The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series)

by S. M. Stirling

  And that man had died by treachery not a day’s travel from Stath Ingolf and none of the Rangers had realized it until a frigidly-polite messenger in the tartan of the Clan Mackenzie had delivered the tidings from Dun Barstow. He’d found everyone still getting ready for the Royal visit. That made it a matter of honor, too. Under the Great Charter the Dúnedain were direct vassals of the High King wherever they lived, holding from his hand and charged with the burden and proud duty of keeping the High King’s peace and borders.

  His own father Ian and the twins’ sire Hîr Ingolf Vogeler had taken a keg of brandy into the woods when the news came and gotten monumentally drunk together, drunker than the legendary guards of King Thranduil, off on their own where they could . . .

  I don’t know. Sob, I suppose, or howl. Or maybe just tell stories of their friend Rudi and not have to be formal in what they said about High King Artos.

  He suspected they welcomed the pain of the hangovers as distraction and punishment. Mary and his mother Ritva had occupied themselves with drawing up new patrol and guard schedules, however far the horse was from the locked stable door. Which was why this mountaintop post was now crewed full-time. That was done on rotation out of the Ranger station in the Eryn Muir—named for a friend of trees. Back in those days forests had had few friends, and needed them badly. A number of Dúnedain families lived there full-time and others including his parents usually did during the summer. Which made the new arrangement easier, though not easy.

  “We didn’t even make it for the cremation,” Malfind said morosely. “Not us, not one Ranger from Stath Ingolf. Our mothers are . . . were . . . the High King’s half-sisters and they and our fathers were on the Quest with him.”

  Well, pretty much, Faramir thought.

  His own father had joined the Questers as they came back through the Dominion of Drumheller, which was a northern realm friendly to Montival but not part of the High Kingdom. He’d won Ritva Havel’s hand, though, and fought through the Prophet’s War and joined the Rangers and helped found Stath Ingolf.

  Ingolf Vogeler—widely known as Ingolf the Wanderer—had gone all the way to Nantucket on his own from his birth-home in the Free Republic of Richland in the Midwest, carried the message of the Sword to Dun Juniper, gone all the way back there with the Quest and returned, a feat nobody else since the Change had equaled. It would have been notable nowadays, when it was a lot easier to travel, at least between Montival and the Mississippi. Uncle Ingolf had done it when the Prophet’s bullyboys were running rampant over half a continent with orders to kill him on sight.

  “And . . . you’re right, not one of us at the side of the pyre,” Faramir said. “I suppose there will be a delegation from Mithrilwood at the formal funeral in Dun Juniper, Hiril Eilir will be there of course, and Hîr Hordle, but . . .”

  “We didn’t spot four ships sailing through the Glorannon either,” Morfind said, pointing to the Golden Gate. “Three ships chasing a fourth ship and shooting at it all the way to the mouth of the Napa. I’m not surprised the Princess is angry and didn’t want to see any of us.”

  “Órlaith’s likely not angry,” her brother said. “She just wasn’t thinking about us at all, I’d guess. Just wanted to get it over with fast and take his ashes back to the High Queen Mathilda. The Mackenzies over east at Dun Barstow were pretty angry, though.”

  Malfind’s a bit goofy, but he’s not stupid, Faramir thought.

  They all brooded for a while; Malfind and he shared a glance and knew what it meant, and Morfind was probably thinking of the same thing. That was confirmed when she murmured:

  “The Doom of Men.”

  The death had been a shock for any number of reasons, but one was that their own parents were of the High King’s generation, pretty much. Ingolf the Wanderer was nearly ten years older than Rudi Mackenzie had been, and only just what the older generation called a Changeling, one born after the Change or too young then to remember the old world first-hand. Nowadays the term was less used, and less needed as the last who’d been grown then passed their three-score and ten and faded from the scene.

  His own father, Ian Kovalevsky, was a few years younger than the High King. You didn’t like thinking of your parents as mortal, but they all were even if they were heroes of song and tale as well. As a child your parents were eternal and unchangeable as the stars, or the trunk of a redwood.

  But even redwoods don’t live forever.

