Chapter Six.

Dun Juniper, Willamette Valley, Oregon.

December 17, CY22/2020 A.D.

"You poor man," Juniper said, leaning forward and putting her hand on Ingolf's.

The easterner looked wasted again as he stopped. Rudi frowned; he wanted to know about the sword.

First and foremost if it's real, he thought. That was a wild tale!

A glance at his mother's face brought him back to a host's obligations. She frowned at Ingolf's silence, then leaned forward and tapped him on either cheek.

"Uh!"

His eyes were wild and blank for a moment. Then he licked dry lips and took the cup of hot borage tea she pressed on him, drinking with a trembling hand and spilling a little.

"Sorry," he said huskily. "Haven't... I tried to keep from thinking about that." He swallowed again. "So, I'm crazy, right?"

"This sword," Juniper said. She met his eyes and held them with her own. "It was a longsword, double-edged, with a guard like a crescent moon, and a pommel of moon-opal held in antlers. Is that it?"

Rudi's breath caught. She had shared that vision with him, but as far as he knew with no other. A great re laxation came to Ingolf's face, as if some tension were unwound at last.

"Christ, I'm not crazy, then?"

"No, my poor Ingolf, you're not. It's far worse than that."

Just then Aunt Judy walked into the hall. She gave an angry hiss as she saw Ingolf's face, came up and took his pulse. Then she examined his eyes; he moved his face obediently to her prodding, passive as a child.

"Juney, are you trying to kill my patient? I said he could talk, not be wrung out like a dishrag!"

"I'm sorry, Judy," Juniper said meekly. "We can stop now."

"We certainly can! I want this man in bed, now. I'll get some green oat milk in wine to calm him."

"I want-" Ingolf began.

"You want a good night's sleep, so you can tell us the rest tomorrow," Juniper said. "We've a guest room ready for you here in the hall. And Judy's word is final on matters of health!"

Unprompted, Rudi came forward and helped the other man rise, then took an arm around his shoul der. When they'd put Ingolf to bed he stopped in the corridor outside the guest room and looked at his mother.

"Who's the sword for?" he asked bluntly.

Juniper looked at him, and he was shocked to see that the leaf-green eyes were full of tears.

"Oh, my son," she whispered. "You know as well as I. What did they call Mike, your blood father?"

The Bear Lord.

"And what did the Powers speak through me, when I held you over the altar in the nemed?"

He didn't need to speak that, either. That was when she'd named him Artos, in the Craft. And... to himself, he whispered what she'd said: Sad winter's child, in this leafless shaw Yet be Son, and Lover, and Horned Lord!

Guardian of my sacred Wood, and Law His people's strength-and the Lady's Sword!

"I don't want to go," he said softly. "I thought... not yet." His eyes went out past the walls of his home. "I'm not a boy anymore, Mother."

They both knew what he meant; that he was old enough to know how easily and quickly a man could die. Ingolf's tale had rammed that home anew. He went on: "And I don't want to leave you and Father and Maude and Fior bhinn," he said. "Or the Clan, and home. Someday, yes, but. .. not yet."

Love and sorrow warred in Juniper's eyes. "I don't want you to go either, my darling. I just don't think you've much choice."

Rudi's temper flared for a moment: "I thought we were the Lord and Lady's children, not their slaves!"

Her palm reached up to cup his cheek. She was a full nine inches shorter than he, but he felt like a child again at the gesture. Then she tweaked his ear sharply and he jumped.

"Yes, we are Their children," she said. "So are cock roaches... and crocodiles... and crocuses. We are not the sum whole of the scheme of things! So don't be thinking that They'll necessarily favor you, any more than I'd put you before your sisters."

"Sorry, Mom," he said after a moment. A grin. "I've been hanging around with Christians too much, sure and I have. Nice people, a lot of them, but they've got a strange way of looking at things."

"Oh, my dearest one," she said.

Her voice choked a little. Suddenly he noticed how many gray threads there were in the mane that had always been so fiery fox-red.

When did that happen? he asked himself, and put an arm around her shoulders. She turned into it and rested her forehead on his chest.

Her quiet voice went slowly on: "And They can be as harsh as sleet and iron, as the wolf in winter and Death itself. They have given you so many of Their gifts for a reason. And a man who refuses a duty They lay on him is... not punished... but... forsaken. And he will never know love or honor or happiness again."

He shivered at the look in those infinitely familiar green eyes; they were looking beyond.

Then they squeezed shut, and tears leaked out, sparkling in the lamplight; she grabbed him by the plaid.

"But how I wish you didn't have to go to that dread ful place! I am so frightened for you, and it will only get worse!"

"There, and I was just grousing," he said, holding her close and remembering her rocking his troubles away. "I'll come back with a shining sword and fine tale, since the Powers would have it so. It's just that I would have them be a bit more open about the reasons for it all!"

Rudi Mackenzie dreamed. The air was sweet and mildly warm, smelling of earth and growing things; some crop that grew in leafy blue-green clumps stretched to the edge of sight in neat rows separated by dark, damp turned earth. A well-made road ran through it, neatly cambered with crushed rock, and a milepost stood nearby. It was granite, hard and smooth, and the rayed sun on it was cut deeply, but time had still worn it down until the shape was visible only because of the slanting rays of the real sun setting in the west.

