her hair.

“Master Culhane—you are listed on the demon machine as ‘M. Culhane.’ ”

“The… oh, the computer. I didn’t know you ever looked at one.”

“I did. Through a window.”

“It’s not a demon, Your Grace.”

She let the words pass; what did she care what it was? But his tone told her something. He liked reassuring her. In this world where women did the same work as men and where female bodies were to be seen uncovered in the exercise yard so often that even turning your head to look must become a bore, this oaf nonetheless liked reassuring her.

She said, “What does the ‘M’ mean?”

He smiled. “Michael. Why?”

As the door closed, the captive royal child began to wail.

Anne smiled, too. ‘An idle fancy. I wondered if it stood for Mark.”

“What argument has the church filed with the All-World Forum?” a senior researcher asked.

Brill said irritably, as it were an answer, “Where is Mahjoub?”

Lambert spoke up promptly. “He is with Helen of Troy, Director, and the doctor. The queen had another seizure last night.” Enzio Mahjoub was the unfortunate project head for their last time rescue.

Brill ran his hand over the back of his neck. His skull needed shaving, and his cheek dye was sloppily applied. He said, “Then we will begin without Mahjoub. The argument of Her Holiness is that the primary function of this institute is no longer pure time research but practical application, and that the primary practical application is time rescue. As such, we exist to take hostages, and thus should come under the direct control of the Church of the Holy Hostage. Her secondary argument is that the time hostages are not receiving treatment up to intersystem standards as specified by the All-World Accord of 2154.”

Lambert’s eyes darted around the room. Cassia Kohambu, project head for the institute’s greatest success, sat up straight, looking outraged. “Our hostages are—on what are these charges allegedly based?”

Brill said, “No formal charges as yet. Instead, she has requested an investigation. She claims we have hundreds of potential hostages pinpointed by the Rahvoli equations, and the ones we have chosen do not meet standards for either internal psychic stability or benefit accrued to the hostages themselves, as specified in the All-World Accord. We have chosen to please ourselves, with flagrant disregard for the welfare of the hostages.”

“Flagrant disregard!” It was Culhane, already on his feet. Beneath the face dye his cheeks flamed. Lambert eyed him carefully. “How can Her Holiness charge flagrant disregard when without us the Tsarevitch Alexis would have been in constant pain from hemophiliac episodes, Queen Helen would have been abducted and raped, Herr Hitler blown up in an underground bunker, and Queen Anne Boleyn beheaded!”

Brill said bluntly, “Because the Tsarevitch cries constantly for his mother, the Lady Helen is mad, and Mistress Boleyn tells the church she has been made war upon!”

Well, Lambert thought, that still left Herr Hitler. She was just as appalled as anyone at Her Holiness’s charges, but Culhane had clearly violated both good manners and good sense. Brill never appreciated being upstaged.

Brill continued, “An investigative committee from the All-World Forum will arrive here next month. It will be small: Delegates Soshiru, Vlakhav, and Tullio. In three days the institute staff will meet again at oh-seven hundred, and by that time I want each project group to have prepared an argument in favor of the hostage you hold. Use the prepermit justifications, including all the mathematical models, but go far beyond that in documenting benefits to the hostages themselves since they arrived here. Are there any questions?”

Only one, Lambert thought. She stood. “Director—were the three delegates who will investigate us chosen by the All-World Forum or requested by Her Holiness? To whom do they already owe their allegiance?”

Brill looked annoyed. He said austerely, “I think we can rely upon the All-World delegates to file a fair report, Intern Lambert,” and Lambert lowered her eyes. Evidently she still had much to learn. The question should not have been asked aloud.

Would Mistress Boleyn have known that?

Anne took the hand of the little boy. “Come, Alexis,” she said. “We walk now.”

The prince looked up at her. How handsome he was, with his thick, curling hair and beautiful eyes almost as dark as her own. If she had given Henry such a child… She pushed the thought away. She spoke to Alexis in her rudimentary Russian, without using the translator box hung like a peculiarly ugly pendant around her neck. He answered with a stream of words she couldn’t follow and she waited for the box to translate.

“Why should we walk? I like it here in the garden.”

“The garden is very beautiful,” Anne agreed. “But I have something interesting to show you.”

