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

by S. M. Stirling

  Writing beyond a list wasn’t something he enjoyed, though, and he’d sweated over the message as he grasped the goose-quill in his callused fingers. He put the thought of his mother reading it, possibly even weeping, out of his mind.

  And Mathun Aylward Mackenzie will be in the tales too, the faithful brother who does and says things that make everyone listening laugh, though brave and true in the end.

  He didn’t add that last thought aloud, not wanting a quarrel right now. Besides which, Mathun’s knobby fists had developed a respectable wallop these last few years, as he had reason to know. Once their mother had separated them with a bucket of cold water.

  The weight of all that gear was solid, about sixty pounds including the armor, but nothing very much to big young men who’d grown up farming and hunting and lumberjacking, digging and building and working at crafts.

  And who’d drawn bows of ever-increasing weight at least dozens and usually hundreds of times just about every day since their sixth year. They said you could tell a longbowman’s bones at a glance.

  Both of them could wolf-trot all day under more than this, and had. Karl remembered a time just before last Samhain when he and his brother had packed out an incautious young bull elk, one that Cernunnos had guided into an upland meadow at dawn when they and their dogs had been waiting behind a thicket of blueberries. Fifteen miles over mountain trails to get it back before dark; even drained, gralloched and minus head and hoof that had been better than two hundred pounds of meat and hide all up. They’d been well and truly tired after that, but they’d done it, and he’d danced through the gate of the Dun with the antlers on his head and Mathun behind him giving the elk-call.

  “We’re as ready as we will be—and we’ll remember something forgotten ten miles down the road,” Mathun said, with another of those loonish grins. “And rend the air with curses, we will. Come along, Fenris, Ulf. And you too, Macmac.”

  Their dogs rose with doggy grins of their own, huge shaggy gray-brown beasts with mastiff and Dane and wolf in them. They might not know the details, but they could tell their masters were about something, and as usual were delighted to join in. Macmac was the Crown Princess’ current dog and of the same breed, the descendant of her first, sent here for safekeeping by their father along with spare horses and gear left behind in the dash northward after the High King died. He’d been moping without his mistress and isolated among strange canines, and now looked eagerly hopeful that any break in routine meant he’d be reunited with her.

  Karl sobered for a moment, thinking of the High King; Rudi Mackenzie had been a presence in their lives as long as they could remember, often as not at the table in their kitchen yarning with their da with a mug in his hand, and the brothers competing for the honor of drawing a new one for him from the special barrel of Old Thumper by the door. Not only was their father commander of the High King’s Archers, and one of the Companions of the Quest, but Dun Juniper was just up the hill from Dun Fairfax—you could do it in half an hour at a walk without pushing, if you took the direct footpath.

  It’s hard to believe he’s just not there anymore, he thought, then brightened again. And sure, we’re to avenge him! Us, not Da!

  “The princess will be glad to see Macmac again,” he said softly. “There’s nothing like a dog you raised from a pup for consoling grief.”

  “Poor lass,” Mathun said. A grin, lickerish this time. “And I’ll be glad to see her for more reasons than him. What a woman! Perhaps she’ll cast an eye on me, and I could console her.”

  “And then you awake from the dream needing a bath,” Karl said dryly. “Hush now.”

  He took one last look around the room where he’d slept most of his life. There was a tiger-skull on the wall; the whole dun had turned out after that one took a cow, and the skin was in the covenstead for the use of the Tiger Sept, but he’d shot the first arrow. There was a dreamcatcher hanging from the ceiling over the bunks that their grandmother had made, trimmed with wolf fur—he and his brother were both of the Wolf Sept, that being the totem-dream they’d had. Most Aylwards got that one. And a few other knickknacks, among them a whimsical green pottery toad his first girl had made for him, she being from a family of potters—though she’d gone off to handfast with a beermaker in Sutterdown, the Clan’s only real town.

  Mathun caught his glance. “Can you blame her? The man had a brewery all his own, for Goibniu’s sake!” He smacked his lips. “Not so fine as Brannigan’s Special, but well worth drinking. I might have married him meself, with that in prospect, despite liking the lasses so.”

