"You didn't pout, flounce, flirt, or storm. You sat there being attentive, intelligent, and

menacing."

"Menacing?"

"Didn't you see our new Speaker watching you during the voting?"

"Yes. Made me itchy."

"As well it should. The man's odd, Brun. Well-Mother's gone to Sirialis, I hear. Are you staying here?"

"For now, yes. I'd planned to be the person on site to deal with the Grand Council, unless you want to take it over."

"Are you sure? Because if you can keep an eye on the Council, then I can concentrate on what our dear uncle was up to with the various family companies. It's hard without Kevil-"

"I'm sorry," Brun said.

He looked at her a long moment, and she knew that he knew what she meant-sorry for everything, for becoming the issue by which the Family lost ground, as well as the reason for their father's assassination.

"Don't be sorry for being yourself," Buttons said finally. "And don't be sorry for coming back-it'd be worse if you hadn't."

"I don't see how," Brun said.

"I can think of a dozen ways," Buttons said. "And so can you, if you take the trouble. But that's not what matters right now. We've got attacks on all fronts-where'd you put the babies, by the way? I don't want them used as hostages against us."

"Cecelia de Marktos took them somewhere. She's trustworthy-"

"Well, unless she puts them in a barn and tries to turn them into racehorses," Buttons said, with the first genuine grin she'd seen on his face. "Grooms, I wouldn't mind, but you never know with her."

Brun laughed aloud. "You're right-but I don't think she has them with her."

"Good. As long as they aren't going to cause us trouble-"

"Not for another ten or twelve years . . . I don't want to think about them as teenage boys. . .

"If we have a Familias Regnant in ten years, we can worry about it then." Brun glanced at him; his face had gone somber, and he looked far older than his age.

"Buttons-do you agree with Hobart about that?"

"That the Familias is in danger, yes. That it's in danger because of lax leadership in the past, no. It's his policies that endanger it most. This business of restricting the franchise-one way we've had of relieving strain between Families is that the small know they can enlarge by having more Seatholders. That's let them take in outsiders as clients. Dad said the movement of power from one sept to another was a major factor in keeping the Familias stable. That's why they instituted the kingship, originally."

"Why can't Hobart see it?" Brun asked.

"I don't know. Back when I was a boy of maybe ten-and you were still in the nursery-I overheard some of the adults talking about how the new rejuv methods might change things politically. But of course, I was too young to follow it. I remember Dad and Uncle Harlis arguing, though. When I asked questions in school, nobody seemed to understand them, and later, when I was in the Royals, everyone talked as if the repeating rejuvenations were just a way to stay young for a normal

lifespan, not an actual extension. It was-oh, the year that Lepescu came to Sirialis, I think it was-that Charlie Windetsson got drunk at a mess dinner and pointed out that if our parents never grew old, we had no reason to grow up. There was no future for us. Everyone laughed, and drank, and-I remember a sort of cold chill. I left the party early, called Sarah, and that's when we decided to marry."

"I didn't know that."

"Well . . . you were being wild at the time. Most of our set were, and I suddenly saw it myself.

Our parents had been more grown up-working in family business in some way-by the time they finished their education. Sometimes even before. But their parents barely lived past their Centuries, and retired from Family work in their eighties. The first rejuv upset that a little, but the new one . . . I came home, and talked to Dad about it. He promised that he and Mother would resign their duties while I was still young-he transferred stock to me right after that Hunt Ball, and encouraged me to be active in Council as well as business."

"And I thought you'd gone all stuffy . . ."

"So I had. But I didn't want to go from childhood to childhood-rich enough to rejuv and be twenty or thirty all my life, with nothing to do. That's no way to live-"

"But Uncle Harlis," Brun said. She wanted information, not a lecture on lifestyle. "What about him?"

"He saw multiple rejuvs as a way of maintaining Family power. He wanted rejuv restricted to the Seated Families at first. So did some others, but the proposal didn't pass. Then he tried an age restriction: no one under eighty should be eligible. That didn't pass either, of course. The Ageists, who had used the biological problems with the earlier procedure to make repeated rejuvs illegal, expected his support with the new procedure, but he didn't go along."

"So . . . you're saying the population grew?"

"Not just that. The birth rate in our set actually dropped, because people could wait to have children until they were fifty or sixty or older. It's the shape of the population that really changed, and the power structure. Age always did confer an advantage of experience, and now it could do so without losing any advantge of physical strength and energy. Younger people needed to find new opportunities because the old weren't dying-or even retiring. And of course people wanted rejuv, and especially when they found out how useful it was in some kinds of illness and injury.

Everyone rich enough wanted it. And the Consellines wanted the profit."

"Ummm . . . which meant expanding, somehow . . . like Dad's proposal to open new colonies?"

"As a temporary measure. Some others wanted to annex adjacent territories, but Dad opposed spatial expansion, on the grounds that we couldn't serve all we had. And why alienate neighbors when we had planets within the Familias outline which could be settled? But he wanted more support for colonies, too-he had been pushing the Colonial Office to make allowances for the less stable ecosystems of the worlds now being opened. That translates into concessions for the companies-and families-purchasing settlement licenses."

Brun shook her head. "I don't know enough to follow this."

"Well, you can learn. Basically, the longer a world is allowed to stabilize after the terraforming treatments, the more easily it can be colonized. Until recently, this required such long-term investment that very few Families would attempt it. When the Familias Regnant came together, the Council agreed to a joint investment at one world a year. We only know how much better the old- treated planets are because of the Lost Worlds."

"Paradise, Babylon, Oasis," Brun said, to prove she was listening.

"Yes. All treated in the second wave of outreach, and all lost to the records for centuries in the Cluster Wars. So they had between seven and eight hundred years of stabilization after treatment.

Nothing like the mature ecosystem of a planet in its natural state, but for human purposes vastly superior to most of the worlds we used . . . only now are others approaching the quality. The

scouts who found Paradise found mature forests with 300-year-old timber . . . grasslands with deep soil, not a shallow dark layer . . . estuaries rich in shellfish rather than a few colonies that had still to be nurtured. A stable climate, reasonably predictable. Nobody had known what difference another five centuries could make. If we could let all terraformed planets have that long, colonists would have a much easier time. Not easy-it's never easy-but easier."

"But temporary, you said. Was he thinking of enforcing a limit on reproduction, or on rejuv?"

"I'm not sure. He talked about both, from time to time. But the Familias is so complicated . . .

you know, we have planets populated mostly by free-birthers, and others with mostly zero- growthers, and probably eight dozen religions, not even counting the fringes. Any policy one group approves will offend someone else. And meanwhile, the percentage of the population that had been rejuved was going up every year. Every survey taken showed that Rejuvenants wanted and expected to rejuv again."

"I wonder how the Guernesi have handled it," Brun said. "They've had the process as long as we have, and they aren't falling apart."

"I don't know . . . it's a good question. Do they have our diversity of beliefs?"

"And I don't know that one." Brun shook her head. "This is seriously complicated stuff, Buttons."

"It's a seriously complicated universe, and we're right in the middle of a whirlpool if we don't figure it out." He gave her a long, steady look. "You're a grownup now, and you've volunteered for the job of being Council watchdog for our family. This is what it takes."

"Being a dizzy blonde was such fun," Brun said, but her heart wasn't in it.

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