A Meeting at Corvallis (29 page)

“And you've
known
about this?” Jones said.

“More or less suspected,” Aylward said.

“We've got to do something!”

“We're not going to go charging in with four archers and you against that lot,” Aylward said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “They've got six to our one,
and
about half of them looked like they had hauberks on. Mother Aylward didn't raise any of her kids to be bloody fools.”

“Why didn't you tell us before?”

“We tried to, didn't we? It was always ‘no proof, no proof, no bloody proof, you kilties are just trying to get us fighting Portland, oh dear, oh dear.' Colonel Loring was the one suggested we stake out this location—he's had the time to think about it, you see, and he always did have a fine eye for ground, and for putting bits of this and that together to get a picture.”

“They're stealing
people,
” Jones said, incandescent with anger.

Aylward nodded. “Stands to reason, short of labor as everyone is, and the Protectorate's not going to get many volunteers. At a guess, the border barons started hiring bandits to catch runaway peons and bond-tenants. Not a big step from there to buying replacements, and who's going to listen to one more poor, unfortunate bugger in a labor gang?”

“The Faculty Senate is going to hear about this!”

A grin split Aylward's square Saxon face. “That's the point of this little walk in the woods, innit? Hopefully they'll listen to
you
.”

Corvallis, Willamette Valley, Oregon
January 14th, 2008/Change Year 9

“It's indecent,” Juniper said.

“What, the kilt?” Nigel Loring asked, glancing down as they strolled arm-in-arm between the booths. “I admit that my knobby knees aren't much to look at, but I wouldn't say they were actually
obscene
—”

“That so much is going wrong, and I'm still so
happy,
” Juniper replied, prodding him in the ribs with a finger.

He laughed. “My dear, if I were any happier, I'd be dead and in heaven—and on a related topic, I soon may be, at this rate. I'm not a young man any more.”

“Dá mbeadh cuinneog ag an gcat, ba mhinic a pus féin inti,”
Juniper said with a wicked grin. “If the cat had a churn, it's often her own face would be in it. And you know what they say about Witch girls…”

Eilir snorted and freed her arm from John Hordle's for a moment to sign:
Oh, get a room, you two! It
is
indecent, at your age!

Juniper stuck her tongue out at her daughter. “
Ní bean níos sine ná airíonn sí.
A woman's no older than she feels. I'm feeling sixteen again, so why shouldn't I act it?
Or
Nigel, who can put many a sixteen-year-old boy to shame, let me tell you.”

Nigel flushed and grinned at the same time. Astrid, Alleyne and John Hordle developed an intense interest in the plank-and-plywood booths that filled what had once been a parking lot, beneath old broadleaf trees. With so many in town for the meeting of the Faculty Senate business was brisk; the sheds sold winter crops in this season—kale, Asian greens, turnips, endives, chicories, dried beans, fennel, carrots, parsnips, strings of garlic and onions. And plucked and gutted chickens, eggs, tubs of butter, big round cheeses…

“Hi, Juney!”

“Bob!” Juniper said to the stall-keeper, where he stood amid his produce. “Merry met! In from the farm, I see. Where are Karen and Danny and Karl?”

“The family's all hard at work, since we got a dairy herd and a barrel churn,” the man said; he was middle-aged, with a graying beard. “You don't own cows, cows own you. Here, try this.”

He smeared butter from an opened bucket on a heel of bread before handing it to her. Before the Change she'd have been astonished at the rich, intense taste of it; now that was normal, and she mostly noted that it was perfectly fresh and only lightly salted.

“That's good, as good as any we make at Dun Juniper. If I lived here and didn't have cows of my own, I'd certainly buy from you.”

He looked at the golden torc around her neck. “New Mackenzie fashion…or just ring around the collar?”

“I'll have you know this torc is an
engagement
torc! Meet Nigel Loring, my fiancé.”

“Congratulations!” Bob said, enthusiastically pumping their hands. “I heard about Sir Nigel getting in…when's the happy day?”

“Beltane's best for a handfasting, but we may not be able to wait past Imbolc.”

“Here, all of you have one of Karen's rolls, and a slice of ham to go with it. Mr. Pig smoked up pretty well this year, if I do say so myself.”

Juniper savored a bite; the salty brown taste of the cured meat complemented the crusty bread and fresh butter wonderfully, and somehow it was even better on a raw January day with rain threatening from a low iron sky.

“Nigel, this is Bob Norton. He and his family actually moved back from Silicon Valley and started a little farm up in the Coast Range foothills southwest of here two years
before
the Change. I used to buy eggs from him at the old Farmer's Market when I passed through Corvallis.” With a sly smile: “Back then, they were something special.”

The farmer grinned and nodded towards the well-worn pile of cardboard egg cartons as he shook hands with the Englishman: “All free-range, grass-fed, with those nice orange yolks…just like everyone else, nowadays. I thought the farm would be a nice hobby place for the kids to grow up on while I did technical writing to pay the bills. Then—wham! I've been a cautious man ever since.”

The
because I used up a lifetime's luck right there
didn't have to be spoken. Juniper went on: “I hope you can come to the handfasting. It's open-house.”

After a moment's wait while a woman bought two broilers and half a large, round cheese, Bob replied, “If we're not all dead by then, of course. I'll be voting, though…what was all that about a murder?”

“Knife work in the dark by the Protector's people,” Juniper said grimly. “To shut their own man's mouth, whatever else you may have heard.”

“About what I figured,” Bob said. “Bastards. Good luck! I'll be voting for you, no doubt about that!”

