What she hears is sufficient to prove that she is being deliberately prevented from recovering, her visual sense deliberately impaired and even worse, that she had been poisoned. Unfortunately for Cecelia, while she is not dead, she has been deemed sufficiently incapacitated that her will is being executed. In her will she had recently made a change to give the "Sweet Delight" to Heris, both because she was a good friend and because Heris had saved Cecelia from Admiral Lepescu on Sirialis in "Hunting Party". Berenice, Cecelia's sister, had always envied her her yacht, and given the suspicious nature of Cecelia's stroke and the amendment to the will, decides to sue Heris for the yacht. With the yacht tied up in probate, Heris's options are limited. They are further limited when the King summons Heris to an audience, and quite firmly insists that she and her crew steal the "Sweet Delight", and while avoiding arrest by the Fleet, discovery of their identity and also any attacks by the Benignity and their agents, take the stupid prince to the Guerini Republic to seek an antidote to the poison. Heris has little choice but to agree, and steals the yacht and busts out of the Rockhouse system at high speed. Brun and Ron take advantage of the lowered scrutiny and security (since Heris has quite visibly left, and Lorenza's agents were expecting any threat to their imprisonment of Cecelia to come from her direction) to arrange for a bunch of rowdies in hot air balloons to "visit" the long-term care facility during a festival; Cecelia is then evacuated in Brun's balloon (Ronnie having previously prepared Cecelia and had the surveillance devices put on a loop). Immediately they take her off-planet and eventually to her stable on the planet Rotterdam, where the locals like or love her. From there they begin hiring medical experts to come treat her. Heris' pickup of the prince goes badly when she proves unable to distinguish between the real prince and his clone double. The confusion is exacberated when Captain Arash Livadhi shows with a "third" prince whom he believes to be the real prince, but who is likewise indistinguishable. Otherwise, the trip goes smoothly, except for Sirkin, who keeps making careless mistakes and whose performance is otherwise deteriorating. As Lady Cecelia recovers and prepares to file for competency and thereby regain her estate, Brun works her way back to Rockhouse Major via low-level jobs aboard various commercial vessels; even with this ruse, she barely avoids Lorenza's hired assassins.