H.R.H.

“Your Highness,” the prime minister spoke to her gently. He could see that she was in no condition to talk. But they had no choice. They had been together since four o'clock that morning, hours after they'd been called with the news, and had waited till eight o'clock to come to the palace. Everyone, including Christianna, had been up all night. The palace was ablaze with light in the November darkness. “Your Highness, we must speak with you,” the prime minister said again. He was the senior member of all twenty-five, and had been her father's chief confidant. “Will you sit down with us?” She nodded, still looking dazed, and they cleared the room of everyone except the guards carrying machine guns. No one knew what to expect next, or if the car bomb had been a single act, a precursor to a broader offense, or even an ambush on the palace. There were Swiss soldiers carrying machine guns outside and in the palace. The Swiss government had offered them immediately and sent them from Zurich.

Christianna sat down, staring at the members of Parliament, and they all took chairs around the room. They were sitting in what had been her father's office, and it felt strange to her that he was not there. For a moment, she wondered where he was, and then like a second explosion in her mind, she remembered. More than anything, she remembered the look they had exchanged just before her brother drove him away. That look of apology and regret that would now haunt her for a lifetime, along with the bitter argument that had driven a wedge between them for two months. They had not even yet recovered, until the wounds began to heal that night, and now he was gone. She kept telling herself she would never see either of them again, and found it impossible to absorb it.

“We must speak to you. We are all beside ourselves with grief over your enormous loss. It is something so horrible that it is truly beyond thinking. Please accept our deepest condolences, from all of us.” She nodded, unable to speak herself as tears came to her eyes. She was in fact a twenty-four-year-old girl who had just lost all the family she had. And there was no one to console her, only these men who wanted to talk to her. She recognized each and every one of them as she looked around the room. All she felt able to do was nod. It had been an immeasurable shock, as they were well aware. Her face was so pale, she almost looked transparent.

“But we must also speak to you about the succession. Our country has no leader. It's a situation that, according to our constitution, must be resolved at once. It is dangerous for us to have no one in charge, particularly now.” For the moment, the prime minister was designated to handle any national disaster, which this certainly was. But all of them felt uneasy having no one to fill the seat her father had so unexpectedly and suddenly left empty. “Are you able to understand what I am saying to you, Your Highness, or are you too upset?” He spoke to her as though she had suddenly become deaf. In fact, she was overwhelmed at having been left so bereft. But she was still able to understand, if not respond.

She finally forced words from her mouth, for almost the first time since it had happened. “I understand,” she was able to confirm.

“Thank you, Your Highness. What we want to discuss with you is who is to take the succession.” He was well aware of her family history, and knew each member of the hundred-member Family Court. “You have several cousins in Vienna who are directly in the line of succession. They are related to you, of course, on your father's side. But in fact, when I went down the list last night, at least the first seven of them, or even eight or nine, are not appropriate to even consider. All of them are far too old and some quite ill. Several have no children, so the succession could not pass down through them. And a great many after that are women. And you know the rules about no female succession. We would have to go to well over the twentieth in line, even twenty-fifth, to find a man of appropriate age, in good health, and I am not even sure he would accept. They are all Austrian, and none has had close ties with Liechtenstein, which leads us to a very interesting place.