A Meeting at Corvallis (68 page)

Ath was on a hill not far south of the town of Forest Grove and a little west of old Highway 47, just where the Coast Range began rearing out of the Tualatin Valley in green forest-clad heights, walling off the Pacific. Orchards and groves of filbert and walnut had covered it before the Protector's labor gangs came, and still mantled the lower slopes. The castle itself was of a simple design the Association had put up by the dozens as the vacant lands were resettled, and then handed out to knight and baron; unlike many, it hadn't been enlarged. In the southeast corner of a walled enclosure stood a rectangular tower whose outline was about the size of an ordinary suburban house, but four stories tall; smaller round towers stood at the other three angles, one of them sporting a metal windmill whirling at its peak to keep the reservoir filled. The gate ran in beside the main keep, with portcullis and drawbridge, and a dry moat full of barbed wire and angle iron surrounded the whole; the wall itself was crenellated and half the main keep-tower's height, and it enclosed an acre and a half.

North and east and south the castle commanded a broad view of land where patches of cloud-shadow drifted over smaragdine brightness in an infinite variety of greens, dappled by occasional squares of red-brown plowed land. It was good to be back from the wild lands and the dead cities, back among the fields that fed mankind. Fingers of higher, treeclad ridge stretched out into the rolling farmlands; those were busy now with ox-teams and people planting barley and oats and potatoes, and sugar beet for the new factory in Forest Grove.

My
barley,
my
oats, and
my
potatoes. My cows, and wheat, and vineyards…my
farmers,
for that matter,
Tiphaine thought.

It was pleasing and daunting and exciting at the same time. And the Lord Protector and Lady Sandra certainly hadn't been cheap about it; there were barons without much more than this, and most ordinary landed knights had a lot less.

It can be sort of disorienting when you finally
get
what you've been aiming for. I'm twenty-three. What do I do now? Do I want to be…oh, Mathilda's right hand and her Grand Constable and bone-breaker when she's Lady Protector?

On south-facing slopes peach trees were in blossom; sheep grazed beneath on the crimson-clover sod. Swaths of the grassland below the castle walls were bright with yellow daffodils. Down by Carpenter Creek a mile northward, horses and black-coated cattle drifted through the meadows; southeast lay a big block of vineyard drawing square regularity over rumpled land. A hamlet of frame cottages with ditch and bank around it stood on the south side of the roadway that led west to the castle gate, and anxious-looking civilians and their families in their best tabards stood there, waiting to greet her—those would be the castle service staff, most of whom lived outside the wall in normal times. The castle garrison and
their
families were inside the gate, in the courtyard, the men drawn up in ranks for inspection.

Or would I rather just sit here and enjoy my life? Get in some hunting and hawking, read a few books, play my lute, drill the troops…maybe find some nice girl and settle down to quasi-clandestine bliss?

A six-year-old in double tunic and tabard with ribbons in her hair clutched a bouquet of early wildflowers and daffodils eked out with ferns, and what was probably her brother led a pretty, plump and spectacularly well-groomed lamb with a bow around the neck; their parents discreetly pushed them forward.

The steward grew formal once more, going to one knee for an instant: “Lady, I deliver to you the estate.”

He had a big book of accounts under his arm, and touched it reflexively as he rose. “You have forty-six hundred acres of field, pasture, orchard and vineyard, and pannage and forest rights and rights of venery in the mountains; fishing rights at Henry Hagg Lake; three villages and the castle settlement; two hundred thirty-two families of free tenants, bond tenants and peons, eight hundred and ten souls in all; two gristmills, a sawmill and a fulling mill, a tannery—”

“Thank you, Goodman,” Tiphaine said; that was what you called civilian commoners of just below Associate status. “I
did
read the accounts. We'll go over them together in the next few days, and I'll be riding around the estate to familiarize myself, and to settle Sir Ivo and Sir Ruffin on their fiefs. Now, I presume my quarters are ready, and those for my guests?”

She indicated the carriage that followed in her train, a four-horse closed model built before the Change for the tourist trade. These days it was a symbol of wealth and power sufficient to make anyone thoughtful; modern equivalents weren't nearly as comfortable yet unless you had the limitless resources of the Lord Protector or his consort.

“Yes, my lady, as the message instructed; and we've been preparing a feast. If I may say so, the quarters in the Montinore manor are much more comfortable. I've had what gear I could brought up here as your messenger instructed, and we've been working hard on putting things in order, but the castle is simply…”

“More suitable in a time of war,” she pointed out. “And my guests are Princess Mathilda and Rudi Mackenzie.”

