The Democratic Alliance of Free Planets was somewhat less alien than Annerose had expected. Most of the people were white, to begin with - like most Imperials, she had never appreciated the indelible nature of 500-year-old genocide. As if Rudolf von Goldenbaum had upended a galactic bucket of bleach to make humanity pure and clean. Yet the colossal statue of Arle Heinessen still overshadowed the city of glass towers and monorails his children had built. The worship of heroism and wealth, with equality, perhaps made for as mad a place as the Empire, but of paradox rather than hypocrisy. The stone arms of Uncle Arle shed more comfort than Rudolf's statue on every corner had, with a camera in each eye.

Imperial expats were certainly familiar to the Alliance; millions had been welcomed after their war's first great victory at Dagon. Over 150 years, enough blood had been spilt and hot air blown off over 'savage hordes of Huns, infecting our perfect democracy' or 'Pitiful sisters and brothers, fleeing from darkness to light' that refugees were generally looked on only as refugees, nowadays. There were outreach and social clubs to tell Annerose she was free now, as if she couldn't tell a nice cup of tea from a cold cup of poison. Everyone who'd heard of Reinhard von Lohengram had heard of his sister; only a few would even try to know her, but that was alright. It had sunk down to the heart of Annerose von Müsel – they said Grünewald had been her slave name - that strangers' judgement was one of many things she could not change.

"...such a sweet listener. Poor dear. So much freedom must be rather overwhelming, though you wouldn't know how our last government practically tore the constitution up, for the wretched war. Our potluck supper may not be fit for a palace, but I'm sure you'll find it lovely. I know it's a dreadful stereotype that you're all mad on music, but we really need another soprano, for our community choir? You'll find barbarian music odd at first, but honestly, this new 'Galaxywave' my daughter goes in for…"

Magdalena - Annerose smiled to think – would have been drily amused by some of the Alliance ladies' music and conversation, very cutting about the rest. Though she couldn't imagine Magdalena von Westphalen looking Heinessen over with fan and wineglass in hand – a social creature perfectly adapted to mock the Empire's monoculture, lost in a trackless mess of subcultures and trends. Alliance ladies didn't wear pants because they were bold and outrageous as Magda – they couldn't comprehend how she'd suffered and loved, as Magda always had. Yet they cared for her, as Magda had cared. Their aristocratic self-assurance, as free citizens of sovereign democracy, poured out good-intentioned compassion on the innocent girl they might as freely have excoriated as Lohengram's sister. Annerose clung to them, shamefully grateful.

She learned to cook, for the potluck suppers. The Alliance ladies' sewing and knitting clubs rapturously lauded her skills as superior to them all, urging her to take an instructor's course online and run classes. Independence was indispensable for women, they said – she must learn about computers, thank goodness the Evil Empire had at least let her read, and she simply must learn how to drive...

Annerose was glad of their company, their food, and such freedom as she felt. She couldn't leave Heinessen – as she'd flown free from Odin, once - but practically no one in the Alliance wanted to rape, poison or execute her. These were things to be appreciated, as was the happiness of people who'd never dreaded death squads or secret police. Would never again fear bloody conquest or nuclear hellfire – the blonde beast, Lohengram, was gone.

"You must be happy." President Dolittle had welcomed her personally, to the foreign world she would grow old on, clasping her hands, "For all our sakes, for Lynn, all the lost and alone, you must be happy..."

She wore black for the wife who Annerose's brother had killed, and plainly did not hope for herself to know happiness again. Yet she had two lovely children and had known joy more unimaginable to Annerose than marriage between women. Growing old at Maggie's side would've been a marvellous dream, though selfish and impossible – wherever Magda might find happiness, with her empire destroyed, it would not be Heinessen. It was for Annerose to face the white streets full of people, loud, proud and living, whom the brother she still loved would have killed and enslaved for his galactic destiny. She didn't believe that if he'd lived and conquered, she would have been happier – but she could not even tell the kind and wonderful therapist she saw each week that she did not know.

