A Meeting at Corvallis (3 page)

Though she's
not
going to appoint her brother garrison commander. Sir Jason's too much of a hothead. A pity, since he's intelligent otherwise.

As a gesture, giving her the chatelaine's job would help keep the rest of his baronage sweet, if he had to take action against Molalla. They were developing an irritating attachment to the minutiae of the law, and an even more irritating sense of collective solidarity about their privileges. Step on one, and the others all squalled like scalded cats. He was stronger than any individual noble, but not more powerful than all of them put together.

Less formally, he went on: “Mary, Eddie was a good man, and a friend of mine. I won't forget that he died trying to rescue my daughter from captivity. And you can take it as a promise that I'll see those who killed him pay for it. I'll see that they pay in full—
and to the inch
.”

Mary Liu's blue eyes flared for a moment; she'd grown up in a Society household before the Change, and was only twenty-eight now. He'd noticed that the younger generation took certain things very seriously, particularly those with that background. What their parents had dreamed, they lived.

“I'll rely on that promise, lord Protector,” she said. Her fingers curled into claws. “If you take the Satan-worshippers alive, I'd appreciate your turning them over to
my
court for sentencing and execution rather than the Church and the Holy Office. We…
I
have some experts as good as any of His Holiness'.”

Sandra Arminger chuckled, and Arminger laughed aloud. “That's the spirit!” he said as the crowd applauded. He rose, and caught the eye of two at the rear of the crowd: the merchants from Corvallis. A flick of the head said
later
.

“And now, dinner,” he said. Sandra's fingers came down to rest on his arm, and he turned to lead her up the great curving stair.

Dun Juniper, Willamette Valley, Oregon
December 12th, 2007/Change Year 9

The girl drew carefully, using the shoulders and body as much as the arms. The yew bow bent…

“Bull's-eye!” Mathilda Arminger whooped as the shaft thumped home in the circle behind the wooden deer's shoulder.

“Not bad, Matti,” Rudi Mackenzie said. “Not bad!”

It was late afternoon going on for evening, and overcast. The sudden chill and wet mealy smell in the fir-scented air meant snow coming soon, rolling down the heights from the wall of mountains eastward. Rudi finished another round of practice and then looked up and stuck out his tongue; sure enough, the first big flakes came drifting down, landing with a gentle bite and a somehow dusty taste. Snow was rare in the Willamette, where winter was the season of rain and mud, but Dun Juniper was just high enough in the foothills that it could get heavy falls sometimes, though they rarely lay for long. This would be a big one, by the way the air tasted and felt.

The two children were the youngest in the crowd at the butts; they'd both been born in the first Change Year, and were shooting up with a long-limbed, gangly grace. Rudi was the taller by an inch or two; the hair that spilled out from under his flat bonnet was a brilliant gold tinted with red to her dark auburn-brown, and his eyes somewhere between blue and green and gray to her hazel, but otherwise their sharp straight-featured faces were much alike as they began to shed their puppy fat.

“Willow!” one of the assistants called to a round-faced girl of ten. “Don't hop and squint after you shoot. It won't help.”

The girl flushed as classmates snickered and giggled; she shot again, then did the same up-and-down-in-place hop as before, squinting with her tongue between her teeth and the wet turf squelching under her feet. Today Chuck Barstow Mackenzie, the Clan's Second Armsman, had dropped in to observe. Which made everyone a little nervous despite the fact that he lived here, even if it wasn't as momentous as it might be at some other dun. Now he silently reached over and rapped her lightly on the head with the end of his bow; she flushed more deeply, hanging her head.

The rest of the crowd at the butts ranged from nine or so to thirteen, children of Dun Juniper's smiths, stockmen, carpenters, clerks, schoolteachers and weavers, and of the Clan's small cadre of full-time warriors. Their work was overseen by a dozen or so elder students in their later teens, walking up and down the line offering advice and helping adjust hands and stances, and four Armsmen oversaw them; archery was very much part of the Mackenzie school syllabus, and much more popular than arithmetic or geography or even herblore.

“And Otter, Finn, don't laugh at Willow,” Chuck added. “She shoots better than you do most of the time. Someday you'll have to stand beside her in a fight, remember.” He cocked an eye at the darkening clouds. “All right, it's time to knock off for the day anyway; everyone unstring. Carefully!” he added, keeping a close watch on the process, as did the teachers and their helpers, lest cold-stiffened fingers slip.

There were a couple of quick corrections to those doing it wrong. Rudi braced the lower tip of his bow against the top of his left foot, stepped through between the string and the riser, and pushed down against the bow with his thigh while his right hand held the upper part of the stave steady. That let him slide the string out of the grooves in the polished antler tip—carefully!—with his left hand. There were the inevitable throttled yelps and a few tears from those who'd let go too early or put their stave hands too far up, and so pinched their hands between string and wood even through their gloves, but no real accidents. Even a light child's stave could be dangerous if the wielder let it get away from them, and the tip of a grown-up's war bow would rip through flesh and bone like a spear when it slipped just wrong. That was why you always kept it pointed away from your face when stringing or unstringing, something he'd learned years ago.

“You're getting pretty good, Matti,” he said.

“I always had a bow,” she said. “Not just here.”

“Not a bow like that, I bet,” Rudi said, grinning.

“Yeah!” she said enthusiastically. “It's great. We heard about Sam's bows, even, you know, ummm”—she didn't say
Portland
—“up north.”

