Negotiation
Flicka von Hannover
The princess and the prince,
negotiating a treaty.
Flicka’s shiny shell snapped tightly around her body and mind.
She sat forward on her chair—her spine ramrod straight, her hands folded on her knee—and smiled as graciously as she could. She had pinned Raphael’s alpine mountaineering badge to the shoulder of her black dress for strength.
A wide, executive-style desk separated her from His Serene Highness Pierre Grimaldi, her ex-husband.
The dark wood of the desk was mahogany, she could see, and the intricate carvings on the front were fine, sixteenth-century craftsmanship. Morning Mediterranean sunlight streaming in the windows glowed on the gold-tinted plaster of the walls and in the rich finish of the desk’s wood. Dust motesdanced in the bright sunbeams, buffeted by the invisible atoms of air.
They were two princes, negotiating on the battlefield, even though the war was over her body. She was a Hannover royal, a kingdom won on the field of war. Her ancestors, warrior princes, had increased the kingdom’s glory by leading the charge at the heads of their armies.
Flicka had read Dieter’s textbooks on military philosophyand strategy when they had lived together in London, and she’d edited his undergrad essays on tactics and strategy and his master’s thesis on war and business. Carl von Clausewitz, the long-dead military philosopher whose thoughts and writing reminded her of Dieter Schwarz in so many ways, said that during war, one must pursue one great, decisive aim with force and determination.
Onegreat, decisiveaim.
Flicka’s one goal was escape, for herself and for Alina.
Everything else was secondary to escaping.
Sun Tzu, that ancient tactician, had said, “Know thyself and know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.”
Flicka knew herself and her lineage, and she knew Pierre Grimaldi.
Paintings of Pierre’s noble ancestors hung on the far wall away from the windows so they wouldn’t bedamaged by the sunlight, even though all the windows of the Prince’s Palace in Monaco were glazed with UV-blocking and bulletproof glass. Some of the noblemen and noblewomen had been painted wearing their knighthoods and honors, which were medals, sashes, and ribbons like military medals, except that royals award them to each other for no reason other than to curry favor or reward loyalty.
Flickapicked out the sashes and medals she knew.
One of Pierre’s ancestors wore the French Order of the Rose, a sash and a pin awarded by the Bourbon kings of France, now extinct along with the kingdom of France.
Another of Pierre’s ancestors from the eighteen hundreds—judging by his small wig and the fashion of his military uniform—was clad in green velvet robes heavily embroidered with gold andthe nearly round breast star and necklace of the Royal Hungarian Order of Saint Stephen, founded by Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa in 1764. Empress Maria Theresa had used induction into the order to cement her and her son’s claims as rulers of the Holy Roman Empire by bestowing it upon nobles and royals who were loyal to them. It was a public political reward.
Back in those days, chivalricorders were created for a purpose.
Flicka noticed that there was no portrait of the first Grimaldi Prince of Monaco in this room.
Pierre’s Italian noble ancestor François Grimaldi would have been depicted in his disguise as a harmless monk, an innocent man of God, and clutching a long knife. He had begged the castle guard of the Prince’s Palace for shelter during one cold night. Once FrançoisGrimaldi had infiltrated the fortress above the headlands and harbor, he slit the throat of the guard who had taken pity on the traveling monk and opened the defenses, allowing his men inside to butcher the rest of the guards and take the palace and the country.
Thus, the Italian noble family of Grimaldi had elevated themselves to become the sovereign princes of a tiny slice of French land anda Mediterranean port.
Yes, Flicka knew what Pierre was.
Another of Pierre’s grandfathers wore the thick, gold collar of the Spanish Order of the Golden Fleece, a knighthood reserved mostly now for sovereigns. Flicka’s Aunt Elizabeth had one of those collars but disliked wearing it because of its weight on her aging neck and shoulders. She also didn’t like the small, gold charm that resembleda dead sheep.
In centuries past, being inducted as a knight in the Order of the Golden Fleece meant that the bearer couldn’t be arrested for any crime, up to and including treason. Instead, the knight would be detained in the gentle custody of his fellow knights as suited his dignity, before being tried only by his fellow knights and found innocent, of course.
Pierre wasn’t a member of the Orderof the Golden Fleece because he wasn’t a sovereign yet. If he had been counting on that to get him out of being tried for rape or assault someday, it wasn’t going to work.
Also, that sovereign immunity thing had been stripped centuries ago.
None of the chivalric orders and knighthoods and the statuses that they conferred meant a damn thing anymore.
So many worthless trinkets, all for nothing.
