And I did it, Katrina, she thought. No, we did it, together.
The glider circled three times as she repeated the message; she could imagine the pilot with one hand on the control yoke and the other holding his binoculars. Then he waggled his wings and banked again, turning north. The glider mounted skyward in a smooth, arching rush as it hit the updraft on Famine Hill, turning on one wingtip in a narrow circle as the sheet of rising air flung it skyward. When it was insect-tiny it banked again, heading north. The
Willamette Valley was good sailplaning country, and it ought to have no trouble making the thirty miles to the launching field near the castle at Gervais.
She was grinning to herself at the thought when one of the men started up with a curse.
"It's those fucking dogs again!" he said. "Hell, don't the kilties ever get tired?"
"Get mounted, everyone!" she snapped, cocking an ear.
Sure enough, a faint belling sound was coming from the southeast, harsh and musical at the same time. It took only moments to get the tack back on the horses; the beasts were looking weary, but with remounts they hadn't come anywhere close to foundering them. Ivo unshackled the Mackenzie boy and then cuffed his ankles to the stirrups, and passed a chain on his wrists through the loop on the saddlebow. That was mildly dangerous, but the knight would be taking his horse on a leading-rein as well, so it was unlikely to bolt, and the boy rode as if he'd grown out of the horse's spine anyway. Mathilda had been good in the saddle before she was kidnapped and was even better now; evidently the Clan hadn't been neglecting her education in the equestrian arts over the past year. She'd pitched in with the camp chores without complaint as well, which was a bit surprising.
The sprayer was a simple thing like an old-time Flit gun. Tiphaine checked the direction of the wind—out of the north—and began methodically pumping a mixture of gasoline and skunk oil over their campsite in a fine mist. Rudi wrinkled his face, and so did Mathilda; it smelled awful to a human, but it would stun the sensitive nose of a tracking hound for hours.
"Out of the way, Ruffin, unless you want to smell so bad your leman sends you to sleep in the outhouse when we get back. What are you looking at, anyway?"
The young knight chuckled as he moved aside to avoid getting any of it on his clothes, and held up a ring. "The kid tried to drop this!" he said. "I like the little bastard, dip me in shit if I don't."
Tiphaine nodded; Rudi grinned impudently back at her. She checked the ground; sure enough, he'd moved leaves aside, drawn an arrow with his heel and then covered it again without anyone noticing. She looked back at him impassively as she scrubbed it out with her foot. Mathilda looked unhappy again; she must be feeling very torn.
"We'll go up the old railroad line until we hit Apple Creek," she said to the others as she swung into the saddle. "Then we'll wade up the creekbed half a mile."
"Then?" Joris said. "We should know, in case we're separated."
Tiphaine met his heavy-lidded eyes. He was a vassal of Lady Sandra's household like her, and he'd obey whoever the Lady told him to, even an untitled woman. That didn't prevent him from resenting it, and needling her subtly.
"No we shouldn't, Joris, in case the kilties catch one of us," she replied. So you don't have to know we'll head for Sucker Slough, cross the North Santiam there and make for Miller Butte, where there ought to he a couple of troops of men-at-arms to escort us home.
"Yeah," Ivo said. "That might be the Witch Queen after us." He crossed himself. "Maybe that's how they're following us—magic."
"Sounds awful like a bunch of plain old hound dogs to me," Tiphaine said dryly, and reined her horse around. "Let's go!"
Missouri Ridge, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 5th, 2008/Change Year 9
Juniper Mackenzie felt slightly guilty that she wasn't pushing one of the mountain bikes as she leaned into the welcome warmth of her horse's flank. It was cold and wet here in the foothills near Trout Creek, and the old gravel cutting was chilly under a slow morning drizzle and a low, gray sky; fifteen hundred feet was high enough up to be a bit colder than the Valley proper, and they were a thousand feet higher than Dun Juniper as well as sixty miles north and east. Fog drifted over the hills about them, hiding the tops of the trees and drifting down the slopes in tatters and streamers, dull gray against the second-growth Douglas fir; everything smelled of wet; the wet wool of her jacket and plaid, wet leather and horse from her mount, wet earth and brush from the ground. There was little sound, save for the slow sough of wind, the occasional stamp of a horse's foot, and the gruk-gruk-gruk of ravens that were the first birds she'd seen in hours.
