"Watch and learn, children," he said.

He'd brought in a fair amount of bark, as well as deadwood; the bark was from some fortunate mountain larch trees, thick and furrowed and fairly fire-resistant. He tied sections into a rough hollow square tube, reinforced it with sticks, and thrust the completed article up along a crack in the rock at the edge, through the sloped saplings and the snow on top of them. More of it made a smoke hood beneath the improvised chimney, and then he got a small fire going on the floor. Flickering reddish light opened out the little chamber they'd made, seeming to push back the noise of the storm a bit. The men stripped off their outer garments and hung them from the saplings, making added insulation and an opportunity for them to dry as well.

"Well, we're not the first here," Edain said grimly, as he spread the boughs across one corner of the overhang.

What had seemed like another brown rock was in fact a skull. The bone was clean and dry, long since picked bare by insects and decay; the gold in the teeth gleamed in the firelight.

Ingolf nodded. Edain reburied the remains, and Rudi made a sign over it and murmured a few words he didn't catch. None of them were much put out; you still found the like pretty well everywhere except places where people had lived since the Change to clean things up. A lot of people had died that year, and skulls lasted.

The fire cast a grateful warmth. The little shelter would have been habitable without it, given the depth of snow piling up outside to insulate it. But it certainly helped to have their own temporary hearth.

"This is a good trick," Rudi said, grinning at Ingolf. "Home away from home."

"Well, I wouldn't go quite as far as to call it homelike, if you take my meaning, Chief," Edain said. "I'll remem ber the way of it though, if I'm ever caught out like this again."

"I learned it from an old Anishinabe named Pete-Pierre, actually-Pierre Walks Quiet. He worked for my father," Ingolf said. "Wandered in from the north woods a couple of years after the Change and ended up boss ing the Readstown forests for us-timber runner, look ing after the game, stuff like that. He helped teach me woodcraft when he took me and my brothers on hunt ing trips... and scared the bejesus out of us with stories about the Windigo. We get a lot of snow, and we get it every damned year."

Rudi stretched and yawned. The sun was probably barely down outside, but they were all ready for rest.

"I'm part Anishinabe myself," he said. "One-eighth. My father's mother's mother was Ojibwa. My blood father came from your part of the world-farther north and east a bit, if I remember the old maps."

Ingolf nodded. You wouldn't have thought it from the way the young man looked, except maybe the high set of his cheekbones and the slightly tilted eyes.

"And I'm a member in good standing of the tribe called hungry, " Edain said.

He mixed meal from a bag in his pack with melted snow and set the dough on a thin metal plate over the fire that he greased with a pat of butter. It rose and browned, filling the shelter with a mouthwatering smell that was not quite like baking bread but close enough; Ingolf felt his hunger return as warmth and the scent reminded him of just how much effort his body had put out today. The meal was premixed with baking soda and a little salt, a Mackenzie trick he admired; it gave you something a lot better than the usual travelers' ash cake.

The rest of their supper was the last of the pork chops and trail food; after today they'd be down to leathery, salty smoked sausage for meat to go with the hard cheese and dried fruit. Oatmeal and some of the fruit went into a pot of water, to cook overnight in the ashes and be ready for breakfast.

"When you're hungry enough, this all tastes good," Rudi said.

"When you're hungry enough, your bootlaces taste good," Ingolf said tolerantly. "Hope we don't come to that on this trip."

Though we probably will, sooner or later, he thought, and went on aloud: "Now for another trick."

He'd collected the saplings he needed along with the firewood, and he had plenty of leather thongs in his pack; a few minutes' work gave him two teardrop-shaped snowshoes, a little crude but usable. The Mackenzies watched carefully as the shavings peeled away from the wood beneath his knife and he tied the ends together and knotted the webwork across. The only tricky part was the square opening in the middle and the loop to catch the toe of a boot.

"I've heard of those, but I've never actually used them," Rudi said, turning one over in his hands. "Skis yes, sometimes, snowshoes no. Not much call for them down in the valley."

"There's nothing like them for deep snow in the woods," Ingolf said. "Especially when you don't know the ground; you've got better control than you do on skis, even if it's slower. Your turn."

He watched closely, but the two younger men were both good with tools and used to handling wood and leather, and produced passable if not elegant results.

Then they played paper-stone scissors to see who'd take which night watch. Nothing was likely to hit them from the outside in weather like this unless it was a par ticularly mean bear, but someone had to keep the fire carefully, given the combination of open flame and the tinderbox materials of their shelter.

