Count Felipe was sitting on one of the chairs near the three-deep pile of enemy fallen. The spindly seat creaked dangerously under his armored weight. Two men with bolt cutters were working on the bevoir of his suit of plate, which had been bent so badly beneath his chin that the usual hinges and clasps were all irredeemably stuck; it came free with a clang, and another got the equally damaged gauntlet off his left hand.
Felipe swore again, his handsome swarthy young face showing as much chagrin and anger as pain. A chirurgeon began to work on the hand. By then the two western nobles were close enough to see that the fleshy pad at the base of the thumb there was mangled, besides the bruising where the little overlapping plates had been bent; the doctor was examining it carefully, and then got to work with tweezers and a small very sharp pair of scissors, and a spray of disinfectant.
At mere pain the Count’s face went impassive, though a film of sweat covered it. He started to speak, and then something gripped Tiphaine’s left ankle with crushing force and jerked.
Reflex saved her; she had the sword coming down before she hit the ground, curling up and using the grip that anchored her leg as a brace to strike. The edge of the long sword hit and bit, and the fingers started to relax as tendons cut. Another slash and she was free, rising in a flickering shoulder roll. Half-free at least; it took a stamp and the use of her point to get the hand off her ankle. Blades were rising and falling, amid half-hysterical shouts of loathing. She tested the ankle and found it only a little sore.
She looked up. A man had risen from the pile of bodies, half-risen at least. Six crossbow bolts studded his torso, and one eye was dangling down his cheek, and an arm ended in an oozing stump. The sole remaining eye looked at her.
“I… see… you… forever…”
The voice was a rasping guttural, and air wheezed out of the chest from the other openings as well. If cinders could speak, they would use that tone. For a moment it was as if she were locked in endless hot stone, and then there was a dry wind and a rustle that might have been broad wings hunting in the night or the wind in narrow olive leaves of silver-gray, and the world returned.
Rigobert’s long sword was up in the two-handed grip with the hilt beside his face. He stepped and struck, pivoting his torso in a beautiful suihei horizontal cut and follow-through. The head toppled away from the body, and the torso fell back with a thud.
Thank you, Lady of the Owl! Tiphaine thought.
Men were crossing themselves all around her, touching their crucifixes or saint’s amulets. Her own hand had gone to her throat, for the owl medallion hidden there, and she grinned for an instant at the tinge of scorn she’d have felt for the others only a few years ago.
I’m finally a full-fledged Changeling, not caught betwixt and between, she thought. Poor Sandra! She got the world of her dreams and she’ll never really be at home here.
Aloud she went on: “You men! Get that head and body, wrap them in mats and blankets, and take them away. Wear gauntlets. Burn the body and everything that’s touched it, somewhere where you’re upwind of the smoke. Don’t touch it if you can help it. Wash afterwards. Wash thoroughly and discard your clothes and gloves. Have the floor here ripped up, cautiously. Scrub everything with lye and bleach, burn the wood. And get a priest to do an exorcism. Do it all now.”
The Walla Walla men hesitated, looking at their lord. He flushed and snapped, “She’s the Grand Constable, you fools, do what you’re told! Do it all, do it right! Sir Budic, take charge and see that the Grand Constable’s instructions are followed to the letter. Now! And get the rest of this carrion out of the palace.”
A little more gently: “You’ve all done well and bravely, and I will not forget who stood with me this night. Now show good vassalage once more, and keep your mouths shut about this until I give out what’s happened. We don’t want a panic.”
The men scattered about their tasks, though Tiphaine doubted any secrecy would last more than about fifteen minutes. When they had some small degree of privacy Felipe looked at her and ducked his head.
“I am in your debt, my lady. I and my House. But for you, I and my wife and our unborn child might have been caught by surprise by that. .. that thing and its minions. Even as it was-”
He looked around.
“I thought you were being overcautious when you recommended so many men waiting. Remind me not to doubt you again.”
