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

by S. M. Stirling

  Well, dang, I can feel the chivalry boiling up inside ’em, Heuradys thought as Órlaith filled in the details, complete with prophetic dreams.

  It was right out of a chanson, a princess in need of brave and faithful knights, with another beautiful monarch, an exotic quasi-exiled foreign one at that, and a holy relic to sweeten the appeal.

  I can feel it in myself, for that matter.

  Aleaume evidently had more control over his reflexes than Droyon, who was bursting with eagerness to volunteer as knight-errant.

  Or squire-errant, she thought. Though if he goes on this quest and survives, the accolade is a certainty. Though-the-second, he’s the son of a Count, and he’d be knighted in a year or two anyway. Plus he’s six years younger than Aleaume, which has to make a difference. Girls become women faster than men stop being boys.

  “Your Highness . . . am I to understand that your mother . . . Her Majesty . . . has forbidden this?” Aleaume said heavily.

  “Not in the least,” Órlaith said. “She hasn’t been informed, yes, that’s true enough.”

  He winced. “Better to seek forgiveness than permission, then?”

  Droyon cut in: “Her Majesty High Queen Mathilda herself did much the same thing when she was Her Highness’ age, Sir Aleaume. Against the express wishes of her mother, the Lady Regent Sandra.”

  Aleaume acknowledged that with a gesture; it probably also acknowledged that the High Queen was much less likely to have him killed for disobedience than her terrible, smiling mother would have been. Though quite likely to give you a memorable tongue-lashing, or to inflict whatever penalty strict law allowed. Far less to arrange an untraceable tragic accident or have a challenge issued by someone like Tiphaine d’Ath in her dreadful deadly prime. The Lady Regent Sandra had been known in her lifetime as the Spider of the Silver Tower, and for good reason.

  They paced along in silence for some distance, until the lancers and mounted crossbowmen of the knight’s little detachment turned and kept pace with them at a suitable distance. His brow was knotted.

  “This is very difficult, Your Highness,” he said at last. “There is a conflict of loyalties here. I am of the Protector’s Guard, and your mother is the Lady Protector. You are not; you are also not her heir to that position.”

  “Your honor is your own to judge, Sir Aleaume,” Órlaith said gravely. “And a knight has no more important duty. I will inform you that my brother John—who is heir to the Lord Protector’s chair—is with me in this, actively. He will accompany us. As a matter of fact, he’s off seeing to our transportation and supplies this very day. Successfully, I might add. All will be in readiness in Newport; a fast ship with good captain and crew, money, supplies. Otherwise I would not seek to take this forward.”

  His eyebrows went up. He nodded and said approvingly:

  “You are moving quickly, Your Highness.”

  “There is no other way, if it is to be done at all.”

  They walked on for a few paces, and then she continued:

  “Tell me, do you remember my father and mother’s visit to your home during the Prophet’s War, when the County Palatine was being liberated? You would have been very young then . . . and I was conceived but unborn.”

  The red-haired knight grinned, looking far more relaxed. “Yes, Your Highness, I most certainly do! I was just six—I remember the siege of our castle at St. Grimmond-on-the-Wold. My mother and Captain Grifflet held it, while my father led our men in harassing the invaders.”

  “Sharp memory, for a six-year-old!”

  Aleaume laughed. “What I mostly recall is being allowed to pull the lanyard on a catapult, and our soldiers grinning and cheering every time I did. And yes, that wonderful day! Seeing my father again after months, the foe in flight, the news of the great victory at the Horse Heaven Hills . . . and then the High King came, like a paladin of old, like Roland or Huon or Ogier le Danois or Arthur himself. He knelt and let me put my hand upon the Sword, and told me of how he’d gained it, and spoke to me . . . I didn’t understand it all, but I swore then to be his knight and fight for him as my father had! I don’t remember much from that long ago, but that memory has never left me.”

  Órlaith nodded. Heuradys knew the story; she’d heard Rudi Mackenzie telling it to his daughter at a campfire once. She’d been charmed at the time; it summed up all the romance of being an Associate.

