A Meeting at Corvallis (28 page)

“We don't plan to kill or capture you,” Alleyne said. His mouth was slightly pinched—he didn't like this part. “We're here to offer you something you want very badly, in return for telling the truth to the Faculty Senate.”

She laughed at him. “What exactly do you have that I could want?”

Eilir felt John Hordle shift beside her. She took time out to nudge his ankle; this was no time to improvise.

“Me,” Astrid said, standing forward a little. “My oath to meet you with any weapon you choose, in the wilderness, right after the Faculty Senate finishes its meeting.”

Eilir could see a flush wash up Rutherton's neck and face, and her nostrils flared. “You mean that?” she said, tilting her head to one side. Then: “Yes, you do. And I suppose your boyfriend there would be waiting to kill me, after I won?”

“No,” Alleyne said. “The deal includes two horses, a hundred and sixty rose nobles, and free passage to wherever you please, so long as it isn't Bearkiller or Mackenzie land.”

“Corvallis,” she said. “Or there's always the Yakima towns, or Boise…”

Astrid shook her head. “That's all moot, because
I'll
kill
you,
” she said. “But you'd have the satisfaction of trying.”

Tiphaine Rutherton closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them and smiled a hungry smile. “Agreed. Knives, fought
estrappado,
” she said, and turned on her heel. Astrid and Alleyne had to turn sharply as she pushed between them without another word.

I have a bad feeling about this,
Eilir thought. And not just because the Association fighter had specified a knife duel with left wrists tied together.
Quite bad.

Sandra Arminger dusted the surface of the letter with sand and waved it gently back and forth to dry for an instant. “My compliments to the noble Faculty Senate, and this is my reply,” she said. “I'm most pleased to comply with their request.”

The messenger bowed his head and took the page from her hand, then carefully slid it into a leather-bound folder. When he had left Sandra sat toying with the lower edge of the peplum pinned atop her wimple, twisting the sheer fabric around a finger where it fell over her shoulder. The flames burned blue and red and gold over the coals in the fireplace, and one of the consulate cats brushed around her skirts before jumping to her lap and curling up for a nap; papers and books littered the table.

Tiphaine Rutherton stood by the side of the fireplace, as relaxed as the cat, with her hands in her sleeves.

“I find this rather odd,” Sandra said carefully. “You don't think anything can be made of the men this merchant Hatfield had guarding Sir Jason, now that they've been dismissed?”

“No, my lady,” Tiphaine said. “I don't think they
were
really dismissed. They were bait. The other side is trying to turn the situation to their advantage.”

“Ah, that would be young Signe,” Sandra said. “Clever girl! She's been quite annoying.”

“And that's why I slipped away after sounding the two laborers out. You did emphasize that discretion was of the essence.”

Sandra's eyes narrowed as she lifted the letter the messenger had brought.

“Yes, I did, didn't I?” she said. “But now the Dúnedain have requested that you be there when the Foreign Relations Committee meets. Some of the Corvallans are
very
annoyed at all this commotion in their orderly little city. The political situation is quite delicately balanced…and it is
very
important that Corvallis stay neutral when we move against the Bearkillers and the Mackenzies and those annoying schismatic monks at Mount Angel. Which will happen soon; the Lord Protector would prefer it be after the next harvest at the latest.”

“My lady, they were expecting something to happen, but not the way I approached. None of them saw my face, when I…attended…to Sir Jason. They
did
hear my voice, so they know it was a woman. I'm the obvious suspect, but they have no proof. All they can do is swear that a dark-clad, masked woman trounced the four of them and fled…and that sounds pretty unlikely.”

“Did you, by the way? Trounce them, that is. I know you're very capable, but…”

“Well…no. I managed to get away from them, though, which wasn't easy. Told secondhand, it sounds pretty much the same thing, and that's useful.”

“It does, and it is,” Sandra said. “I'm not annoyed with you, child. Simply a little puzzled. At least we've taken Sir Jason off the board. He was deplorably impulsive.”

Tiphaine's calm face snarled for an instant. “He was a
pig
!”

Sandra chuckled. “Well, yes, but if we were to stick knives in all the pigs on the Association's rolls, we'd have a lot of pork and very few living noblemen,” she pointed out. “At any rate, at worst we can convince the noble Senate and public opinion here that getting mixed up in a messy business like this is bad; at best, we can shift the blame onto our enemies. Well done.”

She extended a hand, palm-down. Tiphaine went to one knee and took it, kissing the knuckles formally and then rising to leave with a bow. Of course, in strict form she ought to have curtsied, but unless you were wearing a skirt that wasn't really practical.

Odd,
Sandra Arminger thought idly.
I spent most of my youth in jeans, but even to me a woman in pants is starting to look vaguely indecent. Habit is lord of us all, I suppose.

She picked up the quill pen—she found them more aesthetically satisfying than the surviving reservoir types—and brushed the swan feather meditatively across her lips. The cat on her lap blinked its eyes open and rolled on its back, reaching for the feather with both paws; she teased it until it decided to jump down and groom.

Ordinarily she didn't like improvising on this scale, but Jason Mortimer's ill-timed raid had left her with no alternative, and the damage control had worked. Granted, there was that absurd ritual the children had gone through…

Which seems to have been their own idea, unless that Mackenzie woman is much better at deception than I am at penetrating same,
she thought.
Still, it may be inconvenient. Matti doesn't seem to have changed much in one way; she's still very self-willed…well, not surprising considering her parentage. I'm not surprised she's fallen under the boy's spell; he's quite charming. Now, something could be made of that, perhaps?