Her thoughts went homeward, and she imagined Rudi and Mathilda reading by the hearth with old Cuchulain wheezing in sleep on the rag rug, cider mulling in thick mugs …
And oh, Mother-of-All witness, I'd rather he there than here! she thought ruefully, taking another bite from a dried, salted sausage.
It wasn't exactly eating in the usual sense: more like worrying a bit off an old tire, and then chewing until your jaws were tired and you gave up and swallowed the whole barely touched lump the way a snake did a dead rat. She gave journeybread to her horse, and the animal gratefully crunched the hard biscuit in sideways-moving jaws.
"And you don't have to worry about the sorry state of our dentistry, sure," she said. Then when it lipped at her fingers for more, smearing them with slobber: "Niorbh a fhiú a dhath ariamh a bhfuarthas in aisgidh!"
A hundred or so of the First Levy were in the cutting too; most were squatting by their bicycles, eating or looking to their gear or just patiently waiting despite the general, damp misery. Two near her were even chuckling softly about something. Ten times that number were scattered through the woods within a quarter mile of her, but they made little noise and gave less sight of their location. That and the wretched weather ought to hide them from the Protector's aerial scouts, even though they were far north, near his bases.
A clop of hooves brought her head up. Sam Aylward was riding towards her from the path to the east, his horse's hooves throwing up spatters of mud as it came. That coated his boots and stockings and kilt with gray-brown muck. The man with him had started out that way, clothed in leather pants and jacket of similar hue, his round helmet and steel breastplate painted dull brown, and his face and hair and eyes were all shades of the same color as well; he wore a long, hooded duster over the armor and carried a short pre-Change compound bow in a case at his left knee, with a long, slightly curved saber at his waist. Juniper grinned and moved away from her horse, extending a hand as the two men pulled up and swung down from the saddle; two young Mackenzies took their mounts.
"Sam!" she said happily. "And John!"
John Brown was most of a decade older than her; it had been a year or so since she saw him, and she was slightly shocked at how much more gray there was in his close-trimmed beard. As usual, he looked worried, the deep squint lines of a plainsman graven further into the skin at the corners of his eyes.
But perhaps with more reason than usual, she thought.
"Well, we're here, Juney," he said, and she sighed slightly with relief. "All of us as could make it. Less than I hoped, more than it might have been."
"Four hundred twenty-five combatants," Aylward amplified. "Plus twenty-five youngsters along to help with the horses and gear. That's all they could spare. Raids from the Pendleton country on the CORA territories are keeping them hopping."
"Bastards," Brown said. He'd been one of the movers of CORA since the Change, and they'd fought the Protector's men together more than once. They've been goin' downhill these whole ten years. Bunch of murderin' hillbilly bastards, the ones that came out on top there, and then they got into bed with Arminger. Might have been as bad with us, if we hadn't had that help from you the first couple of years."
Juniper nodded, smiling and acknowledging the compliment; the help had been mutual. Even then her fine ear noticed that his accent sounded a little stronger; speech was changing fast
er than it had in the old days, without national media or recorded sound to stabilize it. Highway 20 connected the Mackenzie territories with the CORA lands around Bend and Sisters, and the two communities were friendly and traded a good deal, but by pre-Change standards they had less contact than America had had with Bolivia back then.
"Four hundred riders's about all we could bring anyways," Brown went on. "Sneakin' over the mountains, that is. Not much fodder. Still snow lying up there. As it is, we don't have near as many remounts as I'd like."