  “And what did my father say to that?” the Crown Princess asked.

  “He said if I was as brave and true a knight as my father I would indeed be welcome at his side. Or . . .”

  He slowed, and then turned and looked at her. “Or at the side of his daughter who was to be born that year, who would need such knights.”

  She waited, and after a long moment he nodded and went to his knees, looking up at her and holding his hands out with the palms pressed together. She took them between hers, and Droyn and Heuradys moved instinctively to stand between them and any onlookers and to act as witnesses—an oath was a legal act, and required observers who could swear they had seen it done in due form.

  “I, Aleaume son of Maugis, of the House of Grimmond, a knight of the Association and the High Kingdom, pledge myself as vassal-at-arms to Crown Princess Órlaith of the House of Artos. I shall be your man, of life and limb and all earthly worship. To you I pledge fealty and obedience unto my death or the ending of the world. Your enemies shall be mine and your friends likewise, and all my aid and help be yours, with goods and sword and counsel. So I swear by God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost; by the most holy Virgin Mother of God; and by the especial patron of my House, St. Joan of the Bow; and on my honor as a knight.”

  Heuradys swallowed, for she knew the man meant exactly what he said. The moment was intensely solemn; there were times when you didn’t need something like the Sword of the Lady to tell when someone was binding themselves with chains of faithfulness like bands of adamant around the soul. Órlaith’s voice was equally grave.

  “I, Órlaith daughter of Artos, of the House of Artos and the Royal kin of Montival, accept your fealty, Aleaume de Grimmond of the House of Grimmond. I shall be your liege-lady; to you I pledge fair justice and good lordship and all the aids due a vassal-at-arms, and my protection to you and yours. I will hold your honor as precious as my own, and whoso does you wrong does also the same to me, and at their peril. This I swear by Sea and Earth and Sky; by the Sword of the Lady and She who entrusted it to the line of my blood; and by my own honor as a knight.”

  She pulled him to his feet and they exchanged the ritual kiss on the cheeks with their hands on each other’s shoulders. Droyn knelt to make his own pledge as Aleaume stepped back; then they all turned and continued their walk.

  “Welcome to the Crown Princess’ menie,” Heuradys said, and exchanged handshakes.

  She didn’t mind; a great lord would have many personal vassals, and she was the first and Orrey’s friend as well. The company was pretty good, at that. These were both men to respect, swords to stand about a throne.

  What’s that Nihongo word Orrey mentioned? Hatamoto, yes.

  “Now we plan,” Órlaith said.

  After the explanation Sir Aleaume’s eyes went a little unfocused. He’d had a fair bit of military experience in the Protector’s Guard, including the undramatic logistical parts that made the rest possible.

  “There are two ways to do this, Your Highness,” he said. “A full expedition, pushing ahead bases and supply dumps through the dead lands, digging wells and repairing roads. And a quick and dirty in-and-out, which I presume is what you have in mind.”

  “Exactly,” Órlaith said. “And sure, the latter is the only practical one . . . considering the circumstances. A great whacking do with engineers and the like would take far too long, that it would, nor could we do it without the Crown being involved. It isn’t an expedition for destriers and full harness, either, no matter if knights are along. We’ll have to equip lightly and move fast.”

  “Bicycles, I suppose?”


  He sighed; bicycles were distinctly lower class, or middle at best.

  “To be sure; we’re not going to cram forty coursers on a ship—a few horses for scouts, and that’s it. Frankly, I wouldn’t take any horse I cared for on this trip. Now, first we’ll get a hippomotive and train ready here at Montinore—”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Larsdalen Station, Bearkiller Outfit Territory

  (Formerly northwestern Oregon)

  High Kingdom of Montival

  (Formerly western North America)

  July 8th, Change Year 46/2044 AD

  Luanne Salander was an A-Lister of the Bearkiller Outfit. That status was new enough that the little blue burn-mark between her brows she’d gotten at her Initiation still itched as she waited in the dark behind the wooden sheds that made up the train station. A single light burned there, the watchkeeper waiting and yawning and occasionally getting up to do a walk-around.