Alexis trotted beside her obediently then. It had not been hard to win his trust—had no one here ever passed time with children? Wash off the scary cheek paint, play for him songs on the lute—an instrument he could understand, not like the terrifying sounds coming without musicians from yet another box—learn a few phrases of his language. She had always been good at languages.

Anne led the child through the far gate of the walled garden, into the yard. Machinery hummed; naked men and women “exercised” together on the grass. Alexis watched them curiously, but Anne ignored them. Servants. Her long, full skirts, tawny silk, trailed on the ground.

At the far end of the yard she started down the short path to that other gate, the one that ended at nothing.

Queen Isabella of Spain, Henry had told Anne once, had sent an expedition of sailors to circumnavigate the globe. They were supposed to find a faster way to India. They had not done so, but neither had they fallen off the edge of the world, which many had prophesied for them. Anne had not shown much interest in the story, because Isabella had, after all, been Katherine’s mother. The edge of the world.

The gate ended with a wall of nothing. Nothing to see, or smell, or taste—Anne had tried. To the touch the wall was solid enough, and faintly tingly. A “force field,” Culhane said. Out of time as we experience it; out of space. The gate, one of three, led to a place called Upper Slib, in what had once been Egypt.

Anne lifted Alexis. He was heavier than even a month ago; since she had been attending him every day he had begun to eat better, play more, cease crying for his mother. Except at night. “Look, Alexis, a gate. Touch it.”

The little boy did, then drew back his hand at the tingling. Anne laughed, and after a moment Alexis laughed, too.

The alarms sounded.

“Why, Your Grace?” Culhane said. “Why again?”

“I wished to see if the gate was unlocked,” Anne said coolly. “We both wished to see.” This was a lie. She knew it. Did he? Not yet perhaps.

“I told you, Your Grace, it is not a gate that can be left locked or unlocked, as you understand the terms. It must be activated by the stasis square.”

“Then do so; the prince and I wish for an outing.”

Culhane’s eyes darkened; each time he was in more anguish. And each time, he came running. However much he might wish to avoid her, commanding his henchmen to talk to her most of the time, he must come when there was an emergency because he was her gaoler, appointed by Lord Brill. So much had Anne discovered in a month of careful trials. He said now, “I told you, Your Grace, you can’t move past the force field, no more than I could move into your palace at Greenwich. In the time stream beyond that gate—my time stream—you don’t exist. The second you crossed the force field you’d disintegrate into nothingness.”

Nothingness again. To Alexis she said sadly in Russian, “He will never let us out. Never, never.”

The child began to cry. Anne held him closer, looking reproachfully at Culhane, who was shifting toward anger. She caught him just before the shift was complete, befuddling him with unlooked-for wistfulness: “It is just that there is so little we can do here, in this time we do not belong. You can understand that, can you not, Master Culhane? Would it not be the same for you, in my court of England?”

Emotions warred on his face. Anne put her free hand gently on his arm. He looked down: the long, slim fingers with their delicate tendons, the tawny silk against his drab uniform. He choked out, “Anything in my power, anything within the rules, Your Grace…”

She had not yet gotten him to blurt out “Anne,” as he had the day she’d thrown a candlestick after him at the door.

She removed her hand, shifted the sobbing child against her neck, spoke so softly he could not hear her.

He leaned forward, toward her. “What did you say, Your Grace?”

“Would you come again tonight to accompany my lute on your guitar? For Alexis and me?”

Culhane stepped back. His eyes looked trapped.

“Please, Master Culhane?”

Culhane nodded.

Lambert stared at the monitor. It showed the hospital suite, barred windows and low white pallets, where Helen of Troy was housed. The queen sat quiescent on the floor, as she usually did, except for the brief and terrifying periods when she erupted, shrieking and tearing at her incredible hair. There had never been a single coherent word in the eruptions, not since the first moment they had told Helen where she was, and why. Or maybe that fragile mind, already quivering under the strain of her affair with Paris, had snapped too completely even to hear them. Helen, Lambert thought, was no Anne Boleyn.

