1636： The Saxon Uprising ARC - By Eric Flint Page 0,98

did. Apparently Oxenstierna assumed he could bring enough pressure to bear on Luebeck to get them to do the same.

After that initial flurry of demands and threats, though, Oxenstierna had said nothing. Rebecca suspected he’d come to the conclusion that since he couldn’t force the issue right now, he’d be wiser to just let sleeping dogs lie. The way things stood, if he forced Ulrik and Kristina out of Luebeck they’d most likely go to Copenhagen—which was even worse, from his standpoint.

So, for all practical purposes, the pair of royals had been ignored for the past weeks. But Rebecca was quite sure that if Oxenstierna found out what they were really planning to do—had been planning all along, in fact—he would do everything possible to prevent them from carrying the project through.

And he could do quite a bit. He had no control over Magdeburg, of course. So far, in fact, he’d not even made any threatening troop movements toward the city. He’d kept that large army he had under his direct control in Berlin. But if he needed to, he could get that army moving—and there was no force in the Germanies that would be able to stop it. He couldn’t take Magdeburg without a siege, and that siege would last at least as long as the siege of Dresden was lasting. But he could interdict the territory between Luebeck and Magdeburg. Most of it, at least.

Even if Simpson was willing to bring the ironclads back out of the Baltic and move them up the Elbe, it wouldn’t do any good. The warships were immensely powerful but they had vulnerabilities also. There were too many ways an ironclad could be ambushed on a river unless it had a powerful land force running interference for it—and there was no land force at Simpson’s disposal that Oxenstierna’s mercenaries couldn’t disperse. For that matter, the Swedes wouldn’t even have to lay an ambush. They could simply wreck some of the locks that made the river passable for the big ironclads.

No, once the secret was out, the only practical way to get Kristina and Ulrik to Magdeburg was to fly them in. Given, of course, the over-riding political imperatives involved.

USE naval base

Luebeck

“No, no, no, no.” Ulrik matched Kristina’s glare with his own. “We’ve been over this already.”

Driven into a corner, Kristina fought back the way any cornered child will do—with the truth instead of the folderol.

“But it’d be fun!”

Out of the side of his eye, Ulrik could see Baldur grinning.

“Not a word, Norddahl,” he said through clenched teeth.

The Norwegian shrugged. “She’s right, you know. We could have a dandy little adventure, disguising ourselves and dashing all about the land as we make our cunning way toward—”

“Shut up! You’re not helping!”

Once the prince was sure that he’d silenced his servant—using the term “servant” so very, very loosely—he went back to the princess.

“Kristina, if we sneak into Magdeburg like thieves in the night, we undercut everything we’re trying to accomplish. This is all about legitimacy. Everything! All of it! Why else have we stayed here in Luebeck for so long? Why didn’t we go to Magdeburg immediately?”

Kristina wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Ulrik was relieved to see the gesture. The girl didn’t have a runny nose, that was just a nervous reflex she had when she was beginning to back down from a tempestuous fight.

It was…unsettling, to think how well he’d gotten to know Kristina. And she’d gotten to know him, he didn’t doubt. Over the centuries, royals separated by almost two decades in age had become betrothed any number of times. Nor had it been unusual if one of those royals was still a child when the betrothal was made. But normally, the formalities done—often by proxy, not even in person—the future married couple didn’t see each other for years. When the time finally came to consummate the marriage, the husband and wife who climbed into the nuptial bed were almost complete strangers. Awkward, of course, in some ways. But one could still trust nature to take its course.

When the time finally came for him and Kristina, on the other hand…

It would either be hideous or very, very good. It wouldn’t be anything in between, for a certainty.

He gave his head a little shake, to clear the stray thought. That problem was still a decade away. Well, eight or nine years. Seven, at the very least. Six, if you really stretched every…

He shook his head again. No little shake this time,