  The skin between her shoulderblades itched too as she huddled at the base of a hedge, breathing the strong scents of ancient horse-piss and hay and the nose-memory of manifold freights centered on Larsdalen’s famed wine and brandy that hung around the station and its warehouses on a summer’s night. And not just because she was sweating and the night had its share of mosquitos and other buggy things. The glare of disapproving parental eyes in her mind made it feel that way. The fact that the disapproval was strictly speaking hypothetical—she hadn’t told anyone she was doing this—didn’t make them any less real in her imagination.

  Her parents—hopefully!—didn’t know where she was, but you couldn’t count on that, though she’d gone out the second-story window of her bedroom with all the stealth she could. Her mother had been a military glider pilot for the Outfit in the Prophet’s War flying reconnaissance missions, a hideously dangerous specialty, and she’d worked in the Intelligence Service since. She was a shrimp; her barely-adult daughter towered eight inches above her five-one, which put her about midway between her parents, but height was not a job qualification for pilots or spies, and Alyssa Salander-née-Larsson had a well-deserved reputation for wits of ample size and vicious sharpness. She’d earned it after the war as well, spending a decade winkling out the remnants of the Cutters—the Church Universal and Triumphant—from the mountains and prairies of what had once been most of Montana and was now known as the Crown Province of Nakamtu.

  Luanne’s father Cole Salander had been in the United States of Boise’s Special Forces and had captured Alyssa when her glider crashed during the Prophet’s War—after he shot the grizzly bear that had been trying to pull her from the wreckage like the kernel out of a cracked walnut. Once he’d gone over to the Montivallan side along with most of his compatriots the two of them had entered a Boise occupied by the Prophet’s men under false colors and pulled off the spectacular special operation that had opened the city’s gates from the inside. The Outfit had voted him A-Lister status unanimously, a rare honor for an outsider. Afterwards he’d led dozens of patrols into the Bitterroots on leads Alyssa had sniffed out, outsmarting bandit-partisans on their own ground and running them to earth. And usually to death, by the blade or at the end of a rope, since the amnesty had long run out by then.

  Which means I can’t count on my parents being idiots. Middle-aged stick-in-the-muds, yes, stupid or unobservant or slow, no. Mary Mother be thanked I took the hint and talked to the courier where nobody could hear! Which was sort of cool in itself, I must say.

  The whine of gearing and rumbling metallic clatter of wheels sounded northwards, and around a corner and a woodlot came the harsh yellow light cast by a hippomotive’s headlamp. It flickered as the track curved and the trunks of the big Chinar trees along this stretch of the West Valley Railroad cut the beam one after another.

  Right on time, she thought. Less than an hour out from the Montinore siding, probably.

  The Outfit’s chunk of the western Willamette was directly south of the Protectorate—if you didn’t count the little autonomous Brigittine monastery and its clutch of allied freeholder villages—and stretched south to Corvallis. Eastward were the ruins of Salem where the new capital was being built, and beyond that the Queen of Angels Commonwealth and the Mackenzies and the odd enclave of Mithrilwood, where the Dúnedain had their headquarters. Westward the Outfit’s domain went to the Pacific. Though few lived beyond the Coast Range, only a scattering of villages and the salt-works at Lincoln along the sea despite on-and-off talk of making a port.

  Montinore and Forest Grove were right north of here, and Todenangst not far off to the northeast. The cryptic message from Órlaith had arrived just after dinnertime, and had said the train wouldn’t be stopping for horses here at the Larsdalen station because their journey was pressing and interesting, and that it was possibly very regretful they wouldn’t have a chance to visit and discuss it either here or in Corvallis.

  The Crown Princess had left it to Luanne to tool on down to the station if she wanted to and could figure that much out, and find when a quick-passage train under a recent High Kingdom military override authorization was scheduled to pass through. That had turned out to be twenty-four hundred hours in the notation Bearkillers used, or midnight to most others. Which meant they’d left Montinore not much earlier, and at a time deliberately calculated to find most people asleep and to get into Newport with the largest possible share of the whole trip done in the dark. That was much the same thing since few but the wealthy stayed up long after sunset, especially in summer’s short nights. Ordinary trains stopped for the night on sidings, too, which meant the route would be clear.

