A Meeting at Corvallis (73 page)

Her pictures had also been set out by the bedside. There was a small silver-framed one of her parents and brother, whose whole neighborhood had vanished in one of the first great fires before she got back to Portland. And a fold-out set of three of her and Katrina; one in their Girl Scout uniforms, another taken not long after they entered Lady Sandra's Household, still looking like they had ten pounds between them and starving to death, and a last one six years old, of them both in hauberk and helm, when they'd turned eighteen and been sworn onto the Household rolls as full members and Associates of the PPA. They looked very solemn in that, with their arms around each other's shoulders.

Or so she'd thought, when an expressionless Lady Sandra took the picture, with the very last priceless frame of Zeiss film for the camera. In fact Katrina was holding two fingers up in rabbit-ears behind Tiphaine's helmeted head.

And nobody told me until it was developed!

Someone had also left a golden daffodil on the pillow, with a red ribbon around it tied in the shape of a heart, and another in front of the pictures. Tiphaine picked up the one on the pillow, clipped the stem with her dagger, tucked it behind one ear, and went down into the Hall, smiling quietly to herself and tucking the knot into a pouch at her waist.

I really think I am going to like that girl.

Ruffin and his Joyce had joined the party there, and Ivo and Debbie; they were deep in wedding plans, and Mathilda was listening raptly; the two women rose to give Tiphaine a curtsey before diving in again. Rudi looked frankly bored, and was focusing on his food. She didn't blame him. Debbie was an amiable ditz, in her opinion, but at least smart enough that you didn't
always
want to gag her with her wimple after five minutes of conversation. Joyce was good-natured and loyal and had cheerfully put up with the hardships court and camp held for the leman of a man-at-arms, and was admittedly eye-stopping, sexpot gorgeous in a big-eyed, big-hair, buxom way that had never appealed to Tiphaine. She supposed the woman was very attractive overall,
if
you weren't put off your feed by the very thought of having sex with someone whose IQ was about the same as a large dog's.

Say a golden retriever, but with the added disadvantage of being able to talk and doing it nonstop, mostly about the puppies—pardon me, children—she wants. How on earth does Ruffin stand it? Ah, well, breeders…somebody has to do it,
she thought indulgently, and returned their greeting with a nod.

Everyone gave an odd glance at the flower behind her ear, which was not the sort of gesture she usually went in for, but nobody commented as she took the high central seat and a servant brought her breakfast from the dishes kept warm over spirit-lamps on a sideboard; four eggs, a dozen rashers of bacon, fried green pickled tomatoes, hash browns and toast.

They're good sorts, Ivo and Ruffin,
she thought.
It didn't even occur to them they could dump their girls and find better matches, now that they've got manors in fief. And I can trust them to back me come what may. Lady Sandra knows how to pick 'em.

She sat down and began eating with growing enthusiasm; the cook had heard that she liked her eggs over easy but the whites
weren't
liquid; the bacon was Canadian-style; the hash browns had bits of chili and onion; and best of all her stomach had settled back to normal. Even the chatter wasn't too bad, if you unfocused your ears and just heard it as a happy babble, like a mountain brook.

“We'll get you two settled in today and show you to your fiefs,” she said to the knights, mopping at a yolk with some toast. “And you can swear me homage on Sunday after morning mass. Then we get busy. Sitting on the veranda watching the tenants work isn't on the schedule, and hunting can wait until after wine-harvest. You've got competent bailiffs, and your good ladies can see to setting up housekeeping and finding cooks and shopping for household gear on their own.”

They nodded; Ruffin gave a mock-theatrical groan and then winked at Joyce, who bounced up and down in glee at the thought of being turned loose in the vast warehouses of salvaged luxuries the Association kept for its elite. Several of the nearby males paused to look over at the results of the bouncing, even confined in a cotte-hardi.

Christ have mercy,
Tiphaine thought; one of the few things she and Katrina had disagreed about was whether shopping was fun in itself, or just more fun than standing naked in a hailstorm while juggling live squid.

That switched the conversation from weddings to home improvement; Tiphaine did her best to blur it into background noise, and signaled the servant for another plate. The manors they'd be swearing service for had been in the Protector's demesne since the area was resettled in late fall of the first Change Year, and the spring of the second. That meant a good bailiff, probably picked originally because they knew something about raising food. Norman Arminger had raked the survivors for such from the day he announced his Protectorate, and sent out raiding parties to capture/rescue as many farmers as he could before they were eaten out by the refugees, or just eaten plain and simple, so they could instruct the ignorant urban survivors who made up most of the labor pool and future peasantry—that was one reason for the simple system of five fields per village. But the manor houses themselves would be bare inside, empty and waiting.