  Goibniu was a patron of smiths, and also had a sacred vat of never-failing mead. Maltsters called on Him as well as metalworkers.

  “Hush, I said!”

  Karl stuck his head out into the corridor. It was dark, for all that there were windows at either end. The Aylward house was the biggest in Dun Fairfax; in fact, it was the farmhouse that had stood here for nearly a century before the Change. It was honestly made of timber joists on a stone-walled cellar, unlike a lot of the gimcrack stick-built stuff put up in the last part of that hundred-year span, and looked good for another century at least, with care. It needed to be big, for the Aylwards had thriven mightily and bred lustily.

  They padded down towards the stairs, holding their ankle-boots in their hands and taking care to step near the wall where the boards didn’t creak. The dogs followed quietly save for the slight click of nails on the polished wood; they were well-trained beasts, who knew when their masters wanted silence. Down another set of stairs, and—

  “And where are you two going?” their mother asked.

  Karl didn’t jump; he’d had that trained out of him long ago. His stomach still squeezed as he squinted into the light of the suddenly uncovered lantern. Asgerd Karlsdottir stood there like an image of the Norns, her graying blond braids over her shoulders and her arms crossed on her bosom. She was a tall woman, and not a Mackenzie by birth—their father had met and won her when he was on the Quest, in fabled far-off Norrheim on the shores of the Atlantic, what had once been northern Maine. She wore the garb of her folk, a hanging dress of embroidered blue wool and a full-length apron of white linen fastened at the shoulders with silver brooches.

  “I asked where you were going, Karl, Mathun?” she asked again.

  Her voice had never acquired the Mackenzie lilt; she had a sharp way of speaking and odd expressions—ayuh for yes and others—and a slow sonorous roll when she was moved or speaking formally. Karl’s mouth opened as his mind hunted frantically for an excuse.

  Her hand shot out, pointing a forefinger at his face. “And don’t . . . don’t . . . don’t you tell me you’re off for a day’s hunting with armor on your backs, sword at your belt and your war-bows slung!”

  He sighed and closed his mouth, and followed her pointing finger when it swung to indicate the door into the kitchen. Light flooded out as he opened it; the alcohol lanterns on the walls had been lit.

  He heard Mathun muttering as he followed, and the dogs padded after them and thumped down heavily in their current favorite spots. Dogs had keen noses for rank and authority. The kitchen—which included what had been the living room or parlor of the original building—was the core of the household. There was the hearth against one wall, with the altar and the images of the Lord and Lady over it, the cast-iron cookstoves, the icebox, the working counters. And sinks with faucets, since Dun Fairfax had running water.

  Net bags of onions, strings of garlic and red dried chilies and burlap-wrapped hams and a flitch of bacon and coils of dried smoked sausage hung from the beams of the ceiling. Around the wall beneath it was a broad band of carved boards, wrought with running designs of vines and faces from myth and story. Below that were bright hangings woven by the household’s own hands; other stretches of wall held tools of the sorts used indoors or that you might want frequently when you went out, and over by the door that led to the exterior vestibule were racks for weapons, conspicuously lacking the share he
and Mathun were carrying.

  Right now there was also a big mask woven of green fir-boughs hung over the long table where the whole household ate, a face with slanted eyes and a mysterious smile. It would be Litha at the end of the month, the Feast of Midsummer at the solstice, and Jack-in-the-Green presided over that. He sighed a little again, on a different note. The Green Man was master of summer’s abundance, wildness and sweetness. In the berry-time before the shattering labor of getting in the grain, at least: then He became the dying-and-reborn Harvest Lord. Lithia was a fine holiday for a young man in a Dun of the Clan.

  Well, maybe I won’t be missing it anyway, he thought sourly.

  His grandmother Melissa was also there, sitting in one of the chairs at the end of the table; she was in her white High Priestess’ robe, with her rowan-wood staff with the silver Triple Moon on its finial leaned against the chair, and he winced slightly at that. She was old now, a bit bent and gnarled of hand from a life that had known its share of hardship and toil; she didn’t stand long if she could help it, but the eyes beneath her white brows were still shrewd. She could simply pronounce what he wanted to do geasa, and it would be that-which-is-forbidden under sanctions even a reckless young man wouldn’t dream of breaking.

