I nodded, too nervous to actually speak. He pulled his hand from under mine and used it to tease my hair. "I'll be fine," he told me."But your leg, an... Janice," I said. Tears were now pouring from my eyes and I felt my whole body shake.James put his arm around me. "I'll be fine, little one," he told me. "And Janice will recover. She is already in a medical pod."I gazed up at James and noticed he had a tired smile on his face. I reached up to touch it, only for Lindsay to grab my hand. "Not. I even recognized her perfume on the parchment. The king confronted her and she fled rather than face justice.”“He probably just killed her and told you she ran off,” Elizabeth said.“No,” Jonathan said again. “We had several scouts in our army. They followed her footprints in the soft ground through the trees. She was attempting to make her way toward the Wellington manor in the darkness and fell down a ravine. She broke her neck in the fall.”Elizabeth crossed her arms, a mutinous look on her. Several people in the audience did fall as glasses from the buffet table crashed to the ground, and a statue toppled over. A massive boom drowned out the shocked yells of the crowded ballroom as even those not knocked down screamed and shouted.Taylor didn’t hesitate, moving before the world settled from the massive explosion that must have happened outside.“Stay right behind me,” he said to Kara as he started to move toward the guard by the door, who’d gone down on one knee to keep from falling. Audios, elder sister and elder brother. And, then, with a bit of luck, sayonara, Dorrie.The four of us set up in Claire’s room on a Saturday and Dorrie, without hesitation, gives Eastern Australia just a token army for me to freely pick it off, and then — at more cost to me — New Guinea from Dennis. I likewise provide Dorrie an easy route to march south from Siam and expel Claire — ha! ha! — from Indonesia.When Dorrie leaves her European realms undefended against my troops, the other two call.