-0-

Her flight from Odin, capture by space pirates, delivery to Heinessen for a queen's ransom had all been unthinkable terrors - now passed away, with all the terror of slavery. She had sobbed and choked up more shame than she'd even known in herself; therapy had seemed as unimaginable as it felt right, like so much else in the Alliance. It only left the emptiness - not only Maggie's absence. Not only poor Sieg's death, that might have finished her, if not for the one love she had left.

Deeper emptiness, barren of the richly assured love Sieg and Maggie had shared, and shared with her, had been blasted into her soul on the day she'd been sold from her family for a whore. A cold and useless life, only trying to be the good sister her brother had lost, was still her only life. Nothing on the world of Heinessen felt so real as the days each week she took a mag-lev to the Dolittle Foundation. Passed through the protestors to the low-lit room, where a vast tank silently suspended Reinhard von Lohengram – once duke and dictator, once von Müsel - in palely green fluid.

Once, unconquered ruler of galactic imperium. Once, a frustrated, half-orphaned boy with short pants and scraped knees. Now, helpless as the child laid out on soaked sheets by fever, clinging to a little life and his sister's hand. Nothing then to be done, except wait with her brother. Nothing later, but to beg the man who'd bought and ruined her to protect him. Nothing now, except to sit with the brother she loved. She'd been told what he'd done, but she sat and never asked him why, because true love needed no answer.

A cold-hearted killer; so said his enemies, who had lived to wash blood off their hands. Yet she had seen him, seen him, laughing as he played at soldiers with Sieg - without title or battle-horror to distort his blazing path. He had truly been kind to Siegfried, his friend; he'd been nothing but a dear little hero to his big sister. For her, he had even held back honest anger at father's drunken despair, or the outrageous excesses of the high noble boys. Until he had fought against undeniable corruption and evil, conquered with a broken spirit and the galaxy against him.

Yet she had never seen him weep - proud as she was of her only brother's achievements, she wished he could have let himself cry. Through scraped knees and their lost mother, he'd held back his tears as boys did. When the Kaiser's procurers had led her from their humble cottage into gilded slavery, she had not heard a sound behind her - except the crash of ten little fingers upon the old piano she had played for him. The noise of something breaking - or else breaking through.

Could one kinder or firmer word from her lips have possibly saved lives, that were now dust in space? What could she do, when nothing could be done for love? The future was immutable as her past - unchanging as the silence of her Reinhard.

Golden hair streamed out his halo, in the crawling light of a drowned city; his kingdom of peace, lost forever. No peace, in his furrowed brow and scorn-shut eyes, when so many had died for this...yet Annerose kept her vigil before the stasis tank. She had no peace, and no one else.

"If only Siegfried Kircheis were here." Kaizuka Kei, coming up like a ghost behind her, whispered what Annerose's heart had howled, "He was a man, foolish, heroic and lovable, who did all that he did for love. An enemy to make peace with. An enemy to be treasured as a friend."

"Why can none of you respect my brother? How he suffered, how hard he worked...the good in him, despite everything? If you had to hang him up there like a captured banner, a human trophy of your just and righteous victory...can't you even do that?"

"I never had the honour of knowing your little brother, Miss Müsel. Only the dictator, conqueror and ubermensch, whom Paul Oberstein claimed I was incapable of judgement on - I will be able to give him back his cybereyes, one day. As we will discover a cure for the 'emperor's sickness', one day, and your brother will awake as Reinhard von Müsel, citizen. If that, with your safety, is enough for him, he will have deserved our mercy. If it is not, impotent pride will be its own punishment."

"You arrogant monster. My brother should have beaten you, broken that pride - pride in your perfect, superior democracy, blind to your crimes and corruption. You will grow worse than the Goldenbaums, one day - but who could have humbled you, except him? My brother, more precious than your republic and all the people in this vile galaxy...you should be glad I'm such a weak and helpless victim; the dictator's princess, the Kaiser's whore! I am glad to be so powerless, for if, if I could sacrifice empire and republic to have only my brother, my dear Sieg, and dear Maggie, my friend...I might do it!"