When her plate was empty likewise, Tiphaine cleared her throat and spoke: “Yes, Joyce, you can probably get a gold chandelier and a swinging love seat and a four-poster.”

The younger woman recognized the tone and fell silent, still smiling. Tiphaine went on: “Ivo, Ruffin, what
I
want is to get the
menie
in order. Right now what we've got is sorta-kinda good enough to keep one of the Grand Constable's inspectors from blowing through the roof and ordering floggings all 'round. Just. Sorta-kinda is not good enough for
me
. Next time the
ban
is called, the Domain of Ath is going to put the sixty best-trained fighting-men in the Association at my horse's tail if we have to kill them all to do it.”

They nodded enthusiastically, being men who took their profession seriously. “Is that why the Lord Protector picked this fief for you, my lady?” Ivo asked. “He knew you'd slap the garrison into shape and do it quick?”

“That was probably one of the reasons,” Tiphaine said judiciously. “Believe me, there's always more than one reason behind the Protector's decisions, and at least four behind Lady Sandra's.”

“Can Rudi and I come along on the ride, Lady d'Ath?” Mathilda asked.

She'd either learned or inherited her mother's way of making a request sound like an exquisitely polite but definite command nobody could dream of disobeying. Unlike her mother she didn't have the might of the Protectorate to back it up…yet, but she would someday, which was a good thing to keep in mind. Rudi said nothing, nibbling on a piece of toast and doing his best to be beatifically uninvolved. Tiphaine looked at him narrowly.

Well, it would be the best way to keep an eye on him,
she thought.
He did promise, and I think he takes it seriously. Plus keeping him cooped up and going stir-crazy would be the best way I know to make him mad enough to try and run. Of course, he also wants to get to know the area in case he gets a chance to escape within the wording of that realllllly careful promise. But I can't turn Mathilda down without a good reason, and it'd make trouble to make him stay here if she went.

“Sure,” she said.

Mathilda clapped her hands. Rudi smiled, and the gray-green eyes glowed in the shadowed dimness of the tower's hall.

Near Dallas, Willamette Valley, Oregon
April 2nd, 2008/Change Year 10

“T
hanks,” Michael Havel said, gripping Alleyne Loring's hand. “Christ Jesus, but I wish I was going with you!”

The little party of Dúnedain and Bearkillers waited in the gathering shadows beneath the edge of the trees, some already mounted, some holding their mounts' reins. Westward the sun sank over the Coast Range, casting their shadows towards the croplands. Eastward a strategic hamlet stood a mile away, behind its ditch and mound and stone-and-concrete wall, with an A-lister's fortified steading not far off, within mutual supporting distance. As he shook hands with the Bearkiller lord Alleyne saw a bright blink of light from those walls as a militiaman's steel caught the dying light. The rich smell of plowed earth came on the wind, mingling with the fresh fir-sap scent of the great forests westward, and the horse-leather-wool-oiled-metal scent that meant action.

“We'll get him back, sir,” Alleyne said, giving a squeeze back.

The word came naturally; this was a man you had to respect, even if he was a bit of a rough diamond. His wife, on the other hand, was a stunner—not better-looking than Astrid, which wouldn't be humanly possible, but more human. Her blue eyes were steady on his as she nodded; then she stepped forward and gave him a hug, which was pleasant enough even though she was wearing a mail hauberk. Like the rest of ther Rangers, the young Englishman was in mottled camouflage-patterned clothing of green and brown, with a brigandine covered in the same material, and a war cloak rolled behind his saddle. They all carried sword and bow, but this mission could only be done by stealth and speed, not hammer blows.

“I pray to God you do,” Signe Havel said sincerely. “And take care of my little sister, too.” She looked at the others. “All of you take care.”

Havel went on: “I wish you could take more supplies, but you're right to limit the load. Still, it's better than a hundred and fifty miles by the paths you're going to be following, and the mountains can be cold and wet this time of year.”

There were a dozen of them, and only half as many pack horses, beside the riding animals. Alleyne smiled. “By now I've spent enough time in your Oregonian forests to feel quite at home, I assure you.”

“Yeah, well, the Coast Range isn't quite the same as Silver Falls,” he said.

Astrid stirred where she stood contemplating the sunset. “That's
Taur-i-Mithril,
or in the Common Speech—”

“—Silver Falls State Park,” Havel said, smiling his crooked smile. “You take care too, Sis. Get the kid, and get out.”

