OK, giving a general parole is out, but a temporary one . . . possible.
Especially if he stayed here a couple of days with liberty to walk around he could probably learn something valuable, and he was specifically tasked with getting information about bases like this, so it was aiding his mission to be able to ask questions and watch things. He could try for a break when they moved him—they couldn’t spare much effort to guard one prisoner, and in any army things got looser as you moved away from the sharp end. On the third hand—
“Unless US forces attack this camp,” he said. “If they do, all bets are off.”
There were grins and chuckles at that. Such a lot of merry lighthearted jokester bastards, he thought. Goddammit. It was probably a lot easier to laugh when you were winning.
The redhead raised an eyebrow. “Or unless the sky fall and crush us, or the sea rise and drown us, or the world end,” he said sardonically.
“And my parole to last three days from sunset today and no more. After that I’m free to escape and to do anything necessary to carrying out my duties. And you’re free to shoot me if I try and if you can.”
A short, crisp but somehow respectful nod. “Good. A man careless of his oath would likely make fewer conditions, so. Swear then, in the sight of whatever Gods you follow and on a fighting-man’s honor.”
“I’m a Methodist, I guess . . .” He thought for a moment, then raised his right hand and swore so help me God.
Luag listed the specifics carefully, and drew a sign in the air before finishing:
“So witness all the Gods of my people, and the Mother-of-All in Her form as the Threefold Morrigú, who loves a warrior’s faithfulness, and the Lord Her consort as Lugh of the Oaths. You’re free of our camp, but don’t go beyond its bounds—those white wands you see planted about.”
He hadn’t noticed the peeled sticks, but they were obvious once the bowman’s thick finger pointed them out.
Luag went on: “What the Bearkillers do is their affair, but I wouldn’t go among them alone either, if I were you, for all that they’re blood brothers of ours, so to speak. They’re a suspicious lot about outsiders and quickly fierce with their blades.”
Raising his voice slightly:
“To harm this man is geasa so long as he keeps his oath. Watch him close, but put no slight nor insolence on him while he’s bound helpless by his pledge. Or I will most assuredly kick your arse until your teeth march out of your mouth like little Bearkiller pikemen on parade, and you will be mocked by all and the bards will make a tale of it at the next festival and ill-luck will dog your tracks. This is a war, not a blood feud. Treat him as you would wish on one of our own if they had the misfortune to fall captive. Understood?”
There was a murmur of assent.
“Then spread the word. About your work the now, Mackenzies.”
“Ah . . . that’s it?” Cole said.
“Is anything more needful?” Talyn said. “Ah, here’s our tent, the which you are welcome to share. Though we usually sleep under the stars unless it’s raining or much colder than this. Stow your gear.”
He and Caillech spent a few moments removing each other’s war paint, with a mixture of flaxseed oil and goose grease that smelled of herbs—sage and rosemary, Cole thought—and then soap and water. Most of the Mackenzies just nodded at the prisoner and walked away, going back to working on their gear or shooting at wooden targets and flinging disks with truly alarming dexterity or sparring or towards some cooking pits where an agonizingly good smell was drifting with wafts of bluish smoke to remind him that he’d been working hard on light rations. Others simply napped, played flutes or guitars, read or wrote letters, played games with dice or cards, or . . .
He blinked, and blushed a little. Soldiering tended to erode your sense of privacy, but he was used to it being all guys. His army had stopped recruiting women after the old General died a couple of years ago, and hadn’t had many even then. Cole averted his eyes.
Bearkillers seemed to do things more or less the way he was used to. The Mackenzies . . .
“They’re sort of informal, aren’t they? But it works for them,” Alyssa said. “God knows why.”
“Hup-one-two, and a lance up the arse to keep your back braced straight,” Caillech said. “The Bearkiller way.”
The two young women stuck out their tongues at each other, and Talyn rolled his eyes.
“I smell that a sounder of wild pig were guided our way by Cernunnos,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “Rather than the over-stewed muck of infamous memory we get nine days in ten, when it isn’t jerky and trail mix and dog biscuit instead, ochone, the sorrow and black pity of it. Let us prepare for the sacred rite of eating ourselves full and drinking what’s to be had while we have the chance, for it won’t happen often.”