  When you made the transition to being an adult yourself the thought came unbidden now and then. It would have been worse if Rudi Mackenzie had met his death from a heart-attack rather than an enemy’s knife, which after all was something that could happen to anyone at any time, but they didn’t expect their mothers and fathers to start staying safe at home just yet either.

  “We weren’t supposed to keep a constant lookout for ships,” Malfind said defensively. “There have never been Haida raiders this far south before, not striking on land, there was nothing for them to steal except the lice in Eaters’ hair until we started resettling Westria. Haida don’t do salvage expeditions themselves, they just loot what other people find or make.”

  Faramir blinked; Malfind was smart enough, but he tended to make assumptions and sometimes to take things everybody knew at face value. That was supposed to be a fault of guys their age, but Faramir Kovalevsky had never been prone to it. Possibly he was less happy than his cousin because of that, but all in all he preferred it. It couldn’t be in the blood, because neither Uncle Ingolf nor Morfind was that way. Mary Vogeler certainly wasn’t, since she was his mother’s identical twin and he strongly suspected that Ritva Kovalevsky was the smartest person he’d ever met.

  “They don’t do salvage expeditions that we know about,” he said. “There isn’t anything to salvage up where they live. Not much but fish and fog and trees at all, and the Navy doesn’t let them into Vancouver, but we wouldn’t know if they’d been going to LA, say. Not unless they left a note with the Topangans there.”

  Morfind nodded; Wolf Hall got the Crown’s intelligence reports, and she liked reading them.

  “They make ships,” she pointed out. “By Ulmo, Lord of Waters do they ever! Those orcas of theirs have plenty of range. They could have been sailing across the Mother Ocean to Asia, and we wouldn’t have a clue.”

  “The only ships that call here are merchants and salvagers, and not many of those,” Malfind went on doggedly. “And nobody ever heard of any of those sets of weird foreigners with them—”

  “Japanese and Koreans,” Morfind said. “Koreans chasing Japanese with Haida helping the Koreans.”

  “That’s not going to make the Dun Barstow folk any less angry,” Faramir pointed out with what he knew was infuriating reasonableness. “It saves them being angry with themselves—they were a lot closer and didn’t do any better than we did. I bet they’re scared of what Lady Juniper is going to say.”

  “Lady Maude’s the Mackenzie Herself now,” Morfind said thoughtfully.

  The first Chief—and founder—of the Mackenzies was in her seventies and had stepped down in favor of her middle daughter a decade after the Prophet’s War, when the three of them were still toddlers. The Clan’s Óenach Mór had hailed Maude with no dissent. Beyond the inevitable joke candidacy of someone in a Green Man mask calling himself Robin Goodfellow Mackenzie, who’d run on a platform of universal drunkenness and fornication during the summer and sleeping the whole winter away, and gotten precisely one vote from each Dun in the dùthchas before he danced off into the woods waving his wapping-stick with two bladders on the end.

  “And she’s the High King’s half-sister, like our mothers, only shield-side,” Faramir reminded her.

  “I know that! And Lady Juniper’s like everyone’s favorite grandmother, anyway,” Morfind said. “I can’t imagine her cursing anyone who didn’t really deserve it.”

  She meant curse in a very technical sense, not just using bad language. They all nodded; they certainly liked her more than their ac
tual maternal—shield-side—grandmother, Signe Havel.

  Who is a grim old bitch, frankly, Faramir thought.

  Their fathers’ families were impossibly far away for real contact, though they got a letter every couple of years. Their aunt Lady Maude was all right too, though rather serious and with a tendency to ignore youngsters beyond an occasional pat on the head.

  “It’s just . . . mothers are different, you know?” Morfind said. “I mean, our mothers are pretty even-handed, but imagine how they’d react in her place.”

  “Lady Fiorbhinn . . .” Malfind said, naming the youngest of Juniper Mackenzie’s four children. “She’s First Bard of their Clan. They say she can raise a blister on your face with a satire and after hearing her I sort of believe it. I bet she could make a Mackenzie just drop dead, or run off into the Wild and throw themselves into a pit, and she’s a lot more impulsive than Lady Maude or Lady Juniper. Or Hiril Eilir, of course. Not cruel, but sort of . . . wild.”