"If you did not, it would be a very great kindness."

Anger, buried through a past dead lifetime, furrowed Annerose's flawless brow with scars. She shouted what she'd never dared speak. She breathed out. Kei's unmoving, unlovely visage, more visibly ravaged - was broken by a smile strange as a statue's.

"Reinhard beat us a dozen times," Kei went on, "We never broke, or forgot that we were better than him...but he may still teach us the humility we shall need, if we mean to survive."

"Did you just come to mock my brother? Where is that husband you never fail to brag about?"

"Because he makes me so happy every day, Miss Müsel. You will find someone, and understand." Kei's face never moved, but she never lied, "I was away so long fighting the war, I cannot justly complain if he is busy with the reconstruction...I'm only grateful that he is alive. Unlike Inko, Nina, Danza and Kaori, Wolf Areash...Yuki, my big sister. I didn't always accept her words, but if she had died three years before she did, I might have been another Oberstein. They're all dead, though Reinhard is not - but I did not come here for him, Miss Müsel. Erwin Joseph is still alive."

"...the former Kaiser?"

"For what his grandfather did to you, alone, the Galactic Empire deserved its annihilation. Erwin Joseph deserves something more. I understand he has not integrated well; he has hurt other children and been hurt by them. I was bullied at school myself, until I broke a boy's arm with a rock; my sister was very angry with me." Kei's single eye, under unspeakable emotion, blinked, "We need your help, Miss Müsel. Erwin Joseph needs a big sister."

When the grandson of her life's destroyer first looked up to her golden hair and damp eyes, something moved in her with the pain of wasted years. Frustration, aspiration and loneliness, in the eyes of a boy. Her whole broken life had been given to the little brother she loved. Now she had a new life, to give and give and give.

-0-

No more letters or invitations for Baroness von Westphalen – only messages from across the galaxy. Magdalena read them every morning, and reread them when there were none, over burnt toast and tea of undistinguished blend.

Dear Dotty and her world, the three-year-old Pirate Republic of Far Hope, had never been better. Her husband was constantly discussing agricultural innovations with the new assembly. Serious farmers who had always grown wheat and barley as five centuries of ancestors had done, and actually felt it was time for change, in this space-faring age. Dorothea was terribly busy making sure that things actually got done, especially the peace gardens; they would be lovelier than their estate on Odin that some mob had wrecked, and their beauty would be for everyone. She'd joked in her weekly message that she was as much a woman of affairs as her Maggie. Magdalena responded that she no longer had affairs, in any sense, though she certainly hadn't run off to be a pirate. Her Dotty's delighted giggle warmed Magda's heart from light years away.

(Some of the new Pirate Republics had truly been dragged down by gangsters or warlords. There were already wars between the worlds, and rumours of war; Far Hope and Dorothea had been lucky. Yet little wars now slunk amongst the stars instead of ravaging; bad children hiding from Alliance, Republic and Fezzan. A few had ended already. Every last world still held a seed of hope. A future without god-emperors rolling on its merry, mazy way)

Dorothea's eldest was walking out with a lovely girl whose father was a respectable schoolteacher - although she wrote to Magda of every marriage engagement and new birth in the district, as if they were all her own. Untimely hints aside, Magdalena was quite sure her best friend had never been so happy. Though her old friends and former 'lovers' seldom wrote, she had no doubt the same was true for Orpherus von Marmelade and Eduard von Braunschweig.

In the Alliance invasion, they had flown out to their homeworld of Kurchen. With no defence before the battlegroup of deadly Alliance warships in orbit, a cigar-chomping admiral had called upon them to surrender, in the name of freedom, democracy and the Democratic Alliance of Free Planets. Orpherus and Eduard had said, very well, on the sole conditions that the people should not be harmed, and a competent starship captain supplied to marry them at once. The admiral had reportedly been rather taken aback. The lovers' honeymoon had been on an uncharted asteroid, hiding for their lives after the invasion failed. Yet they had returned at the last to free the world that was now a thriving republic, with a very gallant president and charming first gentleman.