He jerked a thumb behind him, at the invisible peaks of the Cascades. She nodded again, respecting his reticence. One of her Mackenzies would likely be boasting of the feat, unless it was Sam; the Clan was a talkative bunch. To get here from Bend you'd have to leave the route of old US 26 in the Warm Springs reservation—tribal country once more, but friendly to the Clan and CORA— and use old logging trails through the mountains. Hard work with hundreds of horses, and with the season too early for much grass. If they didn't get the mounts down into the low country soon, they'd start to take sick and die.
She said so, and added: "The which would apply to the people as well, so."
That included her folk as well. Most Mackenzies had some woodcraft but only a few from each dun were real hunters who spent much time away from the tilled lands; the rest were crofters and craftsfolk, used to sleeping under their own good roofs within tight log walls every night. Plus they were traveling light in a season still cold and wet—no tents, not much gear and most of what they had brought was extra arrows. In summer these cutover hills growing back towards forest were rich in game—deer, elk, rabbit, birds, boar and feral cattle—but it was early in the season for foraging, and there were far too many of them to live off the land without scattering recklessly. She'd been getting anxious about supplies.
"Where are your folks?" Brown asked. "You got more than this out before they reached Sutterdown, didn't you?"
Behind his back, Sam Aylward grinned. Juniper did too, and waved a hand around. "All within horn call. Just over a thousand, my friend."
"One thousand ninety-seven as of this morning's call," Aylward said. "Got a few more in from the southern duns day before yesterday."
Brown's eyes went a little wider; he'd ridden through their position. "Sneaky," he said. "They won't be expectin' this at all, hey?"
"Hopefully," Juniper said, not joining in the smiles of the men this time.
She'd taken nearly half the Clan's fighting strength right out of their territory while the Protector was invading it, and the best half at that, leaving only enough to hold the walls of Sutterdown and Dun Juniper and the southern steadings. It was a calculated risk, but her stomach still clenched and pained her at the thought of the enemy loose among her folk and their fields.
"I see your people all have those funny-looking shovel things," the rancher went on. "Somethin' new?"
"Eilir's idea," she said, turning to her First Armsman.
"Eilir's idea, and I hope they work," Aylward said, shaking his head. "Otherwise I'm the latest in a long line of inventive buggers who dreamed up something extra for the poor bloody infantry to lug about."
"Any word from the south?"
"Last news from the Rangers is that the enemy 'ave crossed the North San-tiam, united their columns and invested Sutterdown. The Rangers slowed them down, though."
Brown slapped his hands together; there was a jingling from the stainless-steel washers riveted to the backs of his steerhide gloves, and water dripped off the hood of his oiled-linen duster.
"You mentioned a plan," he said. "What sort?"
"Well," Juniper Mackenzie said, "first my fiancé is paying a social call. There are advantages to marrying into the SAS … "
Sam Aylward's chuckle matched her own, but he shook his head as he spoke: "Well, strictly speaking, Lady Juniper, Eilir gets the SAS, and you'll be marrying into the Blues and Royals. Officers don't make a career of the regiment. Didn't, you know what I mean."
Brown looked between the two of them; it started to rain again, making small tink sounds on his helmet and breastplate. "You guys are crazy," he said with conviction.
"Sure, and that's what's brought us as far as we've come," Juniper said. "But ná comhair do chuid sicini sula dtagann siad amacb, and the bird's still very much on the nest."
Then her head came up, and Sam's with it. A cry like a wild swan's echoed through the drizzle; that was the signal for courier. Moments later a man on a lathered horse came up. Juniper stiffened at the look on his face: whatever it was, the news was not good.
"Lady," he said, dipping head and knee. "It's about your son—"
Near Sucker Slough, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 6th, 2008/Change Year 9
"Get the kids ahead, Ruffin," Tiphaine said.
Her voice was dragging with weariness, and she blinked against what felt like grit rubbed under her eyelids. The impulse to simply topple out of the saddle and sleep was overwhelming. They all looked weary, even the horses, though they'd been changing off every couple of hours. The children sagged in their saddles, eyes dull.
"Hey—"
"Your shield-arm's hurt and you can't fight well," she said bluntly. "We may have to delay them. Now get going!"
