Very nearly the hardest part of rescuing Annerose was convincing Reuenthal to hear a word from her, when Magda felt fit for nothing so much as weeping and vomiting. Her darling had been taken, and he had told her to go home. Yet she fixed in her mind what Timoclea of Thebes might have done – what Magdalena von Westphalen, friend of Annerose, must do – and looked her assailant in his mismatched eyes.

"Among Count Lohengram's enemies, only Susanna von Beenemünde is actually insane. Yet even her servants would not dare touch Annerose; her accomplices must be hirelings of a hidden noble, who thinks to strike with impunity by using a woman as his tool. He will have made sure of Beenemünde taking Annerose to one of her own country estates or villas. Most likely near a small village, where she will be found dead tomorrow in a lover's suicide pact with some luckless peasant of particular baseness. No lesser disgrace would satiate that woman's hatred."

"I suppose you'd know all about a woman's hateful envy." Still, fear burned with the rest in Reuenthal's cold eyes. When Reinhardt heard what his admiral had been doing while his sister was abducted, Magda also knew where the blame would fall. "The Marquise will doubtless be gloating over her rival for some time. Through action, rather than talk -"

"- your soldiers could never be mobilised quickly enough. Beenemünde's country holdings are in popular scenic districts, however, surrounded by the holiday villas of my friends. Staffed with groundsmen and gamekeepers who will be looking for a car of a certain model, last seen heading in a certain direction, within a few phone calls. People used to these little intrigues, who ask no questions and gossip only within their closed country circles; efficient and discreet. The Kaiser will hush up this whole affair if we rescue his favourite from a madwoman whom we cannot rely upon to gloat, rather than tear Annerose apart as soon as lay eyes on her. Eight years is a considerable time to wait."

"How the devil do you know what car the enemy used, or which way they went?"

"You shall, after examining the dirt roads behind this cottage, furthest from where the palace guard arrived and left. Estimating the size and model of a car from its trail is as simple to me as naming the vintage of a sip of claret. I presume I don't need to tell you that the displacement of stones and twigs denotes the direction of travel?"

Reuenthal spat out that he didn't have to be told, and then stormed from the cottage. Needlessly dragging Magda by the wrist, until she wriggled free and marched at his back through darkening trees.

If she'd tried to play the desperate damsel, Reuenthal would have rejected her feminine wiles and sound advice with disgust. He would have scorned the command of a baroness – she'd had to speak as if she were a man, or the stern, true mother he would never let himself know. Gambling that his sense and will to survive exceeded his misogyny by a hair.

It was less painful to consider diseased psychology, or even how such a man had used her, than the absence of Annerose. That black obscurity filled with the shame, horror and oblivion Annerose had done nothing to deserve in eight years except for being sold and enslaved. The horror of it drove Magda's mind, so long as investigation was still possible, to fix upon nothing else.

It greatly helped that it wasn't the season for the Empire's small proportion of car owners to drive them out to country estates. Magda owned very nearly every model of car the Galactic Empire could boast of - it was so liberating to speed down empty roads, hair loose and dancing with the wind, in the pink trousers that were her most shocking attire of all. She'd still had to rather exaggerate her powers of perception rather than face the unthinkable journey home - but dawn finally broke, after a terrible silence, even as the evening sky faded to dusk.

From Lady Mangelhoffer's summer cottage, the elderly housekeeper breathlessly informed Magda by phone of the activity around one of Marquise von Beenemünde's villas. On only the tracks, Magdalena's estimation of the district, and their want of time, Reuenthal had already thrown her into his own car and shot down the best part of a forty-minute road in twenty. It took the dark admiral only five more minutes of demonic speed to park them within prudent distance of a charming single-storey lakeside villa. Two more minutes of agony were lost, before another of the tastelessly block-like vehicles used by officers rather than nobles sped to their side.

Secretive plots that stayed secret didn't employ armies of thugs. Reuenthal had only called on his trusted comrade and lover, Admiral Wolfgang Mittermeyer (Magda understood that what Reuenthal called love between men was, for him, simply another rejection of women – she only didn't know how Mittermeyer, or his absurdly adorable wife, endured it). Nothing, however, could have kept the admiral that Mittermeyer had been meeting with from joining them – or kept Magda from flinging herself upon Siegfried's chest.

