“Thanks, my lady,” Rigobert said as the boy raced off. “I should have thought of something like that. I still find myself thinking like an uncle rather than a father sometimes, and as for being a husband. .. And there are other times I have to remind myself I really am a feudal lord, not just playing at it.”
Tiphaine gave a faint snort; she was a crucial near-decade younger and that sort of feeling hit her less often, but…
“Tell me. My highest ambition in Middle School was going to the Olympics as a gymnast. Until the world ended, when not starving to death, and not getting raped, butchered and eaten by cannibals or not catching the Black Death soon came to the fore.”
“I knew you were a complete jockette, but I’ll bet you wore black and red flannel shirts, too,” Rigobert said with a grin. “Flannel shirts and a white A-shirt underneath, and skate shoes?”
“Oh, incessantly; with a trucker’s hat, no less. I think the thirteen-year-old boys hated me because I looked more like a thirteen-year-old boy than they did.”
“Not a mullet. Please, God, tell me you didn’t have a mullet.”
“Mother wouldn’t let me, but that would have come in a couple of years. And when I turned twelve I realized I was desperately in love with Melissa Etheridge and put a great big poster of her on the inside of my locker door and played her music twenty-four/seven on my Walkman.”
Rigobert laughed, and Tiphaine smiled thinly. She’d never lost herself in laughter easily, not when she was sober at least, and for her being thoroughly disinhibited was usually a bad idea. She envied him that easy laugh a little. It was odd to realize she couldn’t have had this conversation with Delia either; not because they didn’t share everything, but because the younger woman simply didn’t have the referents to understand it without a lot of backing and filling. She’d grown up a miller’s daughter on Montinore Manor and hadn’t even learned to read until her late teens. Tiphaine shook her head as memories opened like the door to a dusty cupboard.
“I was a complete caricature of a baby-dyke-in-training and didn’t even realize it until I caught myself in the middle of a daydream of rescuing Melissa from a stalker and then smooching her passionately. .. my family didn’t talk about things like that so I didn’t even really understand the names my beloved classmates were calling me. I did know they weren’t well meant, you bet I did.”
“Was it possible to be that naive in 1998?”
“For a while, if you were a lonely introspective only child of a single mother who was extremely religious, with no friends except your gymnastics coach. And she was terrified of being hit with ‘inappropriate conduct’ accusations by a hysterical parent. Everyone knew before I did, except my mother and she was deep in denial.”
“Wasn’t as much of a problem for me,” Rigobert said, with a reminiscent smile. “It might have been hellish if I were swish, but-”
“Yeah, you’re even more butch than I am,” Tiphaine said sardonically. “Football star, right?”
“Not dumb enough for football. Basketball, track and field, karate, and fencing club. I was such a model of blazing macho hotness even the straight guys wanted me,” Rigobert said. “Ah, high school, the amount of action I-”
“Now you’re boasting… wait a minute, do you realize our speech patterns just lost twenty-five years?”
The other baron shook his head. “You’re right. Best not to dwell on the past… it was just seeing Lioncel looking so damned young. And looking so much the way I did at that age… though I’m pretty sure he’s straight, come to that.”
“He is,” Tiphaine said definitely.
A conversation about stumbling upon him and a servant girl in a linen closet back at Montinore Manor came to mind; Delia had found it hilarious and she’d thought it rather embarrassing.
“Lioncel’s greatest ambition is to be a gallant knight and a good baron, and I think he’s going to achieve it,” she said instead.
“He’s a fine boy, all three of us can be proud of him, but… they scare me, sometimes, the Changelings. No offense.”
“None taken. I’m a borderline case anyway. I can remember the old world, bits and pieces, particularly the last couple of years before the Change. I simply don’t, usually, unless it comes up the way it did just now. The last twenty-three years or so have been a lot more fun than my childhood anyway, on the whole.”
“It’s Changelings raised by Changelings who really give me that odd feeling, and Delia’s seven years younger than you; she is a Changeling and no mistake. From time to time I look back on the way we set things up in the early years and think… what have we done? ”
Tiphaine’s expression went colder than usual. “We all did what we had to do, in those days,” she said, very softly. “All of us. Everybody did what they had to, or they died, like ninety-five percent of the human race.”
Rigobert inclined his head in silent agreement, memories of his own moving behind his eyes. Anyone old enough to really remember the first Change Years and the great dying knew that expression, from the inside as well as from their mirror; it would die only when the last of them were gone.
“Not quite what I meant. I was thinking of the Association’s trappings in particular,” he said more lightly after a moment. “We all went along with it and now… now it’s just the way people around here live.”
“Norman did that,” Tiphaine observed. “God help us if he’d been obsessed with first-century Rome or Chin Dynasty China or the Old South. Or been an old-fashioned Red with a man-crush on Stalin.”
“And if Norman hadn’t existed, we’d probably all three have been dead these twenty-five years now and the children wouldn’t have been born, so done is done and probably for the best.” Rigobert sighed. “ We can’t complain, seeing we not only made it into the small minority who survived but came out very much on top of the heap. I try to do right by the peasants on my manors, but being a baron is much more pleasant.”
“Except when we’re doing the hard parts.”
Rigobert smiled. “No, sometimes then too, don’t you find? Sometimes especially then.”
COUNTY OF THE EASTERMARK BARONY OF TUCANNON PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION (FORMERLY SOUTHEASTERN WASHINGTON) HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL (FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA) AUGUST 18, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
“Gotcha!” Ingolf said as his force came in out of the westering sun.
From here, several miles out on the high plains leading from the mountains down to Dayton, the valley with the sheep looked different; the rugged peaks in the background seemed closer, and the whole thing more closed off. And you could see most of it was rolling, not a steep V down to the little creek. The shepherdesses had fled in well-simulated terror, scattering their sheep artfully as they went, and the Boise cavalry had spread out to get the flock under control.
Almost all of them would be cowboys from the ranching parts of Idaho originally anyway; you nearly had to be born at it to make a good horse-archer. They’d know how to gather a mob of woolies. It was probably a homelike interval in the war for them… until the moment they felt the hook inside the delectable bait. He looked behind. Most of his men would still be hidden by the folds he’d been diligently following, but they were getting too close for caution.
“Sound advance in file order,” Ingolf called, and legged his horse up to a canter.
The sweet notes of Mark’s bugle rang. The columns opened out like fans; a few moments later the First Richland was strung out in a great line two men deep, rippling and twisting as it moved over the swells of the ground. Ingolf looked left and right and over his shoulder; the Sioux were closing in from the rear, their formations more like the flocking of birds than regular lines, but keeping up easily. Three Bears slanted through the Richlander files to ride beside him, his quarter horse matching the longer strides of Boy.
“Got ’em all!” he called, over the growing, growling thunder of hooves; there were fresh scalps at his saddle. “And the remuda. Good horses.”
Horse-theft was the Lakota national sport; you just had to accept that they were obsessed.
“Any prisoners?”
“Nah, they all fought to the death. Brave as shit. Look, cousin, I’ve got a bad feeling about this. They may not have been alone, you know? Yellow Bird and her tree huggers and some of my boys are sweeping back west of here.”
“Good. Let’s get this part done quickly.”
He chopped his hand left, to the north, where the little creek ran down from the hills and came closer to that