Anne sat close to the mad Greek queen, her silk skirts overlapping Helen’s white tunic, her slender body leaning so far forward that her hair, too, mingled with Helen’s, straight black waterfall with masses of springing black curls. Before she could stop herself, Lambert had run her hand over her own shaved head.

What was Mistress Anne trying to say to Helen? The words were too low for the microphones to pick up, and the double curtain of hair hid Anne’s lips. Yet Lambert was as certain as death that Anne was talking. And Helen, quiescent—was she nonetheless hearing? What could it matter if she were, words in a tongue that from her point of view would not exist for another two millennia?

Yet the Boleyn woman visited her every day, right after she left the Tsarevitch. How good was Anne, from a time almost as barbaric as Helen’s own, at nonverbal coercion of the crazed?

Culhane entered, glanced at the monitor, and winced.

Lambert said levelly, “You’re a fool, Culhane.”

He didn’t answer.

“You go whenever she summons. You—”

He suddenly strode across the room, two strides at a time. Grabbing Lambert, he pulled her from her chair and yanked her to her feet. For an astonished moment she thought he was actually going to hit her— researchers hitting each other. She tensed to slug him back. But abruptly he dropped her, giving a little shove so that she tumbled gracelessly back into her chair.

“You feel like a fat stone.”

Lambert stared at him. Indifferently he activated his own console and began work. Something rose in her, so cold the vertebrae of her back felt fused in ice. Stiffly she rose from the chair, left the room, and walked along the corridor.

A fat stone. Heavy, stolid yet doughy, the flesh yielding like a slug or a maggot. Bulky, without grace, without beauty, almost without individuality, as stones were all alike. A fat stone.

Anne Boleyn was just leaving Helen’s chamber. In the corridor, back to the monitor, Lambert faced her. Her voice was low like a subterranean growl. “Leave him alone.”

Anne looked at her coolly. She did not ask whom Lambert meant.

“Don’t you know you are watched every minute? That you can’t so much as use your chamberpot without being taped? How do you ever expect to get him to your bed? Or to do anything with poor Helen?”

Anne’s eyes widened. She said loudly, “Even when I use the chamberpot? Watched? Have I not even the privacy of the beasts in the field?”

Lambert clenched her fists. Anne was acting. Someone had already told her, or she had guessed, about the surveillance. Lambert could see that she was acting—but not why. A part of her mind noted coolly that she had never wanted to kill anyone before. So this, finally, was what it felt like, all those emotions she had researched throughout time: fury and jealousy and the desire to destroy. The emotions that started wars.

Anne cried, even more loudly, “I had been better had you never told me!” and rushed toward her own apartments.

Lambert walked slowly back to her work area, a fat stone.

Anne lay on the grass between the two massive power generators. It was a poor excuse for grass; although green enough, it had no smell. No dew formed on it, not even at night. Culhane had explained that it was bred to withstand disease, and that no dew formed because the air had little moisture. He explained, too, that the night was as man-bred as the grass; there was no natural night here. Henry would have been highly interested in such things; she was not. But she had listened carefully, as she listened to everything Michael said.

She lay completely still, waiting. Eventually the head of a researcher thrust around the corner of the towering machinery: a purposeful thrust. “Your Grace? What are you doing?”

Anne did not answer. Getting to her feet, she walked back toward the castle. The place between the generators was no good: The woman had already known where Anne was.

The three delegates from the All-World Forum arrived at the Time Research Institute looking apprehensive. Lambert could understand this; for those who had never left their own time-space continuum, it probably seemed significant to step through a force field to a place that did not exist in any accepted sense of the word. The delegates looked at the ground, and inspected the facilities, and asked the same kinds of questions visitors always asked, before they settled down actually to investigate anything.

They were given an hour’s overview of the time rescue program, presented by the director himself. Lambert, who had not helped write this, listened to the careful sentiments about the prevention of war, the nobility of hostages, the deep understanding the Time Research Institute held of the All-World Accord of 2154, the altruistic extension of the Holy Mission of Peace into other time streams. Brill then moved on to discuss the four time hostages, dwelling heavily on the first. In the four years since Herr Hitler had become a hostage, the National Socialist Party had all but collapsed in Germany. President Paul von Hindenburg had died on schedule, and the new moderate chancellors were slowly bringing order to Germany. The economy was still very bad and unrest was widespread, but no one was arresting Jews or Gypsies or homosexuals or Jehovah’s Witnesses or… Lambert stopped listening. The delegates knew all this. The entire solar system knew all this. Hitler had been a tremendous popular success as a hostage, the reason the Institute had obtained permits for the next three. Herr Hitler was kept in his locked suite, where he spent his time reading power-fantasy novels whose authors had not been born when the bunker under Berlin was detonated.