"Gods, Magda -! Ah, baroness, are you hurt? Are you…? Is Annerose…?"

"You still have a chance, dear Sieg, there is still hope! After the abductors' Groundcruiser, a Sleipnir towncar, fifteen minutes ago…Beenemünde has been with Annerose no more than fifteen minutes."

Magda insisted that Annerose would need another woman's care, when they had saved her from the Marquise – Reuenthal had scoffed at that. Naturally, Magda was left with the cars, as the three admirals drew their blasters and loped towards the villa in darkness. The baroness rested her chin on her knees like a child and shut her eyes, though she still heard the sizzling and the brief screams.

Then the firing was over, but not the screams, furious shouts…Magda got the car door open on her second try. Fell out on all fours, forced slim, white legs to carry her own weight and walked towards the Marquise von Beenemünde's villa, in her torn, plain dress. Her coiffure had been utterly destroyed; strings of ebony fell over her white shoulders like the medusa's locks.

A masked man was lying in front of the door. Much like any young man, drunkenly strewn in the wake of any party Magda had ever attended, except that there was an ugly crater in his chest. He was dead. The scent of scorched human flesh had only touched Magda's life before when a poor, dear maid had burnt her finger on the curling tongs.

Magdalena shut her eyes. Forced them open, forced herself not to look away. However she yearned to wake between silk sheets, in dear David's arms, this was no nightmare - her life of delicate pleasure was the dream. Across the galaxy of war where Siegfried and so many billions fought and died, this madness was reality.

"I lived for art…I lived for love…she never harmed a living soul…"

Everyone in the villa was shouting, Beenemünde screaming defiance – only Annerose could not be heard. A beautiful sleepwalker through the dusk, Magda moved with mechanical haste towards the rear door. She thought of tripping the breakers, plunging friend and foe into darkness – rather foolish, when the enemy had a hostage, Annerose. Magdalena knew she was already going into shock, but she had to see Annerose, alive, once more, and say one last thing…

The interior of the villa floated before her in burning electric light, hideously clear. Mittermeyer had his blaster levelled at another gunman, kneeling beside another body; Reuenthal and Siegfried were both aiming at Beenemünde. As resplendent in blue taffeta as Magda had so often seen her at court, her slim shoulders were against the wall and her eyes were not human. Her knife was pressed against Annerose's pale throat.

"Dear Susanna, that's simply not the way to kill someone." The voice Magda heard, her own, might have been sniped across a pleasant drawing room, "She'll still be an angel, you'll still be unloved. If you must cut something that offends you, cut out my tongue, Susanna, please- !"

"WESTPHALEN…!"

Then the bewildered gunman finally swung his blaster round. It was pointed at Magda, when Reuenthal and Mittermeyer blew the man's head to ash. Magda saw Annerose, a survivor through everything, swing her small strength against the iron grip of madness. She didn't see Siegfried rush in, wrench the knife away, or slam the Marquise's delicately coiffed head into the edge of a table, because all the rest had already dropped Magda down in screaming hysterics.

She was astonished by how quickly she seemed to recover. In a frozen, dreamlike state, she saw Siegfried kneeling over Annerose, speaking softly and supporting her golden head. Annerose, her darling, alive and safe! Shaken, but stronger than Magda herself, after all she'd endured. Gazing up into the eyes of the hero who had saved her. The pure lover, the one she had kept her pure heart for, survived and waited so long…holding her body in his hands, for the first time in their beautiful lives.

She watched her hero carry his princess away, hiding her pure blue eyes in his chest from the room of death. Magda was quite sure Annerose could've walked out on her own legs but didn't especially care to. Mittermeyer and Reuenthal would've gone with them and ruined the moment, but Magda pretended she was still hysterical, refusing to move so they had to stay with her. Reuenthal ended up slapping her, ungently, until Mittermeyer begged him to stop. Magda was astonished to realise that she felt nothing worse than pain.

