First Armand and Radomar, teaching me how to accept service; now Lioncel and Diomede. And I can’t steal one tittle of what they consider their job without them raising a very, very polite ruckus.
“Thank you, Lioncel. Please sit and eat, yourself.”
This was her usual command when eating alone and her pages had learned to eat with her; however, they always sat after they had served her. Tiphaine shook her head in private amusement at the size of the portions she had to eat these days. A Bearkiller doctor she’d enjoyed talking with a few times had worked out that a knight actually burned off nearly half again as many calories as a peasant on average.
Government by pro athlete, had been the way he’d defined the PPA’s neofeudalism.
And the last few weeks in camp had been short enough rations that she ate with gusto.
“Aunt?”
Tiphaine nodded; the keyword told her this was Lioncel to Tiphaine, not a page to his knight.
“Yes, Lioncel?”
“Aunt, how bad is the situation?”
Tiphaine sighed as she met the serious pale blue eyes.
Looking more and more like Rigobert every day… and me, since Rigobert and I have similar coloring and builds. He’s going to be tall, too… which both of us also are.
“It’s bad, Lioncel.”
She bit off a piece of bread and Tillamook cheese and stared at the ticking grandfather clock against the far wall of the room for a moment, composing her thoughts. He was old enough to be a squire soon; nearly old enough to be treated like an embryonic adult, by modern standards. Certainly old enough to get the unvarnished truth.
“The expression I like to use is cluster-fuck. It’s very rude and describes the situation to a T. It also means that more than one thing went wrong at once, and the things that went wrong each made the other things worse than they would have been by themselves. We did very well to get out of it without being wrecked beyond recovery.”
“What’s it called when everything goes wrong at once?”
“Dead and defeated.”
A flash of fear shadowed the boy’s eyes for an instant. His jaw clenched. “That means really bad things to Mom and Diomede and the baby she’s going to have, doesn’t it?”
Tiphaine nodded. Not fear for himself. Lioncel would have been considered insanely courageous, or pathologically fearless in the old days. Today, the rest of the pages at court know better than to tease or harass him. It’s not just that I’m known to kill anybody threatening my family. Lioncel is shaping up to be a really solid, mean fighter, himself and there’s no backing down in him.
“Lioncel de Stafford.”
He looked up at her, blue eyes meeting gray.
“This is what we’re for, boy. We put ourselves in the front line between danger and those we love, those who look to us for protection. There will always be some danger or threat, because that’s the way human beings work. This is why we have the lands and the castles and power and deference from the commons. It’s the price we pay, not just the danger but the responsibility and worry and the knowledge that everything turns on our making the right decisions, and it’s what being an Associate and a noble means.”
Also it means we were a very successful gang of strong-arm artists back when, right after the Change, but it’s not just a protection racket anymore. Things change. Kings start as lucky pirates, and wolves graduate into guard-dogs. The myths they used to tie everything together were stronger than Norman or even Sandra suspected and the stories speeded up the process quite a bit.
The boy looked down at his plate and visibly put the worry aside.
“Will you be going to the War Office this morning, my lady Grand Constable?”
“Yes, boy. Order the pedicab when you’re done with breakfast, please. You’ll come with me. Tell Diomede that he’ll come down with my lunch, your lunch, and his lunch from the kitchens here.”
Because I swear I’ve lost seven or eight pounds in the last two weeks and I was lean to start with; anything I lose is muscle and I need it all. Grandmother told me once when I was about six that her father used to eat sandwiches with lard for filling and I just thought it was gross. But he was a lumberjack. He needed them.
“We’ll share it and he will stay. You go home then, and study. I heard something about geometry difficulties.”
“Yes, my lady. Why do I have to study geometry? It’s boring; all those lines and arcs and sines and cosines and problems.”
Tiphaine gave him a hard look. “That’s an important skill. Numbers are how you analyze the world; they’re how you to do siegecraft for war, construction and surveying for peace; fight legal battles; aim a catapult… If you can’t do it, or at least understand it, you’re helpless in the hands of those who can, like lacking a hand or a foot or an eye. Hasn’t your tutor explained the applications to you, boy?”
He shook his head, brightening up quite a bit. “It’s good for things? Like sword training?”
Tiphaine growled. “I’ll talk to the man tonight; remind me. Right now, finish your breakfast.”
She sipped her cup of coffee, pausing to admire the delicate rose flower pattern on the cup. She knew Delia had picked it out from the large warehouses the PPA kept for Associates when she’d married Rigobert, and she’d been working with a group of noblewomen and guildsmen here who were trying to get a bone-china works going in Portland for when the plunder ran out. This porcelain had blue roses. The set at Montinore Manor had yellow roses.
And my town house has plain brown dishes because I picked them before I wangled Delia into the office of Chatelaine of Ath and she dove with headfirst glee into Patronness of the Arts and Leader of Fashion mode.
The proprieties required Delia to stay in the Forest Grove town house when visiting Portland, mostly; and it was large enough for the nursery. The d’Ath town house on Cedar Street had been picked out before she realized she would turn into a family woman with a spouse who entertained during the Court season in the city, so it was comfortable enough but rather small and out of the way. All three used it for flying visits when they didn’t have time for the panoply of service and state.
I suppose I could request another town house, there are plenty on minimal-maintenance, there’s still less than forty thousand people inside the walls of Portland and only a few hundred in this neighborhood, but I’ll let Diomede do that when he’s married and old enough to need it. Probably we should get a residence in Newberg, as well. Assuming we win the war, of course.
She put the cup down, stood and slid the scabbarded sword into the frow-sling that hung from her belt and walked briskly out to the porch, nodding as servants curtsied or bowed. Outside she returned the fist-to-chest salute of the squire in half-armor commanding a squad of six crossbowmen on guard outside.
“Will you require an escort, my lady Grand Constable?” he said.
“No, I think I can survive in Portland, Jeffries,” she said.
Lioncel was just coming around the corner of the street, perched on the back of the pedicab Rigobert kept for town work, with the de Stafford arms displayed on the side: Gules a domed Tower Argent surmounted by a Pennon Or in base a Lion passant guardant of the last .
That was a heraldic joke, if you knew how to read it, rather like her own but a bit less blatant and, she had to admit, more witty.
She glanced up at the white-pillared portico of the residence, then looked east towards the heart of present Portland, squinting a little into the sunrise. This was an extramural suburb, literally so these days-better than half a mile outside the city walls. Behind her rose the densely wooded West Hills, green and purple shadows in the light of dawn. Those had been parks and exclusive residential neighborhoods before the Change, and it was all part of the New Forest now; you could smell the fresh greenness of it, and the sky was thick with birdsong. That was Crown demesne under special forest law, and permission to hunt there or an invitation to parties at the royal retreat in the Japanese Gardens was a mark of great favor.
This neighborhood at their foot was reserved for the town house complexes of noble families, prestigious because of the greenery and open space but not too far from the City Palace downtown and the social-political whirl of Court. Each had a central residence, and several other structures taken over and modified for the trail of servants and followers. Their retainers made sure the hoi polloi didn’t intrude, so the usual urban chorus of street vendors and would-be troubadours and the roar of hooves and wheels were lacking, only pedicabs and an occasional rider or horse carriage moving along the curving, tree-lined streets.
