A Meeting at Corvallis (75 page)

Castle of Ath/Hag Lake, Tualatin Valley, Oregon
April 15th, 2008/Change Year 10

Tiphaine let the tune die, leaning back against the pillows with a calf over her knee, idly strumming the lute, watching Delia sew for a moment before she spoke: “You know, sweetie, your dress sense is a lot like Lady Sandra's. At least, you pick the same sort of stuff for me that she used to tell me to wear when I was in the Household. Black with white and gold accents for me, brown and russet and silver for Kat—Kat had dark hair and fair skin and blue eyes, like you.”

Bright morning light streamed in through the narrow eastern window; sunrise and sunset were the best-lit times in the tower bedchamber. The air was cool and fresh, made more so by the sprays of cherry blossom in vases on tables and mantelpiece and the headboard of the bed.

Delia replied as her fingers moved deftly with needle and thread and fine cambric linen: “So, what's she really like? Lady Sandra, I mean?” she asked, holding the fabric up. “Besides having good taste in clothes. I brought her some hot rolls once, that my mother baked, when the consort was visiting Montinore Manor. I was really nervous, I was just fourteen then, and she said
thank you
very nicely. I thought she was wonderful.”

Lucky you didn't meet her husband, then,
Tiphaine thought, surprised at the surge of protective anger she felt.
Hey, I guess I really
do
like her a lot.

The girl continued: “Is she really sinister and cruel and evil, the way the stories say?”

Tiphaine reached over and took a stem of raw asparagus from a bowl by the table that also held the first snowpeas of the season, and crunched on it, savoring the fresh, intense, nutty-green flavor, like eating springtime, or what she imagined fresh grass tasted like to a horse. She looked at the file of accounts tossed aside on the bedcover; they kept saying
you're in the nobility now, tra-la,
anyway; that didn't make them less boring but it did help.

“Sinister? Yup, in spades. But I wouldn't say
cruel,
exactly,” Tiphaine said thoughtfully. “She's certainly pretty evil, though.”

She tuned the lute and played a trickle of notes. Now, how to sum up Lady Sandra…slither of minor key, plangent, fading to something soft and wild…you couldn't really get fingering complex enough. A harpsichord might be better for it.

Delia considered the loose-sleeved linen shirt critically, bit off a thread and stuck her needle in the pincushion. “There!”

She rose from the chair beside the swept and empty hearth and handed the shirt to Tiphaine. The design around the neck and down the seam of the sleeves intertwined the letters PPA and the new arms of Ath, the black and gold and silver stitching neat and precise.

“Did she treat you and your friend badly?” the younger woman went on, turning to one of the cupboards as if to hide the flash in her eyes. “Is that how you know she's evil?”

Tiphaine smiled at the indignation in her tone as she set down the instrument and bunched the linen. “Nope!” she said through the fabric.

Then, as she pulled it down, laced up the three-quarter opening in front, buttoned the cuffs and tucked the tail into the new black doeskin riding breeches she was wearing: “She took me and Kat in, protected us from everyone, got us training and education that nobody else would have. Taught us plenty herself, too. Being around Lady Sandra sort of forces your wits along, like starting this asparagus early under glass frames.”

Delia smiled over her shoulder as she sorted through the clothes with quick, skilled fingers. “Then she's really a nice person underneath, like you.”

“Oh, I'm pretty evil too, sweetie. I'm just nice to
you,
which isn't the same thing at all.”

Delia laughed; so did Tiphaine.
Though she's laughing because she thinks I'm teasing, and I'm laughing because I'm not.

“If she's so evil, why did you work for her?” the seamstress said.

“Well, since I'm evil too, it sort of makes sense…”

Delia made a rude gesture with two fingers and stuck out her tongue. Tiphaine went on, more seriously: “It's my duty; she's my liege-lady, and I owe her, big-time, so honor requires it. Plus in this world we've got you're either on top of the heap or on the bottom, and I prefer to be the one on—”

She stopped: Delia was looking at her with an exaggerated innocent-surprise rounding of the eyes, making a rosebud of her lips and laying one index finger on it, the picture of astonishment.

“
Stop
that!” Tiphaine said, laughing in earnest now. “I am
not
that bossy in bed!”

She threw a stem of asparagus; the girl caught it and ate it, then tossed back the thigh-length sleeveless jerkin she'd picked out for the seigneur of Ath. It was black-dyed fawn-skin, even slighter and more supple than doe-leather, finished like soft suede and lined with thin silk; the delta and V of her arms was done on the front in gold and silver thread, with a mandarin collar closed by a gold button. Tiphaine pulled it on and tugged it into place, swung her legs over the side of the bed to buckle on her boots, slung the lute over her back on its ribbon and walked over to the floor-length mirror.

“Ohhh,
not
bad,” she said, and tossed back her shoulder-length hair, still slightly damp from the shower. “Not bad at all.”

“You are one babelicious chick-magnet, Tiphaine d'Ath,” Delia said, with a chuckle. “And that outfit looks very sinister and…andyrowgenerus?”

“Androgynous,” she supplied, turning and preening slightly. “And no it doesn't. I never was boyish, even at fourteen, just athletic.”

To herself:
She's so smart I forget she can't read very well, sometimes. I must do something about that.
Formal education for people below the Associate level wasn't illegal, just sort of seriously frowned on except for bright children picked for the Church.
Nobody would really mind with a miller's daughter, though.
It wasn't as if she was a peon; the family trade required literacy and arithmetic. So would supervising the domain's cloth-making enterprise.