Schemes spun their way through her mind; it was dangerous to have a rigid plan for an unpredictable future, that made you too like to try and force events back onto a track rather than adapt to them, but you did need to prepare for contingencies. Yes…that might be quite useful.

“But why do I have this sense that something is eluding me?” she asked herself softly. “It all seems to be proceeding as well as could be expected, yet…”

Bowers Rock State Park had lain on the south bank of the Willamette north of Corvallis, where the river turned in an S-curve to avoid low hills; now it was just another piece of uninhabited riverbank, and upstream were islands and more serpentine reaches. It had been swampy even before the Change; since then entropy had undone the works of men far faster than they'd been built, as floods burst levees and dams, silt and leaves and slumping lands clogged drains and culverts. Sloughs and disused gravel pits dotted the area; dead reeds rustled in the cold wind from the north, and tossed the branches of fir and alder, cottonwood and oak, a long creaking groan beneath the whistle of the air. The natural levee along the river was densely grown with tall trees and brush; elsewhere many trees were dead as encroaching wetland killed their roots, with fresh saplings growing on spots of slightly higher ground and tangled brush nearly everywhere. The air was heavy with the chill, silty smell of standing water and vegetable decay, and the air was thick with moisture turning bit by bit into ground fog, kept to tatters and patches by the stiff breeze.

Sam Aylward grinned to himself as he knelt behind a bush. He was cold, and one thigh ached a bit where an Argentine bullet had broken it in '82, and his shoulder would stiffen up if he didn't watch it, and he could have been home playing with Fand and Edain while dinner cooked. He
should
be leaving this sort of thing to the youngsters he'd spent the last decade training, too. Yet this was a chance to use a hugely difficult set of skills that he didn't want to rust; everything hurt more, but he could still do it. Nobody had seen the small party of Mackenzies as they filtered slowly in from the east, not unless you counted deer and feral cattle.

Although this is just the roit bit of bush for one of those sodding tigers to den up,
he thought; they bred fast, and a lot of the older ones were still maneaters when they got the chance. Even then a corner of his mind had time to curse the sentimental idiots who'd turned so many loose from safari parks and zoos after the Change.
Haven't seen any pugmarks yet though…

His eyes scanned the ground ahead, where a clump of oaks and Douglas firs occupied a higher hummock. That's where the idle bastards should have put a sentry, up one of the trees in a blind, with a pair of binoculars. They hadn't, he was pretty sure of that, and there weren't any lookouts covering it either. He was close now, close enough to smell the woodsmoke, though he couldn't see a plume.

He made a soft clicking sound with his tongue, impossible to filter out of the background unless you knew what you were listening for. Then he moved forward from clump to clump, pausing every fifty paces with the ghillie cloak around him like a shaggy, twig-sewn blanket. A crackling branch off to the left made him halt motionless, even as he winced inwardly. That was the price you paid for working with strangers…but the man had done the right thing by stopping.

After a moment he moved forward again. Stories to the contrary, you couldn't move through brush or forest without making noise. The saving grace was that the forest made noise of its own all the time, and if you froze when you put a foot wrong the sound would vanish into the background, especially when there was a nice lively wind like this. A head might come around when they heard a crackle, but if they didn't see movement or hear anything else right away, they tended to let it go. You
couldn't
investigate every noise that
might
be someone.

Slow and careful, that's the ticket.

He made another careful sound as he eeled into the slightly higher ground that bore the trees, one that would announce that he was where he'd intended to go. The surface here wasn't exactly dry, but at least it wasn't outright bog. A fallen alder gave shelter to the west, thick with young seedlings growing about the nurse-tree's rotting trunk.

Well, well,
he thought as he slowly raised the binoculars to his eyes and moved his thumb on the focusing screw.
Isn't that interesting? The colonel was right.

A half-dozen large canoes were drawn up in a slough that gave off the Willamette. Willows trailed drooping branches on them, but the camouflage netting on the frames that spanned their hulls would have made them hard to see in any case; otherwise they were
voyageur
-style boats, aluminum versions of the type Canadian fur traders had used in the old days. He'd used similar craft on wilderness trips before the Change, and in training with the SAS—though apart from the Falklands and a spell in Ulster his active service had mostly involved extremely dry deserts full of homicidal lunatics.

Still, you never know when training will come in handy. You can get better than a ton in one of those things. Paddle slow and at night, lie up by day and you could get from here to Portland without anyone the wiser, or at least to the falls at Oregon City, which is much of a muchness. Not many folk living right by the river these days.

Ragged men unloaded wicker baskets and poplar-wood boxes from the canoes. Others loaded cargo, mostly in sacks; part of it was prisoners, bound and with bags over their heads, which was an excellent way of keeping captives disoriented and passive. Aylward whistled silently through his teeth, then handed the binoculars to the man who'd crawled up beside him.

As he did so he kept counting the number of fighting men down there.
Two dozen at least, all up,
he decided regretfully.
Not a chance.

It was with even more regret that he grabbed Major Peter Jones by the collar of his camouflage jacket and touched the point of a dirk to the inner angle of his jaw when he showed signs of leaping up and advancing on the canoes with drawn sword. The Corvallan wasn't
quite
angry enough to try and fight him, and they moved backward with commendable stealth.

“Those were Protectorate soldiers!” Jones snarled quietly, when they were back where they'd left the horses.

Aylward nodded as he tightened a girth and bundled up his ghillie cloak to strap behind the saddle. “Right you are, mate,” he said. “Some of them. The rest were your common-or-garden bandit shites.”