The Tears of the Sun

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

COUNTY OF THE EASTERMARK

CHARTERED CITY OF WALLA WALLA

PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION

(FORMERLY SOUTHEASTERN WASHINGTON STATE)

HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

AUGUST 23, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

Tiphaine nodded as Sir Tancred saluted with fist to breastplate, whistled for his squire and horse, and detached a conroi of lancers and two of mounted crossbowmen to stay with her. Only a few of her own menie were with her now and they all had real work to do; if you were a retainer of d’Ath you usually had more urgent things to do than dance attendance and lend her credence.

Then he swung easily into the saddle despite a full set of plate and cantered off to the army camp that had sprung up outside Walla Walla’s northern wall in the course of the long day now ending. She looked after the Guard commander with a slight envy; he had a straightforward job to do.

Whereas I have to spend the evening herding barons and bucking up justifiably terrified townsmen and reassuring a Count. Still, that’s a big part of higher command.

The force she’d brought was off the trains and camped on what was usually common-pasture for the chartered city’s horses and mules, with a few spilling over into stubble-fields. A low constant rumble came from it; rows of tents, dust smoking from under wheels and hooves and boots, picket lines, neatly racked bicycles and pyramidal stacks of twelve-foot lances and seven-foot infantry spears, lines of field artillery parked next to their limbers. Grooms and squires were leading strings of horses down to the water of the little Walla Walla River, or to irrigation ditches; files on work detail made the light loess soil fly in a chorus of spades and dirt and muttered curses as they dug sanitary trenches. Light blinked fiercely from metal, and here and there the heraldic banners and shields of baron and knight were splashes of color, but most of it was variations on the color of the soil.

A little farther off the landscape still looked peaceful and prosperous despite its aridity, surprisingly so to someone reared west of the Cascades. Here it was two months before the winter rains were due and it seemed dubious that it had ever rained at all. Reaped grain fields stood sere and yellow-brown, shedding ochre dust to the occasional whirling wind-devil, with the odd remaining wheat-stack like a giant round thatched hut of deeper gold. Poplar trees made vertical accents along a canal, more conspicuous for the general lack of trees, with here or there the intense green of vines or fruit trees or alfalfa and sweet clover in blocks startling against the dun landscape. Rippling distant hills quivering with heat haze were the brown of summer-sere bunchgrass. The creaking sails of tall frame windmills circled, grinding grain or pumping water, and villages of rammed-earth cottages stood each with its church steeple, clustered around the gardens and groves of manor houses often based on pre-Change farms.

You couldn’t see how few folk remained, or how the ones who did worked at a frantic pace with spears close to hand, under the protection of mounted guards. The smell right here made it obvious that peace had flown, though. She took a deep breath through her nose. War did have a set of smells all its own, like the varied bouquets of wine. She liked wine well enough; Sandra had put her through an informal course in telling the various types apart. But she was a connoisseur of the bouquet of lethal conflicts.

Even when you weren’t fighting in a miasma of copper-iron blood and the unique scent of cut-open stomach, or marching past the week-old bloated bodies of dead livestock and smoldering burnt-out houses. Mostly war smelled of old stale sweat soaked into wool, unwashed feet and armpits and crotches, horses, and canola oil smeared on metal and leather and long since gone rancid. A big camp like this added the woodsmoke of campfires, salt pork and beans and tortillas cooking, the charcoal and scorched metal of the little wheeled forges the field farriers used, and latrine trenches. It was all the smell of her trade, the way manure was to a groom or dye-vats to a clothier or incense to a cleric.

Getting the expeditionary force detrained and ready to march had gone fairly smoothly, but she’d been at it all day. Too often dealing with various noble scions who insisted on quarreling over precedence and citing cases right back to the day Norman Arminger proclaimed himself Lord Protector, and who considered themselves too important to listen to anyone but the Grand Constable in person.

That was the drawback of calling out the arrière-ban, the full levy of the Association; you got everyone who had military obligations to the Crown, which meant mobilizing a lot of contumacious, well-and-high-born pricks who hated taking orders from anyone, even if their lives depended on it. Some of the great families had followed their medieval models all too seriously.

I haven’t had to kill any of them. Yet. Which is almost disappointing. Though it’s fun bringing home that the rules in the Schedule of Ranks really, really, really do apply to the ones who think they can’t possibly be expected to go on campaign without three pavilions, a chef and hot and cold running mistresses.

A very small bleak smile turned her lips; she had a long straight-nosed regular face, but at that moment it looked very like a predatory bird. She’d had any baggage found over the established maximum for a man’s status pitched off the barges on the Columbia or the railcars as they turned up later and left for the fish, the coyotes, the camp followers and anyone who had a use for a down mattress or six sets of court dress or a knock-down bathtub or a crate of Domaine Meriwether Cuvée Prestige ’15 with bottles of pickled oysters on the side. Excess servants had been shed with a little more ceremony, but not much.

The fingers of her left hand touched the twelve silver-inlaid notches on the hilt of her long sword, the metal smooth and cool against the callused skin. Nobody had argued much, however purple their faces turned.

A party rode up from the camp. A nobleman in gear that looked to have seen hard use in the last few days led them, and over their heads a fork-tailed baron’s pennant flew from a lance. A squire behind him carried a shield that had been recently and roughly field-repaired after being hit repeatedly with things sharp and hard and heavy.

“My lady Grand Constable,” Rigobert Gironda de Stafford said, thumping his breastplate with his right fist in salute before he dismounted.

“My lord Marchwarden,” she replied, returning the gesture. “Your horses look hard-used. I suppose screening us up there required a lot of riding.”

She turned and gestured for a squire. “Get my lord de Stafford and his party fresh coursers, and have these seen to. Bring water for his men, and bread and cheese and raisins if they want it.”

The nobleman nodded his thanks. “We’ve been busy, my lady. Just got in, in fact. It’s quieted down up towards Castle Campscapell a bit now or I wouldn’t have been able to make this meeting, but it’s the stillness before the storm. I’m extremely glad to see you’ve brought us a substantial force.”

He cocked his head and looked at her. “You were smiling a most evil little smile just now, my lady.”

Tiphaine let it grow. . just a little. This particular campaign would probably be a preliminary to the main event, and she was going to use it to toughen up some of the feudal levies who hadn’t seen the elephant in this war yet. Toughen them up or kill them off; either would do.

“I know that expression, Grand Constable,” the lord of Forest Grove said with a grin of his own, offering his canteen. “Someone who deserved it suffered, eh, my lady d’Ath?”

“Suffered the loss of oversize tents and silk sheets and overweight private rations, my lord Forest Grove,” she said, putting the canteen to her mouth and tilting it. “And the services of various doe-eyed beauties.”