Wielman's eyes bulged. “The princess…
here,
my lady? And the son of the
Witch Queen
?” He recovered quickly and bowed, sweeping a hand sideways; it wasn't his place to question her. “Please, my lady, enter and take possession.”

Tiphaine swung down from the saddle, the skirts of her hauberk clashing against the shin-guards. “I'd better accept the bouquet and the lamb first. Wouldn't do to disappoint the moppets.”

At least they don't have a choir,
she thought as she jerked her head slightly to the man behind her. She didn't exactly dislike children, but preferred them past the age of reason and in the background at that. When you wanted to play with something, a dog was usually better, and it didn't grow up to be surly and ungrateful.

Ivo walked his horse forward to hand a wrapped cloth bundle to one of the garrison. The soldier took it and trotted away; a few instants later the cords along the tower's flagstaff worked, and the banner broke out at the top.

“Sable, a delta or over a V argent,” the steward said respectfully, as her new arms took the air over her citadel for the first time, silver and gold and black. “What is the symbolism, my lady?”

“V for the Virgin Mary, of course,” Tiphaine answered gravely.

I thought Lady Sandra would do herself an injury laughing,
she thought.
And she suggested a pair of crossed keys with a fist beneath them, middle finger extended, that would be only a little more explicit…going to be lonely leaving the Household. Even more lonely.

It had been half a year since Katrina died. They'd been together since the day ten years ago when their Girl Scout troop was left in the Cascades by the Change; they'd made it back to Portland together, and together they'd managed to penetrate the Protector's security. He'd wanted to kill when two starving fourteen-year-olds woke him up in the middle of the night and demanded a job, with the bodyguards none the wiser. Lady Sandra had laughed then, too, and said no, that they would be far too useful to waste.

Always together until Kat went off to rescue the princess.

Since then she'd learned that you didn't die of loneliness. You even got used to it, and the pain of being abandoned faded to a dull ache. The need for revenge didn't, though.

Well, that's something I know I want to do. Someone
else
is going to die of my loneliness, and Kat…I know
just
who.

Castle Ath, Tualatin Valley, Oregon
March 16th, 2008/Change Year 9

“T
his is sort of cool,” Rudi said. “I like this better than Todenangst already.”

Then he looked over at the girl beside him. “And your folks really didn't want to send you away, you know. They're just busy. That happens with my mom sometimes, and your mom and dad have a lot more to look after.”

Mathilda wiped her forearm over her eyes and smiled.

“Yeah, I know. Sometimes it just sucks when your parents have jobs like that, doesn't it?”

“Oh, tell me,” Rudi said. He waved at the huge dappled stretch of countryside. “This is great, though.”

“Well, I think it's even better from the Dark Tower at Castle Todenangst,” Mathilda said judiciously. “But this isn't bad.”

“That's the only thing I really don't like about home,” Rudi said. “Even from the gatehouse towers, all you can see is the meadow and the mountains. But that's sort of the point—it's hard to get at.”

Mathilda frowned slightly. “Then why do our castles have such great views?”

“I remember something Sir Nigel said,” Rudi said. “Castles aren't just for stopping someone attacking you. They're bases to go out and fight people and control places, and for that you have to see the ground around.”

“We sure can!” she grinned, tapping the heavy tripod-mounted binoculars.

They'd graced some tourist lookout-point once. Now they were part of a surveillance and message system that linked most of the Protectorate's castles, from here to Walla Walla and north to Puget Sound.

“Yeah, it's like being a god or an angel or something, with these.”

They had a box to stand on, which let them reach the eyepieces, and a helper—what they called a varlet here—to move the tripod around for them.

The forty feet of the tower and the two hundred and fifty of the hill gave a splendid view of a countryside that was subtly different from what he was used to, looking like a painting tinted with old gold as the sun dipped towards the Coast Range westward. He could see two villages from here, with their houses and barns, worksheds and mills, surrounded by truck plots. Farther out each had a set of five large fields; winter wheat, spring oats or barley, roots like turnips or potatoes, and two in clover for grazing and hay. Strips within each marked family holdings; there were meadows beside the rivers, and the vineyards and orchards mostly where pre-Change convenience had put them; manor houses had a big farm attached, the demesne. The main roads were well kept; potholes patched with asphalt, gravel and grading maintained on the smaller ones.

