Wet wool, wet horse, wet me, Juniper thought, as the fog drank the dull sound of hooves on soft dirt, and moisture dripped on them as steadily as rain. Just when I'd gotten comfortable again. This had better be good, Sam!
Under that went a chill. She knew it would be. Sam wasn't the sort to start at shadows… unless something important was doing the shadow-casting.
They came out of the woods, and Tamar hopped down lithely to open the gate in the plank fence that edged the Dun Fairfax farmlands. Then she trotted along beside Juniper's horse, one hand gripping the stirrup leather to ease her pace, tireless as a yearling deer. The gates of the dun were abustle, with people standing about and dogs barking and lanterns burning bright; the hum of conversation rose as the riders from Dun Juniper drew near.
Juniper stood in the stirrups and held up a hand: "Merry met," she said, and then waved down the greetings. When silence fell, she went on: "I know you're all fair ruptured with curiosity, Mackenzies… but as a favor to me, could you keep it quiet for a wee bit?"
"That means keep your sodding mouths shut," Sam said as he came out of the gate, genially enough, but with an edge to it.
There were murmurs at that; the folk of her clan tended to be talkative, and to love argument and assembly and debate—it had become as much a mark of a Mackenzie as shooting skillfully with the bow. Probably they'd caught it from her original core group of coveners and re-creationists, who could talk black into white and up into down, and loved to do it—plus it was entertainment to replace TV.
On the other hand, they also tended to take what she said seriously, sometimes excessively so. The little crowd broke up as people went back to their homes—doubtless to hash over the events of the evening, but at least they weren't getting in the way. Most of them would delight in keeping the news within their own dun, too, and hug a secret close until they couldn't bear it anymore.
Sam whistled sharply, and several of his household people came up to collect the horses as the visitors swung down.
"Started with a missing sheep," he said quietly to her as they walked towards his house. "And from there…-."
"Hmmm," she replied when he was done. "Let's go see."
"And they're frightened at the name of you, Lady Juniper. But most anxious to see you, as well."
"Not the first time it's been like that."
"Not a bad bunch. They made it out with Baron Liu chasing them, after all."
"Thanks to Eilir and Astrid," she said quietly, looking over her shoulder at the pair in question. As well try to keep water from flowing downhill as keep those two out of it. "But I see your point."
"Plus some little things… they've been eating short for years and running hard on next to nothing for days now, but we didn't have to stop them from rupturing themselves. Thanked us polite-like when we used the bolt cutters on those dog collars around their necks."
Juniper nodded, and took off her cloak to shake free the moisture before she walked into the warm, well-lit space of Aylward's hearth room and hung the garment on a peg; there was a mat underneath to catch drips. Then she made a gesture with one hand and bowed her head towards the family altar over the fireplace.
Melissa Aylward smiled as her kin cleaned away plates and bowls. "Merry met and welcome to our home, Lady of the Clan," she said, and extended a plate and cup.
"Merry met and thanks, Lady of the Hearth," Juniper replied, taking a cookie and popping it into her mouth—she wasn't hungry, but symbolism was important. The hot mead was soothing, though.
Melissa grinned then, and said less formally, "Sam's always bringing home something that needs cleaning up and feeding, Juney."
"A big softie, under that gruff shell," Juniper agreed.
The children Sam had mentioned were being borne off by members of the household, to be bathed—and de-loused—and tucked into beds; several of the younger were already lolling limp into sleep by then, between the warmth and full bellies. Others of those who lived here had suppressed their natural curiosity and scattered off to the rest of the big farmhouse. That left only Sam, her, Chuck, Eilir and Astrid apart from the two refugee couples and the teenager. She looked at them…
Something. Something important. The worm biting its tail, things yet to be casting their shadow through the circles of time…
The power points of her body flaring in an electric tingle, a cool wind blowing through her mind, a hint of a star-shot darkness that glowed with an inner light… She damped down frustration at the uncertainty of it.
Even to her most beloved child, a mother doesn't reveal all her mind—she can't, because the child can't grasp it yet. How then does the Divine speak to us? In song and myth, dream and vision, like a serpent in a bed of reeds, coil upon counter-coil.
The dark Hispanic-looking man gulped at her green-eyed stare. "Ojos garzos"—The eyes of wizardry—he said softly, and crossed himself.
Juniper shook herself back to the waking world, and remembered discussions she'd had with Jose and Carlita over platters of camarones al mojo de ajo.
"Si," she whispered in his tongue. "Si, garzos, pero para el bien, no el mal. Bruja, si, bruja de los buenos—Sacerdo-tiza."
He inclined his head. "Queen of Witches."
Her smile grew wry as she swept aside the tail of her plaid and sat, tossed her bonnet on the table and ran her hands through unruly red curls where the first gray threads had made their way this winter past.
"Yes, but that doesn't mean what you think it means. Look, let's be practical, shall we? First, you don't have to worry about the Protector or Baron Liu anymore. You're free of them now. We'll find you food and decent homes. And work, but work for yourselves—rely on it—and land of your own eventually. We don't turn anyone away who's running from those… I won't call them swine because it would be an insult to that noble beast the pig, sure."