  “Lady Juniper isn’t chief of the Clan anymore but she’s still Goddess-on-Earth to the witchfolk, and her son got killed on their land over at Dun Barstow,” Faramir said. “Napa isn’t even in Stath Ingolf’s area of responsibility, after all. Our Charter stops at the ridge of the Mayacamas.”

  Probably Lady Juniper will just mourn but they can’t be certain, so they take it out on us. And the Mackenzies really didn’t do any better than we did despite being right on the spot.

  That last bit was comforting, in a guilty sort of way. Usually the Rangers got along fine with Mackenizes. After all Hiril Eilir, the other original founder of the re-formed Dúnedain, was the eldest daughter of Juniper Mackenzie, born before the Change. Most Dúnedain were of the Old Faith like them, though not witches strictly speaking. There was a certain rivalry as well, though. Not least, many Mackenzies thought the Rangers put on airs, and that the Clan’s folk were better archers and just as good in the woods. He thought some of them were, but most weren’t though they certainly had high standards . . . for outsiders. None of that had anything to do with the death of the High King, but it was certainly going to be part of how everyone felt.

  “It’s not going to make us feel much better to know that they shouldn’t be blaming us, either,” he concluded with depressing realism. “Even if the Princess isn’t, we’re all going to feel like she should blame us.”

  Órlaith was older than they were. But he liked her, beyond and above a wholehearted teenage-male appreciation of her looks; she wasn’t snotty with people just a little younger than she—

  Well, over three years younger, he admitted to himself.

  —the way most people the other side of twenty were. She hadn’t tried to act as if there was some sort of unbridgeable gap of experience between them. The three of them liked to tell themselves they were adults. He knew deep down that what they really were was just trembling on the brink of junior probationary adulthood, eager to prove themselves and secretly anxious that they weren’t ready. They all sat and brooded a little more, keeping watch with ingrained care in turn and trying not to think of Uncle Rudi.

  When the time came they silently opened their lunch bag and spread the contents out on a flat-topped rock as the sun passed its zenith and turned the surface of the ocean westward to an eye-hurting brightness like hammered silver. The leather sack held two long loaves of brown bread fresh out of the oven that morning. Besides that there were three hard-boiled eggs, a flask of olive oil and a bowl to pour it in, some salty, sharp-tasting black pickled olives, filaree and chickweed, yellow-topped hedgehog mushrooms and other wild greens they’d picked on their way up, a lump of pungent sheep’s-milk cheese the size of a small fist wrapped in leaves, dried figs strung on straw twine and a few slices of the inevitable smoked roast venison from last night’s dinner for relish.

  An old joke defined venison as Dúnedain potatoes.

  There was a small clay jug of wine, too, to be heavily diluted with the water in their canteens; here in the south-country most drank wine with every midday and evening meal, it being a staple rather than a treat. Everything came from the Stath Ingolf house-lands except the bread; they got the flour from the settlers down in the Sonoma lowlands or the newer ones in Napa as part of their fees.

  The three Dúnedain stood together facing the west for a moment before they ate, their right hands over their hearts.

  To Númenor that was, and beyond to Elvenhome that is, and to That which is beyond Elvenhome and will ever be, he thought, knowing the others did likewise.

  The ritual was calming, reminding them of things beyond their own troubles. Then they sat to share the meal, in positions that gave them good views down from the lookout and half-rising occasionally to make sure no pirates were using the interval to sneak in. Faramir ripped a piece off a loaf, dipped his chunk into the oil, cut some cheese with the smaller knife he wore tucked into the top of his soft calf-high elf-boot, smeared it on top of the bread and took a moody bite. Morfind tore her bread into small neat bits before dipping it, and her brother cut his with his knife, which was slightly eccentric though not actually bad manners. After a minute he passed around some sea-salt in a twist of rag to use on the greens.

  “The stranger ships came in very early, in thick fog,” Faramir said thoughtfully.

  His eyes narrowed as he swallowed a few mouthfuls of bread and oil and cheese and crunched up a nutty, slightly bitter mushroom. Then he tossed a few olives into his mouth, working off the flesh with tongue and teeth and spitting the pits over the wall. Something was teasing at his mind, a thought struggling to be born.