A train of ox-drawn wagons loaded with unknown boxes and sacks passed in the middle distance, heading south towards the railway stop there. Heading north was a troop of half a dozen horsemen; he looked through the glasses and saw it was a knight in bright tunic and tooled leather with golden spurs on his heels and a peregrine on his wrist. Beside him was a lady riding with divided skirts and embroidered leggings showing beneath, as gaudy and as haughty, bearing a goshawk; as he watched she unhooded it and the bird mantled, wings splayed for an instant before it leapt skyward in a torrent of strokes.

Rudi sighed; and again when he pivoted the binoculars westward. Barely two miles in that direction was trackless forest. Literally trackless since the hand of man was withdrawn, as lumbering roads were overgrown, and clearcuts sprawled into impenetrable tangles of undergrowth taller than a man through which Douglas fir and hemlock and red cedar saplings pushed. He could…

Nah. Make a realistic threat appraisal, the way Unc' Sam does. I'm a kid. Sure, I'm really, really good in the woods for a kid my age, but they've got some
real
woodsmen here. And Lady Tiphaine isn't just good, she's
scary.
They'd catch me and then they'd lock me up all the time. If someone does come to rescue me, that could screw everything up. The Luck of the Clan will help me, if I'm smart and wait for the Lord and Lady. Gotta be like Coyote, always waiting for the right moment for a trick.

The top of the tower was a featureless rectangle, fifty-five feet by forty-five, covered in thick asphalt paving, broken only by the trapdoor and a metal chimney in the middle of the eastern side, and by the turntable-mounted throwing engines crouching under their tarpaulins at each corner. They walked over to the western edge and looked down, Mathilda sitting casually in the gap between two merlons, with Rudi leaning by her side. The fighting platform on the inside of the circuit wall ended a dozen feet short of where it joined the tower's second story; the gap was covered by removable footbridges that ended in thick steel doors. A full-scale metal drawbridge joined the ground floor of the tower to the courtyard over a ditch bristling with sharpened, rust-reddened angle iron that surrounded the tower-keep on the inside. The drawbridge was down now, and the gates wide open, but two spearmen stood by the entrance.

Houses and barracks and workshops lined the inside of the wall, along with a chapel, all built in thickly plastered and whitewashed cinderblock, plain and serviceable; there were paved pathways, but most of the courtyard was graveled dirt. Savory smells came from the kitchens; scullions bustled in and out, and outside over pits full of white-glowing oak coals two yearling steers turned on spits, along with shoats, sending wisps of blue smoke skyward as cooks basted and brushed. Others rolled barrels up pairs of beams thrust slantwise through cellar doors. There was a cheerful bustle in and out through the main gates; relief was in the voices as well, for nobody had lost their post, and the new seigneur had ordered a feast on a scale that showed she wasn't the sort to squeeze every silver dime until it squeaked. The tenants and peons would pay for all in the end, but at least the staff would get a good feed out of it.

A female knight was very rare, but not enough to be bizarre or totally unheard-of, even as a fief-holder. And this one had the prestige of rescuing the princess, and capturing none less than the son of the Witch Queen, and having the favor of the Lord Protector and Lady Sandra.

Tiphaine d'Ath was busy at something else, over by the pells and targets where the castle garrison trained. Rudi grinned, and Mathilda did too: one of the men-at-arms froze in midstroke. Even at this distance they could tell how his face went white as new cheese under a weathered tan. The razor tip of his new liege-lady's sword rested very lightly against the throat of his mail coif; a slight push would crush his larynx, or even pierce the mail—she used a sword with a lighter blade and a longer point than most in the Protectorate.

“Not bad,” she said, stepping back. “But you can all use some work with the blade, particularly the pointy bit on the end. A hint: it's supposed to go into the other guy. Any of you infantry care to try a bout? You'll have to use a sword sometimes as well as crossbow and spear.”

Sir Ivo and Sir Ruffin were grinning as well, where they stood with their shields slung over their backs and their crossed hands resting on the pommels of their own drawn blades. None of the men-at-arms had been able to beat either, even Ruffin with his not-quite-completely recovered left arm, but some of them had lasted more than a few seconds. Then the new Lady of Ath had offered a hundred rose nobles and a promotion to anyone who could beat
her
….

“Tiphaine made them all look like dancing bears,” Mathilda giggled.

“Yeah. She's
good,
” Rudi said; he blinked away a memory of Aoife's neck suddenly running red, and her eyes going wide in shock. “I think maybe Aunt Astrid's better, and maybe Lord Bear, but maybe not. And she's smart, too. Now they'll all go around boasting about what a swordswoman their new liege is.”

Mathilda gave him an odd look. “I thought she was just making them look silly, and they'd hate it,” she said.