It was field-purified water, cut one-to-six with harsh coarse brandy to cover the chemical taste and kill any bacteria the chlorine missed. The mixture cut the gummy saliva and dust in her mouth quite nicely; she swilled it around, spat and drank.

“But they can’t say I didn’t warn them,” she finished, handing it back.

“Thirty lashes with an acerbic tongue and an icy stare, too,” Rigobert said. “The novel experience of having to bow their heads and stand silent while their arses are roasted in public will be good for them. It’ll rectify their humors, though not as much as a good bleeding and purge would.”

They were both in half-armor, the articulated lames of the back-andbreasts covering their torsos, pauldrons and faulds on shoulders and thighs; with their junior squires standing by, the rest of the gear could be donned in less than two minutes. Sweat and dust clung to their faces beneath the peaked Montero hats-the type she’d always thought of as a Robin Hood hat, from an old movie she’d watched on TV before the Change. Nobody put their head in a steel bucket if they didn’t have to right that moment. She could feel more sweat trickling down her neck and flanks and between her breasts, itching and chafing in the padded arming doublet and her underwear as it baked to a rime of salt in the hot dry air and then more dripped in, long-familiar and still irritating. The interior was hot this time of year, and its mountain-fringed geography made the Walla Walla valley warmer still.

“Is the Count due?” de Stafford asked.

He was seven years older than she, in his mid-forties, a tall broad-shouldered man with pale blond hair like hers worn in the usual nobleman’s bowl-cut, eyes of a blue that was startling against his tanned face, and an unfashionable short-cropped beard that emphasized his square chin and ruggedly masculine good looks.

In fact, we look enough alike to be brother and sister. Rigobert might actually have been a tolerable sibling, unless he was a lot less bearable as a teenager.

The thought was oddly wistful; she’d been an only child.

A few of the less experienced or more naive staff officers and messengers in the group around her looked surprised that he dared to bandy words with the Grand Constable, who had a reputation for a cold, distant masterfulness. Tiphaine’s mouth quirked a little more as she jerked her head slightly and the circle around them widened to allow more privacy.

Or to put it differently, I have a reputation for being a murderous evil reptilian unnatural bitch who’s inhumanly good with a sword and under the Lady Regent’s protection, she thought. Rigobert’s a special case, though.

She looked at her watch, a self-winding mechanical model from the old world.

“Not for about another fifteen or twenty minutes, my lord, assuming he’s punctual. We got the encampment settled just a bit faster than I anticipated and told him we would.”

“Any news from Delia?” he asked.

“A letter just in,” she said, fishing it out from where she’d tucked it into her thigh boot. “She’s well, Diomede sends his love and wishes he were here and not in Tillamook, where incidentally he’s going to stay if I have to tell Baron de Netarts to chain him to a dungeon wall, Heuradys has learned to say ‘no’, and our beloved Delia herself feels like an overripe watermelon about to split, she says. Also she sends greetings to my beloved beard.”

“I’m her beard, she’s mine,” de Stafford laughed as he took it and read it eagerly.

Her Châtelaine and lover of fifteen years, Delia de Stafford, was married to Lord Rigobert. The Barony of Forest Grove was the next tenant-in-chief holding north of her manors, and its lord had about as much erotic interest in women as Lady Delia de Stafford did in men, which was even less than Tiphaine did. Fathering Delia’s children had involved what passed for hightech medicine these days, namely a pre-Change turkey baster.

“Ah, I see Countess Odell has arrived for the accouchement, with her girls. That will be a comfort,” he said happily. “To them both. Valentinne will worry less about Conrad and her sons with something else to occupy her time and Delia will feel better with company and mothering, she’s always been a social sort and makes friends easily.”

So do you, Rigobert, she thought. Including people like me, who really aren’t easy to be friendly with.

“I hope it’s a daughter,” he went on. “Delia does so want a matched set of four, Lioncel, Diomede, Heuradys and. .”

He glanced at her with a raised eyebrow.

“Yolande if it’s a girl, Rigobert for a boy, we thought,” Tiphaine said.

The Lady Regent had arranged the marriage a little after the War of the Eye and not long after Tiphaine was given the title and estates of Ath as grounding for a rising succession of military commands. It was one of Sandra’s classic kill-three-ducks-with-one-bolt political rim shot maneuvers, at one swell foop turning Delia from Tiphaine’s plebeian and clandestine girlfriend into a noblewoman eligible for a post such as Châtelaine of a baron’s household, giving public cover to Tiphaine, Delia and Rigobert all three against sheet-sniffing clerics and similar vermin, and giving Sandra a valuable two-way source on the distaff side of the nobility’s gossip-and-intrigue pipeline.

She’d sized Delia up quickly, and foreseen that her spectacular looks, fashion sense, personality and organizing skills would make her a star of the castle and manor house feast, hunt dinner, ball and masque circuit in jig time with a little discreet patronage. The social order hadn’t jelled as hard then, either; it would have been a bit more difficult to bring off in the increasingly Changeling-dominated present, the time of the second generation’s flowering.

“You’d name the boy Rigobert? Why thank you!” Delia’s husband replied sincerely, with a winning smile. “I’m flattered.”

But the Baron of Forest Grove genuinely liked Delia; they had become close friends, and he had been a good if slightly long-distance father to the children she insisted on. He was also extremely capable, and not only in the straightforward head-bashing style of most Association nobles; he’d been a junior spook of some sort for some agency that didn’t officially exist before the Change, as well as an SCA fighter, and valuable enough that Norman Arminger had put aside his-literally-medieval prejudices on the subject of gay people to make use of him.

Odd. In retrospect as an adult rather than a creeped-out and perpetually seething-angry teenager, I don’t think Norman really hated us, not in the visceral loathing sense.

Rigobert folded the letter, handed it back, and then raised a brow at her expression.

“Just thinking of Norman,” she explained.

“My sympathies, my lady. I hope you recover quickly and don’t lose lunch.”

He raised the canteen in another toast. “May his bigoted, sadistic, rotten soul roast in Hell to the cheers of his innumerable victims,” he went on-quietly-and drank.

She took the canteen and sipped herself. “Though to be fair, as far as the bigotry goes I think he just thought he should hate queers because he was such a fucking Period Nazi purist Society geek, killer psychopath academic subdivision. Sort of like wearing hose and houppelande. He was playing a role twenty-four/seven. And he scared me, frankly.”

