from the gates of Dun Juniper when she struck, the which was ingenious and bold. She got us back out of the Mackenzie duthchas to Castle Todenangst with cloth yard arrows raining about her ears, too, which was not merely bold but skill of a miraculous degree-even on foot the Clan’s warriors can push a pursuit like wolves on the track of an elk and run horses to death. Lady Sandra stashed the both of us at Castle Ath for some time… which is where I began learning swordplay from her.”
“She’s good with a blade?” Bjarni said, his own hand dropping unconsciously to the hilt of his broadsword. “I thought she might be, from the grip she gave and the pattern of calluses on her hand.”
“I first beat her sparring when I was twenty-one, and didn’t again for some time,” he said soberly. “I’ve never crossed blades with anyone faster in all my travels. As swift as I, and more nimble. I have more reach and I’m much stronger, of course, but her blade-art is complete.”
The others all nodded, Signe a little unwillingly. A speculative look came into Bjarni’s blue gaze; to a warrior, everything that wasn’t a prize to be seized was a potential challenge to be overcome.
“Don’t even think it,” Rudi said, and Eric nodded vigorously.
Signe smiled grimly. “Did you see the hilt of her sword, my friend?”
Bjarni nodded, obviously puzzled. “A very good weapon, if narrower than we like in Norrheim, I suppose for thrusting strokes against the joints in plate. And well-adorned, the silver setting off the back horn.”
“Those twelve silver bands aren’t adornment, Bjarni King. They’re a death-tally and public warning,” she said.
“Holmgangs?” Bjarni said, using his folk’s word for a duel.
“Technically,” Eric laughed, but this time it was utterly without humor. “I saw a few of those… you couldn’t really call them fights, though the victims were experienced swordsmen. They were executions. Slow executions. It was more like a cat playing with a mouse than combat. And one of the few occasions I’ve seen her really smile.”
“Brrr!” Bjarni said. Then, with blunt practicality: “And what’s my part in this plan you make, my blood brother?”
“Never fear, you’ll hear it soon.” He turned to Eric and Signe. “I brought two thousand Drumheller cavalry with me when we crossed the Rockies at Castle Corbec,” he said. “Medium horse, lance and saber and bow, mail hauberks and plate for the arms and legs.”
“About what we Bearkillers were using ten, fifteen years ago,” Eric said thoughtfully. “I liked what I saw of them there. Trained in cataphract tactics like ours, too?”
“Precisely; well trained and drilled. Also Drumheller is not part of Montival and will not be, and they did fight the Association, when they tried to take back that western part of the Peace River country the Lord Protector grabbed off in their despite, the spalpeen. County Dawson, it is now; about which they are still bitter, so. So I’ll be brigading them with your Bearkiller A-listers, giving out it’s the best tactical fit-the which is true-and to avoid unnecessary memories of a painful and awkward sort.”
“That ought to work,” Eric said thoughtfully. “We’re more mobile than the Association knights, we don’t need a light cavalry screen as badly, and we have a lot more punch in a charge with the lance than pure horse- archers.”
“It’s fair pleased I’ll be if it does work,” Rudi said frankly. “Fitting this collection of puzzle pieces, not to mention the odds and sods trickling in from everywhere between Dawson and Ashland, into an army I can use without it coming to pieces on a battlefield like a soggy biscuit in hot tea is a nightmare of purest black, and we’ve little time.”
Sober nods, and he continued: “Well, you’ll be receiving them in the next day or two. And I’m off. This High King position needs about six men to fill it.”
“You won’t be disappointed in us Bearkillers, Your Majesty,” Mike Jr. blurted. Then he quoted: “Always faithful.”
That was the motto of a band of warriors their common father had fought with, before the Change.
“Mike, mo bhrathair, you were at my wedding!” Rudi said. “And saw me pale and wan with terror until your uncle slipped me some brandy. It’s a little too formal that was, brother, for an everyday occasion like this.”
“My liege, then,” Mike said.