Lioncel silently returned her sword, clean once more, dropped a cloth into the pile that the Count’s men were getting ready to burn, and then stripped off his gloves and added them as well.
She nodded, sheathed the weapon and went on to her host. “I don’t claim to be infallible, but I’ve had some experience with this. With those creatures in particular, and I’ve made it my business to investigate. And the High King told me more.”
“What was it? I… I had my sword through its belly, I swear I did, and then it put its hands around the bevoir of my suit and started to squeeze as if it were trying to throttle me through the metal, and I could feel the steel begin to buckle! I was holding it off with one hand against its face and stabbing it, and it chewed through the bison hide on the palm of my gauntlet!”
“That,” Tiphaine said, “was a High Seeker out of Corwin. You don’t really need the red robe to recognize them once they get into action; and if you kill them… well, you kill the man that was. But the. .. whatever… lingers, even stronger, for a few moments. Be flattered, my lord; the enemy have paid you a great compliment.”
Her face was glacier-calm; inwardly she was cursing herself for overconfidence. Her little trap had worked perfectly… against normal assassins. It had been only marginally acceptable at what had shown up, and that only because the main effort had happened to hit here. If the Seeker had come after her-
“The High King had a similar experience on his quest,” she said. “And Lady Juniper a little east of here, though she was better prepared.”
Then she looked at the palm, stopping the chirurgeon for a second. “This was a bite?”
“He’d have had the thumb off in another moment, but someone hit him on the head with a war hammer.”
“That would be what popped out the eye. Well, my lord, if you’re going to be taking my advice from now on, after it’s dressed I’d send for the Mother Superior.”
The doctor gave her an offended stare. She glanced back at him and he opened his mouth, closed it, finished his work and left with a deep bow to join the others working on the casualties.
Felipe’s face changed as he followed her thought.
No, he’s not a genius as a field commander, but he’s not stupid.
“My lady, my lord,” he said. “I think we need to consult.”
Rigobert’s squires removed his armor as the Count’s did his, and then they walked after him as he went, limping slightly. Their path led farther into the family quarters; when they stopped at a door that looked as if it had a solid steel core so did the reinforced guard detail. When the door closed behind them the noiseless whuff and the abrupt silence confirmed her suspicions; she blessed his parents’ paranoia. The room within was probably his wife’s, from the decorations, which included a big oil painting of a snowbound landscape realistic enough to make Tiphaine shiver a little at the black pines shedding wisps of ice crystals. Certainly his wife was in the chamber, dressed in a thick night-robe trimmed with marten fur. The only windows were narrow and thickly barred, though open to the air. She started up, reached for his hand, and then stopped at the bandage.
“I’m fine,” he said.
They embraced a little cautiously, for his bruises and injuries and her pregnancy, and he kept the bandaged left hand well clear of her. Ermentrude followed the words with close attention as he spoke, then curtsied to Tiphaine, and again to Rigobert.
“Please, be seated, my lady, my lord,” she said, gracious but pale. “Refreshments?”
Felipe grinned at her, a tired expression. “I think we could all use a stiff brandy, my beloved,
” he said.
“Not for me,” she said, and touched the slight swell of her stomach for a moment. “But how I wish I could.”
She did the honors, poured herself a cordial, and they all sat around a table that bore some sewing gear and a copy of Sense and Sensibility with a tooled leather cover and a silk ribbon marking a place. It rested on another with the title, Birds of North America.
You never knew everything another human being. Tiphaine sipped at the brandy, which was excellent, not quite as smooth as the pre-Change salvage Sandra preferred, but demonstrably on the same road. Though at present raw hooch distilled from potatoes by peasants would have been welcome.
“You said that I should send for the Mother Superior of the house of the Sisters of Charity here,” Felipe said, and raised his injured hand. “I presume not for their medical skills, excellent as those are?”
