heavy.
“My lady Grand Constable,” Rigobert Gironda de Stafford said, thumping his breastplate with his right fist in salute before he dismounted.
“My lord Marchwarden,” she replied, returning the gesture. “Your horses look hard-used. I suppose screening us up there required a lot of riding.”
She turned and gestured for a squire. “Get my lord de Stafford and his party fresh coursers, and have these seen to. Bring water for his men, and bread and cheese and raisins if they want it.”
The nobleman nodded his thanks. “We’ve been busy, my lady. Just got in, in fact. It’s quieted down up towards Castle Campscapell a bit now or I wouldn’t have been able to make this meeting, but it’s the stillness before the storm. I’m extremely glad to see you’ve brought us a substantial force.”
He cocked his head and looked at her. “You were smiling a most evil little smile just now, my lady.”
Tiphaine let it grow… just a little. This particular campaign would probably be a preliminary to the main event, and she was going to use it to toughen up some of the feudal levies who hadn’t seen the elephant in this war yet. Toughen them up or kill them off; either would do.
“I know that expression, Grand Constable,” the lord of Forest Grove said with a grin of his own, offering his canteen. “Someone who deserved it suffered, eh, my lady d’Ath?”
“Suffered the loss of oversize tents and silk sheets and overweight private rations, my lord Forest Grove,” she said, putting the canteen to her mouth and tilting it. “And the services of various doe-eyed beauties.”
It was field-purified water, cut one-to-six with harsh coarse brandy to cover the chemical taste and kill any bacteria the chlorine missed. The mixture cut the gummy saliva and dust in her mouth quite nicely; she swilled it around, spat and drank.
“But they can’t say I didn’t warn them,” she finished, handing it back.
“Thirty lashes with an acerbic tongue and an icy stare, too,” Rigobert said. “The novel experience of having to bow their heads and stand silent while their arses are roasted in public will be good for them. It’ll rectify their humors, though not as much as a good bleeding and purge would.”
They were both in half-armor, the articulated lames of the back-andbreasts covering their torsos, pauldrons and faulds on shoulders and thighs; with their junior squires standing by, the rest of the gear could be donned in less than two minutes. Sweat and dust clung to their faces beneath the peaked Montero hats-the type she’d always thought of as a Robin Hood hat, from an old movie she’d watched on TV before the Change. Nobody put their head in a steel bucket if they didn’t have to right that moment. She could feel more sweat trickling down her neck and flanks and between her breasts, itching and chafing in the padded arming doublet and her underwear as it baked to a rime of salt in the hot dry air and then more dripped in, long-familiar and still irritating. The interior was hot this time of year, and its mountain-fringed geography made the Walla Walla valley warmer still.
“Is the Count due?” de Stafford asked.
He was seven years older than she, in his mid-forties, a tall broad-shouldered man with pale blond hair like hers worn in the usual nobleman’s bowl-cut, eyes of a blue that was startling against his tanned face, and an unfashionable short-cropped beard that emphasized his square chin and ruggedly masculine good looks.
In fact, we look enough alike to be brother and sister. Rigobert might actually have been a tolerable sibling, unless he was a lot less bearable as a teenager.
The thought was oddly wistful; she’d been an only child.
A few of the less experienced or more naive staff officers and messengers in the group around her looked surprised that he dared to bandy words with the Grand Constable, who had a reputation for a cold, distant masterfulness. Tiphaine’s mouth quirked a little more as she jerked her head slightly and the circle around them widened to allow more privacy.
Or to put it differently, I have a reputation for being a murderous evil reptilian unnatural bitch who’s inhumanly good with a sword and under the Lady Regent’s protection, she thought. Rigobert’s a special case, though.
She looked at her watch, a self-winding mechanical model from the old world.
“Not for about another fifteen or twenty minutes, my lord, assuming he’s punctual. We got the encampment settled just a bit faster than I anticipated and told him we would.”
“Any news from Delia?” he asked.