“Very impressive, Director,” Goro Soshiru said. He was small, thin, elongated, a typical free-fall spacer, with a sharp mind and a reputation for incorruptibility. “May we now talk to the hostages, one at a time?”

“Without any monitors. That is our instruction,” said Anna Vlakhav. She was the senior member of the investigative team, a sleek, gray-haired Chinese who refused all augments. Her left hand, Lambert noticed, trembled constantly. She belonged to the All-World Forum’s Inner Council and had once been a hostage herself for three years.

“Please,” Soren Tullio said with a smile. He was young, handsome, very wealthy. Disposable, added by the Forum to fill out the committee, with few recorded views of his own. Insomuch as they existed, however, they were not tinged with any bias toward the Church. Her Holiness had not succeeded in naming the members of the investigative committee—if indeed she had tried.

“Certainly,” Brill said. “We’ve set aside the private conference room for your use. As specified by the Church, it is a sanctuary: There are no monitors of any kind. I would recommend, however, that you allow the bodyguard to remain with Herr Hitler, although, of course, you will make up your own minds.”

Delegate Vlakhav said, “The bodyguard may stay. Herr Hitler is not our concern here.”

Surprise, Lambert thought. Guess who is?

The delegates kept Hitler only ten minutes, the catatonic Helen only three. They said the queen did not speak. They talked to the little Tsarevitch a half hour. They kept Anne Boleyn in the sanctuary conference room four hours and twenty-three minutes.

She came out calm, blank-faced, and proceeded to her own apartments. Behind her the three delegates were tight-lipped and silent.

Anna Vlakhav, the former hostage, said to Toshio Brill, “We have no comment at this time. You will be informed.”

Brill’s eyes narrowed. He said nothing.

The next day, Director Toshio Brill was subpoenaed to appear before the All-World Forum on the gravest of all charges: mistreating holy hostages detained to keep peace. The tribunal would consist of the full Inner Council of the All-World Forum. Since Director Brill had the right to confront those who accused him, the investigation would be held at the Time Research Institute.

How? Lambert wondered. They would not take her unsupported word. How had the woman done it?

She said to Culhane, “The delegates evidently make no distinction between political hostages on our own world, and time hostages snatched from shadowy parallel ones.”

“Why should they?” coldly said Culhane. The idealist. And where had it brought him?

Lambert was assigned that night to monitor the Tsarevitch, who was asleep in his crib. She sat in her office, her screen turned to Anne Boleyn’s chambers, watching her play on the lute and sing softly to herself the songs written for her by Henry VIII when his passion was new and fresh six hundred years before.

Anne sat embroidering a sleeve cover of cinnamon velvet. In strands of black silk she worked intertwined H and A: Henry and Anne. Let their spying machines make of that what they would.

The door opened and, without permission, Culhane entered. He stood by her chair and looked down into her face. “Why, Anne? Why?”

She laughed. He had finally called her by her Christian name. Now, when it could not possibly matter.

When he saw that she would not answer, his manner grew formal. “A lawyer has been assigned to you. He arrives tomorrow.”

A lawyer. Thomas Cromwell had been a lawyer, and Sir Thomas More. Dead, both of them, at Henry’s hand. So had Master Culhane told her, and yet he still believed that protection was afforded by the law.

“The lawyer will review all the monitor records. What you did, what you said, every minute.”

She smiled at him mockingly. “Why tell me this now?”

“It is your right to know.”

“And you are concerned with rights. Almost as much as with death.” She knotted the end of her thread and cut it. “How is it that you command so many machines and yet do not command the knowledge that every man must die?”

“We know that,” Culhane said evenly. His desire for her had at last been killed; she could feel its absence, like an empty well. The use of her name had been but the last drop of living water. “But we try to prevent death when we can.”

