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won, making the crown the price of her virtue. She had conquered a king, brought down a chancellor of England, outfaced a pope. She would not show fear to this executioner in this place of the damned, whatever it was.
    She turned from the window, her head high. “Please begin your explanation, Master…”
    “Culhane.”
    “Master Culhane. We are eager to hear what you have to say. And we do not like waiting.”
    She swept aside her long nightdress as if it were court dress and seated herself in the not-wooden chair carved like a throne.
     

     
    “I am a hostage,” Anne repeated. “In a time that has not yet happened.”
    From beside the window, Lambert watched. She was fascinated. Anne Boleyn had, according to Culhane’s report, listened in silence to the entire explanation of the time rescue, that explanation so carefully crafted and revised a dozen times to fit what the sixteenth-century mind could understand of the twenty-second. Queen Anne had not become hysterical. She had not cried, nor fainted, nor professed disbelief. She had asked no questions. When Culhane had finished, she had requested, calmly and with staggering dignity, to see the ruler of this place, with his ministers. Toshio Brill, watching on monitor because the wisdom was that at first new hostages would find it easier to deal with one consistent researcher, had hastily summoned Lambert and two others. They had all dressed in the floor-length robes used for grand academic ceremonies and never else. And they had marched solemnly into the ersatz sixteenth-century room, bowing their heads.
    Only their heads. No curtsies. Anne Boleyn was going to learn that no one curtsied anymore.
    Covertly Lambert studied her, their fourth time hostage, so different from the other three. She had not risen from her chair, but even seated she was astonishingly tiny. Thin, delicate bones, great dark eyes, masses of silky black hair loose on her white nightdress. She was not pretty by the standards of this century; she had not even been counted pretty by the standards of her own. But she was compelling. Lambert had to give her that.
    “And I am prisoner here,” Anne Boleyn said. Lambert turned up her translator; the words were just familiar, but the accent so strange she could not catch them without electronic help.
    “Not prisoner,” the director said. “Hostage.”
    “Lord Brill, if I cannot leave, then I am a prisoner. Let us not mince words. I cannot leave this castle?”
    “You cannot.”
    “Please address me as ‘Your Grace.’ Is there to be a ransom?”
    “No, Your Grace. But because of your presence here thousands of men will live who would have otherwise died.”
    With a shock, Lambert saw Anne shrug; the deaths of thousands of men evidently did not interest her. It was true, then. They really were moral barbarians, even the women. The students should see this. That small shrug said more than all the battles viewed in squares. Lambert felt her sympathy for the abducted woman lessen, a physical sensation like the emptying of a bladder, and was relieved to feel it. It meant she, Lambert, still had her own moral sense.
    “How long must I stay here?”
    “For life, Your Grace,” Brill said bluntly.
    Anne made no reaction; her control was aweing.
    “And how long will that be, Lord Brill?”
    “No person knows the length of his or her life, Your Grace.”
    “But if you can read the future, as you claim, you must know what the length of mine would have been.”
    Lambert thought: We must not underestimate her. This hostage is not like the last one.
    Brill said, with the same bluntness that honored Anne’s comprehension—did she realize that?—“If we had not brought you here, you would have died May 19, 1536.”
    “How?”
    “It does not matter. You are no longer part of that future, and so now events there will—”
    “How?”
    Brill didn’t answer.
    Anne Boleyn rose and walked to the window, absurdly small, Lambert thought, in the trailing