A crack and a wretched gobbling sound came from behind him. He turned, or at least his disembodied view point did. A score of... creatures... were working their way down the rows of the crop.

They look like men, he thought absently.

A little; they stood on two legs, and their hands held tools, digging sticks of polished wood set with blades of smooth stone. But their legs were too short and the arms that hung from their broad flat shoulders too long, and the heads sloped backward above their eyes. Those eyes were big and round, on either side of a blob of nose and set above big chinless thin-lipped mouths; it made them look like children, somehow, and the more horrible for that. The naked bodies were brown, sparsely covered in hair.

A nondescript-looking man with a loose headcloth covering half his face rode a horse behind them, a long coiled whip in his hand. He swung it again, seemingly to relieve his boredom; the creatures were working steadily and well, jabbing the sticks downward in unison every time they took a step forward. Another worker jerked and moaned as the lash laid a line across his shoulders, then turned his too big eyes down and drove the stone-headed tool into the earth again.

No. They're not men, but their ancestors were, Rudi's bodiless presence thought.

Then he woke. Shudders ran through him, and he could feel sweat running off him to soak the coarse brown linen of the sheets. That turned chilly quickly in the damp cold air of winter. The girl who was sharing his bed had awoken too; she snapped a lighter on the bedside table and touched it to the candle in its holder.

"What a dream." He gasped, clutching at the blanket as if it would help him keep the shattered, fragmented images clear. "My oath, what a dream!"

"It must have been, Rudi!" Niamh said.

Her blue eyes were wide as she tossed back tousled straw-blond hair. Like half the people in Dun Juniper she was an apprentice from somewhere else, in her case studying under Judy Barstow. They'd been friends and not-very serious occasional lovers for years; she didn't want anyone long term here, since she planned to go back home to Dun Laurel when she was consecrated as a healer.

"You clouted me a bit, thrashing around the now, and I couldn't wake you."

"Sorry, Niamh," he said contritely, shaking head and shoulders and letting the dream go. "Maybe it was just a sending from the fae."

Who weren't all kindly, he knew, particularly those from the wildwood. Looking around grounded him; he'd slept in this room ever since he stopped using a pallet in his mother's. It had a cluttered look and a lot of souvenirs; there was his baseball bat and glove-he'd been first baseman for the Dun Juniper Ravens Little League team as a kid-and the images of the Lord and Lady over the hearth he'd carved when he wasn't much older.

A shelf was stuffed with his books and ones he had out from the dun's library. A stand in the corner held his armor and weapons.

The blanket was of his mother's weaving, done while he was a captive of the Association in the War of the Eye, a bit worn now but still beautiful with its subtle pattern of undyed wool in shades of white and brown and gray. He smoothed it and lay back.

"What was it, then?" she said, yawning and laying her head on his shoulder. "A sending? Or just a dream?"

"It's never just a dream," he said. "But... you know how it is."

She nodded. There were dreams, and then again there were dreams, and deciding which meant what was as important as it was difficult.

"On the whole, I think it was the Powers telling me to get my shoulder to the wheel and my arse in gear." He sighed.

"Oh," she said. Then: "Something to do with that cowan Ingolf?"

His mouth quirked in the candlelit dimness; cowan was a term for those who didn't follow the Old Religion... and not an altogether polite one, either.

"So much for secrecy. Yes, but don't ask me anything more about it ... yeeep!"

"Anatomy. I'm just studying anatomy."

Castle Todenangst, Willamette Valley Near Newberg, Oregon January 14, CY22/2021 A.D.

"Yes, I gave them hospitality in Gervais," the dowager baroness of that holding said, glaring at the three faces across the broad malachite table from her. "Why shouldn't I?"

She was a gaunt woman with gray streaks in her blond hair; Sandra thought the green silk of her long cotte-hardi dress went badly with her rather sallow complexion.

The Lady Regent of the Portland Protective Asso ciation answered calmly: "Why? Because it would have made me look very bad if it came out that a noblewoman of the Protectorate had done that, particularly if this man they attacked had been killed... and our own children were there. Questions raised in the Lords. Questions raised in Corvallis at the next Meeting. Embarrassment, fines laid on the whole Association... I do not like being embarrassed, Mary. Do you understand?"

Sandra was an unexceptional woman in her fifties, pe tite and round-faced. Her stare could still make others flinch; it did now.

"I understand, my lady regent."

"Good. Then don't let it happen again. You have my leave to go. In proper form, Mary, " she said.

The baroness halted, made a sardonically precise curtsy that bowed her head just a hair more than manners required, and stalked out.

Sandra steepled her small elegant fingers and cocked her head a little, looking at the door through which Mary Liu had just gone in high dudgeon. It was massive, of light-colored oak over a solid steel core, and Liu hadn't been able to slam it, which must have annoyed her no end.

"Do you know the problem with the Dowager Baroness Gervais?" the Lady Regent asked.