Amidst the most exquisite moments in her career of decadent love and luxury, the fear had never been silent; that she would wake from the dream and never have been freed from her father's attic. Imprisoned and unloved, forever. As the justice and reason of a galaxy demanded…but this world of pain and struggle could not be a pleasing fantasy, and she was no prisoner. This world that held the dream of perfect love, even for a moment, even in the little walk from the villa to the cars – they must speak the name of love, they must vow and promise, they must steal one single kiss, before the moment is gone! Nothing else in the universe, Magda felt in her heart, could shine right and meaning upon a galaxy of pain and hideous death.

Magda stared back at Marquise Susanna von Beenemünde's unconscious form, as Mittermeyer finally led her out. Even insensible, a steel web of malice seemed fixed beneath her face – the fury of a woman scorned, though Magda didn't suppose she looked much nicer herself. The proverbial cup of cold poison she'd prepared for Annerose's staged suicide pact had spilt over a table (Hearing later from Annerose that all her inductions had been correct, Magda had wondered about the peasant whose corpse was to have been placed with Annerose's – but killing commoners for less than nothing was what empire did). Over fifteen minutes the Marquise had made a fair start on telling Annerose exactly what she thought of her relations with Kaiser Frederick, her personally, and , and what she would've liked to do with Annerose if she'd had a decade or so – Magda's dear friend would carry the scar of that terror for the rest of her life.

Still, Magdalena pitied the woman whose petty, deadly schemes she had been parrying for the past eight years. The woman used and abandoned by Kaiser Frederick, whom Magda had blithely mocked to her friends over tea and finger food, as she sunk further into jealous delusion and insanity. A court of cruelty and lies, that held women as prisoners within sight of galactic power, had tormented her until poison and bloody murder had seemed saner than trading venomous wit across a wineglass. Yet her madness was the madness of every Kaiser that had reigned, every President the rebels had chosen, every space admiral and every patriotic citizen in one hundred and fifty years of galactic war. Magda couldn't see herself as less than mad, whether she recalled her actions that day, or over the past eight years of her fortunate life.

-0-

Admirals Reuenthal and Mittermeyer took her back to her townhouse; Magdalena collapsed into her glorious bed and slept through the morning. Then she called David with some explanation for the date she'd missed, other than the scandalous truth that both Reinhard and the Kaiser's ministers were already suppressing. There was no answer. She soon heard that he was gone and spent the next few days getting insensibly drunk.

None of her friends or lovers could've sat with her, over a horror than had never happened and a loss they'd never have understood. Even Dotty couldn't have understood what she'd felt for a common musician among so many common musicians, the most beautiful love she'd ever had. All she had left was her cellar, the saddest arias of La Traviata, unhealthy food and a hot tub. Sarah and Eva, her tireless maids, constantly at her side to ensure that she didn't choke or drown when she passed out. Miserable as she felt, Magdalena was still nothing but grateful to be living and free.

Annerose was safe, but the ministers had forbidden her to leave the palace; only Glaser, the court physician, had been permitted to see her. Magda doubted that the palace functionaries would inform the Kaiser of the incident, or of measures taken for the general peace of mind. Magda read of Marquise Susanna von Beenemünde's suicide. According to her own palace sources, the poison had needed to be forced down the wretched woman's throat. In her way, she had fought to the end. Kaiser Frederick's only acknowledgement of his former favourite's devotion had been to fall asleep at her funeral.

The whole incident had left the Goldenbaum dynasty as unruffled and secure as any unrecorded intrigue of its five-hundred-year history – so Magdalena heard that some foolish old men believed. Centuries of glory and noble dignity, underpinned by nothing but vanity and noble airs, might only be a five-hundred-year fall towards cold, approaching ground.

Siegfried had sent Magda a fulsome message of thanks. Dealing with the aftermath of the abduction, and Reinhard's considerable feeling about the matter – even now, he couldn't meet with his sister – kept Sieg from thanking her in person. It was no surprise. High Admiral Count von Lohengram lived by the same absolute commitment to work – his own work - that had propelled Cadet Reinhard von Müsel to such heights as he had reached. He did not drink, smoke, make love, or even eat very much; the constant attendance of his flame-haired shadow at his right hand was his only apparent human need.