Eilir stopped to order a dozen of the hams sent to the Mackenzie guesthouse for the Dúnedain to take with them when they left town; Bob's knowledge of Sign was rudimentary, but enough for bargaining, which she did with cheerful ruthlessness. Then they bought mugs of mutton soup rich with barley and dried mushrooms at a stand by the road; Juniper looked up in surprise at a deep, accented voice ordering another.

“Not 'alf bad,” Sam Aylward said, raising the steaming mug to his lips. He winked at her. “Congratulations, Lady, Sir Nigel.”

Juniper touched her torc, then threw her arms around the stocky Englishman and hugged him hard—more symbolic than anything else, since he was wearing his brigandine.

“Thank you, my old friend!” she said. “Thank you, thank you for helping! It's the loveliest surprise present I've ever had.”

A flush went up the thick, corded neck and square face. “Well, I hope I can do more than a little carpenter's work for you two,” he said gruffly.

A bell rang, a slow, steady tolling. The crowds around the booths began to thin as people streamed westward, across Twenty-sixth Street and up the stairs to Gill Coliseum, where Corvallis held its public assemblies; many of the stall-holders closed up and headed that way themselves. Juniper felt her stomach tighten, then forced it to relax as she drew a deep breath down to her diaphragm. There was no hurry; foreign dignitaries didn't have to hustle in, or elbow for a seat in the bleachers, either, though she remembered doing just that at basketball games before the Change. Instead she made herself drain the mug, and then use the spoon to hunt down the last barley around its bottom.

“Let's go,” she said at last, after she set it down on the counter.

She looked across the street, where two lines of armored troops with glaives waited, making a line up the stairs and under the columned entrance.

It's just another entrance and just another stage,
she told herself, taking another deep breath.
And it's a performer you've always been.

Mike Havel sat. “Here we go,” he muttered, the sound lost under the shuffle and rustle and whisper of the crowd seating itself likewise.

The interior of the coliseum was huge—it had been proudly hailed as the biggest basketball stadium west of the Rockies at its opening in 1949; when the seats were full they held over nine thousand, half of the adults in the whole territory of the city-state. Today there were less than half that, but the delegates voting proxies represented everyone. The western wall was mostly glass, letting in pale, cold light tinged with gray; concrete arches spanned the roof high above. More of the militia ringed the inside of the basketball court, which had been covered in rolls of broadloom; at the eastern end was a dais with tables and chairs. The four foreign delegations were grouped before it, with the Bearkillers on the right, the Mackenzies on the left, and the Dúnedain and Sandra Arminger's party between.

He looked over at the Rangers and nodded in friendly fashion. Eilir grinned back at him, with an urchin cockiness he'd always liked. Astrid, as usual, looked smoothly regal and not quite human in her black-and-silver outfit. Beyond them at the Mackenzie table, Juney appeared relaxed and confident…well, she always did, when the pressure was on; she'd gotten over stage fright a long time ago. Sir Nigel Loring was beside her, doing his Imperturbable Englishman.

But I think I catch a bit of a glint in his eye. He likes people to underestimate him, that one.

A herald—or whatever they called them here—came out on the dais. Silence fell, and then she shouted:
“All rise for the noble Faculty Senate!”

They all filed in, wearing their mortarboard hats and academic robes—the latter were fur-trimmed, and probably fairly comfortable in the vast unheated space that smelled of chill concrete and, very faintly, of locker room and disinfectant. Everyone did stand, including the foreign delegations. Havel looked casually over to the Portland Protective Association's envoys before they all sat down again. A couple of clerical nonentities in robes and tonsures with their pens and briefcases, plus the consul—Lord Carl Wythman, Baron Kramer, a dangerously smooth hard case whom he hoped to have the pleasure of hanging someday. And Sandra Arminger, looking as I-picked-your-pocket-and-you-never-knew-it satisfied with herself as she had when he saw her in April of the first Change Year, with her bodyguard Tiphaine Rutherton standing behind her.

And preparing a nasty surprise.

Signe opened her folder and smiled, very slightly, a closed curve of the lips.
She
was looking forward to this, and had a nasty surprise of her own in store. Calm-faced, Havel made a
tsk
sound within. His wife was an excellent fencer, but if she had a fault with the sword, it was relying too much on outsmarting her opponent. That worked…sometimes. Sometimes you had to remind her that the object was to ram a yard of sharpened leaf spring through someone, not leaving them blinking and rubbing their heads in amazement as you turned a double somersault in midair with a fiendish laugh and came down on both sides of them simultaneously.

I've got great confidence in her,
he thought.
The problem is, I've also got great confidence in Sandra over there…and she's years older and miles more experienced than my beloved better half. I'd never try to match wits with her. Smash her skull like a pumpkin, yes: get all subtle and wheels-within-wheels, no.

The President stood. “We are met to consider troubling matters relating to our relationships with our neighbors,” he said. “Therefore—”

Havel let the words flow over him; mostly politician's chatter. His mouth quirked: his sister-in-law Astrid hadn't talked to him for a week when he'd told her why he stopped reading
The Fellowship of the Ring
.

She just hadn't wanted to hear that the Council of Elrond was a classic committee meeting, and a badly managed one at that.

Signe was taking in every word. When she tensed he stopped thinking about modifications he'd like to make in the Outfit's logistics train in the event of a full mobilization and focused once more.

The President of the Faculty Senate was looking at him; as far as appearances went Thomas Franks was a pleasant, balding old buffer in late middle age, and plump in a way you rarely saw anymore, but his eyes were extremely shrewd. Nobody who'd brought so many people alive through the Change and its aftermath could be stupid, to begin with, and he'd been uncomfortably sharp in any number of negotiations since.