“Ah, but you can’t. ‘Prevent death’—as if it were a fever. You can only postpone it, Master Culhane, and you never even ask if that is worth doing.”

“I only came to tell you about the lawyer,” Culhane said stiffly. “Good night, Mistress Boleyn.”

“Good night, Michael,” she said, and started to laugh. She was still laughing when the door closed behind him.

The Hall of Time, designed to hold three hundred, was packed.

Lambert remembered the day she had given the orientation lecture to the history candidates, among them what’s-his-name of the violet eyes. Twenty young people huddled together against horror in the middle of squares, virtual and simulated but not really present. Today the squares were absent and the middle of the floor was empty, while all four sides were lined ten-deep with All-World Inner Council members on high polished benches, archbishops and lamas and shamans of the Church of the Holy Hostage, and reporters from every major newsgrid in the solar system. Her Holiness the high priest sat among her followers, pretending she wanted to be inconspicuous. Toshio Brill sat in a chair alone, facing the current premier of the All-World Council, Dagar Krenya of Mars.

Anne Boleyn was led to a seat. She walked with her head high, her long black skirts sweeping the floor.

Lambert remembered that she had worn black to her trial for treason, in 1536.

“This investigation will begin,” Premier Krenya said. He wore his hair to his shoulders; fashions must have changed again on Mars. Lambert looked at the shaved heads of her colleagues, at the long, loose black hair of Anne Boleyn. To Culhane, seated beside her, she whispered, “We’ll be growing our hair again soon.” He looked at her as if she were crazy.

It was a kind of crazy, to live everything twice: once in research, once in the flesh. Did it seem so to Anne Boleyn? Lambert knew her frivolity was misplaced, and she thought of the frivolity of Anne in the Tower, awaiting execution: “They will have no trouble finding a name for me. I shall be Queen Anne Lackhead.” At the memory, Lambert’s hatred burst out fresh. She had the memory, and now Anne never would. But in bequeathing it forward in time to Lambert, the memory had become secondhand. That was Anne Boleyn’s real crime, for which she would never be tried: She had made this whole proceeding, so important to Lambert and Brill and Culhane, a mere reenactment. Prescripted. Secondhand. She had robbed them of their own, unused time.

Krenya said, “The charges are as follows: That the Time Research Institute has mistreated the holy hostage Anne Boleyn, held hostage against war. Three counts of mistreatment are under consideration this day: First, that researchers willfully increased a hostage’s mental anguish by dwelling on the pain of those left behind by the hostage’s confinement, and on those aspects of confinement that cause emotional unease. Second, that researchers failed to choose a hostage who would truly prevent war. Third, that researchers willfully used a hostage for sexual gratification.”

Lambert felt herself go very still. Beside her, Culhane rose to his feet, then sat down again slowly, his face rigid. Was it possible he had… No. He had been infatuated, but not to the extent of throwing away his career. He was not Henry, any more than Lambert had been over him.

The spectators buzzed, an uneven sound like malfunctioning equipment. Krenya rapped for order. “Director Brill: How do you answer these charges?”

“False, Premier. Every one.”

“Then let us hear the evidence against the Institute.”

Anne Boleyn was called. She took the chair in which Brill had been sitting. ”She made an entry as though she were going to a great triumph and sat down with elegance”… But that was the other time, the first time. Lambert groped for Culhane’s hand. It felt limp.

“Mistress Boleyn,” Krenya said—he had evidently not been told that she insisted on being addressed as a queen, and the omission gave Lambert a mean pleasure—“in what ways was your anguish willfully increased by researchers at this Institute?”

Anne held out her hand. To Lambert’s astonishment, her lawyer put into it a lute. At an official All-World Forum investigation—a lute. Anne began to play, the tune high and plaintive. Her unbound black hair fell forward; her slight body made a poignant contrast to the torment in the words:

Defiled is my name, full sore,

Through cruel spite and false report,

That I may say forever more,

Farewell to joy, adieu comfort.

“Oh, death, rock me asleep,

Bring on my quiet rest,

Let pass my very guiltless ghost

Out of my careful breast.

Ring out the doleful knell,

Let its sound my death tell,

For I must die, There is no remedy,

For now I die!