The seamstress-weaver nodded critically, circling behind her, examining the clothes with professional skill and tugging down a hem, then went on with a thoughtful finger tapping at her jaw: “Well, it looks nice and sinister and
evil,
which I suppose is
good,
since you say you're evil and all. And it does so look andyer-iogenous to me. I mean, nobody could mistake that gorgeous ass for a guy's, but you could bounce a rose noble off it, and the way the jerkin sets off your shoulders and legs against the tuck of your waist and the bosom—”

Tiphaine nodded:
I suppose it
does
look that way, these days. It's sort of a different effect now that most women don't wear pants very often.

Delia handed her the sword belt—her second-best one, with monochrome tooling rather than inlay and a cut-steel buckle, since she was going out for a ride and a picnic, not to a festival—and she put it on, settling it fashionably just above her hips and just below the waistline. The sword was new, made to her preferences by the best war-smith in Forest Grove and layer-forged from fillets of mild steel and tough alloy; double-edged but relatively slender, with a yard of blade tapering to a long, vicious point, checked-ebony hilts and a silver fish-tail pommel. She speed-drew it and did a quick figure-eight flourish, making the air hiss as she neatly snipped off a spray of cherry blossoms and cut it in half again before it fell an inch. Then she sheathed the sword again with a sweet
tiinngg
as the quillons kissed the metal rim of the scabbard.

“Beautifully balanced,” she said with satisfaction, tucking one bunch of the flowers behind her own ear and one behind Delia's; the miller's daughter was wearing her hair in braided coils over the temples. “I don't
care
what the Period Nazis say; the fifteenth-century model is just way more effective against anyone wearing decent armor than those Franco-Viking meat cleavers.”

She grinned reminiscently. “One time Conrad Renfrew—this was at a tournament, I'd just cleaned up the intermediate foot-combat event—asked me if I didn't have any respect for the Norman broadsword. He was sounding sort of indignant, and I bowed and told him,
My lord Count, if I ever have to butcher an ox, the broadsword shall be my
first
choice.”

Delia sighed and began to dress herself; her interest in swords roughly matched Tiphaine's in furniture. Looking at the asparagus and snowpeas, she said: “Mind if I have the rest of these?”

“Sure, sweetie. I was only eating them because they're fresh,” Tiphaine said. “You know, I remember a few things from before the Change—”

“That's more than I do,” Delia said, pulling on knitted hose made for riding, with leather inserts on the insides of the thighs, what Tiphaine had heard Sandra call a bastard cross between pantyhose and a sweater.

She paused to eat a stick of the asparagus. “All I really remember is the Change, the way it hurt inside my head, and then being hungry and afraid and Mom and Dad hiding us. I used to remember more, but it gave me bad dreams. And then the Association came that fall…at least we had food, and we went to work helping to build the mill.”

Tiphaine shuddered slightly; she had certain memories of her own about those first months that she'd
like
to be able to forget, and the dreams had gotten less frequent but never gone away entirely. Particularly what had happened to Ms. Darroway, their troop leader, when she got an infected cut on her leg after leading them in fighting off a bunch of would-be Mountain Men who thought a Girl Scout troop was a gift from God. Things had gotten really bad after the wound went gangrenous and she died, until Tiphaine and Kat took off on their own…

With an effort of will, she shook herself back to the present: “Well, what I was going to say was that I really like the taste of cherries, you know—”

She stopped and made an exasperated sound at the other's wide-eyed expression, then laughed; it was hard to look guilelessly surprised when naked to the waist and holding a stalk of asparagus between the teeth, but Delia was bringing it off.

Tiphaine extended an arm and index finger at her: “You were not! Not,
not
!”

Delia curled her tongue around the asparagus, bit the stalk in half with a flash of white teeth, gathered the pieces into her mouth without using her fingers and then slowly licked her lips, keeping up the innocent stare in the process.

“God, that has
got
to be the most lascivious thing I've ever seen!” Tiphaine shook her head, slightly dazed. “Anyway, back then you could get fresh fruit out of season, even if you were just an ordinary person; I remember my mother buying peaches and grapes and things at Christmas. Now I'm rich and I can't have cherries until June. Not even the Lord Protector and the Consort could.”

The seamstress finished pulling on her own tunics; for riding, the longer undertunic was split, with a flap that could be buttoned over to close it when on the ground. That and the leggings were the respectable female's solution to riding astride, though some Associate-rank women wore men's clothing for the purpose and a few used a sidesaddle, which was the only way you could back a horse and wear a cotte-hardi at the same time. Lady Sandra's opinion of
that
was short and pungent, and she'd outright forbidden them at court, with the Protector's backing because sidesaddles weren't period. Of course, cotte-hardis weren't eleventh century either, more like fourteenth, but they'd become firmly established before Norman Arminger noticed.

Against fashion, even tyrants struggle in vain,
she thought.

“So,” Delia said, putting on her own belt, which had a knife with a legal four-inch blade, the universal tool of the countryside. “If Lady Sandra's sinister and evil but really sort of nice, what's the Lord Protector like?”

The smile died on Tiphaine's face. Wordlessly she extended her hand, palm up, then slowly curled the fingers into crooked predator talons that quivered with the tension in her tendons and strong wrist.

Delia swallowed, silent for a moment. “It's sort of hard to remember sometimes that you're…one of…
them.
”

“Them?” Tiphaine asked.

“The castle-folk—Association people.”

Who, we both know very well, aren't too popular with a lot of commoners,
Tiphaine thought.

She didn't answer, but instead took a moment to put on her hat, the usual rolled-edge affair with a long palm-broad tail of black silk down one side, and Lady Sandra's livery badge of the Virgin and the Dragon at the front in silver. Today she turned the tail up under her chin and pinned it on the other side, which would keep it from flying away completely in a high wind or a gallop.