One of the women buried her face in her hands and began to weep. Juniper suppressed an impulse to give her a hug—more likely to scare than not—and signaled Melissa to lead her away; she'd probably feel better close to the children anyway. The others seemed to slump where they sat.
"We made it," the dark man murmured. "Before God, we actually made it." He crossed himself again. "Even at peril of our souls, it's worth it."
Juniper sighed. "First, Mr… Lopez, isn't it?" He nodded. "We've got freedom of religion here; and we'll help you pass on to the university people, or the Bearkillers, or the good monks at Mount Angel, if you prefer. Frankly I've been sort of embarrassed at how many people here have taken up the Craft, but there are still Christians among us… Why didn't you head for Mount Angel, by the way? It's closer."
"I think of that first, but too many damn soldiers in the way," he said frankly. "Those hijos, they kill us all slow, they catch us, even the ninos."
Sam grunted agreement. "The Protectorate's got continuous cavalry patrols along there—and the border's well marked."
Miguel nodded; he was a stocky brown-skinned man with shaggy hair so dark that it had blue-black highlights. "Si. So Jeff"—he indicated his lanky Anglo companion—"say we should go west first, then turn south before the river, around Salem. Nobody go near there much, too scared. Territorio bandido. Some of the bandidos, they do things for the Baron, too, but we figure we hide better than from soldiers."
"That was wise of you," Juniper said.
She flicked a hand, and Astrid and Eilir sat down on the benches across from the fugitives. Chuck went and poured mugs of beer for everyone, then resumed his stance a little behind Juniper, watchful without being tense—this might be a trick. With four of the most formidable warriors in the Willamette Valley at hand to protect her, Juniper didn't feel particularly threatened. She didn't want the fugitives to feel pressured either, and wasn't sure whether having Chuck behind her in full fig was a good idea, but he certainly thought so and she didn't want to argue about it.
Instead she teased the story out of the three of them. Miguel Lopez had actually been a resident of the town of Gervais
before the Change and had managed to survive hiding near it, which was a rarity; his family had arrived a few years before from Jalisco in Mexico, migrant farmworkers like many in that town. He'd moved around hiding from Eaters and refugees and the plagues—living mainly on a pickup load of cracked oats, livestock feed his family had hidden in a woodlot—come out late in the first year, and started a small place of his own, before the Protector's men arrived.
"We didn' fight much," he said bleakly. "Too many of them. And they promise to protect us against Eaters and bandits, get us seed and tools, at first it sound pretty good. Then—" He touched his neck where the collar had left raw patches and calluses.
His friend Jeff Dawson had been a high school student in a Portland suburb—and as he confessed, lucky to end up in one of the Protector's labor gangs rather than driven out to die with so many others. He'd come to Gervais as part of a group sent to help construct the castle, and stayed as a general worker around the place.
"But I wasn't going to take it forever," he said. "And then there was Crystal."
That, evidently, was his sister, who was sixteen or so and strikingly pretty, with wide blue eyes and long tawny-colored hair; she looked a little younger than her age, and she was shorter than Juniper would have expected from her brother's six feet.
She'd have been about seven or eight when the Change came, Juniper reminded herself. Probably undernourished since, which would limit her growth. And she can't be as much of an innocent as she looks, or she wouldn't be alive, no matter how much her brother tried to help her.
"She was working in the castle," Jeff said. "That bastard Mack, he started sniffing around her."
He flushed and his hands clenched into fists on the table. Juniper raised an eyebrow, though she'd heard rumor and reports. Jeff couldn't speak; it was Miguel who went on:
"Malo, that one. Bastardo. He don't just bother girls, he hurt them. The Baron, he don't give a damn."
Why am I not surprised? Juniper thought.
So far it wasn't an unfamiliar story; they'd had hundreds of similar refugees. But…
"But Crystal brought us something," she said softly. "Something important. Important enough for Baron Liu to come after it in person, with such a small escort, as if keeping it all quiet was important to him. Very important."
Sam handed her the papers. They were bound, making a bundle about the size of a hardcover book, but the spine was held with steel post-and-clamp fasteners, allowing leaves to be removed or added. She riffled quickly through it; mostly columns of numbers, written in a small neat hand—someone from Arminger's own chancery, at a guess, and they might be able to identify who from the fist.
"Sam?" she said.
"I'd wager it's an Altendorf substitution code," he said. "The numbers'd refer to the pages, to lines, and then letters within the lines. They're a right nightmare to decode if you don't have the book, because if they're careful they don't even give things away with word frequencies—the and and and bumf like that. I'm no code breaker, but I do know enough to recognize that."
He leaned over and turned the book to the back pages. Her lips shaped a silent whistle; those were maps. Maps of the central and southern Willamette, and the coastline—one of Newport was very detailed, with all the post-Change corrections, and that was the coastal town closest to Corvallis. It had a good pass over the mountains, too. A final foldout map covered the whole of western and central Oregon as far as Umatilla, with copious notes in the same frustrating columns of numbers.