Then the two Mackenzies made their evening prayers; it made Ingolf feel a little self conscious about the way he'd gotten lax over the years, so he said a rosary. It would have made old Father Matthew smile, anyway.

"Wish we were over the mountains already, though," Edain said, wrapping himself in his sleeping bag and stretching out on the crackling, sweet scented boughs. A smile: "Mom told me not to get my feet wet, you see."

Garbh curled up against his stomach; now that it wasn't so cold in here it smelled powerfully of wet dog, the wet leather of their boots and gear and the tallow that greased it, and the more pleasant scents of fir sap and the sputtering coals and the slowly cooking oat meal. Even the muted howling of the wind was comforting, with a full belly and a soft place to sleep.

"Wish we didn't have to leave at all," Rudi added. "Curse the Prophet and whatever it was you saw on Nantucket both, Ingolf. Nothing personal."

"Not much point in cursing it, any more than the weather," Ingolf said, twisting to find a comfortable position. "Mind you, times like this I wish I was settled down somewhere with a nice warm girl and a good farm, myself."

"No, it doesn't help... but cursing it makes me feel a little better," Rudi said, flashing him a grin.

"I'd settle for the nice warm girl right now, meself," Edain said. "Not that you two aren't good compan ions for the trail, but you're a mite hairy and smelly for perfection."

"Bite your tongue," Rudi said. "You might be camping out with my half sisters."

"No offense, Chief, but..." Edain said, and shuddered theatrically.

"You two done much traveling together?" Ingolf asked. In other words, "Why did you pick this kid?"

"Just a wee bit, you might say," Rudi said. "And he was with me up at Tillamook last year, when the Haida hit us."

"So was Garbh," Edain said, and thumped the dog's ribs.

"Yeah, but she wasn't so useful," Rudi said. "Tell the man about it, Edain-we're all going to be together a long time, and we need to know one another."

"Chief-"

Modesty, Ingolf decided, listening to the protest in the tone. Who'd'a thunk it?

"Wait a minute," he said. "Wasn't that the fight where Saba's husband got killed?"

"Sure and it was," Rudi said. "He was on a trading trip; the Brannigans and their kin are all good at that. Myself and Edain and a few friends had been travel ing up north, seeing the sights, you might say, and went along with Raen and his wagons for the last bit when they headed to Tillamook. I know the baron there, and could introduce them. Then..."

Edain stayed silent. Rudi snorted. "You tell him or I will, boyo!"

"Everything was fine until we got to the coast," Edain said at last, starting slowly, as if dragging things out of the well of memory that wanted to stay submerged. "This was... by the Wise Lord, more than a year ago now. Fall of the year before last. We were riding along and singing-"

County Tillamook, Portland Protective Association Coastal Oregon October 1, CY21/2019 A.D.

It was upon a Lammas night When corn rigs are bonny Beneath the Moon's unclouded light I lay awhile with Molly...

The song died away, muffled in the clinging mist, and they rode on in silence; though usually you couldn't get four young Mackenzie clansfolk to shut up, riding abroad for adventure and strange sights. The air was too thick, and the way it drank sound made the song forlorn.

I feel like a ghost, Edain Aylward Mackenzie thought, peering through the fog.

Then he shivered a little at the thought, spitting leftward to avert the omen and signing the Horns. Thick morning mist off the sea puffed and billowed about them, and moisture dripped from the boughs of the roadside trees. Drifts wandered over the graveled way; the fetlocks of the horses stirred it like a man's breath in smoke. Slow wet wind soughed through the Coast Range firs behind him, louder than the sounds of the little caravan's hooves and wheels; the Association baron and Rudi Mackenzie rode directly ahead.

"These clansfolk have come all the way from Sutter down to see about your cheeses and smoked salmon," Rudi said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder towards the wagons. "Not to mention that attar of roses stuff you wrote about. If trade's not below your notice, Juhel."

"Men with wheatfields and vineyards in their demesne and Portland on their doorstep can afford to get picky about derogeance, " the young baron growled. "What I've got is trees, grass, cows, potatoes and fish. God has given this land and these people into my charge-and now that I'm Anne's guardian, the whole of goddamned County Tillamook's on my plate till she's come of age, not just Barony Netarts. It's up to me to see to it the people prosper. I'm sick of courtiers making jokes about Tillamookers in wooden shoes."