“No,” Tiphaine said. “We are contending with… I think the expression is principalities and powers, my lord. And I’m not a superstitious person by natural inclination, as you may have heard.”
He’d probably heard scandalized whispers that she was the next thing to an atheist, which, until fairly recently, would have been absolutely correct.
Not that I’m a good Catholic now either!
“Not the archbishop?” Ermentrude said curiously, but she sounded curious about Tiphaine’s reasons rather than disagreeing with the judgment, from the tone.
“No. I’m sure he’s a pious and learned man”-which took care of the formalities-“but what you need right now are certain… personal qualities. An archbishop is inevitably something of a politician and that is not what’s required.”
Felipe and his wife exchanged a glance, and he went on.
“Very well, my lady Grand Constable, I will do as you recommend, and light candles and pray to St. James, the patron of my House. Could you tell me exactly what we’re facing? I know in general terms that the Church has denounced the CUT as diabolists and done everything but proclaim a Crusade… they’d need His Holiness for that, of course, and Badia is so far away… but could you give me some details? It would be very much appreciated.”
Tiphaine hesitated; she was operating at the limits of her discretion here, and Sandra had always preferred need-to-know. On the other hand…
I’ll edit things as I go along, just give him the gist. Certainly I’ll take out the personal bits! And I’ll be vague on exactly who helped me out. But he does need to know; the war effort requires that he be brought up to speed. Plus I think Ermentrude is his closest adviser. And unlike their men-at-arms, I think they can keep secrets.
“I was in charge of the Mary Liu matter,” she said.
“Dowager Baroness Liu? Lord Odard de Gervais’ mother?” Felipe said. “She was arrested for treason, wasn’t she? I’d heard she was under house arrest at Fen House. But there was a rumor she died…”
“Yes. That wasn’t simply a case of treason. What happened after her arrest has a bearing on your wound and what needs to be done to make sure it heals. The King had such a hurt on his quest from an arrow, and I did last spring, and now you. That May I rode to Fen House-”
INTERLACHEN PRISON THE NEW FOREST, CROWN DEMESNE (FORMERLY NORTHERN OREGON) PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA) MAY 28, CHANGE YEAR 24/2022 AD
It was the dawn of a fine spring day when Tiphaine d’Ath rode out of the East Gate of Portland, taking the carefully maintained Banfield north to the I-205 interchange, towards the Columbia.
If anyone had been ill-advised enough to ask where she was going or why, she would have jerked her head back towards her squires and the mounted varlets carrying nets and boar spears and the half a dozen shaggy slothounds panting and padding in their wake. The dark green tunic and trews and shirt she wore, and the peaked Montero hat with a partridge feather in the livery badge would bear that out. It was well known that the Baroness of Ath had the rare and valued privilege of hunting in the Crown Preserves of New Forest and Government Island.
New Forest had once been Forest Park and Metro Portland’s outer suburbs, before the firestorms and the plagues and then the Lord Protector’s spearmen had emptied them.
Government Island to the east was still Government Island; the government had changed… but not the restricted status. They passed through the new agricultural zone quickly. Truck gardens and specialty orchards had been planted where once houses had crowded cheek by jowl.
Once off the old highways, Tiphaine relaxed a bit. Trees arched over Airport Way for a while. Then they opened out to reveal shaggy, intensely green meadow thick with blooming thickets of purple lilac and wild roses gone feral into impenetrable tangles and making the air heavy with sweetness. Then a stand of young garry oaks and black walnuts planted by the Crown’s foresters, thirty or forty feet high, with here and there the snag of a scorched brick wall, or a reedy pond where a basement had been, and then self-sown woods ranging from the tall poplar trees and copper beeches of some park or suburb to tangled saplings poking their way through the monstrous barbed chevaux-de-frise of blackberry vines around a chimney. A generation’s rapid growth in this moist mild climate had drawn a haze across the past, as if it were trying to turn the Change into something in a story or a song or a picture in an illuminated book.