“That will do. Feel free to add embellishments when you’re convinced I’ve gone lunatic; I’ve yet to see a battlefield where men didn’t feel that way about the high command, at times.”
The tall young man’s face split in an answering grin, and the High King went on: “Every time we meet you favor our father more; you’ve more of his cast of face than I do, I’m thinking. Perhaps by the end of this war you’ll be wearing the Bear Helm, eh?”
Mike’s face flushed; he met Rudi’s eyes for a long moment, then gave a slight nod. Eric’s brows went up. Signe went pale.
After a long moment she bowed to Rudi. “Hail, Artos King,” she said; there was a slight choking in her voice. “I wished that. I hadn’t thought you’d aid me in it.”
Rudi smiled. I know it’s a charming smile, some corner of him thought. Matti’s told me it is often enough, and sometimes with a deal of exasperation in her voice. Still, if the Gods gave it me, I should use it, and I’m not putting it on, either. I’ve always liked Signe better than she did me, Eric is a man you’re glad to have at your back, and of young Mike I’m fond in truth.
“The Bearkillers will be a stout pillar of the High Kingdom,” Rudi said. “The more so with the bond of blood between my House and the line of the Bear Lords.”
“We will be your sword and shield!” Mike blurted, then blushed as his mother and uncle shot him quelling looks. “Well, we will.”
Rudi made his farewells and turned to Bjarni. “Walk with me, blood brother.”
The Norrheimer did, squinting westward for a moment past his own people’s encampment; the lines of tall slim poplars on the plain were casting long shadows. They were alone. Except for Edain and the score of the High King’s Archers behind them, of course, and a half dozen of Bjarni’s hirdmen, walking with mail byrnie clinking and conical nose-guarded helmets on their heads, round shields on their left arms and spears or great long-hafted axes over their right shoulders. All of the guardsmen were out of earshot, if they spoke quietly.
“Bad blood there, eh?” Bjarni said shrewdly, inclining his head slightly back towards the Bearkillers. “Or there was.”
Rudi shrugged. “My blood father rescued my mother from some Eaters-mad cannibals-”
“What we called troll-men,” Bjarni nodded.
Such bands had been common throughout the more heavily peopled places in the year after the Change, as the desperate millions ate the storehouses bare to the last hidden scrap and then turned on each other amid chaos, fire and plague. Where the cities had been most dense, their savage descendants were the only human thing left, save scorched bones split for the marrow.
“-not long after the Change. They were both of them on scouting missions, you see. And… well, that night was when I was begotten. Mike Havel wasn’t handfasted to Lady Signe then; they weren’t even betrothed, really, though they were thinking of it from what I’ve heard.”
“Ah,” Bjarni said. “And there’s the rub, eh?”
Rudi nodded: “She always held it against mother, and me. Less so as the years have gone by, but it’s also a bitterness to her that her son will be a chief in my kingdom, and not the other way about, you see. Mike himself doesn’t mind; we’ve always gotten along well and he’s a likely and good-natured lad. Also just the now he’s at the age when he needs a hero to worship, or an elder brother. Whether he’ll still feel that way ten or fifteen years from now… we’ll see.”
“I do see,” Bjarni said. “My folk have their own rivalries. It’s the nature of the sons and daughters of Ash and Embla. So that’s why you said your half brother has more of a look of your father.”
“Sure, and it’s the truth… though not by much, we’re both his image in body and face, though we’re taller than he was by a few inches. And the neither of us have his coloring; he was black-haired, perhaps because he had an Anishinabe grandmother, one of the First People, though for the rest he was mostly Suomi with a dash of Svenska and Norski. But young Mike does have a bit more of his face, I’d be saying. He was a handsome fellow, my father, among much else.”
“He must have been a man of strong main”-which meant soul-strength, in the Norrheimer dialect-“and a fighting man of note and able to steer matters wisely,” Bjarni said thoughtfully. “From what I’ve heard, Gods aside,