“We will,” she said, and Eilir and John Hordle nodded. “And it's time to go. We want to get as far as we can before moonset.”

Havel nodded. Alleyne swung into the saddle and turned his mount westward, touching it into a fast walk and bending his head as they passed beneath the branches of the oak at the head of the trail. A last look showed him Michael Havel staring after him, and pounding his right fist into the hollow of his other palm.

Village of Montinore, Tualatin Valley, Oregon
April 8th, 2008/Change Year 10

“Come and hear!” Estella Maldonado said. “Come and buy! Come and laugh!”

She circled the wagon dancing and rattled the tambourine in the air as her mother played her fiddle from the driver's seat, and her brothers juggled cups and eggs and daggers, flinging them high to catch the evening sun. They were slender, dark-haired, olive-skinned young men, dressed
gitano
-style in dark pants and baggy shirts, boots and spangled vests, with kerchiefs bound around their hair and big gold hoop earrings, and daggers—just barely of legal size—thrust through their sashes. She was younger—twenty to their twenty-two and-three—and wore a silk kerchief herself, but her strong black hair flowed waist-long behind it; a flounced scarlet skirt swung around her calves as she swayed her hips, and a red bodice thrust her full bosom up into the low-cut, embroidered white blouse, enough to show an enticing amount without quite bringing down the wrath of some village priest. Her jewelry was gaudy and abundant and quite genuine; it was a convenient way to store the family assets…and fun.

“Come and buy! Come and laugh! Come one, come all, people of Montinore Manor!”

The tinerant wagon—the legal term for its owners was
licensed itinerant
—was a simple box with a curved sheet-metal roof, but gaudily painted. Light trucks had furnished the wheels and springs; four red-and-white oxen drew it. Right now they were lying down and chewing their cuds unconcernedly while her father walked around the vehicle and unfolded the sides. Another much like it followed; that was their sleeping quarters and for baggage, with the family's one horse hitched behind the door in the rear, and a tin chimney through the roof.

Rogelio Maldonado opened the cargo wagon up in cleverly arranged stepped metal trays on both sides, a staircaselike arrangement that reached almost down to the muddy surface of the village green. There was a tempting smell from bottles of perfume, and from trays of spices—curry powder, dried chilies, ground sage and sesame seeds; there were rock candy and crystallized ginger; toys and picture books and tops; cloth in bolts and little cakes of wild-indigo essence and saffron and madder. Ribbons and precious cotton sewing thread (and the newer, distinctly inferior linen variety for those who could not afford it) shared space with buttons and vied with tools and pans and pots and a few luxury foods like potted shrimp and pickled peppers and jams. There were also the miniature anvil and hammers and punches, last and awls, that proclaimed the travelers to be tinkers and shoemakers and repairers of leather goods as well. Bundles of wildflowers hung from twine set along the sides of both wagons, in the first stages of drying to make sachets.

A crowd was already gathering from the homes and cottages along the single patched asphalt street of the settlement below Montinore Manor, drawn from wheel and loom and garden hoe and workbench by the noise and the gear and the prospect of a break in the dull round of days. There were three hundred souls in the village, a little more than average, most of them here on the Saturday half-holiday…
holiday
meaning for most it was time to do for themselves and their families instead of the landholder. A few in the crowd were probably servants from the manor or castle from the embroidered tabards, and a pair were off-duty soldiers in the padded gambesons usually worn below armor for protection, and now keeping their owners warm against the spring evening. She looked around, deliberately waking her memories; when you moved every couple of days that was necessary, or you could get lost because your mind used its map of some other familiar place.

Yes, there was a glimpse of white off to the north and west, over low, rolling hills covered in leafy rows of vines—the manor house, a pre-Change mansion that had been the center of a vineyard estate. A little more west of north, and the brutal exclamation point of the tower of Castle Ath reared over a low hill, flying the black-and-red of the Lord Protector and the more complex heraldry of the new baronet; mountains green and forested rose beyond, and to the west. That was all demesne land. South more vineyards, east the old railroad tracks and the five open fields where the tenants had their strips of land, looking more settled every time they visited as the trees planted along their edges grew.