Edain listened and snorted quietly to himself. He'd seen enough in this visit to know that any Association aristo would say that sort of thing, and a lot of them were right bastards all the same. Evidently Rudi thought this one meant it, though-he'd gotten to know the man while he was up north in Protectorate territory on his yearly visits.

That was why Juniper Mackenzie's son and tanist had agreed to speak for the wagon train's owners. Edain and his three friends had come along for the fun of the thing, this being after Mabon and slack time on their parents' crofts. There were casks of Brannigan's Spe cial and carved horn cups from Bend and raw turquoise and such packed in the wagons, and blankets and cloaks woven on Mackenzie looms-his own mother's and sister's among them.

He let the conversation blur into the background noise of hooves and wheels on gravel and looked around instead; he'd come along on this trip with Rudi to see new things.

That I have! he thought.

The ruins of Salem, the steel gates of Larsdalen, great empty-eyed skyscrapers in Portland staring like lost spir its of the past at the present-day pomp of tournament and court, the majesty of the Columbia gorge and hang gliders dancing through it like autumn leaves, Astoria and its tall ships and crews from as far away as Chile and Hawaii, Tasmania and New Singapore and Hinduraj...

And the sea, the Mother's sea. And whales! And sea lions!

His eyes went left, towards the ocean about a mile away. The great gray vastness of the Pacific was out of sight now-fog still clung in drifts and banks over the flat green fields of the Tillamook plain.

It gave them glimpses as if curtains were drawn aside for an instant and then dropped back. They rode past drainage ditches and levees and rows of poplars with leaves gone brown-gold and the skeletal shape of a windmill that pumped water to dry out the soggy land. Cows with red and yellow and brown coats grazed between rose hedges, mostly on the rich grass of the common pastures; now and then there were fields that looked like reaped oats, and potatoes; others bore ranks of rosebushes, an odd looking thing to be grown like a crop, and he wished he could see them in summer's glory.

He could smell the sea, though, the wild deep salt of it, and the rich silty scent of the vast salt marshes on the seaward edge of the plain. They were full of wildfowl at this time of year too, and the gobbling and honking and thrashing of their wings came clear.

A village passed, stirring to the morning's work and giving off a mouthwatering scent of cooking and baking; there was a roadside calvary; then a manor's sprawling outbuildings, and ahead the gray concrete of a castle's tower on a hill, with the town walls of Tillamook glimpsed at the edge of sight when a gust parted the fog for a mo ment. A fisherman had told them there would likely be an onshore breeze most mornings. The view would be better from the castle where they'd be guesting...

And I'm sharp set for breakfast.

They did an excellently good veal and potato pie here, and fine things with seafood you couldn't get in the Clan's home territory.

The baron's young son dropped his pony back from where the talk had turned boringly to trade. His father's men at-arms and crossbowmen rode on the left side of the road, and the four Mackenzies who'd come with Rudi on the right, and behind it all the wagons and the clansfolk from Sutterdown who were wrangling them. He angled back towards the fascinating strangers and gave a would-be regal nod.

"The best of the morning to you, young sir," Edain said.

That was polite enough, and Mackenzies didn't call anyone lord -even the Chief herself herself, the Mac kenzie, much less some foreign kid in strange clothes.

The boy was dressed in a miniature version of his father's green leather and wool hunting garb, down to the arms in the heraldic shield on the chest of his jerkin-a round cheese one-half sinister, with a Holstein head dexter, a crossed sword and crossbow below. He also had a real if boy sized sword; otherwise he looked like any tow-haired and freckled seven-year-old.

"You guys sure talk funny," the lad said seriously.

"And sure, we think you northerners are the ones who talk funny," Edain replied, exaggerating his lilt and winking.

The youngster laughed, but Edain did think that; the Portlanders' accent was flat and a little grating to an ear accustomed to the musical rise and fall the younger clansfolk put into English, and the nobles here sprinkled their talk with words from some foreign language in an absurd, affected fashion.

The boy threw a look at their kilts and plaids and bon nets; Rinn Smith and Otter Carson had painted up too, with designs on their faces in black and scarlet and green and gold-designs of Fox and Dragon, for their sept to tems. Not from serious expectation of a fight, but to play to the Clan's image and look fierce for the outlanders. Rinn thought it impressed outlander girls no end, often onto their backs in a haystack, to hear him tell it, but then he was a boaster who'd have worn himself away to a shadow in the past couple of weeks if everything he claimed was true.

And he's not traveling with his girlfriend.