The last notes faded. Anne looked directly at Krenya. “I wrote that, my Lords, in my other life. Master Culhane of this place played it for me, along with death songs written by my… my brother…”

“Mistress Boleyn…”

“No, I recover myself. George’s death tune was hard for me to hear, my Lords. Accused and condemned because of me, who always loved him well.”

Krenya said to the lawyer whose staff had spent a month reviewing every moment of monitor records, “Culhane made her listen to these?”

“Yes,” the lawyer said. Beside Lambert, Culhane sat unmoving.

“Go on,” Krenya said to Anne.

“He told me that I was made to suffer watching the men accused with me die. How I was led to a window overlooking the block, how my brother George kneeled, putting his head on the block, how the ax was raised…” She stopped, shuddering. A murmur ran over the room. It sounded like cruelty, Lambert thought. But whose?

“Worst of all, my Lords,” Anne said, “was that I was told I had bastardized my own child. I chose to sign a paper declaring no valid marriage had ever existed because I had been precontracted to Sir Henry Percy, so my daughter Elizabeth was illegitimate and thus barred from her throne. I was taunted with the fact that I had done this, ruining the prospects of my own child. He said it over and over, Master Culhane did…”

Krenya said to the lawyer, “Is this in the visuals?”

“Yes.”

Krenya turned back to Anne. “But Mistress Boleyn—these are things that because of your time rescue did not happen. Will not happen in your time stream. How can they thus increase your anguish for relatives left behind?”

Anne stood. She took one step forward, then stopped. Her voice was low and passionate. “My good Lord—do you not understand? It is because you took me here that these things did not happen. Left to my own time, I would have been responsible for them all. For my brother’s death, for the other four brave men, for my daughter’s bastardization, for the torment in my own music… I have escaped them only because of you. To tell me them in such detail, not the mere provision of facts that I myself requested but agonizing detail of mind and heart—is to tell me that I alone, in my own character, am evil, giving pain to those I love most. And that in this time stream you have brought me to, I did these things, felt them, feel them still. You have made me guilty of them. My Lord Premier, have you ever been a hostage yourself? Do you know, or can you imagine, the torment that comes from imagining the grief of those who love you? And to know you have caused this grief, not merely loss but death, blood, the pain of disinheritance—that you have caused it, and are now being told of the anguish you cause? Told over and over? In words, in song even—can you imagine what that feels like to one such as I, who cannot return at will and comfort those hurt by my actions?”

The room was silent. Who, Lambert wondered, had told Anne Boleyn that Premier Krenya had once served as a holy hostage?

“Forgive me, my Lords,” Anne said dully, “I forget myself.”

“Your testimony may take whatever form you choose,” Krenya said, and it seemed to Lambert that there were shades and depths in his voice.

The questioning continued. A researcher, said Anne, had taunted her with being spied on even at her chamberpot—Lambert leaned slowly forward—which had made Anne cry out, “It had been better had you never told me!” Since then, modesty had made her reluctant even to answer nature, “so that there is every hour a most wretched twisting and churning in my bowels.”

Asked why she thought the Institute had chosen the wrong hostage, Anne said she had been told so by my Lord Brill. The room exploded into sound, and Krenya rapped for quiet. “That visual now, please.” On a square created in the center of the room, the visuals replayed on three sides:

“My Lord Brill… was there no other person you could take but I to prevent this war you say is a hundred years off? This civil war in England?”

“The mathematics identified you as the best hostage, your Grace”

“The best? Best for what, my Lord? If you had taken Henry himself, then he could not have issued the Act of Supremacy. His supposed death would have served the purpose as well as mine.”

“Yes. But for Henry the Eighth to disappear from history while his heir is but a month old…we did not know if that might not have started a civil war in itself. Between the factions supporting Elizabeth and those for Queen Katherine, who was still alive.”

“What did your mathematical learning tell you?”

“That it probably would not,” Brill said.

“And yet choosing me instead of Henry left him free to behead yet another wife, as you yourself have told me, my cousin Catherine Howard!”

Brill shifted on his chair. “That is true, Your Grace.”

“Then why not Henry instead of me?”