Hmmm,
Estella thought, considering as she danced.
They're better-dressed than last time. Especially the peons. More shoes, too. And the place looks tidier, the church has been painted. As we heard, there's a new broom here…

The fiddle squealed on as Papa unrolled the awnings above the slanted steplike trays of their goods. He claimed to have a little
gitano
blood, but it was probably not true, though she and her brothers looked the part—which in his rare moments of candor he admitted was what you got when you crossed Sonoran mestizo with small-town Arizona Anglo. The half-believed claim had gotten them help that let them live through the Change—she remembered little of that, since she had been barely ten—and nowadays some of the other tinerants were the genuine article, and it was the fashion among the rest to imitate it. Hiding in plain sight; if you were suspect and despised because you were a tinerant and a gypsy, you'd be less likely to be suspected of witchcraft.

Other than size Montinore village was similar to hundreds of others in Portland's territories, which was no accident; they were built to a standard pattern out of the Lord Protector's history books. The church was brick, and a few of the free-tenant houses were pre-Change, ordinary frame structures covered in clapboard. Others had been moved here, hauled with ox-teams or disassembled and rebuilt. The peon cottages were all new-built from salvaged materials, one room and a loft, with a toolshed and chicken coop attached. Each house was on its own garden plot, a long narrow rectangle stretching back from the road; the tenant farmhouses had barns and byres attached on their larger allotments. There was a mill here, built on a water-furrow from a dam on the creek a few hundred yards away; the wheel wasn't turning right now. The bailiff's house stood near it, and the miller's, the two best in the village with the priest's cottage right behind.

“Come buy!” Estella shouted again. “Come buy!”

Suddenly an off-duty soldier grabbed her around the waist from behind, hands groping at her breasts. “
I'll
buy!” he said, laughing.

You think that's funny, pig? Let's see how you laugh at
this.
But no, better not be too emphatic.

Fortunately he wasn't wearing his hauberk, which would make it easier to reach behind and grab
so
…and then he howled and let her go.

“That would be renting,” she said sweetly, as he bent and rubbed at himself and laughed—it had been more of a playful tweak than a real wrench-and-twist. “Ask someone else, soldier, and don't believe all the stories you hear about tinerant girls.”

Then the steward was there holding his white staff, with the fat bailiff in tow; she let the tambourine fall silent along with the fiddle. Both were looking more sour-faced than usual, and the bailiff's even more loathsome son looked more like a sulky boar than he had the time before.

“You have your permit?” Wielman said.

Her father bowed—the whole family did, except for Estella and her mother, who curtsied. Then he produced the stamped, signed authorization they had for travel and petty trade; it was countersigned by a bishop and several priests, all of them deceived by the ostentatious piety of the Maldonado family. Such permits were something the PPA gave out only grudgingly, and only because they knew that otherwise swapping and barter would go on underground.

Which they do anyway,
Estella thought.
Along with a good deal else, by the Lord and Lady!

“You can stay four days and nights,” he said at last, after checking that the signatures were up-to-date and taking the bag of “gifts” her father offered, along with the regulation fee; the bailiff got another. “We have a new lord…lady…here, so be careful. I don't have the right of the High Justice, but she
does
.”

And nobody would care if she used it on tinerant trash,
Estella thought, grim behind her smile.

Later that night Estella walked away from the bonfire where a sudden
ah
from the gathered crowd said her brother Carlos had swallowed the sword. They had done well today, in coin and in supplies and barter—the miller had sold them three bolts of the lovely woolen twill that his daughters wove and two great sacks of shelled filberts in return for a set of big metalworker's files salvaged from the ruins of Olympia, and they'd picked up enough flour, spuds and flitches of bacon and hams to last for two weeks in trade for sundries. Tomorrow they would start repairing pots and making shoes….

And speaking of the miller and his daughter,
she thought with a smile.
It will be good to see Delia again. I could use cheering up, and she is fun.

Delia waited behind the millrace scaffolding, where deep shadow made the night even blacker, and the fires and noise were comfortably distant; if anyone noticed she'd gone from the crowd around the wagon, they'd suspect the reason, though hopefully not the person, for she'd cheerfully flirted with half a dozen, including the undiscouraged soldier. Water gurgled by overhead, making the spring night chilly and damper than elsewhere, with a scent of wet earth and soaked wood; Estella pulled her shawl over her shoulders.

But she can get us in the mill, which has a nice comfortable pile of grain sacks,
she thought with a warm glow of anticipation.

They exchanged the murmured recognition signals, as much to cater to the younger woman's sense of drama as from real need—both had been raised witches—and the ritual kiss of greeting; both were tailored to be meaningless to someone outside the hidden Coven network. When she tried for a real kiss, though…

Estella laughed ruefully at the dodge; a relationship conducted at month-long intervals just didn't have a long shelf life.