Now and then a taller building poked through, a green mound overrun with vines, but most of those had been torn down for their materials in the program that had rebuilt Portland and sown the land with castles. It had been policy to clear these areas first. Now they helped feed and fuel the Crown city of Portland and provided hunting for its lords.
Practical, and I think Norman wanted to wipe out the remains of a world he hated. Maybe one man in a hundred thousand welcomed the Change, knowing full well what it was and what it would do. And they were the ones who did best.
The sounds of life were thick-the air full of northbound wings, murmurous with bees, squirrels chattering and scolding, now and then the slap of a beaver’s tail, or a glimpse of a raccoon. Once an elk bounded across the roadway, and she saw the tracks of mule deer, whitetails, antelope and feral cattle and bison and the churned patches where wild boar had fed, besides smaller game innumerable. There were wolf and bear and cougar here too, and sometimes tiger wandered in for a while from the mountains or the river swamps, though the predators were fewer and wary.
Like me, she thought. I’m rare and wary, all right. And I still don’t like this area. It’s even better hunting ground than Barony Ath’s share of the Coast Range forests, but…
In her lands in the Tualatin Valley you could pretend the Change had happened centuries ago, that it was a legend. Most people preferred that, and she did too. She had been young then, after all, still flexible, able to get on with her life. Well over half of it had been lived since then.
But Portland was where she’d been born, and lived all her life until the Change. That was long ago, but every so often something around here would jog her memory-the precise silhouette of Mt. Hood’s white cone over some trees-and the ghosts of buildings and cars and people would return in her mind’s eye.
Though it is good hunting ground. Most animals like the edge of a forest better than the depths, and this is all edge. When Heuradys is an old lady dandling her grandchildren, it’ll be like Sherwood and the roots will have ground most of the ruins into the dirt.
Sandra Arminger did a little genteel hawking now and then for form’s sake, or rode to hounds in the sense that she sat on a small gentle horse for an hour or so while other people chased the game, and then she went home. She’d also been known to remark that most hunting was far too much like wallowing in the mud with wild animals for her taste. The New Forest had other uses, though. Interlachen Prison was one, another of Norman Arminger’s mad whims.
He was an evil bastard, but not a stupid one, Tiphaine thought. And there was a touch of demented brilliance to him at times. Well, fairly often, in fact.
She’d always hat
ed the man with excellent reason and she’d inwardly rejoiced when he was killed, along with the better part of a million other people, for all her loyal service to House Arminger. The only sorrow in it for her had been the grief Sandra had had to suffer through. But there were occasions when she thought she understood a little of what Sandra had seen in him-which was a disturbing thing in itself.
The forest thinned out a little as she approached the Columbia. The narrow spit of land known as Interlachen lay between Blue Lake and Fairview Lake, each sixty acres or better of shallow water. Wide channels had been dug at either end of the ridge to turn it into an island in the middle of a shallow marshy swale of water and reed beds and trees.
Guard towers loomed on both sides of the eastern channel; the western channel had two courses of walls. Tiphaine approved as her bona fides were scrupulously checked before the spear points and crossbows went up, and she was rowed across, with the horses and her party stashed in a barn on the shore. The Grand Constable leapt out of the boat onto the narrow bench and waited for the postern beside the main gates to be opened; it was all rather like a castle, but focused mainly inward rather than outward. The medium security prisoners were all in the main building closest to her, which had a conventional enough layout for a jail, plus the quarters of the Seneschal and the guards and their families. A large bare cobbled yard separated it from the maximum security block, known as Fen House. Norman had said the best place to hide a prison was inside a prison.
And laughed. It was a joke after his own heart.
Sir Stratson came to meet her and escorted her through the next few doors to the exercise yard and across it. He looked as mournful as ever. She couldn’t imagine living here and not going insane, though the garrison seemed contented enough. They had boating and fishing, and poaching she supposed, and their families cultivated gardens nearby. Otherwise…
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