“Me too. Not much of a difference on the receiving end whether he was sincere or not,” he said a little sourly. “What was that ancient Greek saying? The boys throw stones at the frogs in sport, but the frogs die in earnest? When Norman cut someone dead, he didn’t do it metaphorically. Usually it involved him laughing hard with blood up to his elbows. I’ve never met a man who enjoyed killing more and I’ve known some ripe evil throat-cutting bastards in my time. Been one myself, at need.”

“True. But you have to grant that at least he didn’t have any racial prejudices. Gender yes. Us, yes. Race, no.”

Which was true; about one in five of the Association’s nobility were what the old world would have called members of a visible minority, as opposed to about one in twenty-five of the general population. Not that anyone gave a damn about that sort of thing anymore; things like class, kin and religion were vastly more important now.

“That’s probably only because William the Bastard and King Roger II of the Two Sicilies didn’t have racial prejudices either,” Rigobert said sardonically. “Hanging around Sandra so long has made you inhumanly rational, my lady.”

“It is catching, my lord Forest Grove,” she admitted. “Though as far as excess rationality goes, remember that Sandra truly loved Norman.”

To herself: And he had it in for gay men much more than women, which makes it easier for me to be objective. But that’s standard. It’s even authentically medieval, from what I’ve read; without a dick involved somehow it wasn’t real sex, or not real enough to be a serious sin, even a perverted variety, back during the Reign of the Penis.

“Oh, well, I got a happy marriage out of it in the end,” Rigobert said lightly. More seriously: “And the kids, which I find in retrospect I wouldn’t want to have missed.”

“Me too. And I was never a rug-rat fan either; as usual when Delia insists on something, she turns out to be right.”

She sighed slightly. “How long are we going to be haunted by Norman’s ghost?”

“Up until about the time Rudi and Mathilda’s eldest takes the throne,” Rigobert said. “And he or she will be Norman’s grandchild.”

He drained the canteen and tossed it to a page. “So may the Lord Protector get an occasional day off from the furnace. He did some good too, even if unintentionally.”

The arrangement had started as pure and rather resented protective coloration as far as she was concerned, but it had eventually made Tiphaine and Rigobert. .

I think you could say friends, she thought. Though I don’t have many, never did, except for Sandra and Conrad and that’s a liege-vassal thing too. Certainly we’re colleagues and close allies. He’s fun to go hunting and hawking with, too, and I’ve had some very pleasant times just hanging out with him and Delia and the children and sometimes his current boyfriend. It’s only taken fifteen years for us to reach the stage of exchanging BFF confidences. Delia must be mellowing me at last.

“Which reminds me,” she said to him. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, when there was time. There won’t be any unless I make the time, so. . Rigobert, stand witness for me, would you? Since we’re waiting for the Count anyway.”

“At your command, my lady,” he said, doffing his Montero and bowing slightly; they were of roughly equal status as nobles, but her appointed Crown office as Grand Constable was higher than his as Marchwarden of the peaceful southern flank of the Association.

She glanced around and called sharply: “Armand! Rodard! Attend me!”

The most senior of her squires looked up from the papers in their hands, handed them over to clerks and then hurried over, bowing formally and standing at the Association equivalent of parade rest, with their left hands on their sword-hilts and their right tucked behind their backs. Both were dark-haired boldly handsome young men in their twenties, with slightly hooded blue eyes. . and nephews of Katrina Georges, Tiphaine’s first lover, who’d been killed in the run-up to the Protector’s War fifteen years ago. The parents hadn’t long survived the Change, but thanks to Katrina and Tiphaine their children had. She’d handled their training as pages and squires since her own knighting.

“Kneel!” Tiphaine said.

They did, going down on one knee with their eyes wide. Tiphaine drew her long sword and tossed it a little to settle the grip. The gesture attracted more attention; as a baron and as commander of the Association’s armies she had the right of the High Justice twice over. There were probably some people here who knew her only by reputation and thought she was going to start beheading with her own hands. Though that sort of thing wasn’t done as much these days.

When she spoke, it was pitched to carry beyond her bubble of privacy. “Esquires, knights, and all gentles of the Association who are within hearing of my voice. Know that these men are of good birth and Associates of the PPA. For some years they have served me as esquires, and have proven valiant in battle, faithful in service-”

And extremely efficient in some covert ops work, but let’s not break the flow. “-and skillful and courteous in those arts and graces which become gentlefolk. I am therefore minded to dub them knights, which is my right as their liege-lady, as baron and tenant-in-chief, as Grand Constable of the Association and as myself one who wears the golden spurs and belt of knighthood. Do any here dispute my right or know of an impediment in these men? If so speak now, or hold your peace thereafter, for you may be called to court under oath as witnesses of this ceremony.”

Silence fell in a circle of the busy, bustling scene. Tiphaine looked around, her pale gray eyes cool and considering. Then she turned to the two men, facing Armand first; he was the elder, after all.

“I dub thee knight,” she said, and the flat of the blade rang on his armored shoulder. “I dub thee knight,” as she flipped it to strike the other side and then sheathed it.

Then: “Receive the collée.”

That was a slap on both cheeks, delivered forehand and backhand; it was supposed to cement the moment in your mind, and she gave it in the traditional style, a hard smacking buffet both ways. Knighting in the field was traditional too, and if anything, more prestigious. Armand was fighting down a grin as he drew his own sword and presented it across his palms. Tiphaine held it up and kissed the cross the hilt made before returning it.

“Take this sword, Sir Armand de Georges, knight of the Association. . and the High Kingdom of Montival. Draw it to uphold the Crown, Holy Church, your own honor and your oaths to your liege, and to protect the weak as chivalry demands.”

“I will, my lady and liege. Before God and the Virgin I swear.”

“Then rise a knight! And I welcome you to the worshipful company of that most honorable estate.”

She repeated it for Rodard; when they were both on their feet she waved aside their thanks.

“It was overdue. The spurs and the vigil and the calligraphy on parchment can wait. Style yourselves household knights of Barony Ath and your stipends are doubled. We can discuss fiefs and manors after the war.”

That made their ears prick a little, beneath very well-schooled calm; they were loyal, but naturally ambitious. All noblemen lusted after land, herself included. She added, “Not to mention the marriages Lady Delia has been thinking of arranging for you, in loco parentis. Dismissed.”

There was a little alarm on their faces as well, when they turned away. Then she nodded to Rigobert.

“One more thing. Lioncel de Stafford! Attend me!”

The page dashed up; he was one of a brace of six she had running messages, all about as old as pages got and by modern standards eligible to be taken on campaign; his younger brother Diomede was eleven, and still serving in an ally’s castle on the far-off Pacific coast. Delia’s oldest child took after his father in looks, fair and blue-eyed, tall already at fourteen and from his hands and feet going to be even taller. He was wearing a light mail shirt, a steel cap, a sword and a buckler, with a crossbow slung over his back. Pages weren’t expected to fight, but you couldn’t rely on the enemy to observe the niceties, especially when fighting the Church Universal and Triumphant. Who were either bugfuck crazy, possessed by demons, or both.

Probably both, when it comes to their leadership. And I thought the Change was the weirdest thing that could ever happen. Never say ever.

“Lioncel de Stafford,” Tiphaine said formally; she usually called him Lioncel or you or boy!

He bowed deeply with the standard graceful sweep of right hand, uncovered and drew himself up in sudden conjecture, visibly suppressing an impulse to give his hair an emergency comb; it was in what was once more literally a pageboy bob and considerably tousled by a day of wind and dust and hard scrambling work. She wore her hair that way herself, since going the full monty to a bowl-cut would be more of a thumb in the eye to the clergy than was wise, even for her.

“Let this company witness your words,” she said.

Everyone in her menie, her fighting-tail of personal retainers, knew the answers, and of course the boy’s father and his following did too, but it had to be spoken aloud for the record.

“What are your years?”

Lioncel swallowed, going a little pale as what was happening sank in. “I will be fourteen years come the Feast of Saints Crispus and Gaius, my lady.”

Which was October fourth; she remembered it herself because it was Lioncel’s birthday, but the Church calendar was the natural set of references to his generation of Associate. He was conventionally pious, despite his mother being a secret witch and Tiphaine having been, until recently, an even more secret atheist.

“Fourteen would do, and October’s close enough in wartime. What is your birth?”

“Ah. . I am the son of a belted knight, born in wedlock to a gentlewoman Associate of noble blood, my lady.”

“What is your service?”

“I, ah, I have served as page in your household, and for a year in that of the Baron de Netarts who is Marchwarden of the Coast, before returning to you this summer, my lady. I have been under instruction as a page since I was six years old, learning courtesy and good service.”

“Is it your will to take service with me as squire, your parents having given their consent?”

“Y-yes, my lady!”

She ignored the sudden crack in his voice that had him blushing crimson, and spoke to carry again: “On this day, I have chosen to take Lioncel de Stafford as my squire, deeming him of good character and sufficiently instructed in the knowledge suitable to his years. Does any here know of an impediment to this oath?”

Silence, and she went on: “Kneel!”

She drew her sword and planted it point-down. Lioncel hesitated for an instant, then set his hands on the quillions; she clasped hers around his and looked down into his eyes. The fingers felt a little chill beneath hers despite the hot day; he hadn’t been expecting this.

“The path of chivalry is a long one, and the honor of knighthood not easily won. Are you willing to devote yourself to this cause?”

“I am.” The boy’s voice rang, strong and steady now.

“Then repeat after me: Here I do swear-”

“Here do I swear-”

“-by mouth and by hand”

“-it is my intent to become a knight”

“-to learn by service”

“-to act always with honor”

“-and as the guardian of the honor”

“-of the knight I serve”

“-to obey my knight and my knight’s teaching”

“-that I may learn skill and courtesy”

“-to follow always the virtues”

“-of faith and hope”

“-charity and justice”

“-of prudence, temperance and strength.”

“So I swear.”

The boy’s face was shining as he finished. Tiphaine replied, “In return for your service, and your devotion to chivalry, I swear to teach you what I can, and to find instruction for you in what I cannot. I will furnish you with arms, horse and gear as needful and see to your honorable maintenance as befits your station. You shall be my vassal in arms and my pupil, and your service is not menial or infamous. As my honor reflects upon you, so does your honor reflect upon me. Whoso deals ill with you deals also ill with me, and at their peril.”

She released his hands, wiped the point of her sword carefully on one sleeve before sheathing it and pulled a badge with her arms out of a pouch. Then she pinned it to his cap before she drew him up by his shoulders and exchanged the ritual kiss on both cheeks.

“By wearing my badge, you declare your service to me, and my sponsorship of you.”

Rigobert was beaming with fond pride; Tiphaine drew him and the broadly grinning Lioncel aside, and the other baron hugged his son. Lioncel returned the gesture, then faced Tiphaine proudly; now he was forcing himself not to finger the badge in his cap that marked his acknowledged exit from childhood and into the intermediate status of a youth.

“Lioncel, do you know why I took your oath as squire today?”

“Ah. . no, my lady.”

“First, you deserve it. In peacetime, I’d have waited another year, but we’re at war. That leads to the second reason. You are your father’s heir, but your younger brother Diomede is my son and heir by adoption, and the Barony of Ath, title and lands, go to him and the heirs of his body.”

Lioncel nodded; he’d already started his study of feudal law-the Association’s system was based on twelfth-century England under the Anglo-Norman kings, as modified by the peace treaty at the end of the Protector’s War and more subtly by Sandra Arminger in her term as Regent since. A nobleman needed some acquaintance with it, if he weren’t to be helpless in the hands of his advisers.

“Nothing is certain in war. Your father and I may both fall in battle. I don’t expect it, but it could happen.”

Lioncel nodded gravely; even as a youngster the son of a knightly house did not hide from the facts of life and death. He had been raised with the knowledge that war was the nobility’s trade and avocation, and death by the sword their accepted fate. One that might come calling at any moment to exact the price of their privileges.

“If we did, your mother would take seisin of Barony Forest Grove by dower right until you came of age, in trust for you and your sister, and would have a third of the mesne tithes as widow’s portion for her lifetime after you came of age and took seisin in your own right; that’s settled law. But Diomede’s position would be. . ambiguous, and so would Delia’s with regard to Ath and its revenues. Your lady mother would need your support because she has no formal right to Ath from me except through Diomede and that’s uncertain. Technically Diomede is my son, but of course I’m not married to her so she can’t claim seisin by dower right if I die or the widow’s portion of the revenues. Dower descends from the husband, it doesn’t rise from the child.”

Dammit, she thought. Norman and his obsessions! Not to mention the Thomas à Becket fixation a lot of the clergy have developed. Why on earth couldn’t Delia and I get married? We have been for all practical purposes for a decade and a half!

Aloud she continued: “It’s a nice point of law and some Chancellery clerk or worse still some Churchman might start a suit alleging Diomede was an orphan in need of wardship and that she had no standing to claim ward over him since a child can’t have two legal mothers. The thing could be tied up in the courts for years with the land going to ruin. A page is a child; being a squire doesn’t mean you’re of age but it does give you a foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. It proves that you’re old enough to take a legally binding oath of vassalage, so you can’t be completely ignored. And as elder brother, you do then have certain rights where a minor sibling and the sibling’s inheritance is concerned, and your mother through you since you’d be automatically under her ward as a widowed mother of a minor heir. Understand?”

He frowned, pale brows knotting in his tanned young face. “Yes, my lady, I think so. God and your patron saints protect you and my lord my father, but if the worst should happen, I will be my mother’s strong right arm and my brother’s shield and prove their rights against any who deny them. I swear it before God and the Virgin and my patron saint, St. Michael of the Lance.”

He crossed himself and she nodded.

“Good. In the meantime, you’re the most junior of my squires instead of the oldest page in the household. And you’re not going to be old enough to fight as a man-at-arms for another five years or so, is that clear?”

A nod, and she went on: “Sir Rodard will find you enough work to do, esquire of House Ath. Hop!”

“Thanks, my lady,” Rigobert said as the boy raced off. “I should have thought of something like that. I still find myself thinking like an uncle rather than a father sometimes, and as for being a husband. . And there are other times I have to remind myself I really am a feudal lord, not just playing at it.”

Tiphaine gave a faint snort; she was a crucial near-decade younger and that sort of feeling hit her less often, but. .

“Tell me. My highest ambition in Middle School was going to the Olympics as a gymnast. Until the world ended, when not starving to death, and not getting raped, butchered and eaten by cannibals or not catching the Black Death soon came to the fore.”

“I knew you were a complete jockette, but I’ll bet you wore black and red flannel shirts, too,” Rigobert said with a grin. “Flannel shirts and a white A-shirt underneath, and skate shoes?”

“Oh, incessantly; with a trucker’s hat, no less. I think the thirteen-year-old boys hated me because I looked more like a thirteen-year-old boy than they did.”

“Not a mullet. Please, God, tell me you didn’t have a mullet.”

“Mother wouldn’t let me, but that would have come in a couple of years. And when I turned twelve I realized I was desperately in love with Melissa Etheridge and put a great big poster of her on the inside of my locker door and played her music twenty-four/seven on my Walkman.”

Rigobert laughed, and Tiphaine smiled thinly. She’d never lost herself in laughter easily, not when she was sober at least, and for her being thoroughly disinhibited was usually a bad idea. She envied him that easy laugh a little. It was odd to realize she couldn’t have had this conversation with Delia either; not because they didn’t share everything, but because the younger woman simply didn’t have the referents to understand it without a lot of backing and filling. She’d grown up a miller’s daughter on Montinore Manor and hadn’t even learned to read until her late teens. Tiphaine shook her head as memories opened like the door to a dusty cupboard.

“I was a complete caricature of a baby-dyke-in-training and didn’t even realize it until I caught myself in the middle of a daydream of rescuing Melissa from a stalker and then smooching her passionately. . my family didn’t talk about things like that so I didn’t even really understand the names my beloved classmates were calling me. I did know they weren’t well meant, you bet I did.”

“Was it possible to be that naive in 1998?”

“For a while, if you were a lonely introspective only child of a single mother who was extremely religious, with no friends except your gymnastics coach. And she was terrified of being hit with ‘inappropriate conduct’ accusations by a hysterical parent. Everyone knew before I did, except my mother and she was deep in denial.”

“Wasn’t as much of a problem for me,” Rigobert said, with a reminiscent smile. “It might have been hellish if I were swish, but-”

“Yeah, you’re even more butch than I am,” Tiphaine said sardonically. “Football star, right?”

“Not dumb enough for football. Basketball, track and field, karate, and fencing club. I was such a model of blazing macho hotness even the straight guys wanted me,” Rigobert said. “Ah, high school, the amount of action I-”

“Now you’re boasting. . wait a minute, do you realize our speech patterns just lost twenty-five years?”

The other baron shook his head. “You’re right. Best not to dwell on the past. . it was just seeing Lioncel looking so damned young. And looking so much the way I did at that age. . though I’m pretty sure he’s straight, come to that.”

“He is,” Tiphaine said definitely.

A conversation about stumbling upon him and a servant girl in a linen closet back at Montinore Manor came to mind; Delia had found it hilarious and she’d thought it rather embarrassing.

“Lioncel’s greatest ambition is to be a gallant knight and a good baron, and I think he’s going to achieve it,” she said instead.

“He’s a fine boy, all three of us can be proud of him, but. . they scare me, sometimes, the Changelings. No offense.”

“None taken. I’m a borderline case anyway. I can remember the old world, bits and pieces, particularly the last couple of years before the Change. I simply don’t, usually, unless it comes up the way it did just now. The last twenty-three years or so have been a lot more fun than my childhood anyway, on the whole.”

“It’s Changelings raised by Changelings who really give me that odd feeling, and Delia’s seven years younger than you; she is a Changeling and no mistake. From time to time I look back on the way we set things up in the early years and think. . what have we done?”

Tiphaine’s expression went colder than usual. “We all did what we had to do, in those days,” she said, very softly. “All of us. Everybody did what they had to, or they died, like ninety-five percent of the human race.”

Rigobert inclined his head in silent agreement, memories of his own moving behind his eyes. Anyone old enough to really remember the first Change Years and the great dying knew that expression, from the inside as well as from their mirror; it would die only when the last of them were gone.

“Not quite what I meant. I was thinking of the Association’s trappings in particular,” he said more lightly after a moment. “We all went along with it and now. . now it’s just the way people around here live.”

“Norman did that,” Tiphaine observed. “God help us if he’d been obsessed with first-century Rome or Chin Dynasty China or the Old South. Or been an old-fashioned Red with a man-crush on Stalin.”

“And if Norman hadn’t existed, we’d probably all three have been dead these twenty-five years now and the children wouldn’t have been born, so done is done and probably for the best.” Rigobert sighed. “We can’t complain, seeing we not only made it into the small minority who survived but came out very much on top of the heap. I try to do right by the peasants on my manors, but being a baron is much more pleasant.”

“Except when we’re doing the hard parts.”

Rigobert smiled. “No, sometimes then too, don’t you find? Sometimes especially then.”

COUNTY OF THE EASTERMARK

BARONY OF TUCANNON

PORTLAND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION

(FORMERLY SOUTHEASTERN WASHINGTON)

HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL

(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)

AUGUST 18, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

“Gotcha!” Ingolf said as his force came in out of the westering sun.

From here, several miles out on the high plains leading from the mountains down to Dayton, the valley with the sheep looked different; the rugged peaks in the background seemed closer, and the whole thing more closed off. And you could see most of it was rolling, not a steep V down to the little creek. The shepherdesses had fled in well-simulated terror, scattering their sheep artfully as they went, and the Boise cavalry had spread out to get the flock under control.

Almost all of them would be cowboys from the ranching parts of Idaho originally anyway; you nearly had to be born at it to make a good horse-archer. They’d know how to gather a mob of woolies. It was probably a homelike interval in the war for them. . until the moment they felt the hook inside the delectable bait. He looked behind. Most of his men would still be hidden by the folds he’d been diligently following, but they were getting too close for caution.

“Sound advance in file order,” Ingolf called, and legged his horse up to a canter.

The sweet notes of Mark’s bugle rang. The columns opened out like fans; a few moments later the First Richland was strung out in a great line two men deep, rippling and twisting as it moved over the swells of the ground. Ingolf looked left and right and over his shoulder; the Sioux were closing in from the rear, their formations more like the flocking of birds than regular lines, but keeping up easily. Three Bears slanted through the Richlander files to ride beside him, his quarter horse matching the longer strides of Boy.

“Got ’em all!” he called, over the growing, growling thunder of hooves; there were fresh scalps at his saddle. “And the remuda. Good horses.”

Horse-theft was the Lakota national sport; you just had to accept that they were obsessed.

“Any prisoners?”

“Nah, they all fought to the death. Brave as shit. Look, cousin, I’ve got a bad feeling about this. They may not have been alone, you know? Yellow Bird and her tree huggers and some of my boys are sweeping back west of here.”

“Good. Let’s get this part done quickly.”

He chopped his hand left, to the north, where the little creek ran down from the hills and came closer to that steeper edge of the valley.

“Keep them from getting across that, will you? It’s fordable everywhere but it’ll slow them if they try to cross and you can shoot the shit out of them. We need them bunched and I don’t want to extend that far. Your call on when you get stuck in.”

“Right, cousin. Ki-yi-yip-ki!”

He angled away again, and the Lakota veered in that direction, pulling ahead at a gallop. A growing pillar of dust was rising from the pounding hooves, fortunately mostly swept behind them by the wind and the speed of their own passage. The spicy scent of crushed grass mixed with Ingolf’s own sweat and Boy’s and the oily metallic smell of his mail and the muskier stink of leather. Ahead the Boise formation was reacting with commendable speed now that they’d realized. .

They’re about to be corncobbed, Ingolf thought with a taut grin, reaching over his shoulder for an arrow.

The wind in his face would give the other side a slight advantage in a horse-archery duel. You had to be careful about that sort of thing, and remember always that mounted men could only shoot ahead, behind and to a half-circle arc on their left. Even worse, the enemy had a battery of four springalds. Spitters, they were called sometimes. Not as bad as scorpions or twenty-four pounders throwing dart-bundles, but bad enough and very mobile. A four-horse team could drag them almost anywhere cavalry could go, and about as fast.

The Boise cavalry were back in formation already, four blocks three men deep-risky, but it would add firepower and weight to any charge. Now they were rocking forward, but between the blocks of the enemy formation loomed squat wheeled shapes behind angled arrow-shields. .

“For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful,” Ingolf muttered, then louder: “Mark! Drop behind me!”

Reluctantly the boy obeyed; Major Kohler was over on the left flank of the formation with the other guidon banner so that a lucky spray of shafts couldn’t decapitate the regiment, but being a commander meant you got shot at more, and that was that. You were completely useless if your men couldn’t see you, and if they could the enemy could too.

Up to a hand gallop now, the knotted reins dropped on the saddlebow, guiding the horse with weight and thighs alone. It took almost as long to train a cavalry mount as it did the rider, longer in proportion to life span, ordinary horses were useless for this. .

TUNG! A great metallic bass throb of a sound, like the world’s biggest untuned lute, and instantly the crack as the springald’s slide hit its stops and the dart flashed free.

Something arched out from behind the onrushing body of horsemen. It seemed to go faster as it approached, a blur in a long shallow curve traveling too fast to really see. Then shunk! as it struck the dirt fifty feet ahead of him and buried half its length in the ground. He was past it immediately, close enough to see the malignant quiver of the sheet-metal fins that fletched it. Then another went by, and he could hear the whipppt of cloven air as it passed his left shoulder. Death missed by six inches; it would have torn his arm off at the shoulder if it had struck. And there was a huge scream from behind him, just an instant before it stopped sharp as an ax-cut.

Mark! he thought, then ruthlessly suppressed the wave of anger and grief.

More three-pound darts traveling hundreds of feet per second; one made a brutal wet cracking sound as it passed entirely through a trooper not far to his right in a spray of blood and broken mail-links and killed the man behind him too. Another skewered a horse, punching into its chest and disappearing entirely into its body cavity. The beast went down between one stride and other, limp as a banker’s charity, tangling the feet of the mount behind as it tried to leap the sudden obstacle. The second horse went over in a tumble of limbs and crackle of bone, the rider flying free to strike with crushing force. And they were close now, close, four hundred yards, three hundred. .

“Shoot!” he bellowed.

Few of the men could hear him. They could all see and the commanders would relay the order; he rose in the stirrups, twisting his torso as he drew against the recurve’s hundred-pound resistance with the thick muscle of arms and shoulders, chest and gut. The arrow slid through the centerline cutout in the bow’s riser, and the smooth curved limbs bent back into a deep C-shape, sinew stretching and horn compressing on either side of the central layer of hickory.

He let the string roll off his draw-fingers.

Whap!

Three hundred and fifty shafts followed within a second, arching into the sky like slivers of incarnate motion, seeming to pause for an instant and then plunging downward. The enemy shot in almost the same instant, and in the passing of a fractional second Ingolf fought and won the usual battle of will not to duck and hunch his head forward. You got hit or you didn’t; he’d had both. Instead he was flicking out more arrows, shooting as fast as he could draw and adjusting the angle as the forces came together. More men and horses went down on both sides, falling out with iron in their bodies, going limp or thrashing out of the saddle, horses suddenly uncontrollable with the pain of sharp steel and wood in their flesh. Not much to choose between his men and the enemy in speed or accuracy of shooting, but there were more of his and the Sioux were into it now too, at extreme range.

Six arrows, seven, eight-

He thrust the bow into the boiled-leather scabbard at his knee. The same motion helped slide the yard-wide round shield off his back and onto his left arm, and an instant later the shete was in his right hand, moves practiced for decades. That switch needed careful timing; too soon and you got shot at without being able to reply, too late and you were fumbling with things while the guy on the other side cut you out of the saddle like a side of pork. Juggling your weapons like that, fast but without dropping anything, was a big part of cavalry training. It was even worse if you had a lance to worry about too.

The enemy’s trumpets sounded, a harsher deeper blatting tone than the ones his people used. The Boise horsemen responded to the order with beautiful precise discipline, reining in from their gallop and turning; their whole formation was racing away back up the valley in a brace of seconds, with the troopers turning and firing backward. The Parthian shot, and his men couldn’t shoot back. He thrust his shete skyward to keep them from uncasing their bows again, and heard officers and noncoms taking it along the line:

“Blades! Blades!”

They’d be wondering why he gave that order, but they obeyed, hunching with their shields up under their eyes as they rode. The enemy were thirty yards away, edging to the right as the Lakota shot at them from across the little creek or began to cross themselves in fountains of spray from the plunging hooves of their horses, holding their bows high over their heads to keep them out of the wet, their yelping, yipping war cries splitting the air.

Thock!

An arrow thudded home in his shield, slamming through the sheet metal and leather and plywood, the point appearing as if by magic with four inches of shaft behind it. He grunted with the impact as it rocked him back in the saddle; sheer dumb luck it hadn’t gone through his left arm. He’d fought an action with an arrow there once and didn’t remember it fondly. Also he’d lost that skirmish and barely gotten away with his life.

Tock!

Another; he used the hilt of his shete to break them off with two sharp blows. One of the oddities of command was that you had to keep thinking when things like this were happening.

The Boise troops were bunching closer together; their commander was aiming at the gentlest, or least steep slope-up ahead to the right. If he could get his men across that he had options. If he stayed to fight, he didn’t. The numbers were against him. Being outnumbered two to one didn’t mean you were half as strong as the other side; the ratio of combat power was more like four or five to one, other things being equal.

But I know something you don’t, you son of a bitch! It’s even worse than you think it is right now.

The onrushing Richlander line overran the springalds and a few sections stayed to deal with them. The battery commander had wasted time trying to hitch his weapons up to their teams, and they all paid for it. There was a brief flurry as the gunners swung cocking-levers and billhooks, the cavalry shetes rising and falling in lethal chopping arcs, bright and then throwing arcs of red drops. It ended soon; artillerymen rarely got a chance to surrender when those they’d been shooting at from out of bow range got within arm’s reach of them for payback time.

Then…

Perfect timing, Ingolf thought vengefully.

The line of the crest above suddenly bristled steel and the Boise formation halted in a ragged stutter with yells of dismay. Steel lance heads glinted above bright pennants flapping in the wind, the steel of armor on man and destrier glinted, a glow of color shone from the heraldic arms on their shields. Another trumpet sang, this time the high harsh sweetness of a Portlander oliphant.

A cry rang out from forty throats, muffled by the visors that turned their faces into blank steel curves with only the vision slit showing dark, but still deep and hard:

“Haro! St. Joan for Tucannon! Haro!”

The lance-points of the men-at-arms came down in a long falling ripple, and their followings came up behind them, ready to run in their wake through the hole they’d punch in the enemy formation.

“Haro! Chevaliers, à l’outrance-charge!”

Nine minutes later Ingolf stopped his shete in midswing; the jarring mental effort left him weak and gasping for an instant. The Boise trooper who’d dropped his saber and cried for quarter had his hands crossed over his face and his eyes screwed shut. When he didn’t die he opened them again.

“Down!” Ingolf barked. “Down and hands on your head!”

The man scrambled out of the saddle to obey, kneeling with his palms on top of his helmet, and his horse galloped off with its stirrups flapping. The will to fight ran out of the Boisean formation with an almost audible rush that spread throughout the milling chaos of the melee battle in instants; their commander put his cross-crested helmet on the end of his sword and pushed it high.

“We surrender! Quarter, comrades, we call for quarter! Throw down, men! It’s useless! Throw down!”

They did. It didn’t always save them. Most human beings found it hard to kill; once rage and fear had pushed them into that state of un-mind, it was even harder to stop. Officers and sergeants and corporals in the Richlander force grabbed men and held them in bear grips until the killing madness ran out of them, sometimes stunning with a blow from the flat or knocking them out of the saddle with the edge of a shield. The knights dealt with their subordinates a bit more roughly, clubbing more than a few militiamen down with broken lances or skull-shaking kicks from armored feet and stirrupirons.

The Sioux weren’t even trying; he heard the savage guttural blood shout of Hoon! Hoon! as the steel drove home. More and more of them were crossing the river, too.

“Kohler!” he shouted.

“He’s dead, sir. Arrow through the throat.”

Damn, he was a good man. Just bad luck. Later!

“Then you, Captain Jaeger! Get your men behind me, now! Shields up, shetes down.”

They followed as he booted Boy back into motion, and he wheeled them between the Lakota and the bulk of the Boiseans, holding up their shields but not the threatening steel. Violence wavered on the brink of reality for an instant, and then Three Bears rode up to Ingolf’s side, reining in stirrup to stirrup. He rose in the saddle and shook his dripping shete at his own folk, shouting something in the fast-rising, slow-falling syllables of their language-which was mostly used for ceremony and important public announcements these days, something that probably redoubled the impact. They stopped, looked at each other sheepishly, shrugged, and pulled back.

“Thanks, cousin,” Ingolf said, looking down at his sword-hand.

It was glistening with thick red liquid, and so was the whole yard-long shete and more was spattered across his thigh and torso and some on his face, and his gauntlet was greasy where it had run down under the cuff and soaked into the leather. The harsh iron-coppery stink was everywhere, and he felt the weary disgust, the sense of let-down-ness that he always did after a fight. For a while you were just an armor-clad set of reflexes that shouted and struck, and then you had to be yourself again.

“Colonel!”

He whipped around. Mark was on a horse that was obviously not his own, and his bugle was bent nearly in half where it rested on its sling across his chest.

“You OK?” Ingolf barked.

Christ, Varda, whatever, thank You I don’t have to write that letter to Ed and Wanda. Not this time, at least!

“Nothing hurt but my bugle and my pride, Unc. . Colonel. A springald bolt went right through Dancer’s neck and cut the saddle-girths and the next thing I knew I was lying flat on my ass. Took me a while to catch a loose horse. Where’s Major Kohler?”

“Dead,” Ingolf said, and the boy’s face struggled with shock for an instant.

“We’ve got work to do,” Ingolf said grimly. “We made the mess and now we need to clean it up.”

Mary rode up laughing a couple of hours later, cantering past the rows of Boise prisoners sitting with their hands still on their heads. Ingolf looked up at her with relief; just beyond the prisoners were the rows of wounded, and he’d been consulting with the doctors, his own and the Boisean medic squad. The dead were a little farther out, their shields over their faces and a couple of walking injured to keep the birds away.

His wife had a bright scratch across the matte green paint on her helmet, just the sort an arrowhead would make when it banged off the steel. Two inches lower and it would have punched through her face and into the brain.

I’ve been in this business too long, Ingolf thought. I’ve seen too many of the people I care about die. It’s starting to get to me more and more.

