Lady Fiona Holder said. “Wake up!” The accents of the vanished American West were still strong in her voice, despite forty-six years in and around and across post-Blackout Australia and all the seas that bordered it; she’d been born in a trailer park in what was then the dry eastern part of Oregon. She supposed it was still dry and still had cows, though it was part of the High Kingdom of Montival now, which was an absolute kick in the head on the infrequent occasions she thought about it. Outsiders often mistook her range-country twang for faded Southern Gothic, and for sure when her temper frayed, you could still hear an echo of the conga line of deadbeat stepdads who’d passed through her mom’s trailer all those years ago. Years, decades, whole worlds ago. They’d spoken a uniform dialect of genuine Toothless Cracker Appalachio-Methhead, though by now she supposed there weren’t many left who knew or cared about the regional variations.