Cole smiled a little. The general awfulness of military food was something everyone seemed to have in common, weird or not.
CHAPTER SIX
Castle Todenangst, Crown demesne
Portland Protective Association
Willamette Valley near Newburg
High Kingdom of Montival
(formerly western Oregon)
June 15th, Change Year 26/2024 AD
The last series of windows came down to the floor, opening out in French doors. Beyond was a fan-shaped open platform the size of a largish room, held by curved girders of cast aluminum alloy whose ends reared up into stylized eagle’s heads all around its rim. Between them along the edge was a border of waist-high marble sheets carved into fretwork. Not at all coincidentally, they were exactly the right height to lean on comfortably for a rather short someone named Sandra Arminger.
Most of the balcony was covered by an arched pergola of thin wrought bronze rods thickly grown with vines, the last of the late-blooming violet-blue Shiro Noda wisteria hanging in foot-long clusters interwoven with golden Rêve d’Or roses. The heady Noisette perfume of the roses mingled with the fainter, more delicate scent of the Japanese wisteria. Hummingbirds flitted among the blossoms like living jewels of ruby and malachite, and the eyes of several of Sandra’s Persians tracked them with bright wistful interest.
And a low feline chittering of teeth accompanied by a murmur of ah ahnt ahnt ahnt, which meant something like: Chew toy! Chew toy!
“I wonder, was that excessive?” Sandra murmured, looking up. “Roses and wisteria? Did I do it just because suddenly I could? I’m afraid that happened a fair bit back then. It was as if we were both a little drunk with possibilities, your father and I. From impecunious academics to gaming with kingdoms.”
Laughter came from the space beyond the doors, and then the bright tinkle of a metal-strung cittern, and a woman’s voice raised in song:
“I waited for a sunny day to launch my grand design.
The clouds would loom—
The wind would turn—
It happened every time!
Until at last it struck me:
I should just let it all unfold
The sun is shining somewhere . . .
And fortune loves the bold!”
Mathilda smiled at the sound of Lady Delia de Stafford’s clear alto voice; she supposed she didn’t approve of Delia, but she certainly liked her and always had. She turned the smile into one of greeting and nodded to the squire who stood beside the entrance with a white rod of office in his hand. He’d been chatting with Lady Jehane Jones de Molalla, her mother’s amanuensis—confidential secretary—a sleek young woman in a rose-and-gold cotte-hardie and a gold wimple, which set off her chocolate skin.
“Lady Jehane,” she said, smiling and extending her hand for the kiss of homage. “God give you good day, Huon,” she went on to the squire.
“And God and the Virgin be with you, Your Majesty,” Huon Liu de Gervais said, bowing gravely a flourish of the baton in his right hand and the left on the hilt of his sword.
He was in court dress: Ray-Bans, tight hose, ankle-shoes with upturned toes tipped with little golden bel
ls, loose shirt of soft linen, doeskin jerkin and a houppelande coat with long dagged sleeves. And a roll-edged chaperon hat with a broad liripipe tail hanging to one shoulder; that was a mark of near-adult status as opposed to the brimless flowerpot style all pages and most squires wore. At sixteen he was young for it, but he had charged with her menie at the Horse Heaven Hills when the chivalry of the Association broke the Prophet’s elite guard.
If he’d been a little older she’d have knighted him on the field, and not because his elder brother Odard had been one of the companions of the Quest and died for her on the far cold shores of the Atlantic.
Well, not only because of that. Plus his sister Yseult is getting to be really useful in the Household. No flies on that girl at all, as Mother would say, and she’s been invaluable with Fred’s sisters. And I like them both.
The colors were the black-lined-scarlet of House Arminger, which suited Huon’s dark tilt-eyed good looks. She hadn’t had time to put the Household into the High Kingdom’s forest green and silver yet. . . .
And I’ll still be an Arminger, anyway. That doesn’t change.
“Have you and Lioncel had any time for hawking, Huon?” she said.