"And you wear weird clothes, too," the nobleman's son went on. "Even weirder than Bearkillers or the people from Corvallis."

"They are strange there," Edain agreed gravely. Though not so strange as you Portlanders.

"You've been to all those places?"

"To most of them. The wagons have come direct from the Clan's land, but the young Mackenzie and we have been wandering with our feet free and our fancy our only master for weeks now, and only joined them these last days."

Pure sea-green envy informed the look he got. "Cool! I'm going to go to be a page at the Lady Regent's court in a couple of years, in Portland and Castle Todenangst and places. So I can learn to be a squire and then a knight and stuff. That'll be cool too."

Edain found himself grinning; he'd come into the wide world himself now and seen some of the wonders of it, but to the lad this little pocket of farm and forest by the sea was the world, just as Dun Fairfax had been to him at that age. More so, because he'd had Dun Juniper just an hour's walk away, with all its comings and goings, and the Mackenzie herself dropping by to talk with his father. This place was a backwater.

The boy drew himself up then, consciously remembering his manners.

"I'm Gaston Strangeways," he said, left hand on the pommel of his miniature sword. "Son and heir of Baron Juhel Strangeways-Lord Juhel de Netarts, guardian of County Tillamook, with the right of the high justice, the middle and the low."

"It's an impressive array of titles, that it is," Edain said, and they shook hands solemnly, leaning over in their saddles.

"And his father was a knight, too. Even before the Change. He died a year ago, the same time the count did."

Edain had suffered through hour after hour of tedium in the Dun Fairfax school from his unwilling sixth summer to glad escape at twelve, and some of the pre-Change history lessons had rubbed off.

"I don't think they had knights or barons or counts before the Change, the old Americans," he said. "They had lobbyists and presidents and consultants instead."

"In the Society," young Gaston said. "Granddad told me about the tournaments and things." Then he cleared his throat and went on formally: "Welcome to our lands."

Edain grinned again; toploftiness like that was irritating from a grown man, but funny when it was a kid.

"And I'm Edain Aylward Mackenzie," he said. "My sept's totem is Wolf."

The boy's eyes went a little wider. "You're Aylward the Archer?" he said breathlessly.

Then an accusation: "You're not old enough! The Archer fought in the Protector's War, and my dad wasn't old enough for that. Granddad fought in that war and he got his limp then."

"That's my dad you'd be thinking of," Edain said, a little sourly. "Sam Aylward, first armsman of the Clan. Well, he was until a couple of years ago."

Hecate of the Crossroads and Him called the Wan derer, hear me; now wouldn't it be a braw thing to travel far enough that people think of me when I say my name's Aylward! I love my dad, but it's like being a mushroom growing on an old oak, sometimes.

"Oh. Well. That's cool too, you've got ancestors... Did the Archer make your bow? Can I see it?"

"He did that, and you can. Careful now! It's well oiled with flaxseed, but I'd not want to drop it in this wet."

Edain reached over his shoulder and slid the long yew stave free of the carrying loops. It was strung, and the boy tried to draw it after he'd admired the patterned carving of the antler horn nocks and the black walnut root riser. The young Mackenzie let him struggle with it, and there were chuckles from the rest of the clansfolk as the youngster handed it back and said gravely, "That's a pretty heavy draw." He looked at Edain as he returned it. "I've heard a lot about Mackenzie archers. Is it true you guys are witches and can make magic, too?"

"Well, I'm not much of a spell caster myself, beyond the odd little thing to keep the sprites and the house-hob friendly, or for luck when I'm hunting-"

"I shot a rabbit with my crossbow just last week. It was eating the cabbages in Father Milton's garden."

"Sure, and if the little brothers won't mind your gardens, that's what you must do. Also a rabbit is good eating."

"Could you teach me a spell for luck when I'm hunting?"

"Mmmmm, I think your Father Milton might not like you making luck spells, so you'd best ask him for a prayer to your saints, instead. We're followers of the Old Religion, which you are not," he said, touching the Clan's moon-and-antlers sigil on his brigandine.

Then he glanced aside at his lover, Eithne.

"Now, this one you'd better be careful of!" he said, teasingly solemn. "A priestess of the second degree! She can sing a bird out of the bough, and 'chant a cow's teats to give butter ready churned, and blind a man's eyes with love by a rune cut on a fingernail. The fae themselves give her a wide berth, hiding beneath root and rock unless she bids them fetch her tea and spin wool for her, the which they do in fear and trembling before her power, so."