“A letter just in,” she said, fishing it out from where she’d tucked it into her thigh boot. “She’s well, Diomede sends his love and wishes he were here and not in Tillamook, where incidentally he’s going to stay if I have to tell Baron de Netarts to chain him to a dungeon wall, Heuradys has learned to say ‘no’, and our beloved Delia herself feels like an overripe watermelon about to split, she says. Also she sends greetings to my beloved beard.”
“I’m her beard, she’s mine,” de Stafford laughed as he took it and read it eagerly.
Her Chatelaine and lover of fifteen years, Delia de Stafford, was married to Lord Rigobert. The Barony of Forest Grove was the next tenant-in-chief holding north of her manors, and its lord had about as much erotic interest in women as Lady Delia de Stafford did in men, which was even less than Tiphaine did. Fathering Delia’s children had involved what passed for hightech medicine these days, namely a pre-Change turkey baster.
“Ah, I see Countess Odell has arrived for the accouchement, with her girls. That will be a comfort,” he said happily. “To them both. Valentinne will worry less about Conrad and her sons with something else to occupy her time and Delia will feel better with company and mothering, she’s always been a social sort and makes friends easily.”
So do you, Rigobert, she thought. Including people like me, who really aren’t easy to be friendly with.
“I hope it’s a daughter,” he went on. “Delia does so want a matched set of four, Lioncel, Diomede, Heuradys and…”
He glanced at her with a raised eyebrow.
“Yolande if it’s a girl, Rigobert for a boy, we thought,” Tiphaine said.
The Lady Regent had arranged the marriage a little after the War of the Eye and not long after Tiphaine was given the title and estates of Ath as grounding for a rising succession of military commands. It was one of Sandra’s classic kill-three-ducks-with-one-bolt political rim shot maneuvers, at one swell foop turning Delia from Tiphaine’s plebeian and clandestine girlfriend into a noblewoman eligible for a post such as Chatelaine of a baron’s household, giving public cover to Tiphaine, Delia and Rigobert all three against sheet-sniffing clerics and similar vermin, and giving Sandra a valuable two-way source on the distaff side of the nobility’s gossip-and-intrigue pipeline.
She’d sized Delia up quickly, and foreseen that her spectacular looks, fashion sense, personality and organizing skills would make her a star of the castle and manor house feast, hunt dinner, ball and masque circuit in jig time with a little discreet patronage. The social order hadn’t jelled as hard then, either; it would have been a bit more difficult to bring off in the increasingly Changeling-dominated present, the time of the second generation’s flowering.
“You’d name the boy Rigobert? Why thank you!” Delia’s husband replied sincerely, with a winning smile. “I’m flattered.”
But the Baron of Forest Grove genuinely liked Delia; they had become close friends, and he had been a good if slightly long-distance father to the children she insisted on. He was also extremely capable, and not only in the straightforward head-bashing style of most Association nobles; he’d been a junior spook of some sort for some agency that didn’t officially exist before the Change, as well as an SCA fighter, and valuable enough that Norman Arminger had put aside his-literally-medieval prejudices on the subject of gay people to make use of him.
Odd. In retrospect as an adult rather than a creeped-out and perpetually seething-angry teenager, I don’t think Norman really hated us, not in the visceral loathing sense.
Rigobert folded the letter, handed it back, and then raised a brow at her expression.
“Just thinking of Norman,” she explained.
“My sympathies, my lady. I hope you recover quickly and don’t lose lunch.”
He raised the canteen in another toast. “May his bigoted, sadistic, rotten soul roast in Hell to the cheers of his innumerable victims,” he went on-quietly-and drank.
She took the canteen and sipped herself. “Though to be fair, as far as the bigotry goes I think he just thought he should hate queers because he was such a fucking Period Nazi purist Society geek, killer psychopath academic subdivision. Sort of like wearing hose and houppelande. He was playing a role twenty-four/seven. And he scared me, frankly.”
“Me too. Not much of a difference on the receiving end whether he was sincere or not,” he said a little sourly.
