were married in a Catholic church.”
“Not in the open air. Someone might come by! I am Catholic, remember, not a witch-girl.”
“Nobody’s coming by, not with Edain and a score of the High King’s Archers on guard.”
“And they’re too close!”
He sighed dramatically. “Alas, it’s right you are; their silent presence just out of sight would make for a little constraint?”
“ Just a little!”
They rose, brushing bits of grass and the odd leaf off each other; Rudi put on his flat Scots bonnet with the spray of raven feathers in its clasp. There was a clump of meadowsweet growing half a pace away; he made a sign of apology and murmured: “Let us share your beauty for a while, little sisters,” as he bent and plucked them and wove a garland. “My thanks to you and Her.”
“There,” he said, setting the lacy cream-white flowers on her head, binding the long seal-brown hair that fell past her shoulders. “Queen of the Meadow to crown my Queen.”
She kissed him again, and the sweet almond smell of the flowers encompassed them both.
“Duty calls,” she said a moment later.
“In a shrill unpleasant voice,” he agreed mournfully.
Reflex as deep as instinct made them reach for their sheathed swords where they leaned against the tree with the belts wound around the tooled black leather of the scabbards; you didn’t go a step without steel in reach. Rudi felt a slight sudden cold shock as he touched his and swung the belt around his waist, doubling it and tucking the tongue under and settling the weight on his right hip with a twitch.
He’d borne the Sword of the Lady for more than a year now, since that memorable day on Nantucket, and it still made the little hairs prickle along his spine every time he put his flesh to it anew. It was quiet today, or as much as the Sword ever was. There were times a casual eye might have mistaken it for an ordinary weapon of extraordinary quality. The form was that of a knight’s weapon, a yard of straight two-edged tapering blade with a slightly crescent-shaped guard and a double-lobed hilt of black staghorn. He gripped it and drew it slightly, enough for a handspan to gleam above the silver of the chape. Steel, at first glance. Then you could see the rippling, curling marks on it weren’t damascene work. They drew the eye inward, every pattern repeating, down and down and down, as if it were a window through the world.
And the pommel, a sphere of crystalline moon-opal gripped in antlers. Light swirled in it-
“Rudi!”
Mathilda’s voice was sharp as she called him back to the world of common day. He snapped the weapon home with a click of guard against chape.
“It’s so creepy when you… go away like that.”
He looked up at her and smiled. “Don’t say it’s always bad, acushla,” he said. “Here, put your hand on mine, and we’ll see together what I glimpsed.”
She did, where his left-his sword-hand, since the wound that nearly killed him leached a hair-fine edge of the strength and speed from his right-rested on the hilt. Then she gasped.
Rudi went on one knee in this very spot, sinewy wedge-shaped torso brown and bare above his kilt. But older, a little, with scars she didn’t recognize, and his hair longer and worn Mackenzie-style, tied back with a spare bowstring into a queue. He smiled as he extended his arms, and a two-year-old toddled towards him, a girl in a yellow shift, chubby feet bare, white-silk hair falling around her shoulders, huge turquoise eyes sparkling above a gap-toothed elfin grin. Rudi seized her beneath the arms and tossed her high, catching her and tossing her again.
Mathilda watched, laughing, an infant in her arms…
They took their hands from the Sword and looked at each other, wondering.
“Is… that what will be?” she asked.
“No. It’s what might very well be, though, which is close enough for government work, which is appropriate, eh? Making it so is up to us.”
“Two children,” she said wonderingly; he could hear happiness bubbling up beneath it. “In a few years from now, at least, and maybe more later. Oh, thank you, Holy Mary, mother of God. My children! Our children!”
“A daughter and a son,” Rudi added, nodding; then his mouth quirked. “Crown Princess Orlaith, and little Prince John.”
Mathilda looked at him sharply; the order of succession hadn’t been settled yet, whether it should be the eldest or the eldest son. The conservative nobility of the Association mostly wanted the latter, of course; and he knew she was ambivalent herself. Then her eyes went wider.
“You know their names. The Sword knows their names?”
“Well, we could choose others now, just to spite it, so. But they have a nice ring to them, don’t they? So we might as well… though it’s most surely a matter of the snake biting its own tail…”
“Orlaith,” Mathilda said. “That means… Golden Princess, doesn’t it?”
“So it does, in the ancient tongue. Her hair will be like white gold as a child, and palest yellow when she’s grown, with eyes like the sunlit sea; she’ll be tall and graceful as a willow-wand, stronger than sword steel.”
He frowned seriously. “And she’ll be mad for strawberries and cream in season, and love cats, and play the mandolin-”
Mathilda mock-punched him in the chest. “Now you’re making it up!”
“That I am. It’s true about the hair and all that, though.”
She paused for a moment. “And John… that was Dad’s middle name.”
“And so it was,” Rudi said mildly, meeting her eyes.
“I wouldn’t have dared suggest naming him Norman. I know that’s impossible. The politics.”
“Your father did great things, my heart, for good and ill. Let that part of him which did well and saved lives and built for the ages be remembered with the name, and the part of him that loved your mother and you. Let all else… be forgotten.”
Mathilda looked away for a moment. “Thank you,” she whispered.
Her father Norman John Arminger, the first Lord Protector and founder of the PPA, had been a very able man. A warrior to be feared with his own hands, and himself fearless as a lion, and still more to be respected as a battle-leader. Intelligent and quick-witted enough to see immediately what the Change that stopped the machines meant, while others dithered and denied and died. And with power of will enough to inspire and bully others into following him. Without him most of what became the PPA would have been ruins and charred bones split for marrow and wilderness long since. He’d truly loved Mathilda also, and in his odd way her mother Sandra.
A strong man, Rudi thought. Even a great one, but bad at the heart; though no man is all one thing.
As a ruler he’d also been a brutal terrorist and outright tyrant both from policy and by natural inclination, and from a half-mad determination to bring his obsessions to life and impose them as far as his sword’s writ reached. One who killed with a relish and delight that would probably have appalled even his idols and models, William the Bastard and Strongbow and Bohemond and Godfrey de Bouillon. Opportunities for that had been many in those early years of chaos and despair, when the most of human kind perished in a welter of famine and plague and desperate violence.
And ten years after the Change he’d have killed me, if Matti’s mother hadn’t hustled us out of his way after Tiphaine d’Ath rescued Matti from us Mackenzies, and captured me in turn. Killed me with embellishments, just to give Mother anguish, I think. His mind worked that way, the creature. But Sandra saw she might have use for me, even then.
Lady Regent Sandra Arminger was just as ruthless as her spouse had been. She was also even more intelligent, vastly more patient, and not hagridden by his inner demons. Since Norman’s death at the end of the War of the Eye she’d even been a good overlord to the Association from pure rational calculation; a hard ruler, very hard indeed, but not vicious. She had men killed without passion when she thought it necessary, like a croft-wife picking a chicken for the pot, and with as little regret; in just the same spirit as she calculated taxes or which bridges needed repair or how to balance factions in the dance of intrigue. She was even popular with the commons in the PPA territories, because the Counts and barons feared and obeyed her and she kept them in check and enforced the law on high and low alike.
Out of… craftsmanship, I think. It’s with good reason they call her the Spider of the Silver Tower. Yet she wept tears of joy when she saw Mathilda again; and she raised Mathilda… me too, when I was spending those
