Valentinne looked as if she’d been crying last night, and she was in the formal cote-hardie that she usually managed to avoid, a pale blue-and-gold affair.
“No, Sandra,” she said, a determined smile on her face. “I knew it wouldn’t work, anyway.”
“Didn’t keep you from trying,” her husband observed.
“And good to see you, Lady d’Ath,” the Countess said; though in fact Tiphaine’s cold coiled violence had always made her a little nervous. “How’s Lady Delia? She’s six months along now, isn’t she?”
Tiphaine smiled slightly; the Countess of Odell and the Chatelaine of Barony Ath were good friends.
“Delia’s well, but growing huge, and sends her regards. And she’d like you to be there for the accouchement, Lady Odell, particularly since neither I nor Lord Rigobert are likely to be able to take the time.”
“Of course, if…”
If we’re not all under siege in our castles by then, Sandra filled in. Or dead.
“… if circumstances allow,” Valentinne finished.
“No reason they shouldn’t,” Conrad said. “You could take the girls. This campaign’s going to start a long way east of here.”
The Count of Odell was already in full armor except for the helmet, which showed his fireplug build; he’d put on some flesh since he resigned as Grand Constable to be Chancellor full-time a decade ago. Now he snorted and rose with a slight grunt and clank, tucking his helmet upside down under his left arm with the gauntlets thrown in the bowl; the bevoir hid his chin and neck, giving his cannonball head an oddly detached look.
“I’m still stronger than a lot of the men I’ll meet,” he said, slapping the hilt of his rather old-fashioned, Norman-style chopping broadsword. “And age and treachery beat youth and gallantry most times.”
Tiphaine d’Ath raised both eyebrows. “Still stronger, yes, Conrad,” she said. “Also stiffer, fatter and slower these days. I’d hate to lose the man who helped shape me into the murderous, evil bitch I am.”
“Blame Sandra for that,” he laughed.
And he’s looking positively carefree, Sandra thought. Men and their games!
“Besides, I’m planning on directing the levy of County Odell, not fighting with my own hands,” he pointed out. “Not unless I have to. Worry about Erard and Thierry more, they’ll be at the head of their men-at-arms. And Ogier is at the reckless age.”
From the haunted look in her eyes, Lady Valentinne had been thinking along the same lines. Conrad paused to glance out the west-facing windows in their Gothic tracery; he’d be looking down on the rolling orchards and fields of the Hood River Valley, off to Mt. Hood’s snow peak, towering dreamlike and huge and distant.
What’s he thinking? Sandra mused. Of how we fought and worked to build this new world? Of what we were, and are, and what we might have been if the Change hadn’t come? Or just that it’s a beautiful day?
Then he bowed them out into the other room, and extended a hand; his wife rested her fingers on the back of his, and they followed. He smiled at his children, as they gravely bowed or curtsied.
“Kiss your sisters and make your devoir to your lady mother, boys,” he said, thumping their shoulders as they straightened and grinned back at him. “We have a war to fight. And you girls give me a kiss as well, eh?”
They did, and then the whole assemblage trooped down to the courtyard. The Castellan was there, with an older nobleman-
Lord Akers, Baron de Parkdale, Sandra’s mind supplied. Lamed in the Count’s service back when we were doing the first salvage run on Seattle. Son down with the Three Tribes, helping patrol against the enemy occupation forces in the CORA territories. I should mention that.
There was some ceremony; Lord Ramon passed over the white baton of his office to Lord Akers, who would command the skeleton garrison of oldsters, the halt, the lame and those really too young to take the field; the castle chaplain blessed everyone, though doubtless they’d already had morning Mass; and Lady Valentinne bound a favor on her husband’s arm, a ribbon she’d woven from flax grown in her herb garden, prepared with her own hands. Her daughters did the same, and for their brothers as well, except for young Melisant, who shyly showed them a book-sized triptych of St. Michael she’d painted in a stiff, glowingly sincere style. She’d dedicate that for them in the Cathedral and burn candles before it until they returned.
