strike. Even so, we would need more swords than we have now. There would probably have to be a sacrificial rearguard, now that I’ve looked at the ground myself.”
Major Hanks was there too, still looking worn from his own swift journey south, though he’d done some of it on the rails.
“I’m afraid Lady Astrid is right. The hydrogen isn’t quite as inflammable as you might think; it has to be mixed with air to burn quickly, and when it leaks it leaks up. But an incendiary bolt or a spray from a flamethrower… sorry. And it’s only really dirigible, steerable, in a dead calm. But about the rearguard, ah, that might be done.”
“Let’s concentrate on how we’re going to get the people we want out of the compound first. And we can’t take just Cecile or just her daughters,” Eilir said through Ritva. “That wouldn’t do at all. Almost better to do nothing.”
“Wait,” Astrid said again. “Wait… what was that you said about Juliet Thurston drinking a good deal?”
Gleam nodded. “That’s the rumor. Well, the complete rumor is that she and Martin had some hellacious fights. Then he beat her, and she stopped fighting and started drinking.”
“Wait a minute,” Ritva blurted. “He beat her?”
She obviously wasn’t translating and the leaders stared at her.
“ Hiril, I was here, remember,” she said. “I have relevant observations.”
Astrid nodded and raised a hand in permission, and her niece went on: “Two years ago, they were very close. The rumor then was that Martin was ambitious, and that she was right behind him pushing with all her weight and fitting herself for a consort’s crown. I only met her in passing, but she was… impressive. Hard, very intelligent, I thought probably quite ruthless too, though maybe not cruel for the sake of it. Not the I-deserve-it type.”
Gleam nodded. “Yeah, that’s how it was then.”
Astrid rested her chin on her hands again, something stirring in her moon-shot eyes.
“And when was this change? When she had her child?”
“No, a good long while after that. Just lately, since he got back from Bend in May. That’s where he had his conference with Sethaz. He’d done that before but this time… there was something different about him. A lot of people noticed it, and apparently the First Lady did more than most. Which makes sense.”
“Let me think.”
Astrid closed her eyes; there was silence except for the tapping of a venetian blind against the frame of an open window in the cool night breeze. The street outside was quiet too, and then the tapping of a Natpol’s truncheon against the walls rattled through the silence as he walked his rounds.
“It’s risky,” she said at last. “But it’s our best chance. We have to get someone into the compound and get more information about this. It’s that or go home, and the fate of the High Kingdom may depend on this.”
Everyone turned and looked at Ritva.
Dulu! Ritva thought. Help!
Ritva had her hair hidden under a kerchief, and she wore a longish brown wool skirt, brown because it hadn’t been dyed. Keep your eyes down, slump a little, don’t swing your legs, hesitate a bit before you move your hands. Those minor things added up; they changed the gestalt that people recognized as much or more than they did faces, especially faces they weren’t very familiar with. The best protection was to look bored, though. Boredom was like a magical force pushing people’s attention away.
“Delivery from Ayers for the President’s mother at the Brick House,” she said to the guards in a singsong monotone.
The soldiers at the entrance to the Presidential Compound were standing to attention; she watched a fly crawl over the face of one of them, and he didn’t move even when it reached his eyeball, merely blinked. There was a Natpol doing the actual examination of documents. Ritva smiled nervously through an impulse to sweat. These documents weren’t even improvised fakery; they were just someone else’s, quickly stolen by a Dunedain team who’d snatched the bearer and had her tied up in a warehouse. The black-and-white picture was of a tallish blond woman of about her age, and there was about the degree of general resemblance Ritva bore to half the young women in Boise. But she wouldn’t have been fooled herself if she made an effort to compare picture to features, not even briefly. Luckily not even Boise’s obsessive devotion to order and regulation extended to using color pictures. And it was natural to be nervous around a document check outside the dwelling of a ruler.
Act like a peasant who’s bringing something to Regent Sandra at Castle Todenangst, Ritva thought. You’ve watched the poor devils sweat there, often enough.
“Pass,” the Natpol said in a tone as bored as the expression on Ritva’s face. “Next!”
The Presidential Compound bore the marks of haste in its construction. This had been the citadel from which Lawrence Thurston extended his realm, in the chaos of the first Change Years; there had been chaos and fighting in Boise, and then typhoid and cholera and the Black Death, until he came and gave men a name and a flag to rally around.
The walls were high and thick, but they’d been roughcast and smoothed only enough to give no easy handholds. They followed the lines of a block across from the State capitol, with what had been the Williams Office Building as their core; it was the Citadel now, bulking high with cranes and machicolations above. Other buildings had been incorporated into the outer wall, sometimes simply used as forms into which concrete was poured. It gave the fortifications a weird angular look, jagged and irregular. Most of the interior was a concrete-floored parade ground, where soldiers and bureaucrats and their various hybrid offspring clattered back and forth to the offices around the periphery amid the odd horse or mule-drawn cart.
It is a castle, just a strange-looking one, Ritva told herself. It does all the things a castle does.
The General-President was not at home right now. They’d checked that carefully.
I am brave. I am very brave, in fact. But I am not stupid and I don’t want to die, she thought.
She walked to the Brick House; it was an ordinary two-story dwelling of red brick with a shingle roof, substantial but not really large, disassembled in some wrecked suburb and rebuilt here. The current General- President had a much more extensive suite in the Citadel, and another in a fortress south of town. A pair of soldiers stood at the steps that led up to the verandah, big concave oval shield on shoulder and six-foot javelins braced to the side, armor and the brass eagles and thunderbolts on the shields polished blazingbright. Their eyes followed her, but neither moved until she reached the steps.
Then they both turned in, and the spears moved out to make an X in front of her.
“Name and business,” one of them said crisply.
“Wanda Meeker,” Ritva said. I’ve got more names than the Lady these days! “Delivery from Ayers Produce.”
They looked her over, checked the basket with its two dozen eggs in straw and bricks of butter wrapped in coarse paper on a lump of ice in a clay cup, and one of them said: “Pass.”
Then they turned back, with a crisp stamp of hobnails and a toss that sent their spears turning and then slapping back into the callused hands. It was discipline for discipline’s sake, but oddly impressive. Ritva remembered how she’d walked up these steps the last time-in Dunedain formal blacks with the crowned silver Tree and Seven Stars on her jerkin, Mary and the other questers at her side. Then she’d been Lawrence Thurston’s honored guest after Rudi and Edain saved his life, about to set out on a path that led to the battle at Wendell and the ruler’s own death.
Now… she pulled the bell-handle. The string attached to it yielded with a feeling of weight on the end that ran through a copper tube into the house. Bells tinkled, and she heard slow footsteps and a shadow behind the beveled glass panels of the door before it opened.
“Did I order this?” Cecile Thurston said. “I suppose I did. Come in, come in.”
Ritva blinked, shocked. She remembered Lawrence Thurston’s wife as a quiet woman who’d radiated both strength and warmth and showed a flash of cutting wit now and then; she’d been educated in some profession that the Ranger didn’t remember, before the Change. Now there was little of the light brown left in her hair as she stood in the door of the Brick House, and the gray that had spread to most of it seemed dull. So did her own blue eyes.
Lawrence Thurston helped build this house with his own hands-she told me that, and he shrugged and laughed and they looked at each other. Hard enough to lose your man like that, but to have him killed by one of your sons would make it altogether worse. It’s probably a good thing she has daughters to worry about.
And there was little energy in the way she walked. In the kitchen her two daughters were sitting at the table busy at what looked like schoolwork; one of them jumped up to take the basket and transfer its contents to a big