Former Admiral Ernst Mecklinger, captured and promptly repatriated by the Alliance, had never been tried over the murders involved in Reinhard's coup. The more responsible admirals were all dead, and the new Republic's great idea was that a page should be turned. The artist admiral had turned his hand to literature, producing a biography of Reinhard von Lohengram swiftly banned in both the Alliance and Galactic Republic. His documentary scholarship and logical argumentation, Magda personally thought, were the most excellent that could have been deployed behind his thesis; that Reinhard had been the greatest of strategists and statesmen, brought down by his united inferiors. A certain Professor Yang had defended Mecklinger's work and denounced the Alliance's abrogation of free speech. Would have been beaten or killed by thugs for it, in the name of freedom and democracy, had his younger husband been less handy with both fists. Lord, what fools we mortals be.

Poor Hildegarde remained on Mariendorf with her aging father and cousin Heinrich, who had been terminally ill since childhood. Confined to his bed, with no life before him but death - Magda still hoped that wouldn't be Hildegarde's exiled fate, though she had sent no message in three years.

Katerose von Kreutzer had been the first to declare for Reinhard in the civil war, and the first to denounce him after Operation Diogenes. Magdalena was unspeakably glad that such a plucky, clear-headed girl had survived every unpleasantness, to become the Galactic Republic's first and fastest-rising female senator. Magda intended to vote for her in the next presidential election – though reverently placing her scrap of paper in a box still seemed so silly, it would be her first vote.

Neither Eugen Richter nor Karl Braque had remained in office, when the new Galactic Republic had sorted out actual elections. Whether it was for serving under the mad dictator Reinhard or betraying the tragic not-emperor Reinhard, Karl wrote, at least the people clearly understood they could choose their leaders. After all they'd suffered and done, he and Richter would be very content to advise and mentor the rising generation. There were indeed some bright and earnest young men in the new senate, as well as corrupt sponges and would-be second-rate Reinhards. Despite fleet mutinies, uprisings and continuing economic chaos, the Republic had survived thus far, as the man said between the tower and the ground. It was generally understood that if Republic or Alliance took sides in any of the border wars, a second galactic war would follow, and swiftly conclude with the former Empire's destruction. For the best, perhaps…but Magda found she could still hope for better.

Sarah, Magdalena's loyal maid for over a decade, had taken a cottage near Castle Westphalen, with an older woman who kept a few goats and pigs on her war-widow's pension. So many women and men who had hidden their affections throughout long lives were now bravely stepping out - even if there was no law against it, no more DSD, there was always prejudice, hate and murder.

"...I'm sorry, milady...Miss Magdalena. It feels like I deceived you, it always did. I curled your beautiful hair every morning, helped you dress for all those balls...I should've left, but I couldn't leave you. I couldn't stop loving you, no more than all those bloody men could."

"My poor, dear Sarah, I can barely imagine...you were so close to me every day, and I never knew. Can you ever forgive me my ignorant cruelty?"

"Even your constant histrionics, milady. It's never all buns and skittles for servants, the deal we had to accept...but it really is high time for a change. It was an honor to serve you at your side, but I think sleeping in beside Veronica every morning is going to be a lovely new life."

-0-

What could be said, after all that, of Magdalena von Westphalen?

The planetary council administering the Westphalen system under the Galactic Republic had voted Baroness Westphalen and her mother an exceedingly modest stipend. Despite the petitions she had liberally answered in former years, giving freely to relieve her serfs' distress or simply bring some light into dull lives, Magda judged that her people had already fully repaid her, in gratitude continually poured at her feet. The council and her former serfs clearly thought so as well.