"Men are such bastards, milady, if you'll pardon my Fezzani." Sarah commented, as she kneaded her mistress's shoulders. Her fingers brushed the bruise on Magda's cheek, "They're not worth all this carrying on, even if it ain't my place to say."

"Then were you never in love?"

"Never had time, milady. I don't need anybody to trouble my heart, except for you."

As soon as she'd recovered herself and obtained permission, Magdalena went to Annerose in the palace. They talked all night about what they'd done and the terror they'd felt. How much they loved each other, and Siegfried Kircheis.

"…I suppose I can understand."

Annerose's eyes flickered towards the floor. Magda's gaze turned away, then back again.

"If I said I was sorry, it would be a promise to stop…stop feeling for him…and I can't do that, Annerose, I couldn't. Yet I feel sorry, I feel wretched, I feel rotten as a poison apple…I never wanted to hurt you."

"This mustn't come between us. It can't." Before the desperate resolution in pure blue eyes, Magda almost swooned, "You're my best friend, Maggie. The only one who can love me and sit with me, while Reinhard and Sieg tear the galaxy apart, and say it's for my sake. You risked your life for me, you've always given so much for me. How could I say that my, my schoolgirl crush, matters more than that?"

"Darling, don't you dare say that!" Annerose smiled at Magda's feigned outrage, "After all I went through, for your perfect moment together…was there a kiss, dare I ask?"

"…I must confess that being rescued, by such a wonderful man as Sieg, has been my dream since I was eleven. I wanted to tell him, at least, that I love him…but I had been abducted by those men, threatened by that woman with her knife and hateful eyes. I hadn't the strength. I'm sorry."

Annerose gripped the arms that had been grasped by violent men. Gripped tighter, and shivered from the core of her heart. The sunlight that poured over the coffee table where Magda drew her hands and clasped them – poured through the windows of her prison – was no more than a burning illumination of her shame.

"You've always told me I'm strong, and pure, dear Maggie…" Her words tumbled out, "…but I don't feel strong. I feel dirty. For my brother's advancement, I've used my influence with his Highness…how can I ever be with Sieg, when I did that? When even my dreams of us are stained through, by what…that man…has done to me for years? I can't even think of being with any man as a wife, even Sieg, without terror and filthiness. I could never give Sieg the happiness he deserves, but I do believe you could make him happy, dear Maggie."

"Dear, darling Annie, Sieg loves you. I'm a fallen woman, a whore by choice – you are Siegfried's perfect princess, and nothing that was forced on you can change that."

"I wish you wouldn't call yourself such names, Maggie." Now, Annerose looked away from her friend, "You can choose to be whoever you want, and live however you wish."

"If I can, you can, darling. One day, you will…"

Still, Annerose looked away. If the Kaiser had died that afternoon, she would have remained a prisoner. As a war could not be ended only with words, or the dead recalled to life, her heart would never be unbroken. As Magdalena swore – in vain – that she would never stop caring for Annerose; urging her broken strength towards life and freedom.

"That isn't the real reason I can't be with Sieg," Annerose withdrew her hands from Magda to rest in her lap, "Reinhard, my dear brother, has never truly loved another person except for myself and Seigfried. Poor Sieg loves him as a devoted friend, as the one who will transform the Galaxy and save us all…"

"…but not in the manner of Reinhard's love for him?"

"No. Still, I could never love the man that my brother loves; I could never do such a thing to him. I can't even imagine…what my brother would do."

"Darling…you've given everything for your brother, time and again. Must you give up love as well?"

"Magdalena, I can't love as you can. I certainly cannot change this Empire, end the war, or save the galaxy. I cannot even save myself. Reinhard is fighting for the dignity, freedom and peace of every human being in the galaxy. Isn't that a higher love than my futile, selfish feelings? Isn't it worth all that even women such as us can give?"

Magdalena knew she had no power to move Annerose on the subject of her brother. No more than if she had spoken of Count Lohengram to Sieg, Reuenthal, Mecklinger, or any of the invisible army caught up in the spell of his dreams. His revenge. Her troubled thoughts, as she left the palace, were also of Reinhard von Lohengram. As brilliant a salvation as it would surely be, Magdalena doubted that love had birthed the future that Reinhard had planned for the galaxy.