At last Conrad stood pulling on his gauntlets, ready to hand her up into the carriage and swing into the saddle of his own traveling rouncy. He chuckled as he slapped fist into opposite hand on each side to settle the leather- palmed metal gloves.
“What’s the joke?” she asked.
“That even if… that whatever happens now, I’m a lucky man. Lucky in my wife, my children… lucky in my whole life. Thanks, Sandra.”
“Thank you, old friend, and take care of yourself. I need you still, your loyalty and your wits and the fact that you were never afraid to tell us when we’d made a mistake. Mathilda will need you, too.”
“I’ll do my best. I haven’t seen my grandchildren yet, though Erard’s little Alaiz is expecting! To tell you the truth, I don’t know how much the kids need any of us fogies anymore, Sandra. It’s their world now, and they’re more at home in it than we can ever be. Let’s give it to them in good condition.”
CHAPTER SIX
SUTTERDOWN DUTHCHAS OF THE CLAN MACKENZIE (FORMERLY THE EAST-CENTRAL WILLAMETTE VALLEY, OREGON) HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA) AUGUST 1, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
F rederick Thurston was the second son of the founding General-President of the new United States-the country everyone else called the United States of Boise. He wasn’t in its green uniform, though. He’d insisted on that, wearing a nondescript outfit of coarse-cloth shirt and trousers and brown boots instead, and he was unarmed except for the beltknife that virtually everyone carried as an all-purpose tool. He took a deep breath, and drew calmness on himself like a cloak; this wasn’t going to be any easier if he waited.
I’ve made my decision. Now I’ve got to do it.
“You should be fancied up a bit,” his wife said. “Your uniform, or somethin’ to show you’re someone.”
There was a Powder River rasp in her voice; Virginia Thurston (nee Kane) had been born and raised there in the grassland country of what had once been eastern Wyoming, until the Church Universal and Triumphant and its local allies killed her father and seized her family’s Sweetwater Ranch and she’d stumbled into Rudi Mackenzie’s camp on the edge of the Sioux country on a blown horse. The two of them were nearly of an age, not quite twenty-one, but their looks were very different. Virginia was middling-tall for a woman, slender but whipcord-tough and tanned, with long brown hair worn in a braid, a narrow straight-nosed face and blue eyes.
Fred was a lithe, long-limbed broad-shouldered young man a little over six feet, with bluntly handsome features; his skin was a light toast-brown color, and his short black hair curled naturally. He grinned at his wife; they’d been together just over a year, and married for less than half of that-a handfasting ceremony in Norrheim, on the borders of the Atlantic.
“You look good enough for both of us, honey,” he said.
She snorted. Her costume was full-fig formal for a prosperous Powder River rancher’s daughter in this twenty-fifth year of the Change, acquired here since they got back to Montival and at some trouble and expense. Linen blue jeans with copper rivets, heeled riding boots of tooled and colored leather, a buckskin jacket worked with colored quillwork and fringed along the seams, a colorful bandana about her neck and a broad-brimmed black Stetson on her head. Her belt was covered in worked silver conchos, and a smaller strip of the same went around her hat; the hilts of her shete and bowie knife were jeweled, if also perfectly functional. More silver and tooling made the saddle and bow case and tack on her gray Arab match the arch-necked mettlesome horse itself, with ribbons woven into its mane. He’d noticed that when it came to horseflesh she was cheerfully rapacious in a way that was probably influenced by the close contact her family had had with the Sioux to the east of them. Or possibly just the obsessive focus on horses natural in a place where they were the difference between life and death.
“You made me drop the chaps, honey,” she pointed out. “Those were good chaps.”
“You look like there’s a sheep in your family tree with those things on. And anyway, this is the best way to approach them, believe me. They’re going to be sensitive as a singed wildcat, seeing me on the other side.”