  His mother leaned back into the stairwell. “Down!” she called.

  Mathun groaned behind him as the whole household filtered down the stairs. His aunt Tamar—his father’s elder half-sister—and her man Eochu, a friendly sort and a fine leatherworker though quiet and unambitious, and their children. Except for the three eldest, one of whom was off with the High King’s Archers, another who’d gone south to Dun Barstow, and the third who was a millwright up in Dun Juniper. His uncle Nigel, who was only a few years older than he himself. He and his twin sister Nola had been grandmother’s last, after a long gap; Nola had moved out to a new dun with her man, as had Karl’s aunt Fand and uncle Dick. Nigel’s wife Caiomhe, and their first child, a babe in arms. And Karl’s other siblings; his brother Cathal, who was gangly, sixteen and looking at him and Mathun with bitter envy, his sister Gunnvör, twelve and doing her usual quiet cat imitation, and little Aoife, looking a bit bewildered at it all with her great blue eyes troubled and her stuffed unicorn clutched close, for she was the baby and only six.

  “If you grassed us up, Cathal, then by the Threefold Queen and the Lord of the Dance I’ll smack that pimply—” Mathun began.

  “Quiet!” his mother said. “Did you think to slink off without a word?”

  “And just before the harvest,” Nigel added.

  Karl winced; that had bothered him. “I, um, wrote a note . . .”

  Then his grandmother began to laugh. “Oh, stop tormenting the boys, you two, for sweet Brigit’s sake,” she said. “Look at them stammering and flushing the now!”

  He exchanged a glance of sudden hope with his brother. His mother snorted.

  “They deserved a bit of a scare, for deceiving us. Or trying to.”

  “Sit,” she said shortly, and they did. “It was the Princess who called you to her aid, didn’t she?”

  Karl and Mathun looked at each other, and their mouths set: they couldn’t speak, not when the first part of the message had been an oath of silence. Asgerd nodded approval.

  “Good. You can keep your mouths shut.”

  “Though they couldn’t befool a blind three-legged pig itching with mange,” Aunt Tamar added. “Walking about looking at things and thinking ‘will I see this again.’”

  “I didn’t say anything of the kind!” Karl said, and his brother nodded vigorously.

  “No,” his aunt said dryly. “But you thought it. You thought it very loudly.”

  Their mother added: “After a Royal courier I know to be a friend of Órlaith comes, and then you tiptoe around like bears trying to dance, and sneak off into corners to whisper with a few of your friends . . .”

  Suddenly she grinned, and for an instant you could see the wild girl of the stories beneath the grave matron who was known to be a bit dour and stern by Mackenzie standards.

  “Did I ever tell you why I was ready to go off with your father, when he and the King and the others came to Eriksgarth to guest with King Bjarni? Why I was a shield-maid? Which is not so common a thing among my folk as it is here, though we all train to arms.”

  They looked at each other again. “No, Ma,” Karl said.

  “I’d been betrothed, and not to your father,” she said, shocking them a little. “And my man was killed by the Bekwa when he went a-viking to the dead city of King’s Mountain for goods to start our own garth. I pledged to the High One on the oath-ring of the Bjornings—”

  They knew that the High One meant Odhinn, Lord of the Slain and Giver of Victories; she’d told them the tales of her people. The One-Eyed wasn’t much worshipped in the dùthchas, though He was given due respect, and had followers elsewhere in Montival. Among the Bearkillers, particularly, and in Boise where the Thurstons, the ruling kin, were His. That was an unchancy One, from all the stories. You didn’t use His proper name casually, lest the ravens called Thought and Memory fly too near. Even in Norrheim, red-bearded Thor who brought rain and warded the world of men from the giants was more popular with most.

  “—that I would send him ten lives for the one taken, and that by my own hand. My kin were unhappy with it, though it was within our customs . . . just barely. But your father, ah, your father just nodded and took it as a thing needing no speech. That was the start of my love for him. He was just the age you are now, Karl, and you favor him in your spirits as well as your faces, you and your brother. You’re men grown now, not to be taken by the ear and swatted on the backside when you’re naughty. Only hiding what you meant to do angered me. Your grandmother is not in her dotage, and neither am I!”