The longbow was one of Sam Aylward's; the First Armsman made Juniper's son a new one every Yule as he grew, and last year's was about the right weight for Mathilda. It was his bowyer's skill as much as his shooting that made him known as Aylward the Archer.

It's funny,
he thought.
She learned some things up there—she can shoot pretty good. But not how to look after her own gear. Weird.

They both wiped their bows down with hanks of shearling wool, slipped them into protective sheaths of soft, oiled leather, laced those tight-closed and slid them home in the carrying loops beside their quivers. By the time they'd put on the quiver-caps—getting wet didn't do the arrows' fletching any good—the snow was thick enough to make objects in the middle distance blurry, turning the faint light of the moon above the clouds into a ghostly glow. The thick turf of the meadow gave good footing, but the earth beneath was mucky, with a squishy, slippery feel.

Most of the mile-long benchland that held the Mackenzie clachan was invisible now from here at the eastern edge; the mountain-slope northward was just a hint of looming darkness. They could hear the little waterfall that fell down it to the pool at the base that fed Artemis Creek and turned the wheel of the gristmill, but only a hint of the white water was visible. Rudi cocked an ear at it, humming along with the deep-toned voice of the river spirit in her endless song, and enjoying the way the snow muffled other sounds: the wind in the firs, the sobbing howl of a coyote—or possibly Coyote Himself—somewhere in the great wilderness that surrounded them, creaks and snaps and rustles under the slow wet wind's heavy passage.

The teachers and their helpers chivvied everyone into order on the gravel roadway, counting twice to make sure nobody had wandered off into the woods and fields. Aoife Barstow hung a lantern on her spear and led the way; she was Uncle Chuck's fostern-daughter, a tall young woman of about twenty with dark red braids, and a figure of tremendous prestige with the younger children. She and her brothers Sanjay and Daniel had been on Lady Juniper's great raid against the Protectorate just after last Beltane, when Mathilda had been captured; Sanjay had died on a northern knight's lance point. Aoife had not only killed the knight who did it; she'd cut off his head and waved it in the faces of his comrades, shrieking and possessed by the Dark Goddess the while. Gruesomely fascinating rumor had it that she'd wanted to bring the head home pickled in cedar oil and nail it over the Hall's front door, the way warriors did in the old stories, but that Rudi's mother had talked her out of it.

Chuck mounted his horse and trotted along, quartering behind them and to either side to make sure nobody straggled.

“School's over until after Yule!” a boy named Liam shouted as they walked, which got him a round of cheers.

“I wouldn't mind school, if it were all like this,” someone else said.

“Yup,” Rudi said. “Even arithmetic and plants aren't so bad. It's that classwork about things before the Change.
Bo
ring!”

“Yeah.” Liam nodded; he was several years older than Rudi, but far too young to really remember the lost world. “Presidents and atoms and rockets and all that hooey.”

Chuck Barstow caught that, and reined in beside them. The other children grew a little silent, but Rudi grinned up at the middle-aged sandy-blond rider; Uncle Chuck had been as much a father to him as any man.

But Lord Bear's your real body-father,
he thought, then let his mind shy away from the knowledge. He wasn't sure what he thought of that at all, and he'd only learned it for sure last year at the Horse Fair.

“What about King Arthur and Robin Hood and Niall of the Nine Hostages and Thor's trip to Jotunheim and
A Midsummer Night's Dream
?” Chuck asked.

“Oh, that's different,” Rudi said confidently; there were nods of agreement from those within earshot. “That's more like real life, you know? Those are the
cool
stories. They mean something. They're not just weird names like Liam said.”

For some reason Uncle Chuck gave a snort of laughter at that, and rode away shaking his head. “People that old are
weird,
” Liam said.

Rudi nodded thoughtfully. Of course, there weren't all that many
really, really
old people around at all. They'd mostly all died the year he was born. Uncle Dennis was fifty-eight, and the oldest person in Dun Juniper by a decade. There were only six or seven people here older than Mom, who was forty.

Then he called out to the leader of the little column. “Aoife,” he said. “Do you think all the old folks are weird? I mean, you're grown up but you're not old—not
real
old.”

“Thanks!” the woman who'd turn twenty-one in a few months said.

The lantern wavered a little as she looked over her shoulder, and paused to brush snow from her plaid. “Not really, sprout,” she went on. “I was…just a little older than you are now, at the Change. I remember riding in cars, you know? And TV and lights going on when I pushed a switch…sort of. We were in a school bus when the Change happened, Dan and Sanjay and me; I can remember
that
. But I'm not really sure if I'm remembering all the rest of it, or just remembering remembering or remembering what the oldsters told me.”

That got a chuckle; but then he thought her face went uncertain and a little sad in the white-flecked dimness. “And it gets more that way all the time; more like remembering a dream.” More cheerfully: “But they do go on about it a lot, don't they? Even Dad.”

There were more nods and mutters of agreement.

“Hey, I heard that!”

Chuck's voice came out of the snow-shot darkness. Rolling eyes and sighs were the younger generation's only defense against tales of the days before the Change. There wasn't much point in talking about it among themselves.

“Let's have a song!” Rudi said instead.

That brought enthusiastic agreement; it usually would, among a group of Mackenzies. They passed a few moments arguing over what tune, which was also to be expected. At last, exasperated, Rudi simply began himself and waited for the others to join in:

There were a few complaints, but the song matched the weather, and most of the youngsters took it up with bloodthirsty enthusiasm: