The Given Sacrifice

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Morrowlander Scout Pack Domain

(Formerly Yellowstone National Park)

High Kingdom of Montival

(Formerly western North America)

August 15th, Change Year 26/2024 AD

The glider blazoned with the crimson bear’s-head whispered by overhead. Sunlight blinked from the canopy as the wings waggled, once and twice and thrice; then it banked off, caught an updraft, and spiraled up into the sky.

“OK, cousin Alyssa, message received,” Mary Vogeler said, waving broadly with her sword in one hand for emphasis and to catch the light as well. “Company’s coming.”

Then she repeated it aloud and in Battle Sign, and the word was passed on from mouth to mouth, quietly and without visible stir. The Dúnedain Rangers were out in force for the great hunt, along with the other scouts and light troops. The day was only just warm even in high summer, for this rolling volcanic plateau rose seven thousand feet above the level of the sea; nights would make bedrolls and fires very welcome, though actual hard frost was unlikely for another month.

Somewhere a work party was singing at their labors, in the Noble Tongue:

“East and west of the Misty Mountains

North and south of the sea-”

Mary smiled; it was good to be back among her own folk for a while. She’d been travelling and adventuring among strangers for a long time by the time they got back from the Quest, and even since. Spending some time in Mithrilwood would be even better, badly though Aunt Astrid’s absence was felt there. . though she had to admit that this part of Montival was just as comely. Mountaintops winked eastward, icy teeth stretching towards a sky aching blue and streaked with high white mare’s-tail cloud.

The rolling ground around was mostly grass tall and lush and green, starred with yellow sand lily and thick drifts of crimson Indian paintbrush, yard-high purple bunches of fringed gentian and more. There were occasional stumps or the remnants of logs in the grassland, charred and rotting; this land had a natural burn cycle that pushed it from forest to prairie and back. Already there were clumps of aspen and tall slender lodgepole pine up to forty feet high on the most favorable locations on south-facing ridges. They’d cut some of those and erected tripods to hoist up the carcasses of the bison and elk and black-tail deer; if gutted and drained they would keep acceptably for days in this climate.

There were dozens of the tripods in use within sight, and teams of horses dragging in more bodies. This was strictly killing for meat, just methodical hard work like farming. Very much like slaughtering season in the fall, in fact, down to the collective thanks-and-apology prayer. They’d used screens of beaters to drive the herds onto the waiting spears and bows. Even upwind the smell of blood was strong, though clean enough, mingled with the smell of grilling kidney and liver, the strong-tasting organ meats that went off so quickly and were the rights of the hunter. They’d dug trenches for the guts, once the dogs had gorged themselves into a stupor, and the hides were stacking up, to be used to wrap around butchered, quartered carcasses for easy transport.

Mary still felt slightly guilty, since they’d be wasting so much valuable sausage casing, horn and fat and leather and sinew and bone, not to mention the brains that could be used for tanning. The Valar recognized that humankind had a right to eat just as the other carnivores did, but they disapproved of wantonness with the gifts of Arda and Eru the Creator.

This is rich land and we’re not taking the calves or young females, she thought a bit defensively. The herds will bounce back quickly. For that matter, the way the herds are composed shows that someone is cropping the wildlife here, and someone who knows what they’re doing, too. You see the same thing in Mithrilwood or our other steadings. I think I know by whom, too.

The Lakota had been most impressed; they lived by ranching as much as anything these days with a little gardening here and there and some crafts, but they managed the swelling buffalo herds of the makol, the high plains, very carefully.

Nobody was alarmed at the message from the glider; she wasn’t the only one tasked with waiting for it, and anyway they had a perimeter of guards out and everyone was on the alert. If nothing else, the killing had brought every opportunistic predator in the area out hotfoot, and when wolf-packs and grizzlies and tigers got the scent of blood, you had to be cautious.

Oh, wolves usually didn’t attack adult human beings, unless they were cornered or mad-hungry or had some other good reason. . but usually was the operative word and it was their idea of a good reason that counted. Not to mention what would happen if they caught you alone with a broken leg. Grizzlies were another matter. Oldsters said it was amazing how fast they’d realized that guns weren’t a problem anymore. And all tigers were either man-eaters or their descendants, since that was the game they’d survived on right after the Change, the easily caught meat that tided them over while they gradually learned how to live in the wild once more and then bred and spread explosively.

It was difficult to imagine the landscape she’d grown up in without tigers. That would be like seeing it without dandelions or tumbleweed or sparrows, but apparently the ancients had just liked keeping big cats around in pens for some reason and be damned to the risk to their descendants’ children and dairy cows.

They were. . strange back then. Very strange.

Ingolf came up, naked and still running with water. He’d stripped as most did while working his turn on the butchering and then he’d gone for a dip in the nearby pond to clean off. That was much easier than getting blood out of cloth or, even worse, leather.

“Oh, now you’re tempting me to neglect my duty,” she said, giving her husband’s hairy, muscular, glistening six-two a long look; just the right height for a woman who was five-ten herself. “It’s not the time to drag you into the bushes, more’s the pity. The Expected Guests are on their way.”

He was carrying his clothes and gear strapped up into a bundle in one hand, but he put them aside while he dried in the mild warmth. He also had a bunch of smoking skewers in his other hand, and juggled things to hand her one.

“And here I thought you were reading the life-story inscribed into my tattered hide,” he grinned, with that boyish look she’d always liked.

He did have a remarkable collection of scars; you could tell he’d been flogged once, knotted white tracks that told of a barbed whip. That had been the Cutters. And the thick white mark across his shoulder had been them too, a triad of assassins pursuing him into Sutterdown. If you knew wounds that one told you how tough he was, to have lived and healed. He’d gotten that the night she first saw him, in Brannigan’s Inn. There had been something about him, even then.

She touched the patch over the socket where her left eye had been. It gave them something in common.

“The scars just show you’re a survivor type, lover, fit to make excellent babies,” she said, and stood hipshot for a moment, looking out at him from under a fall of yellow hair and putting a hand behind her head. “It was your manly charms I was thinking of.”

“Good thing that water was cold,” he grinned.

“Oh, we’ve managed. Remember that little waterfall?”

“My back hurt for days, but it was worth it. Here, keep your strength up.”

She took the skewer, blowing and biting off a chunk. “Mmmm!”

There was nothing quite so good as fresh buffalo liver taken right out of the beast and onto the coals with no seasoning but a little coarse salt; richly meaty, but with a very slight tang of musky bitterness. Even buffalo-hump and kidney pie wasn’t quite as tasty.

“Remember that time we were with the Lakota for their summer hunt, on the Quest? Around the time they did that adoption thing with the tent and the sweetgrass?” she said.

“I’m not going to forget that, Yellow Bird.”

“Iron Bear backatcha,” she grinned.

In fact they’d both taken that ceremony quite seriously. They ate in companionable silence. After a few minutes there was a coded whistle and five figures came trotting towards them from the westward through the waist-high grass, where a dark green line marked the beginning of the thick forest. Two wore Mackenzie kilts with a pair of enormous dogs loping at their heels, two were her sister Ritva and Ian in Dúnedain field gear, and the last was a young man in Boisean Special Forces camouflage outfit.

“Cole,” Mary called with a grin and a wink and a raised index finger: “Cousin Alyssa just paid a call. That girl chases you in aircraft.”

“She gave us the heads-up first,” Cole said, stolidly ignoring the teasing; Boiseans could be annoyingly businesslike at times.

But then, so can Bearkillers, so maybe they deserve each other. Manwë and Elbereth witness we were right to move in with Aunt Astrid.

Ingolf handed out more of the skewers; Talyn gave a sharp no when Artan and Flan looked interested, whereupon the dogs completed their sniff-and-greet and flopped down with sighs. As far as they were concerned it was a wonderful day to do nothing in particular but enjoy a well-fed nap in good company. There were times she thought that dogs were more sensible than human beings.

“Company?” Ingolf asked.

“Yeah,” Cole said. “Sneaky company.”

Ritva rolled her eyes and nodded with her mouth full, and Ian spoke:

“If we hadn’t had warning, we wouldn’t have known a damned thing. As it was, we just had time to make it look like we’d seen them a mile off. I think they were pretty disappointed. Anyway, they said their Council emissaries would be showing up soon and then faded away again.”

Cole frowned thoughtfully: “I don’t think they know about aerial reconnaissance at all. Apart from that. . perfect technique.”

Talyn rolled his eyes and juggled one of the sticks of hot meat. “Ochone, the black pity of a Mackenzie hunter and First Levy warrior being surprised! Still, this is their home ground, and doubtless the spirits of place-”

He made a gesture of propitiation and tossed aside a fragment of the liver.

“-help them. They’d not do so well about Dun Tàirneanach, that they would not.”

“Not unless you were drunk,” Caillech said dryly. “Like that time you swore you missed a deer with two heads by an inch and saw it run off north and south. That was just before the Lady Flidais bore you off to her bower of love, I do not think.”

Ritva nodded. “Only guy I’ve ever met who successfully snuck up on me came from around here. He was working for the Prophet at the time. . but I don’t think it was a love-match. I kicked his ass in the fight, and he did tell me about sis being in trouble so I could save her life again-”

“Which just made us even,” Mary said. Lightly, but she shivered a little inwardly. The man who’d cut the eye out of her head had been technically dead at the time, and if Ritva hadn’t known-

“-but it was close. Far too close for comfort,” Ritva said soberly.

Ingolf grunted. “Now we find out how they’re going to jump. I do resent that he tried to carry my sister-in-law off.”

“Well, you carried me off,” Mary pointed out.

“The hell you say,” Ingolf replied. “As I recall, you won me from Ritva at dice.”

“She cheated-”

“I cheated?”

“-one or both of us cheated, so we did rock-paper-scissors,” Ritva said helpfully. “Nobody can cheat at that. . well, maybe Rudi could, but he wouldn’t.” Virtuously: “And we were really deciding who got a chance at you. I mean, twin sisters should share, but there are limits. Combs and pads yes, men no.”

“Sure, you were deciding who got a chance. And how much chance did I have?”

“None at all,” Mary said cheerfully. “I mean, we’re the Havel twins? What man could resist us?”

“Rigobert de Stafford aside,” Ritva added, which Mary had to admit was true.

“All right,” she said. “No man who likes women.”

She saw a dangerous glint in her twin’s eyes; hair-splitting was a favorite sport of theirs, and Rigobert did like women. The baron of Forest Grove was delightful company, in fact, not to mention gorgeous in a rugged manly middle-aged way. He just didn’t consider women to be sexy.

“Correction: no man who desires women can resist us. But I got dibs, so there.”

“Hey, what does that make me?” Ian said. “The alternative menu selection?”

“It makes you younger and prettier,” Ritva said, giving his arm a squeeze.

“But mine has more character,” Mary said.

“Character? You mean he’s grumpier in the morning and makes bad puns,” Ritva said.

“Honey-smooth skin and chiseled jaws aren’t everything.”

“Hey!” both men said, antiphonally.

Ingolf started dressing. He’d just finished cinching his sword belt over his mail shirt when two parties of mounted Dúnedain closed in from the north and south; one included John Hordle on his usual warmblood destrier and the other Alleyne on a more conventional dappled part-Arab. Alleyne was tall, around six feet, but if you put Uncle John on an ordinary horse. .

He looks like a man trying to ride a big dog.

Mary put her monocular to her good eye and looked eastward. The people she saw weren’t making any attempt to hide, but they ran through the tall grass with a smooth economy that made them look just at home there as the lobo packs.

“Here they are, three of them,” she said. Then: “Oh. It is our old friend with the badges, right? Not just the bunch he runs with?”

“Right,” Ritva confirmed when her sister passed her the optic.

The party of the Hîr Dúnedain, the Lord of the Rangers, pulled up and dismounted. The standard-bearers thrust the butt-spikes of their flagpoles into the ground-the silver-and-black tree, stars and crown of her people, and the green-and-silver Crowned Mountain of Montival.

Mary and Ritva stepped forward to greet the three emissaries; presumably they weren’t their people’s sovereigns, which meant proper etiquette would be for them to meet someone of rank, but not one of the lords of the Dúnedain. She recognized the tall lean redhead from her sister’s description; he looked a lot neater and cleaner now than in that tale, but then he was on his home territory and not leading a fast pursuit on the trail of nine Questers. And she wasn’t dazed with pain and horror, in a way that still gave her bad dreams occasionally. With him were a medium-tall man in his thirties with dark brown skin-several shades darker than Fred Thurston-and a pale freckled woman of around her age with braided black hair.

The two men both wore broad-brimmed hats with wings of eagle feathers attached; the woman had similar headgear, but sporting falcon feathers. All three had loose well-tanned leather britches that ended above the knee, moccasins, and long belted tunic-shirts sewn over with round badges bearing stylized symbols-bows and arrows, tents, knapsacks, various tools. There were kerchiefs around their necks, too, run through carved bone rings. They had knives at the belts, and tomahawks a lot like Ingolf’s; her old acquaintance and the woman had recurve bows and quivers over their backs, and the dark man had a broad-bladed spear taller than he was.

“Good G-. . by Manwë and Varda,” Alleyne Loring said quietly from behind her. “I thought you were exaggerating, Ritva.”

“Not in a report, Lord,” she said. “But they’re a bit. . fancier than the one I saw three years ago. I suppose because it’s a diplomatic mission.”

“I was one myself once,” he murmured. “Before the Change. I wonder if I should mention it or not? It seems another world.”

The three halted. The redhead smiled at Ritva. “We meet again, woman worthy of badges,” he said, then gave a broader smile and nod to Ian’s scowl.

The man with the spear frowned himself and stepped forward and grounded the weapon with a formal gesture, raising his right hand shoulder-high, three fingers up, thumb crooked and holding the little finger. The other two copied the movement and the spearman spoke:

“I am Andrew, called Swift, a Scout of thirty-one badges, a bearer of the Eagle, of the Keen Spear Patrol of the Snow Tiger Troop, and I speak for the Council of Troops of the Morrowland Pack,” he said.

“I am Sheila, called Dauntless, a Scout of twenty-eight badges, a bearer of the Falcon, of the Thrown Hatchet Patrol of the Otter Troop, and I speak for the House of Girls and the Council of Troops of the Morrowland Pack,” the freckled woman said.

“I am George, called Tracker, a Scout of thirty badges, a bearer of the Eagle, of the Bright Lightning Patrol of the Wolverine Troop, and I speak for the Council of Troops of the Morrowland Pack,” Ritva’s old acquaintance said.

The spearman went on: “You have come on the Pack’s land and hunted our game without our consent, game that we need to feed our cubs in the cold months. Who are you, to make free with what is ours?”

Alleyne bowed slightly, with hand over heart; the other Rangers copied the gesture, and the rest made salute in their own fashions.

“Mae l’ovannen,” he said, in the formal mode. “Well-met, Scouts of the Morrowland Pack. I am Alleyne Loring-Larsson, Lord of the Dúnedain Rangers, vassal and kin to Artos the First, High King of Montival. We have come onto your land as part of the Host of the High Kingdom, for we are enemies of the false Prophet of Corwin. High King Artos needs this meat for his army, and passage to the north. . and you have served the Prophet. Are you our enemies? Or our allies? Or will you stand aside and take no part in this war?”

The Morrowlanders. . whatever that meant. . looked at each other. Mary would have been very surprised indeed if they hadn’t been following events outside their bailiwick, and even more surprised than that if they didn’t know the approaching Montivallan army down to the nearest battalion.

“We have heard of your war and we have scouted your great army,” the spearman named Andrew said, confirming her guess. “But the Prophet’s men. . the red-robes. . can find us in the forests. Find our cubs and our dens. There are not enough of us to fight their soldiers, if the woods cannot hide us. Nor can we live entirely without trade; we need metal for tools, and salt and cloth. But we could hurt them badly, so they leave us be in return for Scout service.”

“We come to cast the Prophet down, destroy his city of Corwin, and free all his slaves,” Alleyne said. “Then this will be part of Montival, and under the High King’s peace none will trouble you in your own land if you keep his law.”

The three looked at each other again. “We must test your words,” their spokesman said. “Send us emissaries, and we will see if they are worthy to speak with the Last Eagle.”

The woman spoke: “Send us emissaries, and your she-wolves among them. We see that you are not as the Prophet’s men, who seek to turn Girls-”

I can hear the capital letter there, Mary thought.

“-into sheep.”

Well, good for you, Scout of twenty-eight badges! I know everyone’s entitled to their own customs, but some are just plain creepy about that. At least we can beat some sense into the Cutters.

The dark spearman frowned; he seemed to be the senior here, but primus inter pares rather than commander.

“We must see that you are worthy of badges, folk of merit,” he said.

Alleyne raised his brows. “You want us to send our people among you without guarantee of their safety?”

“If you wish us as allies, there must be trust,” the woman said.

“And I will stay as hostage,” the spearman said proudly. “A Scout is trustworthy!”

The redhead grinned. “And you hold our best hunting-ground hostage, too,” he said irreverently, looking at the parties of horsemen and butchering-camps scattered for miles to the westward.

I think this one has gotten out of the woods more, Mary thought. Then to Alleyne, in the Noble Tongue:

“Lord, I think this is a time for. . for the sort of gesture Lady Astrid would have made.”

He looked at her quickly, his sky-blue eyes blinking thoughtfully. Ritva made a small private sign: Good call, sis!

Uncle Alleyne had always been affectionately respectful of the founder of the Rangers, but while he was the husband of the living woman he’d been a mixture of chief-of-staff and Reality Anchor. He’d always loved The Histories, that was how he and Astrid had first come together, but he hadn’t had the fire she did. Since she’d died, though. . since then, he’d lived her dream for her, meticulously.

“You’re right, woman of Westernesse,” he said quietly. Then he replied to the Morrowlanders, with the air of a man quoting from a sacred book, the way bards did from The Histories around a winter hearth in Mithrilwood:

“For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf,

And the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.”

They looked at him sharply, obviously recognizing it. “I need no hostage, Andrew, called Swift,” he said. “For a Scout is, indeed, trustworthy.”

• • •

“Well, thanks,” Ingolf muttered. “For this glorious heartwarming display of trust and so forth your Uncle Alleyne made. He’s back there, I note.”

“We need to take chances,” Mary said back, quietly. “We’re in a hurry.”

She’d seen hints some of their. . guardians was a more tactful way of putting it than guards. . knew Sign. If they really needed to be secret they could use the Noble Tongue, but Ingolf wasn’t really fluent yet, and Ian could follow simple sentences but not really talk it at all, beyond stock phrases. Cole had none at all, and Talyn and Caillech only a few words. So far everyone had been impeccably polite to them anyway.

In the meantime the seven of them followed the trail at a wolf-pace, which was what the Morrowlanders called it too: a hundred yards at a jog, a hundred at a fast walk, a hundred at a normal walking pace, then repeat, with a ten-minute rest every hour. You could really cover territory that way. If you could keep it up, which they all could without much trouble. The Morrowlanders seemed slightly surprised, which they might well be if their standard of comparison was Cutter cowboys who thought they lost caste if they got out of the saddle. The Dúnedain didn’t think that way, nor Mackenzies, nor Cole’s service, and Ingolf was just plain versatile.

The game trail wound as their boots made a dull thudding on the soft pine duff. It took the easiest way through the hilly woods with the unerring skill animals had for a slope and for the least-effort way between two points. The land it led through varied, from open flower-meadow to dense pine forest and Engelmann spruce and pockets of aspen, and there were almost always mountains in view. The thin air was crisp in the mouth and lungs, like a dry white wine, scented with sap and meadowsweet and an intense green savor. Once she stopped for a moment with a gasp as they turned a corner and came into the open.

A river lay well below the hillside trail, winding in S-curves through a meadow intensely green and starred with blue and crimson and gold like one of Sandra Arminger’s neo-Persian carpets, only at this distance the color was more of an is-it-there mist flowing over the velvet, teasing the edge of vision. Beyond was the darker green of forest, turning to blue distance rising to the white teeth of the Absaroka Mountains.

It wasn’t a painting, though: it was full of life. A bison bull shook his bearded head and snorted as red-and-white mustangs swept by with their tails raised like plumes. A pack of lobos had started the horses moving, but they skirted the bison warily as they followed, their heads held high to keep them over the level of the grass. From a twisted spruce below the hillside trail two golden eagles launched themselves into the cool limpid air, banking out over the murmuring white water with the feathers splayed like fingertips on their yard-long wings. Waterfowl rose up in a cataract from a quiet stretch surrounded by willows where a bear nosed through the shallows, climbing like a twisting spire of smoke.

“Now that’s pretty,” Ian said, and everyone nodded agreement; several whistled softly.

Nearby tiny hummingbirds with iridescent orange-red throats circled each other in a buzzing blossom-war.

“Even compared to the Drumheller Rockies, that’s pretty,” he went on. “Even compared to Banff, that’s pretty.”

“Damn, yes,” Ingolf agreed. “I bet the winters here are something to behold, though, even compared to where I grew up.”

“Oh yeah,” Cole said. “Lucky to get two months without a frost around here, probably, up this high.”

He was a native of the interior, if considerably south of this, drier and at a lower altitude. Ian nodded too, looking around at the vegetation. He had a right to be a connoisseur of winters, since the Peace River country lay a thousand miles to the north. The two Mackenzies and the Dúnedain winced a little. They were from the Willamette, off west of the Cascades. Where winter meant chilly and rainy and muddy, not howling weeks of freezing blizzard that could snatch you dead. Campaigning and travel had shown them the difference.

“I’ve done winter training, ski and mountain stuff, in country a lot like this,” Cole said. “And it’s no joke. But it’s pretty then, too. Sort of. . pure.”

They all took a moment to absorb the quiet. The two Mackenzies drew their pentagrams and nodded, then opened their water-bottles and poured libations. Mary put her hand to her heart and bowed. It was actually difficult to say what part of what she saw was prettiest, like a complex piece of music; she’d heard that people came from far away just to walk these woods before the Change, and she could believe it.

The three representatives of the Morrowland Council halted too; they didn’t say anything directly, but they did make that salute gesture again.

“A Scout is reverent,” one of them added.

The whole group-less the unseen but definite escorts who were pacing them out of sight of the trail-stopped at a shelter built into the side of a hill for the night. It wasn’t elaborately camouflaged, but it was fairly inconspicuous anyway, being three-quarters sunk into the slope. There was a bark-shingled roof extending a bit outward over walls of notched logs; a trickle of spring had been turned into a rock pool. A corral stood not far away with stone posts and wooden rails, and a lean-to packed with hay-baled hay tied with straw twists, which was an oddly advanced touch for the backwoods.

Aha, they do use horses, at least sometimes, she thought. Those horse apples are about a day old. This run is a test, too.

The interior of the shelter was interesting, when they spread their bedrolls; neatly folded robes of tanned wolverine fur tied to the bottom of the bunks, mattresses of fresh spruce boughs, clean polished wood table and benches, and a puncheon floor. The stove was an ingenious little affair of stone and metal sheets at the rear with a water heater of salvaged aluminum around the flue, and the food-store was built into the wall where the natural temperature-control of the earth would help it, lined with more aluminum to keep the vermin out.

There was also an arrangement for a block of ice to be inserted above and a water-drain below, and within Ian found a dozen two-foot cutthroat trout, neatly gutted, and bundles of greens and roots. He looked at the contents, at what in the way of herbs and ground roots was racked beside the stove in the usual miscellany of salvaged glass and some rather attractive glazed modern pottery, and rubbed his hands.

“Nothing like running all day to work up an appetite,” he said. “Anyone else volunteering for dinner detail?”

“Caillech is a monstrous fine hand with trout,” Talyn said helpfully, peering over his shoulder and smacking his lips.

“Volunteer yourself, man!” she said, taking his bonnet off for a moment and whapping him with it playfully.

“Well, if it were duck or grouse, I would,” he replied reasonably, adjusting the headgear. “I’m better at those. It’s respectful to make the most of the Mother’s bounty, isn’t it, now? If it’s my part to enjoy eating it, then that I’ll do, as my duty.”

“I hereby volunteer you to go fetch the wood, I do,” she said, then went with him.

“Nobody else?” Ian said, stripping off his jacket, rolling up his sleeves and beginning to scrub his hands. “All right, then.”

“I’ll take first watch,” Ingolf added.

Mary had seen any number of small groups stranded in the wilds by the Change, though most had headed in to more civilized climes as soon as they could; apart from the Eater bands of the death zones, of course. But. .

“A Scout apparently knows what the hell they’re doing,” Ingolf said to her as she sat beside him on a rock. “I’ve seen plenty of wild men but not many who knew their way around the woods as well. Old Pete’s folks, yeah, though they weren’t as. . as tidy. Remember the Southsiders that Rudi picked up east of the Mississippi, Jake sunna Jake’s crew? They didn’t know anything.”

“You took the words out of my mouth; they barely knew what made babies. Or the London Bunch, north of the lakes? They were pathetic. At a guess, the Morrowlanders have a lot of these little places as bases for hunters and people working the woods for foods and medicinals and whatnot,” she said. “We have something similar in the Ranger staths, though the climate’s a lot nicer in the Willamette.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t like to go through February here in a flet. This dugout thing would be comfy enough even in winter. . even in the winters they’re supposed to get around here. . but you’d go crazy after a while if you couldn’t get out. Notice the ski-racks, and the second entrance up on the roof section? Back in Richland we do a lot of our heavy hauling in winter-frozen rivers are best of all. Maybe that’s how they keep from going crazy, spend all their spare time studying for Badges and such.”

She nodded. He’d picked a good spot to overlook the little way station; from the tracks he wasn’t the first to do so.

“You took the words out of my mouth again, lover,” she said. “When he was chasing us for the Cutters, George called the Tracker. .”

“Followed us over ground where you’d swear an eight-hitch yoke of plow oxen wouldn’t leave a trace,” Ingolf agreed.

“They’d make valuable allies,” Mary said, her enthusiasm growing. “Not just getting out of our way, I mean.”

Her husband nodded, but frowned as well. “Hmmm. There’s a drawback there.”

“What?”

“We’re supposed to be impressing them. I think these folks make knowing how to do stuff a real big part of their opinion of someone.”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“Yah, but they’re more. . more formal about it.”

The three Council members were at least impressed with Ian’s pinion-nut crusted trout, accompanied by twice-boiled burdock and roasted arrowroot and bannocks of sweet camas flour studded with dried huckleberries, with a side of Miner’s Lettuce salad with wild onions. The representative of the House of Girls shooed the men out after the meal; evidently a Scout was clean, too, and women got first crack at the hot water and essence of soaproot.

Much later, Mary murmured to Ingolf in the darkness:

“And a Scout likes privacy. Or at least this Ranger does.”

He sighed.

• • •

Ingolf looked down on the Scout headquarters not long after dawn; the air was still chill and a little damp.

“Well, that explains how they got here,” he said.

It was on the shores of a great lake, so broad that the water stretched north almost beyond sight even from this elevation, with occasional small islands and a few sails visible on fishing boats and a landing-stage for big birch-bark canoes. There had been some buildings on the rocky edge before the Change, but it was obvious they’d burned that very night. Mostly because the midsection and tail of the great flying machine still stood, with the scorched and crumpled ruins of the nose stuck into the green scrub that covered the ruins. Bits and snags stood up, and most of a stone chimney. Parts of the aircraft were skeletal where the sheathing had been torn off; aluminum was easy to work and had dozens of uses.

Ian frowned. “That’s a. . 747,” he said. “I think. You can still see the sort of hump thing at the front, it’s not all burned.”

“What?” Talyn said. “Those numbers would mean what, precisely?”

“A type of big flying machine. They could carry hundreds of people.”

They all looked at him; it wasn’t the sort of remark you expected of a Changeling like themselves.

“We had a recognition course for recruits to the Force,” he said, a little defensively. “I don’t know why. Nobody ever thought to change it, eh?”

Talyn snapped his fingers. “Yes, in the ‘Song of Fire and Grief.’ The Chief, the Mackenzie Herself, she saw one such fall and burn in Corvallis on the night of the Change! And made the song about it later.”

Cole whistled softly. “Alyssa goes on about what a great pilot the Bear Lord was, to get a little plane with six people in it down safely. And he landed in a river. Whoever was flying that thing must have been. . something. I’d have expected it to fall like a brick.”

They all nodded somberly. They all knew that the ancients had been able to make huge things fly, but suddenly seeing this-as big as a northern baron’s hall-made you feel it all of a sudden.

The modern buildings became clearer as they approached. From a few remarks their close-mouthed hosts had made Ingolf had gathered that there just weren’t all that many Morrowlanders, less than a thousand and possibly much less, and that this was their winter HQ. Certainly there was plenty of space in the building they were shown to; a room for each couple and one for Cole, and a big dining chamber with only a few other people to share the camas griddle cakes with spicy caramel-tasting birch syrup and-what seemed to be a special treat for guests-French fries, followed by wild blueberries and-another treat-cream. They were courteously shown to a bathhouse afterwards too, before strong hints brought them out again.

Now in summertime most of the Morrowlanders were probably spread out through this vast stretch of wilderness, laying in the food and other goods they’d need in the long deep-snow winters. That made what they’d done here all the more impressive, not least the inconspicuous but substantial storage cellars and icehouses, recognizable mainly by the doors set into what looked like low mounds.

The buildings scattered amid raised-bed gardens and pruned bushes and corrals and many trees were deep-notched logs on fieldstone, carefully set into the south-facing sides of the low hills. The largest reared like a whale among minnows, and from the color of the carved and varnished wood it was the newest, but like the others it had a steep-pitched roof covered in sod. That gave them an intensely green look, like great plants, colored with flowers that must be carefully cultivated despite their wild exuberance.

“Looks just a wee bit homelike,” Talyn said in fascination. “But more spread out than one of our Duns. No wall. And no grain fields and not much in the way of herds, either, just these little bits of garden. They must live mostly from the hunt and what they gather.”

The carving was less ornate and less colorful than, say, Dun Juniper, though there was plenty of it, mostly themed on animals and plants, and including inlays of different woods and colored stones. There were totem-pole-like erections in front of a collection of smaller but still big buildings surrounding the main one.

“What are those?” Ingolf asked.

“Those are the Houses of the Troops, and each Patrol has its Den,” George Tracker said; they seemed to use their epithets as surnames, more or less. “They stand around the House of the Eagle.”

Then, taking over the role of tour guide for a moment, he went on:

“That is the Hall of Boys, and that the Hall of Girls, where they meet for special ceremonies. There are the smithies, and the woodworking shop, and the library. That log flume brings springwater for drinking and washing and to turn wheels; it was finished the year I became a Bearer of the Eagle. That long building is-”

Nice composting toilets, too, Ingolf thought; that had impressed him most of all. Same system we used back in Richland.

The first Bossman of the Free Republic of Richland had been a gadget enthusiast, always pulling a new notion out of his books or someone’s memory or from some traveller. He had sent artisans around to show people how to build the composting thunderboxes a couple of years after the Change, and met warm agreement among a people no longer living in fear of starvation and ready for something better than smelly, dangerous makeshifts. The Bossman had been a self-important fussbudget and easy to mock-Ingolf and some friends had gotten a memorable whaling with a hickory-switch from Ingolf’s father the Sheriff for carving a roadside stump into a caricature of him just before a visit to Readstown-but he’d had some good ideas. And he’d been a much harder man than you’d think to look at him or listen to him burbling about how to rig a side-delivery hay rake or a silage chopper, though he’d used others to do the bone-breaking and head-knocking parts of the job.

Ingolf wouldn’t have expected something so sophisticated in a place so rustic as this, though. The settlement smelled clean, too, with less stink and flies than nearly any warm-season farming community. To be sure, they didn’t have much livestock, which were inescapably messy no matter how careful you were. The water and forest were the strongest odors; there was wood smoke, of course, and cooking, and the scorched metal, glue, leather and sawdust of crafts. His nose didn’t detect the unmistakable reek of a tannery, either, which meant they must have put it elsewhere.

The people were out to see the newcomers when they emerged from getting settled, outsiders obviously not being something that were seen very often here. They were all dressed pretty much like the three representatives of the Council, though less elaborately. Apparently everyone wore knee-length pants in warm weather, roughly the way Mackenzies all wore kilts; many of the young children had nothing on but the shorts. There was a lot less jostling, pointing or exclaiming than he’d have expected from backwoods villagers-probably less than there would have been in Readstown, and certainly than in some other parts of Richland he could name. The hunting dogs that were fairly numerous were well-mannered too, hardly any barking and most staying close to their people even while their noses followed the stiff-legged strut Artan and Flan put on in a strange pack’s territory.

Speaking of children and older people. .

“Notice something about these folks?” he said to Mary.

“Lots,” she said. “What in particular?”

“There are plenty of kids, but the adults are all my age or a bit older, and the Changelings, the born Changelings-”

Strictly speaking, Changelings were people born since the Change, of course. More loosely the term included people like Ingolf who’d been young children at the time; he’d been six going on seven. If you used both senses together Changelings were a majority of the population now nearly everywhere, or would be soon. Here they were apparently everybody.

“-just coming full-grown, only a few with babies of their own.”

She blinked and he could sense her focusing, counting and averaging-numbers were something you had to be able to do well on reconnaissance.

“You’re right,” she said. “Like a clump, and their kids, and only a few people in between. It’s a bit odd. And you don’t expect a lot of really old people but there aren’t any. Nobody even as old as Uncle John and Uncle Alleyne, who were about my age at the Change. I’ve never seen anything exactly like it, and we’ve been from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back. Odd.”

“No it ain’t,” he said. “Scouts, before the Change that is, they were kids and youngsters.”

In Readstown these days you were a baby up until you could get around, use the outhouse on your own and do simple chores, then a kid until puberty, and then a youngster until you grew enough and learned enough to do the things a grown man or woman did. After that you sort of slid into being a full adult over the next few years, capping it off when you got your own house and a job or farm or workshop or whatever and started your own family.

Most places were roughly the same, though he was vaguely aware that they’d seen things differently before the Change when being a kid had lasted a lot longer. That Scouting business had been part of the way they stretched things out back then. It must have been irritating, since as he remembered it he’d been eager to grow up.

“My dad was a. . what did they call it. . Scoutmaster. And my older brother was a Scout, and they talked about it a little now and then. And they had some books about it that were real useful, practical stuff. Nobody kept it up after the Change where I come from, though. Too busy.”

“No need, either, I imagine,” Mary said thoughtfully.

“Yah. You learn that stuff from your folks or uncles or whatever, like farming or hunting or smithing. Or at school.”

From their sixth year to around twelve kids in Richland went to school, at least between fall and spring, which was when they could best be spared from chores. Enough to get their letters and how to do sums and a bit of this and that; children of Farmers and Sheriffs usually stuck with it a little longer so they could keep account books and deal with the outside world, especially merchants and tax-collectors. That was about the way most civilized, advanced places worked, with arrangements running downhill from that to wildmen bands in the death zones who’d forgotten that there ever had been such a thing as writing. Modern life just didn’t demand much book learning for most.

He went on slowly, marshaling his thoughts: “But say there were a couple of hundred of these. . Scouts. . flying through the air on that thing over there, and most of them lived through the crash. They’d mostly be. . oh, teens or a little younger.”

“Ah, I knew I didn’t marry you just for your looks. So they wouldn’t have started having children until a bit later, would they? That’s why the born Changelings are all younger than me, nobody Rudi’s age, or even Ian’s.”

“Right, and no grown-ups to raise them, probably. None still around, at least. And you know how kids get notions and run with them.”

“And they’d be isolated from the outside world. By the Cutters, and by distance. Who’d come here if it weren’t for the war?”

“Oh, afterwards they’ll get a trader and some mules every year. Or every two or three, fur traders maybe. Or hunters. It’s nice country if you like the woods.”

“Yup, but there’s plenty of places with pretty scenery and good hunting somewhere closer to somewhere, if you know what I mean. They haven’t got anything anyone outside would want, they’re not on the best road between anywhere and anywhere, and they’re the only people at all in ten or twenty thousand square miles. I can see how they’ve turned out strange,” Mary said solemnly.

What’s that saying Edain likes? My, how grimy and sooty is your arse, said the kettle to the pot? Ingolf thought behind a poker face.

The Dúnedain had been started by a couple of teenagers, and look how they’d ended up. Though in his private opinion the PPA and the Mackenzies were just as weird, and adults had been responsible for that. Not adults who’d have ended up running countries before the Change, granted. You saw a lot of that if you travelled far, places where some charismatic lunatic or small bunch with some set of bees in their bonnets had ended up on top in the chaos and then shaped everything like a trellis under a vine. Most people had been ready to grab anything that looked as if it worked with the desperate zeal of a drowning man clutching at a log.

Like the Church Universal and Triumphant, he thought with a shiver. The way it turned out after the Change. Of course, something. . else. . is at work there.

The three Council representatives came to meet them. They were back in full formal fig, and there were a dozen more behind them in the same, with carved staffs if they didn’t have spears. After a solemn exchange of greetings-the Morrowlanders were a ceremonious folk-one of them handed over a document written on something he recognized as a sort of paper made from birch bark.

“We didn’t want to tire you excessively,” the member of the Council said.

Ingolf looked down the list of Badges they were supposed to earn and wondered what it would have been like if they had wanted to tire them out.

“I’ll take the Tomahawk Throwing,” he said, briefly remembering that night in Boise. “And Wrestling.”

You never knew when keeping up a skill would save you grief. Mary and Ritva were looking over his shoulder.

“Dibs on Storytelling!” Mary said.

“We can do that together,” Ritva said. “We’ll do Riddles in the Dark and Conversations with the Dragon, and switch off the speaking roles, how’s that? And then one of us can do Shelob’s Lair. Those all come across pretty well in the Common Tongue.”

“OK, I’m cool with Identifying Plants and Their Uses,” Cole said thoughtfully. “I aced that part of Special Forces training and it shouldn’t be too different around here. And Field Shelters.”

“I’m for Snowshoes and Skis,” Ian said decisively. “My dad taught me that, my family had a sideline in making them and swapped them for our blacksmith work back on the farm. And Camp Cooking.”

Everyone looked at the Mackenzies. “Well, Folk Song, and Musical Instruments,” Mary said. “What else?”

Talyn grinned and slid the longbow out of the loops beside his quiver and made a flourish with it. Caillech just strung hers with a step-through and a wrench.

“Need y’ ask?” the young man said. “For let me tell you-”

“You talk too much,” Caillech said, grinning herself. “Let’s show instead.”

• • •

It took a while to get to the archery, but the reception was all that could be asked when they did. A cheer went up as Talyn and Caillech straightened and leaned on their bows, panting and their faces running with sweat. The shooting range was overlooked by informal bleachers made by cutting seats into the hillside and cultivating turf. The cheering came mostly from the younger element-what the Scouts called cubs. The older spectators were enthusiastic too, but a lot of them were looking rather thoughtful.

I would be too, Ingolf thought.

The range included pop-up targets of various sorts and even some rigged to move, but final test had been straight speed-and-accuracy shooting at a hundred yards. Both the round wood targets bristled with gray-fletched cloth-yard shafts. Many had punched their heads right through the four-inch thickness of pine. The ground below was littered with the ones that had been broken by more recent arrivals simply because there wasn’t any more room in the bull’s-eye. The Clan warriors had emptied their big forty-eight arrow war quivers in less than five minutes of concentrated effort, and not a single shaft had missed the targets; most were tightly grouped in the centers, though admittedly there wasn’t any wind to complicate matters.

I couldn’t have matched that, Ingolf thought. Oh, accuracy, sure, but not the speed.

Cole Salander smiled as he fingered the new badge sewn to his camouflage jacket; it turned out to be made of beautifully tanned and colored deerskin, and sported a red leaf against a green background.

“Makes me ever more glad I wasn’t at the Horse Heaven Hills with you guys shooting at me,” he said. “But I’d have figured these guys here for good shots, too. That was some impressive, yeah, but should they be this impressed?”

“I know why they’re startled,” Ingolf murmured. “They’re hunters, not war-archery specialists like our Clan friends.”

Mary nodded, though Cole still looked a little puzzled; his folk mostly used crossbows for distance work, at least when fighting on foot.

Hunting. . particularly hunting on foot in woodland. . you very rarely shot more than once or twice at any particular animal. After that you’d either hit it or it had run away, so there wasn’t much point in carrying more than half a dozen arrows. And you got just as close as you could; Ingolf would have bet the Scouts were good enough stalkers that they ended up shooting from point-blank more often than not. They were fine archers with their light handy recurves within that envelope, and he certainly wouldn’t want to try and force his way through this rugged, forested country with them stalking him from ambush.

Mackenzies did a lot of hunting too; you had to in the Willamette, as in most places, if only to protect your crops from animals breeding fast in a world where humans were scarce. But the Mackenzie longbow was a battlefield weapon first and foremost. On a battlefield you were shooting for your life, not your supper, and your steel-clad targets came at you, screaming and waving sharp pointy things with ill intent. The training regime that old Sam Aylward had instituted right from their beginnings was aimed at shooting very fast with very powerful bows from the maximum possible distance, not taking your time.

To get into the Clan’s First Levy, you had to be able to shoot twelve arrows in sixty measured seconds, and hit a man-sized target at a hundred yards with eight of them; that was the minimum standard, not the average. With a bow of at least seventy pounds pull as measured on the tillering frame; Talyn’s drew a hundred-odd, and Caillech’s a mere eighty. Both of them were well above the entry level in speed and accuracy, too.

When they were serious, Mackenzie archery contests started at a hundred yards.

The badges were presented; the Dun Tàirneanach pair got carried around the bleachers shoulder-high, too. Then everyone stood before the Council.

Andrew, called Swift, came forward again. “You have proven to be people of skill and merit, worthy of badges,” he said. “You are worthy to speak with the Last Eagle, our Akela. So will your King be, when he can come here.”

The Montivallans looked at each other. “Well, about that, Andrew of the Council.” Mary said. “We didn’t want to presume before you’d decided, but there is a bit of a hurry. .”

• • •

The glider banked out over the water and turned in towards the shore; the pennant on a tall pole showed the wind to be directly out of the south. The long slender wings on either side of the tadpole shape flexed visibly, and the speed slowed. Suddenly it turned from a bird-sized dot out over the sun-glinting chop of the waters into something of visibly human make. It slowed, slowed, dropped. . and then it was trundling over the grass, stopping, dropping one wing to the ground.

A long ahhhhhhh came from the Morrowlanders. Flying wasn’t something they’d ever seen in their own lives; they didn’t travel much, and the Cutters who were their neighbors regarded balloons and gliders as abomination. But flying was important in their founding myth.