The wounded man-at-arms nodded grimly, and turned his horse up the far bank of the little creek. The strong legs of the warmblood took it in three surging heaves; Rudi's horse was on a long lead-rein, and even half-conscious Mathilda followed with the effortless ease of someone who'd been riding crosscountry as long as she could walk.
The little guy keeps his seat well too, she thought. Tough kids, those two.
"Joris, get your crossbow. Ivo, have the horses standing by, and get the decoys ready."
She led the blond warrior back to the edge of the brush. He moved fairly well in the brush; she'd picked experienced hunters for this trip, and the chuckling of water in the brook behind them covered most noise. Tiphaine slung her crossbow, took three deep, quick breaths to force her blood to start moving again, aimed herself at the big white-barked alder that grew from the top of the bank and hit it running. She climbed it with the scampering speed of a squirrel despite the way the papery surface crumbled under her hands. Twenty feet up she hugged the trunk with one arm, reached down to slip the irons into place on her feet and felt them sink into the soft wood of the streamside tree. That gave her a secure stance once her elbow was over a branch.
A flick of her fingers opened the quiver of bolts on her belt, and then she unslung the crossbow and brought the telescopic sight to her eye. The magnification was three times; she could see things more closely, at the cost of losing a wider scan. But there was only one convenient way past the hulk of that overgrown tractor …
There. The whiplike tails of four dogs showed above tall grass that was mingled dead stalks and new growth. Occasionally a questing head came up, black nose leading in a tan-black-and-white face, trying to catch her scent on the air, but the wind was from the west right now, and the overcast sky promised rain.
Even to her human nose the air felt wet and muffled. Long range, very, a good two hundred and seventy yards, but with this height …
Her hand curled around the pistol grip of the weapon, the checked metal surface rough and firm through the thin chamois leather of her glove. One finger stroked the hair trigger, light and delicate. Tung! The kick was solid, always a surprise if you aimed well.
The quarrel flew in a long, shallow curve, dipping down towards the leading hound, the one with its nose back down on their trail. A sharp, yelping cry of pain, and the big brown-and-white dog leapt into the air, biting frantically at the light-alloy shaft in its side. She'd never be able to recover that one, which was a pity. The dog disappeared again as she turned the crank built into the high-tech crossbow, but the grass thrashed where it lay. That was also a pity— she'd never have shot at an animal so far away if she were hunting. A kill should be clean and quick.
The animals were distur
bed; the scent of blood and their pack-mate's pain would do that, and cover the trail a bit. Their belling sounded louder through the afternoon air, arrooo, arrooo, calling for their master's help. She slipped another quarrel into the groove, and brought the crosshairs on a white-furred throat.
Tung. Her fingers were reloading as the dog collapsed; quickly this time, simply falling down. If only there was time for one more—
The third dog turned, yelping. Riders came around the big tractor just as it would have fled; it stopped in glad surprise, and her bolt went home between its shoulder blades. The hindquarters collapsed, but before the dog died four of the riders were sliding out of the saddle, bringing up their bows and reaching over their shoulders for arrows even as they swung down. She kicked her feet clear of the climbing irons and abandoned them, sliding down the sloping trunk of the alder in a flurry of papery bark and taking a nasty whack on one elbow from an iron even as she did. She'd seen Mackenzie archers in action before.
"That leaves just one dog," she said to herself with satisfaction.
And before she'd slid ten feet, three thirty-inch arrows went wheet-wheet-wheet through the air on either side of the branch she'd used to rest her elbow. The fourth went crack into the base of the branch itself, and punched through it with brutal force. After an instant the limb ripped free as its weight levered against the strip of bark still holding it, hitting her on the head as her boots struck the ground. It was only a slight, muffled impact through the mail-lined hood she was wearing, but enough to make her blood race uncomfortably even so. If she'd stayed and tried for one more shot …
"Christ!" she said. Then: "Go, go, go!" to Joris, turning and racing back for the horses.
He paused for an instant to aim, and the heavier tunnnngg of his military crossbow sounded under his chuckle before he turned and followed.
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