No convenient arrows and dates. Pity the buggers aren't that stupid. All this tells us is that they're up to no good.
And there was a printed sheet of numbered paragraphs in the back cover of the booklet. There always was, in the Protector's publications intended for his overlord cadre.
Number One read: If I capture my worst enemies, I will not stand over them gloating and boasting and telling them all the details of my secret plans and then keep them alive for torture in an escape-proof dungeon. Instead I will just kill them instantly.
For the first time the girl spoke, in a soft shy voice. "I was in the Baron's office, hiding in a closet—I knew we were going to run that night, and I wanted to steal some of the new silver money." A flash of anger: "He owed us all of it and more!"
Then she licked her lips. "And then the Baron and… and Mack came in, and they talked, and he put this in the desk, and locked it. When they left, I came out and took it."
Juniper's eyebrows went up. "I thought he locked it?" she said.
Crystal smiled, and reached into her blouse. She was wearing something like a housedress cinched over culottes, ragged with her trip through the brush but looking as if it had started out much better than what the others of her party wore. When her hand came out, it held a small sack of soft leather, held closed by a thong threaded into eyelets around the top. That chinked with a musical and—literally—silvery sound as she dropped it on the table.
"I had a copy of the key. He put it down where I could reach it, weeks ago, and I had Jeff copy it."
Jeff grinned sheepishly; it made him look more his real midtwenties age. "I sort of learned how in shop class," he said.
Juniper sipped her mead and thought. Then Crystal cleared her throat. "When the Baron was talking… he said something very strange." Juniper nodded, and the girl went on: "He said it all depended on the Tayz Maniacs."
"Tayz Maniacs?" Juniper said, puzzled.
"And the Brits."
Brits I understand, but what are… wait a bit. Take out his accent and his sense of humor—so-called. She'd always had a good ear for regional patterns of speech, and Eddie Liu's was purest New Yawk, without even a trace of Cantonese; his mother had been American born of remote Polish ancestry. What would it sound like if Liu said it?
"Tasmanians?" she said. "But that… what would he mean by that?"
Chapter Ten
Near Amity, Willamette Valley, Oregon
May 12th, 2007—Change Year Nine
Michael Havel reined in and aside, dead weeds and new grass crackling under Charger's hooves. The big gelding halted in the lee of a house that was deserted but still standing, a large frame bungalow with a small red-painted barn whose walls showed gaps; someone's dream place in the country, its shattered windows gaping like eyes weeping for broken dreams. Young saplings from the ornamental trees had overrun lawn and garden, providing welcome cover. Beside him Will Hutton flung up his right hand, clenched into a fist inside its mail-backed leather gauntlet, and the little column of mounted Bearkillers came to a halt with a sway and a surge, the heads of their long lances safely hidden from anything beyond the crest line ahead as well. This was about as far north as the Outfit patrolled regularly and well beyond the settled zone, but nobody would take too much notice of the horse soldiers—except to keep well-hidden, in some instances.
Lancers have a lot of punch, but they're not what you'd call inconspicuous.
Hiding still had its uses—this operation was one—but visibility wasn't equivalent to death, the way it was when he'd learned the pre-Change art of war.
Though hiding armies is still a good idea, and easier than it was, no radar or sensors beyond Eyeball Mark One. But when the actual killing starts, you have to run right up to the
other guy to noogie on him and he can just stand there giving you the finger until you do. It still feels weird.
Havel and Hutton and Signe dismounted along with Eric Larsson and his wife Luanne, handing off their reins. The patrol got their mounts into the shelter of the building. A very good eye might see the trail they'd left crosscountry from some distance, but the rolling land made that unlikely. So did the combination of shaggy second growth and forest that covered a lot of it.
Havel nodded to the patrol commander and went walking forward with the others, then stooping; finally they went to their bellies as they came to the ridge ahead. That was no knife-edge crest, just a long low swelling that rose perhaps fifty feet above the level of the countryside
and well below the Amity Hills to their west. A sagging board fence grown up in brush and vines marked it, and a few tall firs; they crawled into the undergrowth carefully, pushing forward with helmeted heads and armored shoulders against the thick spiky growth. An occasional muttered curse sounded as a thorn or twig slipped between the rings of chain mail and through the quilted padding beneath.
Then they all uncased their binoculars and pushed back their bowl helmets—the nasal bar made using field glasses impossible unless you did that—and looked through the last screen of tall grass and brush towards the north. There was a burned-out farmhouse not far down the slope, snags of wall reaching up through rampant vine and brush. The ruin stood in a clump of trees; those that lived at all were half dead from the heat of years past, their bare limbs stretching towards the overgrown mound with their other sides in leaf, quivering in the mild breeze from the north. A broken-down barn stood beyond, and after that neglected fields running down to a creek lined with trees; beyond that was another stretch of burgeoning wilderness; the edge of the Protectorate's plow-land and pasture was out of sight at the north end of this stretch, what used to be called the Dayton Prairie.
Two roads ran north-south down the lowland to his right, the easternmost crossing the river on a bridge still intact; someone had gone to the trouble of clearing off the vehicles from that one.
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