“I’m afraid Your Grace does not have sufficient grasp of the science of probabilities for me to explain, Your Grace.”

Anne was silent. Finally she said, “I think that the probability is that you would find it easier to deal with a deposed woman than with Henry of England, whom no man can withstand in either a passion or a temper.”

Brill did not answer. The visual rolled—ten seconds, fifteen—and he did not answer.

“Mr. Premier,” Brill said in a choked voice, “Mr. Premier—”

“You will have time to address these issues soon, Mr. Director,” Krenya said. “Mistress Boleyn, this third charge—sexual abuse…”

The term had not existed in the sixteenth century, thought Lambert. Yet Anne understood it. She said, “I was frightened, my Lord, by the strangeness of this place. I was afraid for my life. I didn’t know then that a woman may refuse those in power, may—”

“That is why sexual contact with hostages is universally forbidden,” Krenya said. “Tell us what you think happened.”

Not what did happen—what you think happened. Lambert took heart.

Anne said, “Master Culhane bade me meet him at a place… it is a small alcove beside a short flight of stairs near the kitchens… He bade me meet him there at night. Frightened, I went.”

“Visuals,” Krenya said in a tight voice.

The virtual square reappeared. Anne, in the same white nightdress in which she had been taken hostage, crept from her chamber, along the corridor, her body heat registering in infrared. Down the stairs, around to the kitchens, into the cubbyhole formed by the flight of steps, themselves oddly angled as if they had been added, or altered, after the main structure was built, after the monitoring system installed… Anne dropped to her knees and crept forward beside the isolated stairs. And disappeared.

Lambert gasped. A time hostage was under constant surveillance. That was a basic condition of their permit; there was no way the Boleyn bitch could escape constant monitoring. But she had.

“Master Culhane was already there,” Anne said in a dull voice. “He… he used me ill there.”

The room was awash with sound. Krenya said over it, “Mistress Boleyn—there is no visual evidence that Master Culhane was there. He has sworn he was not. Can you offer any proof that he met you there? Anything at all?”

“Yes. Two arguments, my Lord. First: How would I know there were not spying devices in but this one hidden alcove? I did not design this castle; it is not mine.”

Krenya’s face showed nothing. “And the other argument?”

“I am pregnant with Master Culhane’s child.”

Pandemonium. Krenya rapped for order. When it was finally restored, he said to Brill, “Did you know of this?”

“No, I… it was a hostage’s right by the Accord to refuse intrusive medical treatment… She has been healthy.”

“Mistress Boleyn, you will be examined by a doctor immediately.”

She nodded assent. Watching her, Lambert knew it was true. Anne Boleyn was pregnant, and had defeated herself thereby. But she did not know it yet.

Lambert fingered the knowledge, seeing it as a tangible thing, cold as steel.

“How do we know,” Krenya said, “that you were not pregnant before you were taken hostage?”

“It was but a month after my daughter Elizabeth’s birth, and I had the white-leg. Ask one of your experts if a woman would bed a man then. Ask a woman expert in the women of my time. Ask Lady Mary Lambert.”

Heads in the room turned. Ask whom? Krenya said, “Ask whom?” An aide leaned toward him and whispered something. He said, “We will have her put on the witness list.”

Anne said, “I carry Michael Culhane’s child. I, who could not carry a prince for the king.”

Krenya said, almost powerlessly, “That last has nothing to do with this investigation, Mistress Boleyn.”

She only looked at him.

They called Brill to testify, and he threw up clouds of probability equations that did nothing to clarify the choice of Anne over Henry as holy hostage. Was the woman right? Had there been a staff meeting to choose between the candidates identified by the Rahvoli applications, and had someone said of two very close candidates, “We should think about the effect on the Institute as well as on history…”? Had someone been developing a master theory based on a percentage of women influencing history? Had someone had an infatuation with the period, and chosen by that what should be altered? Lambert would never know. She was an intern.

Had been an intern.

Culhane was called. He denied seducing Anne Boleyn. The songs on the lute, the descriptions of her brother’s death, the bastardization of Elizabeth—all done to convince her that what she had been saved from was worse than where she had been saved to. Culhane felt so much that he made a poor witness, stumbling over his words, protesting too much.