The Westphalen Conservatory had been kept up, for the obvious profit to be made out of the galaxy's most prestigious school of music - how long that would last, Magda couldn't bear to think. With no more scholarships for her poor, yet handsome and brilliant students, her pride and joy had become the entire preserve of the galaxy's rich. Next to that, she cared little that the family pile would be preserved at public expense, for a museum. Although it would be years before the boldest historian could possibly travel from the Alliance, and Magda doubted any, even then, would care to see the heap of stone from which centuries of egomaniacs called Westphalen had feigned not only to own the world but deserve it.

Magda's mother, who still lived in the castle, as she had always lived in the castle, did not care for the museum plan. As often as Magdalena reminded her, it was the council who were paying to keep her home spick, span and standing, the old dowager moaned scarcely less about common idlers, paying money, than said money going to the council of rank oiks aforementioned.

"…who was that ancient degenerate you practically worshiped? Said the only ones who loved money more than the rich were the poor?"

"I believe it was said at some time or other, mother, that a proper lady ought not to use vulgar words, including money."

"Pah! As if you ever knew what it was to be a proper lady. To survive as one. If half of those outrageous stories the maids would tell me were true, you should have been killed ten times over, ruined at least twenty. You were always a problem child...your father would never have stood for any of it."

"He died, mother. I lived."

Dark eyes and grey eyes held a tremendous mass of feeling between them; fusion-fire in a containment field. After cold confinements that mother and daughter had suffered each other to endure, they couldn't be friends. Yet they couldn't be alone, when they had no one else in the world, and they had too much sense to make each other too miserable.

"…I supposed you did." It was close as Magda would get to a parent's acceptance.

"The wheel of fate has turned, of course, and our two roads joined in the same unglamorous end. Mock me for that, by all means."

"The same fate, indeed! You never suffered as I did; you were never a true lady. You could go off tomorrow and be a music teacher, an art critic, a space pirate, a lion tamer! You're not old."

"Mother, you're scarcely more than fifty - do pardon my language. There's nothing to stop you leaving this ancient place for anywhere in the universe. Anything you ever longed to do."

"You really do not understand a thing. Leave yourself, if it's so simple! You left me here for long enough! When the barbarians and degenerates have triumphed, and all we gave our lives for has come to nothing…oh, just go away."

Magda withdrew. She would return tomorrow. Her mother remained in the dust-choked drawing room, a chintz jungle of heaped ornaments and lampshades too vast for unfeeling sunlight to disturb its midday gloom.

An army of servants had once exhausted their lives, simply to keep Castle Westphalen from sliding into a haunted ruin – though its silverware brightness had only ever been exposed to a few traditional feasts in the year, as Magda had did her entertaining on Odin. A few loyal old retainers still attended on the dowager baroness, a few days of the week; they had to take jobs in the village as well, since the Westphalens had no money to pay them.

Most of the noble wives and daughters exiled by Reinhard to barren frontier worlds had remained there, scorning to acknowledge the new Republic. There was vigorous debate on Odin as to whether forcibly removing the exiled children to the core worlds would be a necessity or a crime.

A joke was current about a mad marquess in the Balt system whose only servant played the part of head gardener with a false beard, chauffeur with false moustache and so on. It wasn't a new joke, or a particularly risible one when Magda thought of her mother, slumped within the silk dressing gown that would be her shroud. A ghost of nobility, haunting the emptiness of her castle – humans did sink to be living ghosts, when their lives were only roles fixed by compassionless centuries. Baroness, lady, mother, wife, all dying for Empire with soldiers and servants, all parts in the tragedy, parts in the ghostly machine. Gone now, but the waste remained - and her mother, lost in it.

-0-

Magdalena, who valued her own space over a castle shared with her mother, had taken up residence on the estate, in the gamekeeper's lodge (Old Wilhelm had retired; his son was studying forestry on Odin). She walked there now, through the lawns and exotic topiary her fathers had sunk a dozen fortunes in, soon to be forests and wilderness. Glowing in the summer heat, rather than perspiring, though it was the longest path she'd ever walked on her feet. She wore tasteful cardigans and beige slacks rather than silks, these days, and used reading glasses. No gossips would think anything of it, now, and she had considerable time for reading.

