Unnatural Issue by Mercedes Lackey Page A

featured a domestic cat about to investigate an open chest, with the motto, translated from the Latin, No fortune without risk.
    “What d’ye think about all this saber-rattling on the Continent?” Nigel asked, both fair eyebrows furrowed, flourishing a folded newspaper in the air as if he supposed Peter could read what was on it remotely. “You spend half your time over there, chasing French ballerinas and Italian opera singers—it’s all nonsense isn’t it? It’ll all blow over by Christmas.”
    “Oh, I very much fear it won’t,” rumbled General Smythe-Hastings. The general looked just like any of the old fellows out in the Club Room at first glance, but at second, aside from the keen intelligence in his eyes and the vigor in his movements, there was no mistaking his military background. It was there in the set of his shoulders and the posture of his neck. “This is too like the run-up to the Boer War for my liking. You mark my words. The Continent is seething, especially the Balkans. Good gad, it’s always the Balkans! But they’re itching for a dust-up, and the Germans and Austrians are itching for an excuse to stop prancing about in fancy uniforms and shoot something. Preferably something French.”
    “But that’s the point, old man!” Nigel cried. “How on earth does tossing a few Balkan anarchists into gaol turn into shooting Frenchmen? It doesn’t make sense!”
    “Whoever said war was logical?” sighed the Hon. James Minton, who had lost the better part of his youth in Egypt. James looked as old as the general, though he couldn’t be a day over forty. What he had seen there would have turned anyone’s hair white.
    The conversation circled around and around this subject while Peter grimly tucked into his saddle of mutton. He had just come from Heartwood Hall, the family estate, and plunging into this conversation was rather like plunging into ice water. He had gone from what could only be described as a pastoral atmosphere of benign and provincial ignorance to—this.
    “Our German and Austrian colleagues have completely withdrawn all contact with the rest of Europe,” James pointed out. “And I mean completely. There’s nothing coming from behind those borders now.”
    And if anyone should know, it would be James, since he’s the Magic Liaison to the Foreign Office..
    “But that just might be a precaution,” Nigel objected. “You know that lot. The least little thing happens, and they pull in their necks like so many turtles.”
    “Which is how they avoid having their heads chopped off,” the general said.
    If I dared, I would finish this excellent roast, bid them all a fond farewell and go trotting on back home, Peter thought wistfully; he was altogether too sure now that what the Old Lion wanted him for was—precisely this. He had an overt reputation as a Continent-hopping, genteel rake, and no one took him seriously but those of his fellow Masters who had actually worked with him. This could be very useful when you were fishing for information. The Old Lion found him very useful in this capacity indeed, in fact. Most, if not all of the Masters of Austria, Hungary, and Germany were under the impression that Peter had much more hair than wit, and one could discuss virtually anything under his nose without him taking any more interest in it than a greyhound in grand opera.
    He thought wistfully of the atmosphere he had just left at the Almsley estate. Sometimes ignorance was bliss. The people back home were sailing into summer full of serene plans about tennis parties and picnics, of ways to entertain the youngsters during the Long Vac, and thinking about the hunts in the fall and the inevitable Season once winter set in. His brother was entirely wrapped up in managing the minutia of the Home Farm and all the tenants and their farms—not to mention his pet cattle-breeding project, which was finally proving to be a great success. When Hall and Village looked at the foreign events in