“Well, yeah, she made them look like clowns. But they don't…you know…
feel
silly if she's Scathach come again with a sword,” he said, blinking a little; he'd thought it was obvious. “Warriors are like that. If their leader can beat
them,
they want to believe they can beat anyone else easy, and that makes them feel sort of proud. It's a bit funny when you say it out loud, but that's the way it works, I guess here too.”

“Yup,” she said thoughtfully. “And I suppose 'cause Tiphaine's a girl, she has to show that she's better than anyone real quick.”

“Well, yeah, around here, I suppose so. Dumb.”

“I wonder if we could get her to tutor us with the sword, while we're here?” Mathilda said, still thoughtful. “Mom said we'd have a tutor for book stuff soon but she didn't say anything about phys-ed. I want to be real good. Like you say, it'll be handy someday. And it's fun anyway.”

Matti's no dummy,
Rudi thought with approval.
A Chief has to think of things like that.

“Her friend Katrina was your tutor, wasn't she?”

“Yup,” Mathilda said. “Arms, gymnastics, and riding. I don't know if she was
that
good—” She nodded towards the exercise ground. “I was only just eight back then, you know, too little to know much. But she and Tiphaine used to spar a lot, and people would come to watch. They did all sorts of things together.”

“Like Aoife and Liath,” Rudi said absently.

Down below, the row of spearmen and crossbowmen were respectfully declining more practice bouts with Tiphaine d'Ath; several of them were smiling as they did so. She nodded to the two knights, and both of them attacked immediately, not wasting time on preparations beyond unslinging their shields. He leaned over the parapet and wished he were a little closer, absently hooking a hand into the back of Mathilda's belt as she bent forward as well.

There was a fast, violent clash, steel-on-steel and beating in sharp cracks on the big kite-shaped shields, and then Ruffin's blade went flying as a shield edge slammed into his forearm just above the wrist. People dodged the pinwheeling length of sharp metal; sparring with real battle swords was a bit of a show-off thing. But even then they kept looking as Tiphaine drove Ivo before her; at last he leapt forward, trying to knock her back shield-to-shield, and she spun like a dust devil, tripped him neatly and tapped the point of her blade between his shoulders before helping him up.

“Well, not
really
like that,” Mathilda said; then her brows flew up in shocked surmise.

Rudi looked up at her. “Oh? I
thought
it was probably like that—I can usually tell things about people, you know. But I can't be sure, 'cause I never, like, saw them at the same time.”

She frowned, and looked over to see that the varlet was out of hearing distance. When she spoke it was quietly: “You'd better not tell anyone else you think that,” she warned. “You could get her into a
lot
of trouble.”

“Oh? Oh, yeah. Sure, no problemo. Tiphaine's not so bad.”

Mathilda hesitated. “I'm sorry about Aoife and Liath. They were great, and…I sort of think it was my fault. If I hadn't gone under the trees—”

Rudi let the grief flow through him and past him. “It wasn't your fault, Matti. I mean, we were right there, only a mile and a half from the gates of the dun. Who could have known? Even Uncle Dennis just said not to go beyond the watchpost, and we didn't get that far. Tiphaine and her bunch pulled it off really slick.”

The garrison cheered and shouted as they watched the brief, spectacular match, then formed up again; Tiphaine addressed them with her sword blade resting on her right shoulder, and the other hand on her hip, shield with its new blazon hanging off her left by its
guige
.

“Sir Ivo and Sir Ruffin are damned good. I won't settle for anything but the best in my
menie,
” she said. “So you're all going to be working hard from now on. When the call comes, you're going to be facing pikes and crossbows or Bearkiller lances or Mackenzie longbows, not wooden posts and targets. Anyone who doesn't like the idea can go hire on with someone else, like maybe as bouncers at the Slut and Brew in Portland.”

That got a general laugh, and blades flourished in salute. “And now let's get cleaned up before the feast; I don't know whether this gambeson is trying to drown me or marry me, and if I get any hungrier I'm going over there to hack that cow apart personally. Dismissed!”

She sheathed the sword without looking down, then passed weapons belt and shield to one of the varlets. The smile was off her face as she turned to look up at the tower top; the wall was casting shadow over the courtyard, but her hair still burned bright in a stray beam.

Yeah, gonna have to be
real
careful,
Rudi thought, ducking back.
She doesn't fool easy.

Then his stomach rumbled; it had been a long while since the picnic lunch in the carriage. Mathilda punched his shoulder.

“Let's get ready for dinner,” she said. “I'm clemmed.”