What was there to do for Magdalena von Westphalen, who would never be anything but a baroness? To live exactly as she pleased, she had lived through violence, terror and loss – not only she had suffered, she knew, for her pleasures. The age of Empire had passed finally away, but the last baroness would still live as she pleased, so far as she could.

Making a somewhat habitable dwelling out of the lodge had taken months, and she was still laying up crates of foxed old paperbacks from all the village shops. She'd never before realised the cost of such life essentials as jasmine candles. To keep the rats from her reading supplies, she'd acquired a cat – one cat was probably permissible.

Her book club in the village had been a failure. Taking charge of people when you meant to help them was harder to quit than drink, though that was rather an ongoing project – the lodge was woefully chilly in winter. She sat at the rear of the village chapel every Friday; chatted to the ladies about their children and husbands in the hall, or the marketplace. The ones who went into fits of deference were worse than those who laughed at the mad baroness – not understanding that she really would go mad without conversation, and society.

Celibacy had been a comparatively simple attainment. She'd momentarily considered strolling down to the local pubs and picking up a few nice young farmhands, but apart from the complications, she simply didn't have the desire. She did have a few lifetimes worth of heart-rending romance to recall in her cosy lodge, as well as two working fingers.

Thinking on the past, in the end, had been the soul of her retirement. The grand balls and heavenly concerts, her triumphant salons and the vanished laughter. When she'd thought too much of herself, again and always, she thought of all those friends still living she had helped and saved…every soul that might possibly be glad of Magdalena von Westphalen having lived. Then the lost, the unsaved, dead on Westerland, Geiersberg, the streets of Odin…all the terror and despair of the past, still sunk in her flesh. Her own despair and death, from which there was nothing now to separate her but years.

Alone, Magda had to remember that she'd been loved, by men who were lost or dead. She really hadn't been a good lover to Liechten, poor David, dear Sieg, all her boys – in impotent regret, she hoped, she was finally paying the consequence of her indulgences. A life given up to no one…was still the life she had kept, her own. Burnt out, in the galactic void still wracked with insensible war…but not entirely misspent. She had lived to remember them all – with Dotty's warmth, Katerose's tears, dear Annerose's rare smile. All the vanished pain and dreams…all the drama her performer's soul had left to live in.

The grave of her first love, Johannes, remained on Odin; for three years there had been no blue roses. Sometimes, moving on was simply necessity, even with no road ahead and no part left to play without sorrow. What would be left when sorrow was gone, except ennui?

-0-

On the evening the curtain fell, Magda was finishing Voltaire's Candide for the fifth time, while rubbing Charmian the cat behind her ears. The hero, having lost an enormous fortune through naivety and passed through a medley of disasters supposed to disprove a benevolent god, had finally found the tedium of retirement from adventures as insupportable as the worst of them. His immortal solution had been to take up gardening, and make himself useful – but where was her garden? What did one do for a garden, anyway?

As the gramophone she'd saved from the castle poured out dear old Puccini, Magda reread Annerose's message of that morning. Her friend had studied, qualified and found work as a support teacher, guiding troubled children of every kind to peaceful fulfilment. Reinhard was as well as ever; her friend of the choir and sewing circle, even better than formerly. She'd confessed to almost feeling ready for 'dating', as the Alliance's young people apparently called it. She was fostering two more boys beside dear Erwin Joseph, grinning from the screen as no Kaiser could ever have grinned. Annerose's smile at his side brought Magda to tears all over again.

Her precious friend, the girl she had saved; the measure of her life's worth. The warmth of it was sufficient to put off her evening drink until she got back from visiting mother. After that, a measure or two of rotgut would probably be required. Still, she stepped out; scarcely attired in the height of fashion, but with head held high.

It was still a pleasant walk; the ornate hedges and rows of off-world trees rose over dark lawns, like a country of mysterious dreams. By the time Magda perceived the figure on the path behind, he was so close that she should have recognized him at once.