  “Oh, let it rest, hethren,” Morfind said to him, spitting an olive pit over the wall herself and disturbing a blue-winged scrub jay that flew off with a peevish cry. “We Rangers of Stath Ingolf are going to be remembered as the ones who didn’t save the High King, and that’s all there is to it.”

  Hethren meant cousin, and most Dúnedain of the same generation called each other that casually in day-to-day speech, just as they referred to each other’s parents as uncle or aunt whether there was a blood relationship or not. The equivalent was common in small close-knit communities throughout Montival . . . which was to say, most communities.

  But the three of them here actually were first cousins by blood. Tow-haired Malfind and black-haired Morfind were fraternal twins themselves, similar in their sharp-featured looks and blue eyes, and very slightly younger than Faramir. Morfind was about an inch under Faramir’s five-nine, but Malfind was nearly up to his father’s six-two. Although he was lanky so far, while Hîr Ingolf was built like a balding, battered-looking bear with a beard that was broadly streaked with gray in the brown. Mary and Ritva were tall blond women; the Havels and Larssons ran to that, and to twins. Malfind and Morfind were the oldest of three sets in their family; Faramir had two sisters and a younger brother, but his mother grumbled that she’d had to do a lot more work for fewer kids since they were all singletons.

  Faramir’s own father was fair-haired as well, which made his son’s pale yellow-gold locks no surprise, but Ian Kovalevsky was of no more than average height and slender and Faramir took after him in that too.

  I wonder who provided the freckles, snub nose and high cheekbones? he wondered; and his eyes were dark blue with gray rims, unlike either of his parents. And Dad’s beard has always been sort of sparse, so I shouldn’t be surprised mine’s nonexistent so far.

  Their mothers had been children of the High King’s father Mike Havel . . . but by his handfasted wife and consort among the Bearkillers Signe-born-Larsson, not Juniper Mackenzie. What it meant in essence was that through her father Crown Princess Órlaith was also their cousin.

  Which now made the whole situation rather worse.

  “No,” Faramir said thoughtfully. “That’s not what I meant, I’m not making an excuse for what happened. I’m just . . . I mean . . . I hope the old folks have thought of it too.”

  The Vogeler siblings looked at him; sometimes they did things in disconcerting unison. />
  He wiped his smaller knife carefully, checked the edge, then rubbed a bead of olive oil over the metal with a fingertip before he slid it back into the boot sheath. It was the one he used for general camp chores and eating, being more convenient than the slightly curved ten-inch fighting blade at his belt. A little film of grease wouldn’t hurt it, quite the contrary, but you had to make sure there was no salt. Then he went on:

  “I’m not just blowing smoke now to make us feel better. If we’d been here and watching we probably wouldn’t have caught them, not with darkness and mist. What are we . . . Stath Ingolf, that is . . . going to do about watching for ships at night or in fog, now that we know enemies might approach by sea? We get night every night, and the Glorannon has fog as often as not for half the year. Whoever they are, we can’t count on them making it easy for us by keeping running lights on their ships.”

  They went on with the lunch in a less gloomy mood now that they had a problem to think about, rather than chewing the crust of failure. Most Dúnedain settlements were well inland, but this one included a big chunk of coast and a landing-place where ships called. They were more conscious of matters maritime than Rangers elsewhere.

  “I can see why they”—meaning their mothers, basically—“put us up here; it’s better than nothing. We’ve got a good view in daylight and it’s the only secure location with this view we have ready. But it’s . . . I mean, it’s not really good, you know?” he said. “Not to make sure ships aren’t sneaking in when the visibility’s bad.”

  “We’d have to put watchers on the Glorannon Iant, for that,” Malfind said as they tossed the diminishing string of figs from one to the other, and jerked his thumb to what the old world had called the Golden Gate Bridge, which meant exactly the same thing in the Common Tongue. “On the bridge deck . . . or maybe up one of the towers? Hard to get up but you’d be safe enough.”

  “No,” his sister said. “The fog lies low a lot, you know how you see the bridge towers rising out of it first thing? So you’d be nearly as blind to something on the surface as you would up here. Blinder than you would be on the actual bridge deck, at least. From the deck you’d be able to hear a ship most times.”