Delia’s eldest son and Huon had become fast friends during last year’s campaign; she knew it roweled him to be here behind the lines while his comrade was mostly off as the Grand Constable’s squire in the east.
“Yes, my lady,” he said eagerly, looking less solemn—and he was allowed to entitle her so in an informal setting, since he was her personal liegeman. “We’re going to have some time to fly tiercels along the river tomorrow, we think. Diomede can come along—”
Who was Delia’s younger son, a page in the household of Countess Anne of Tillamook, and just a little too junior to take the field as yet at all. And green with envy, though too good-natured to be a real pest about it.
“The Grand Constable and Lioncel and my lord Rigobert his father have been winning great honor!”
“So have you, Huon Liu de Gervais,” Mathilda said gently. “For I trust you with my life, and more, my daughter, the heir of the Kingdom.”
He flushed a little and bowed again as she and Sandra swept past. Her mother was fighting to keep the smile off her face as she concluded a low-voiced exchange with Jehane that had the girl packing up her lap-desk and gliding off on some errand.
“He’ll remember that,” Sandra said approvingly, and sotto voce.
“It’s true,” Mathilda replied, very slightly indignant.
Even though there’s no actual danger here—stone smooth as polished glass above and below us, and miles of guards between here and the gates. It’s one of the few places we can really relax.
“Truth? All the better!” her mother said happily.
She’d practiced good lordship by sheer political calculation all her life.
And if she weren’t my mother, her approval would make me doubt myself, sometimes! But a ruler must be a good politician too; it’s a duty. So many lives and livelihoods depend on it! It’s when politics fail that the swords come out and homes burn.
The others were sitting around the tables as the dappled shade played across the pale cream and blue Redondo tiles in patterns that shifted with the breeze. They rose as Huon announced her, calling out The High Queen! and The Queen Mother! briskly but without the annoying bellow heralds used sometimes.
The Associate ladies sank in deep curtsies, the skirts of their cotte-hardies spreading in a display of colors brighter than the flowers overhead and the long sleeves touching the tile. The combination of their own high rank and the relaxed social setting meant they didn’t have to kneel. That sort of thing was one reason why sometimes more could be done during a tea party than at an official council-meeting.
Though this is rather formal dress for a tea party . . . I know, I’ll get Delia to start drawing up a manual of court etiquette and costume for the High Kingdom. Something more relaxed than Association protocol. We can call it a political compromise to make the non-Associates feel more at home.
“Lady Delia, Lady Ermentrude, Lady Anne,” she said—deliberately informal modes, as she extended her hand again. “Lady Signe.”
Signe Havel gave her a stiff salute with a little frost in it.
No hand-kissing there! Mathilda thought, as she returned it with a Protectorate-style gesture, right fist to chest—which looked a little odd when you were wearing a cotte-hardie since it was usually accompanied by a clash of armored gauntlet on breastplate, but she couldn’t think of anything more appropriate.
Signe wasn’t an Associate, of course. The Lady of the Bearkillers was a handsome blond woman in her forties, in the plain practical brown uniform her folk wore in the field and with a basket-hilted backsword leaning against the arm of her chair. She’d never really forgiven any member of House Arminger for the spectacular and mutually fatal public duel between Norman Arminger and Mike Havel that had ended the Protector’s War.
“And Virginia! You’re glowing . . . and looking uncomfortable. Believe me, I sympathize.”
Virginia Thurston was in a housedress, of very expensive printed cotton but cut simply, what a well-to-do woman in Boise would wear though she’d never yet seen the city. It was a maternity style, though, and she looked every day of her seventh month.
“I feel like I’ve swallowed a pumpkin,” she grumbled; her face was still narrow, framed by her yellow-brown hair. “And my ankles hurt and I have to pee all the time. Least I ain’t . . . I’m not puking so much.”
“Don’t worry. It gets better,” Mathilda said.
Delia chuckled. “But not before the birth. And that’s anything but comfortable, let me tell you. The pumpkin has to come out.”