Lambert was called. As neutrally as possible she said, “Yes, Mr. Premier, historical accounts show that Queen Anne was taken with white-leg after Elizabeth’s birth. It is a childbed illness. The legs swell up and ache painfully. It can last from a few weeks to months. We don’t know how long it lasted—would have lasted—for Mistress Boleyn.”

“And would a woman with this disease be inclined to sexual activity?”

“ ‘Inclined’—no.”

“Thank you, Researcher Lambert.”

Lambert returned to her seat. The committee next looked at visuals, hours of visuals—Culhane, flushed and tender, making a fool of himself with Anne. Anne with the little Tsarevitch, an exile trying to comfort a child torn from his mother. Helen of Troy, mad and pathetic. Brill, telling newsgrids around the solar system that the time rescue program, savior of countless lives, was run strictly in conformance with the All-World Accord of 2154. And all the time, through all the visuals, Lambert waited for what was known to everyone in that room except Anne Boleyn: She could not pull off in this century what she might have in Henry’s. The paternity of a child could be genotyped in the womb. Who? Mark Smeaton, after all? Another miscarriage from Henry, precipitately gotten and unrecorded by history? Thomas Wyatt, her most faithful cousin and cavalier?

After the committee had satisfied itself that it had heard enough, everyone but Forum delegates was dismissed. Anne, Lambert saw, was led away by a doctor. Lambert smiled to herself. It was already over. The Boleyn bitch was defeated.

The All-World Forum investigative committee deliberated for less than a day. Then it issued a statement: The child carried by holy hostage Anne Boleyn had not been sired by Researcher Michael Culhane. Its genotypes matched no one’s at the Institute for Time Research. The Institute, however, was guilty of two counts of hostage mistreatment. The Institute’s charter as an independent, tax-exempt organization was revoked. Toshio Brill was released from his position, as were Project Head Michael Culhane and intern Mary Lambert. The Institute stewardship was reassigned to the Church of the Holy Hostage under the direct care of Her Holiness the high priest.

Lambert slipped through the outside door to the walled garden. It was dusk. On a seat at the far end a figure sat, skirts spread wide, a darker shape against the dark wall. As Lambert approached, Anne looked up without surprise.

“Culhane’s gone. I leave tomorrow. Neither of us will ever work in time research again.”

Anne went on gazing upward. Those great dark eyes, that slim neck, so vulnerable… Lambert clasped her hands together hard.

“Why?” Lambert said. “Why do it all again? Last time use a king to bring down the power of the church, this time use a church to—before, at least you gained a crown. Why do it here, when you gain nothing?”

“You could have taken Henry. He deserved it; I did not.”

“But we didn’t take Henry!” Lambert shouted. “So why?”

Anne did not answer. She put out one hand to point behind her. Her sleeve fell away, and Lambert saw clearly the small sixth finger that had marked her as a witch. A tech came running across the half-lit garden. “Researcher Lambert—”

“What is it?”

“They want you inside. Everybody. The queen—the other one, Helen—she’s killed herself.”

The garden blurred, straightened. “How?”

“Stabbed with a silver sewing scissors hidden in her tunic. It was so quick, the researchers saw it on the monitor but couldn’t get there in time.”

“Tell them I’m coming.”

Lambert looked at Anne Boleyn. “You did this.”

Anne laughed. This lady, wrote the Tower constable, hath much joy in death. Anne said, “Lady Mary—every birth is a sentence of death. Your age has forgotten that.”

“Helen didn’t need to die yet. And the Time Research Institute didn’t need to be dismantled—it will be dismantled. Completely. But somewhere, sometime, you will be punished for this. I’ll see to that!”

“Punished, Lady Mary? And mayhap beheaded?”

Lambert looked at Anne: the magnificent black eyes, the sixth finger, the slim neck. Lambert said slowly, “You want your own death. As you had it before.”

“What else did you leave me?” Anne Boleyn said. “Except the power to live the life that is mine?”

“You will never get it. We don’t kill here!”

Anne smiled. “Then how will you ‘punish’ me—‘sometime, somehow’?”

Lambert didn’t answer. She walked back across the walled garden, toward the looming walls gray in the dusk, toward the chamber where lay the other dead queen.

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