  If I wasn’t up to figuring out that this has to have something to do with the High King’s killing and the mysterious strangers who were on the funeral train, I’d deserve to be left out and read about it afterwards in the Bearkiller Gazette, she thought. Damned if I will be, though. Jumping on here is a safer bet than waiting for them in Corvallis, it’s much busier there.

  Larsdalen had a couple of thousand people behind the cyclopean wall and famous Bear Gate; Bearkillers didn’t build cities and had few towns of any size.

  Whether she’d be able to get on the hippomotive-drawn train was another matter. An ordinary train traveled no faster than the team pulling it along hoof-on-gravel, which was usually at a brisk equine walk, equivalent to a slow jog for a human. Horses could pull a lot more on rails than they could on a road, about ten or fifteen times as much, but both ways they did it at a pace they could sustain all day. Like men, horses could walk a lot farther than they could run. A hippomotive’s treadmills and gears and driving wheels translated some of that tractive power into speed, trading off cargo weight they could have pulled otherwise.

  All that went through her mind automatically; logistics were part of the standard Bearkiller education, calculations of time and weight and speed and distance. They generally regarded Associates as play-actors and dilettantes who wasted time on galliards when they could be playing kriegsspiel.

  Figuring out what was going on needed smarts, mostly. Actually getting on the train would require more in the way of speed, strength, agility and a willingness to risk going under the wheels and getting cut in half, which implied a lot of motivation.

  So cousin Órlaith is testing me for brains, brawn, nerve and commitment all at the same time. Not to mention luck. Economical, Orrey! You deserve to be High Queen!

  She thought she could manage it. In height and build she took more after her father, who was a tall sandy-blond man of mostly Svenska descent. There were big fair men on her mother’s side too, like her grandfather Eric Larsson; but his wife had been born Luanne Hutton, and her mother and father had been what the ancient world called black and Tejano respectively. Luanne herself thought that she’d gotten the best of what her ancestors had to offer. She was tall for a woman, she could bench-press more than twice her hundred and fifty-five pounds, and even her weapons instructors agreed she was quick and precise and learned fast and had excellent situational awareness, whi
ch she thought she got from her glider-pilot mother. Pleasing a Bearkiller armsmaster wasn’t at all easy. Her grandmother and namesake admitted she was first-rate with horses; Luanne Larsson had been horse-mistress of the Outfit for a generation, and her parents had been breeders and wranglers with a ranch in Texas before the Change stranded them in Idaho delivering stock to a customer.

  What she saw in the mirror every morning was perfectly satisfactory in her opinion, and other people found it attractive as well, which was nice or in some cases very nice. Dark gray eyes, olive skin that tanned easily, slightly curly hair of a warm medium brown, and features with just enough African and mestizo fullness to moderate the beaky Nordic hatchet-face that prevailed on her great-aunt Signe’s side of the family and which only looked good for a short while. These days Signe’s nose and chin were making acquaintance, and her lips had practically disappeared. While grandmother Luanne had a weathered handsomeness at sixty-two that showed you what a peach she’d been when Eric Larsson fell for her with a dull thud just after the Change.

  Of course, Signe’s lips might have gone away because her favorite expression is thin-lipped disapproval, Luanne thought with a grin. Thank God Mike Jr. is Bear Lord now, and that he’s got a better disposition than his mom. Even if I get caught, he’ll probably commute it to . . . oh, a couple of months public-service call-up or going out and working on one of the Outfit’s ranches down south. Unless I get killed, of course; he’ll be really pissed off then.

  She’d always gotten along well with her first cousin once removed, even if he was Asatruar, which faith Luanne regarded as one of Great-Aunt Signe’s less inspired decisions.

  The train was getting closer. Luanne held up her index and little fingers, used the known distance to a familiar tree, and estimated speed.