  At that all the adults were laughing, at him but with him as well. The two brothers shed their brigantines—they fastened under the right arm with clasps that could be undone quickly—racked their weapons, and hung the armor on the pegs by the door. They’d resigned themselves to missing breakfast, but that was quickly put right with bowls of porridge from the crock kept warming overnight at the back of the stove, with nuts and berries and thick yellow cream atop it, and a hasty dish of bacon and mushrooms and slabs of toasted bread and yellow summer butter.

  Karl looked down as he chewed, thinking of the line he’d just heard from the Blessing: And blessed be the mortals who toiled with You.

  “Going to be strange,” he said. “Every day eating food I didn’t help grow. About the harvest—”

  Eochu shrugged, something he could do quietly, somehow; he was still strong and hale though he was older than Karl’s father and his hands were marked and scarred with the wounds of his trade from knife and awl and waxed thread.

  “We have enough for the Aylward croft, what with Breinan and Evora, and Cathal getting tall enough to do most of a grown man’s work, and even if we didn’t the Dun would help,” he said.

  That was the rule if a household was short labor due to public duty or sickness or unavoidable necessity, war or other emergency. Mackenzies didn’t have lords; they looked out for each other. The tight bonds of a Dun could chafe, growing up next to someone didn’t always mean your stomach wouldn’t knot at the very sight of them, but it meant safety too, and protection in a world always hard and sometimes merciless.

  “And sure, Edain may have stopped screaming and running through the treetops and heaving boulders by then, enough to come home and toss a sheaf or two himself,” Eochu added with another chuckle.

  Nigel nodded. “I wish I was going with you,” he sighed, then looked at his daughter as she nursed. “But . . . no. Not until the First Levy’s called out, if all this comes to war. Which it likely will, in the end, with our High King dead. The wings of the Morrigú will be beating over this, Gwyn ap Nudd will lead the Wild Hunt riding, and many a Woman of the Mounds will keen from the rooftree at night.”

  And I’m just as glad you’re not coming, Karl though
t, without saying anything aloud.

  His uncle was a first-rate fighting man, clever and hard; but if he’d been along, he would have been the first among them, for all that he was only four years older. When they’d finished they gave hugs and the kiss of farewell all around, then knelt before their mother; she put her hand on their heads, and murmured a blessing in the singsong tongue of her ancestors, the one her far-off Asatruar kindred used for worship. Then:

  “Be brave, be cunning, shirk no duty, and hold to loyalty above all things,” she said. Then with a catch in her voice: “And come home to me, my boys.”

  More matter-of-factly. “I’ll talk to your father. He’ll rage, but it won’t last, for he’d have done the same thing in his time.”

  Their grandmother pushed herself erect. “When your father left on the Quest . . . we didn’t know it would be that, then, of course . . . I blessed him. Shall I bless you?”

  Karl and Mathun looked at each other, and nodded. She signed the air above them with the Invoking pentagram—point up first—and her voice rang out, cracked but strong:

  “Through darkened wood and shadowed path

  Hunter of the Forest, by your side

  Lady of the Stars, fold you in Her wings;

  So mote it be!”

  Once outside the brothers lifted their bicycles down from the pegs on the wall, loaded their supplies into the panniers and pushed the machines along. Three others joined them, outfitted much as they were and around their age. Lean Ruan Chu Mackenzie had dark hair that developed red highlights in summer, and was son to the village healer. He and fair round-faced Feidlimid Benton Mackenzie, whose father was Dun Fairfax’ master-smith, were lovers who’d sworn the oath of Iolaus together last year. Karl suspected that was the only reason Ruan had decided to come along, though his partner was wildly enthusiastic. Ruan had picked up a good deal of healing skill and herblore, and Feidlimid could do metalwork, and they were both good men of their hands. The rangy black-haired, black-eyed girl was named Boudicca Lopez Mackenzie, and was clever and could skulk quietly with the best; he’d seen her take deer by sneaking up to them and cutting their throats with a knife. The pair and the young woman both had a hound at their heels, of the same huge hairy breed; there was a moment of sniffing and tail-wagging, but the animals were used to each other too, and bouncing-glad to be off with their folk.