All the mothers present laughed, which meant everyone except Countess Anne, who winced slightly in sympathy. Juniper Mackenzie was still grinning as she came forward and hugged Mathilda. Countess Ermentrude blinked slightly, showing that she knew more of the theory than the practice of Court etiquette. Everyone made allowances for Mackenzie irreverence, and Juniper was a sovereign herself as Chief of the Clan, albeit one in vassalage to the High Kingdom now. Plus after the Protector’s War Mathilda had spent months every year in Dun Juniper with her and her family, just as Rudi had come north. That made Juniper her second mother as well as mother-in-law.
“My darlin’ foster girl!” she said, and Mathilda squeezed her back through the fine soft wool of her arisaid.
“Your unrecognizably fat foster girl!” she murmured into the older woman’s ear.
“Nonsense. Just a few healthy curves; the Maiden becomes Mother.”
Mathilda hugged her again, and felt that little familiar shock that she was so much taller than the Mackenzie.
She and Mother are about the same height. One of the few things they have in common, besides their wits. And that you forget it because they both feel bigger in your mind.
Signe’s face turned a little chillier. She’d also never completely forgiven Juniper Mackenzie for meeting Mike Havel and bearing his son, who was now Mathilda’s husband and High King. Not just for the usual reasons a woman would, even though that had been a single night and before Signe had married him, but because Rudi was High King, instead of one of her children.
The wet-nurse—an Associate herself, a younger collateral of the great Jones family who were Counts in Mollala and who’d lost her own child not long after birth—brought Órlaith to Mathilda. Objectively Mathilda’s daughter looked like any three-month-old . . .
But by the holy Mother of God, she’s beautiful! Mathilda thought.
For a moment the feeling clenched her eyes shut like physical pain. When she opened them again her daughter was baring her gums in a broad smile and kicking within the linen smock, reaching for her.
“Órlaith,” she said as she picked the solid little weight up. “My golden princess!”
“My granddaughter,” Sandra said.
“And mine,” Juniper Mackenzie said.
“But m
y only granddaughter, so far. Your fourth.”
“Give me time, Mom!” Mathilda said.
She was that post-Change rarity, an only child. Juniper had what she thought of as a more typical middle-of-the-road total of four.
Mathilda kissed her daughter on the forehead and handed her over to Sandra, who gave a short odd laugh as she took her competently in the crook of an arm. Juniper looked a question.
“I was just thinking,” Sandra said, “of how often I’ve wondered what the world will be like when the last of us oldsters have shuffled off to our—literal, as it turns out—rewards and the Changelings like Mathilda are left to run things without us.”
“And I’ve had the same thought, many a time,” Juniper said. “But?”
“Just now,” Sandra said, tickling the tip of the baby’s nose with one finger as she smiled and kicked, “it struck me that I should wonder what the world will be like when Órlaith’s generation is in charge . . . people who never knew the people who knew the world before the Change. When she’s my age it will be . . . Good Lord, it’ll be Change Year 84! Nearly a century! Will they really believe anything about our world by then, except as myths? And of course her children . . .”
Juniper’s face froze for a moment, though the Changelings showed polite incomprehension. Then she said, slowly:
“It never fails; in a conversation with you, something truly disquieting will be said. Now I’ll be having that thought every time I look at a baby, instead of just enjoying the little ones. Thank you, Sandra.”
“You’re welcome, dear Juniper.”
Mathilda sat with a slight snort; talking to Mother did keep you on your mental toes, the way sparring with Rudi sharpened your reflexes with the sword. She arranged the skirts of her cotte-hardie and nodded to the others as a maidservant offered a tray.
Everyone occupied themselves pouring tea and passing plates of tiny sandwiches and pastries—potted shrimp and cucumber and deviled chicken and little glazed things with raspberries and cream. The tea was the real luxury, even more expensive than coffee. Local equivalents were still experimental, and this was the genuine article, imported by a profoundly unreliable chain of middlemen through desolate pirate-haunted seas from the few revived plantations in Asia to Maui in the Kingdom of Hawaii and then to Astoria. The world was a very large place, these days. Even larger than it had been in the Jane Austen novels that were so popular among the female nobility, and which probably helped keep the beverage so prestigious.
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