Conrad Renfrew, Count of Odell, took a walnut out of the bowl on the table between them and cracked it between finger and thumb, tossed the nut meat into his mouth and thought for a moment while he chewed.

"Is the problem that she's an evil, murderous, spiteful bitch who's conspiring with these assassins from the cow country?" he replied meditatively.

He was a thickset man in his fifties who'd always been built like a fireplug and had put on a little solid flesh lately. He wore casual-formal dress, a wide-sleeved shirt of snowy linen beneath a brown T tunic cinched with a studded sword belt, and loose breeches tucked into half boots; a heraldic shield on the tunic's chest held his arms-sable, a snow-topped mountain argent and vert. His face was hideous with old white keloid scars, his eyes blue under grizzled brows, and his head as bare as an egg with less need of the razor he'd used in his youth.

"No, that's not the problem," Sandra said, toying with one of the trails of her silk wimple.

"She's a stupid, evil, murderous, spiteful woman who can't even speak a simple English sentence without translating it into High Formal Bitch?"

"No, she's bright enough. What she lacks is self knowledge. I, for example, am fully aware of the fact that I'm an evil, murderous, spiteful bitch. And that I like it that way. Mary Liu just thinks she's hard done-by and never given her due and has to stand up for her rights in a hostile, unfeeling world. And her habit of self-delusion leads her to do things that are quite unwise. Attempt ing to deceive me about helping this Prophet fellow, for example. If I said, 'Mary, darling, as one evil bitch to another-don't...' Why, she'd be quite insulted."

All three of the nobles sitting about the table in the presence chamber chuckled. It was in the Silver Tower, sheathed outside with pearly granite originally stripped from banks in Portland and Vancouver when Castle Todenangst was built by the Lord Protector's architects and labor gangs in the second and third Change Years.

That color scheme continued within: white marble floors, light silk hangings, elegantly spindly furniture of pale natural woods or antiques salvaged from mansions and museums in the dead cities, only the rugs providing a blaze of hot color. A workshop in Newberg had spent two decades rediscovering the secrets of Isfahan and Tabriz carpets, but with modern themes: local wildflowers, hawks among trees and tigers creeping through reed beds beside the Willamette.

The air smelled slightly of jasmine and sandalwood; the closed windows kept the noise of the great fortress palace and the cold bright January day at bay, leaving only the slight hissing of the gaslights and an occasional gurgle from the recessed hot-water radiators behind their screens carved with scenes from Le Morte d'Arthur.

Conrad of Odell cracked another nut, dropping the shells into a Venetian-glass bowl.

"Stop showing off, Conrad," the third person said. "So you can still crack walnuts with your fingers. So what?"

She put one on a ceramic coaster and tapped it open with the plain brass pommel of her dagger; the two halves of the shell fell neatly apart. Then she continued: "Big fat hairy... hairless... deal. You're Lord Chancel lor now, and I'm the new Grand Constable. Breaking things is my job, and the method doesn't matter as long as the job gets done."

Tiphaine d'Ath-Baroness d'Ath in her own right, very unusually for a woman in the territories of the Port land Protective Association-was the youngest present by fifteen years, which put her in her mid-thirties.

In contrast to Lady Sandra's headdress and long skirted cotte-hardi of pale silk and dazzling white linen, she wore male garb; in her case, black silk and velvet, with arms of sable, a delta or over a V argent in the he raldic shield on her chest. Her face was calm, as it usually was: strong-boned, with pale gray eyes and hair so fair it would take a long while for the first gray strands to show, worn in what another age would have called a pageboy bob. She was tall for a woman, just under five ten, built with compact long-limbed grace. Some people called the Regent the Spider. They called her hench-woman Lady Death, in a pun on her title.

Nobody laughed. It wasn't that sort of joke.

" I'm not spiteful, in any case. Murderous, evil and a bitch, yes; spiteful, no," Tiphaine added, taking a sip at her glass of wine after eating the nut.

"Some would say a duel a month for six months shows a certain amount of spite," Renfrew said, smiling; she'd been his protege too, if not for so long as she had been Sandra's. "Particularly since you cut them to ribbons and they died by inches, screaming. Quite a performance; you couldn't have done better with a dungeon and its entire staff. Fulk De Wasco looked like he was naked and nailed to the floor even while he still had his sword."

"No, that was policy, not just fun. If Lady Sandra wanted me as Grand Constable, since I'm a woman I had to kill some of the more inveterate assholes, and in a way that would intimidate the others. A sword through the throat doesn't scare them enough; they're mostly too stupid to be cowards. Doing a little prelimi nary carving and trimming around the edges does give them pause for reflection at the closed-casket funeral, for some reason."

"Everyone knew you were good with a blade," Ren frew said. "Even Norman realized that, and he wasn't what you'd call the equal-opportunity type."

"He was smart enough to believe his eyes, when he didn't let his obsessions get in the way. With some people you need to use visual aids to make a point. I'm still a freak of nature, but I'm a freak they don't dare to diss."

A long-haired Persian cat jumped up on the table. Tiphaine dumped it unceremoniously down; Sandra smiled slightly.