He wore a pack and military boots, like a traveller who'd come further than he'd ever thought to, but held an instrument case like some latter-day wandering minstrel. For a guitar, of all things, rated slightly above the comb and paper in the former Empire's musical tradition. Blonde hair fell over broad shoulders, and his face did not entirely resemble David Wagner's – but Magdalena looked into his eyes and softly screamed into her hands.

"Magda, I…I had to come back. In the whole universe, there was nothing else I could do."

"…I never understood before now, how the heroines of opera could die with a smile. If you've come back to kill me, for all I did, then I will smile, my love, for you came back for me!"

"What are you saying? I left you. I was an IDIOT!" Head bowed, David drove the confession like a dagger into his own heart; years of prison and bewildered exile had not changed it. "What you did that day, for Lady Annerose, what you went through that day I left! I must have been insane, I am insane and years too late…but I'm sorry."

"You're sorry? It wasn't only that day…I never did the right thing by you, dear David. I never devoted myself to your happiness as much as I…used you to please myself. Oh, the memory burns like a brand, you were beautiful and nineteen, and you trusted me! I'm sorry, I'm so sorry…"

"…did you ever love me?"

"Yes. Not well, but with all my heart. I cried myself to sleep for a week. For the boy I'd loved, the man lost to me, forever…"

"I wept into my pillow, until the whole barracks threatened to beat me unconscious. I can't say I got on with soldiering, or soldiers…the Rebels practically rescued me."

"…then you can forgive me, sweet love, for arranging your assignment to Iserlohn?"

With her old smile, Magdalena batted eyelashes filled with tears. The baroness and the pilgrim minstrel suddenly burst out laughing together. They guffawed through their tears, as Magda clung to David's chest to keep from collapsing on the path.

Then their lips had found each other, with the hunger of years and the ease of yesterday. With roaring in Magdalena's soul that her life of love had never known – the ultimate climax of her story and her life. A living miracle in her arms, redemption past any price – her Tannhaüser, returned to the love she would pour out forever, for him!

She tore off her cardigan - simply because she would never wear the hideous thing again, but David naturally got the wrong idea and raised his hands. After more laughter, he finally guided her on down the path to their castle. With shock and joy, her legs were shaking like a filly's – she joked that David would have to carry her over the threshold, but truthfully was glad to walk at his side.

"Your father and siblings all survived. I suppose you'll have to meet mother, but we must go to Kastrop to meet your family, together, the minute we can."

"I went to them first, but we will go, together – we can go anywhere. If I don't get captured by space pirates, again…Magda, there was nothing in the galaxy that didn't keep me from you, but I still came. There's so much to tell you..."

"You certainly must show me what you can do with that instrument. If some form of music was extant on the savage frontier of your captivity, I'm quite sure you found it."

"…I'm quite sure I'm going to surprise you twice today, Magda. I think the whole Republic is going to learn something about music, before I'm done...that the times truly are all changing."

"Before that, I have so much to ask you, my sweet, brave hero. Were hot dogs for breakfast, lunch and diner truly awful? Did you seek to forget my charms in the arms of very many strong and exotic Rebel women?"

"…a few. Sorry. Honestly, I shouldn't be sorry, but I am. I suppose I'll only ever be in love with you."

Magdalena threaded her grip through her minstrel's miraculous fingers and laid her head upon his beautiful heart. Blue eyes seemed to hold the galaxy he'd traversed to find her – a new universe of hope, joy and pure imagination. The galaxy still held poison and chaos that might steal their happily ever after, but they could try, this time she would try – and what might she not try? She was thirty-five, intelligent and beautiful, excellently self-educated and in love. She might write books or compose, make a new fortune and transform the new Republic's culture with it – or simply travel the stars seeking adventure. Her second act would necessarily be more extraordinary than the first, by every law of drama. Across a galaxy stuffed with a billion matters of far more worth than war-waging, or regret.

The grand piano of Castle Westphalen had not been played for years. For many hours into that night, gliding beneath the heaven-bound chords of guitar or violin, keys beneath ivory fingers sang out their passionate joy.