Ingolf and the others walked forward. The transparent upper front of the fuselage tilted to one side; the glider was a two-seater model. Alyssa Larsson hopped out, and a second later Rudi Mackenzie did likewise and stood with the wind from the lake ruffling his plaid and long sunset-colored hair and the spray of raven-feathers in his bonnet.

“Hail, Artos! Artos and Montival!”

The cry was sincere enough, though Ingolf could see a glint of humor in Rudi’s blue-green eyes. They all saluted, and he walked forward. Mary and Ritva fell in on either side of him, giving him a rapid précis in the Noble Tongue; Ingolf caught about half of it. Behind him he could hear:

“Cole, we’re going to have to stop meeting this way.”

“Well, at least you didn’t crash-land upside down on top of a bear.”

“That was only once. .”

Rudi nodded to his half sisters and looked at Ingolf.

“Yeah, he’s. . strange, the Last Eagle,” the Richlander said. “Not exactly wandered in his wits, but strange. And he’s not a well man. I got the feeling he’s hanging on with his fingernails because he thinks he has to get a job done first.”

Rudi’s smile was crooked; not for the first time Ingolf reflected that he seemed older than his face would indicate, sometimes.

“I suspect I know how he feels, and will the more so as time goes on,” the High King said quietly.

A drum was thuttering in the background as the party paced towards the Council; there were flutes too, and flags. Rudi halted for a moment, went to one knee, and raised a clod of the dirt to his lips before he stood again.

“I greet the Morrowland Pack in the name of the High Kingdom of Montival and all its peoples and the kindreds of earth and sea and sky,” he said, his beautiful almost-bass carrying clearly through the still cool air. “I step upon the Pack’s territory by its leave, obedient to its Law, making no claim without the free consent of its folk.”

The Council formed up on either side of them, and they not-quite-marched into the House of the Council. The big interior room was a little dim, but comfortably warm despite the lingering chill of the night, from the stoves in the corners more than the crackling fire on the big hearth at the north end. The figure in the fur cloak sitting waiting for them struggled to his feet, helped by the anxious hands of a young man and woman on either side of him. They put a staff whose head was carved in the form of a wolf’s head in his hand and he leaned on it, breathing a little harshly.

The Morrowlanders all stopped and called: “Akela!” They added a chillingly realistic collective wolf-howl. The Montivallans saluted in their various fashions, and Rudi Mackenzie inclined his head briefly.

And yeah, this is a man to respect, Ingolf thought.

Ingolf Vogeler had never seen anyone burned so badly who’d lived to heal-heal after a fashion. One blue eye looked out of the ruined face, and it was obvious that the Aklela’s left knee hadn’t bent properly for a very long time.

Twenty-six years, to be precise, Ingolf thought. I’ve seen a lot of people hurt in the Change, but usually they’re not only a little more than my own age. Children mostly either made it or they didn’t.

The High King and the Last Eagle Scout stood for a quiet time, meeting each other’s gaze. Then the single eye closed for an instant, with a long sigh.

“Sit,” he said when he looked up again. “Sit, everyone. . I have waited so long. . ”

They did, and then the Last Eagle spoke to the king, as if they were alone. “Captain Morrow got us down, but he died the next day, he was all broken inside, and burned so bad. I went forward with Scoutmaster Wilks to get him out, it was all burning. . that’s why we’re the Morrowland Pack. When the ground thawed we buried him up on the high place, and every year on that day we go there and sing for him.”

Rudi nodded. “Fitting indeed,” he said quietly. “A great honor, but well earned. There are far worse ways to die.”

“It was so cold, and we got so hungry. . Scoutmaster Wilks was hurt too, but he got us through. We chopped holes in the ice to fish, and we dug pine nuts, and made bread from whitebark, and found animals in their dens, and then we got a buffalo, we were so happy about it. . I could help by then. . And Ms. Delacroix knew so much, she was like our mom. . Mr. Androwski left to get us help in the spring, but he never came back, he went north and I think. . I think he met the Prophet, the first Prophet, in Corwin, and. . and then three years later Scoutmaster Wilks was killed by a bear. And Ms. Delacroix had this cough, it got worse and worse, after a while the herbs didn’t help anymore. She said I’d have to be brave for the little ones, be a real Eagle Scout. We buried her next to Scoutmaster Wilks and the Captain on the high place, that was the year we saw the first tiger.”

A long silence and then: “Sometimes I dream about them, dream they’re back and then I wake up. . ”

The story rambled on. Ingolf had heard much of it yesterday, and it gave him an odd lost feeling anyway, as if he was one of those children alone in the dark as the plane fell and broke open to the cold and the fire. Or the hurt boy ignoring his constant pain, working and teaching, holding himself and them to a dream. Instead he looked at the rack of books on the wall behind the hunched figure: The Boy Scout Handbook, Best of Ernest Thompson Seton, The Jungle Book, books on crafts and ecology and some he didn’t recognize at all. Most of those would have been on the 747, though there were a few modern leather bindings that must have trickled in from the outside world.

“Did I do the right things?” the Last Eagle said finally to the King. “I tried, but sometimes I just had to make things up. . I hated to help the Prophet, I bargained as hard as I could, I never let them send their priests here, said we’d die first, but. .”

“You saved your people,” Rudi said, leaning forward for a moment and putting a hand on the older man’s shoulder. “More than once, you saved them, from perils to body and to soul. You did what you could, and what you knew you must do, and you fought the good fight, Scout.”

He nodded to the books. “What those men dreamed in the ancient times, you have become in truth. Now we will free your people.”

He raised his voice slightly: “We will throw down Corwin together, and then all this land will be the Morrowlander Pack’s, forever; to hold in trust for all the kindreds of fur and feather and scale, for the very grass and trees and the rock beneath, as guardians and helpers. None of humankind shall come on it without your permission, nor harm it, while the line of my blood lasts.”

The cheer rose to the carved rafters of the House. The Last Eagle rose to cheer with the rest of them, then staggered. Rudi frowned in concern, and the two young attendants stepped forward.

“Our father is tired. Akela should rest. He’s worked so hard.”

Rudi nodded. “Indeed he has,” he said softly. “Hard and well, and well he has earned rest from the Powers. Rest and blessing, in the land where no evil comes and all hurts are healed.”