He shook his head and looked at the Portlander beside her in the dented and scuffed suit of plate. The man had a tower and a lion on his shield, still discernible beneath a couple of arrow-stubs despite a lot of recent dings and nicks and one lopsided corner looking like someone had hit it with an ax, very very hard. A war hammer in his right hand rested with its shaft across the high steel-plated cantle of his knight’s saddle; the end of it was caked gruesomely, with drying bits of hair and bone and skin caught in the serrations on the blunt side and bits of sticky gray goo as well.

Sometime in the last hour, hour and a half from the state of that. And he didn’t stop to smell the roses afterwards, his horse is foaming its lungs out. Big courser and not a barded destrier, must have been a mobile fight.

The face below the raised curved visor was older than Ingolf by about a decade or a bit more though not as banged up, running with sweat and red with exertion-fighting in armor was like that, especially in that sort of armor in this sort of heat, and you didn’t get over it quick-but it looked coolly amused and totally in command of everything around, starting with his breath. Also it had the sort of sculpted but slightly harsh good looks that would make women coo; the short golden beard added to the impression.

“You’ve done a nice little job of work here, Colonel Vogeler, Lord de Grimmond,” he said, his voice deep but smooth. “I don’t believe we’ve met in person before, Colonel. Marchwarden Rigobert de Stafford, Lord Forest Grove, currently in charge of the Crown’s forces in this area. I’d offer to shake hands but I’m a bit messy right now. I’ve met your charming and capable spouse, Princess Mary.”

He handed off the war hammer to another man, probably his squire. “Well-met again, Maugis,” he said to de Grimmond; they exchanged a knuckle-tap, a clunk of armor on armor. “And thank you for your aid, intancan Rick Mat’o Yamni.”

“What happened out there?” Ingolf said bluntly, jerking his head to the west a little.

He couldn’t look there now, because the sun was only a couple of hours from setting, but he needed to know. His mind filed away the fact that this Portlander had gone to the trouble to learn the Lakota for war chief. It was an extremely tactful thing to do, when you had one under your command. When it came to bloody-minded touchy pride the Sioux and the PPA’s nobility were surprisingly similar.

“There were more of them,” Mary said. “Heading towards Dayton originally, but they probably saw your dust when you mousetrapped their cavalry, and they veered this way. Quite a lot of them. We got cut off and fell back south to try to get around them, and then ran into Lord Forest Grove’s outriders. Which was a very considerable relief. And he acted very quickly.”

“You supplied us with just the information we needed,” de Stafford said, with a savage grin and an inclination of his head.

Then he took a moment to unfasten the straps of his visored sallet helm and take it off, shaking his sweat-darkened hair out with a grunt of relief, leaving his head looking rather odd above the bevoir that buckled to the upper part of the breastplate and protected his chin.

“They had about four battalions of infantry and a couple of cavalry regiments,” he went on. “A raid in force and enough to invest Castle Dayton and do much damage if we didn’t hit them hard. We had a stiff brush with them, and then their infantry pulled back on bicycles with their cavalry screening them. It might have been much worse if we hadn’t been forewarned, but there didn’t seem much point in following. They could get back to Castle Campscapell faster than we could pursue, and it’s a useless to attack a castle that strong if the garrison is alert. Without the sort of special help they had taking it last year.”

Ingolf nodded wearily. Given a few miles start and on some sort of road, men on bicycles could run to death any horses ever foaled. There simply wasn’t any return in trying to catch them.

“Thank you, my lord,” he said. “That might have been awkward, if they’d showed up here.”

“You’re entirely welcome, but they’ll be back. . and this is a close relative of yours, from the good bones?” he added curiously, looking at Mark and smiling. “Not your son, my lord? Too old, I should think.”

That’s sharp, Ingolf thought. Aloud: “My nephew, Ensign Mark Vogeler.”

“Off to a good start in his career, I see. Well, Maugis, Colonel, we need to talk. Can your wounded be moved?”

A doctor looked up from one body resting atop the folding table he was using and threw aside the broken shaft he’d just extracted from the muscle of a thigh. He was an older man, gray-bearded, with blood splashed on his gloves and apron. The one shuddering through the leather strap clenched in his teeth was young Girars, but the peasant boy looked as if he’d make it. They were saving the ether for the really serious cases; two men picked up the stretcher he lay on and carried it off.

“They’d better be, my lords. I need to get them under cover by nightfall, though fortunately it won’t be too chilly,” the doctor said. “Moving will hurt some but help more.”

Then, absently under his breath as he returned to work, “Christ, I never thought when I got out of Johns Hopkins I’d end up sewing up sword-cuts and pulling out arrows in godforsaken Walla Walla County.”

“We have plenty of wagons and carts, my lord de Stafford. It’s not far to Castle Tucannon and the Grimmond-on-the-Wold manor,” the local baron said. “My people should be arriving with the transport any moment.”

“Then let’s get moving.”

De Grimmond fell behind for a moment to whisper into Ingolf’s ear as the Marchwarden rode on with his lancers at his heels.

“Ah. . about my lord de Stafford. . just a word to the wise. .” he began.

Ingolf blinked in surprise as he listened; Mary snorted from his other side as the baron heeled his horse forward again.

“You mean you couldn’t tell?” she said.

“No,” Ingolf said shortly.

“Tell what, Unc. . Colonel?” Mark said.

Ingolf thought for a moment, then told him. The young man goggled for a moment. “Him? But. . but. .”

Mary laughed, which added to his confusion; he had what he probably thought was a well-concealed burning crush on his uncle’s wife. Who was only five years older than he was, after all.

And good-looking if I do say so myself, Ingolf thought a little smugly. If you like ’em tall and blond and with an eye patch, which I do.

She reached over and tweaked the young man’s ear. “Welcome to the club of those who’ve had their butts looked on with the eyes of desire, Mark,” she said. “I’ve been a member since I was much younger than you, and it’s always a hoot when guys complain about it. That’s what I noticed about Lord Rigobert; he didn’t. Look lecherously, that is; not even a glance.”

“Lord de Grimmond said he’s a perfect gentleman, though. Knows how to take no for an answer,” Ingolf said. Then he grinned. “It probably isn’t relevant, Mark. I never did make a try for every pretty girl who caught my eye, either.”

“You’d better not,” Mary said, amused; Mark sputtered a little more.

“You look like a landed carp,” Ingolf said; teasing the boy was probably unkind but irresistible. “And you’re turning the color of a ripe tomato. What’s the problem?”

“Because he looks like, well, like a fighting man!”

This time Ingolf laughed out loud; Mary chortled too, not unkindly.

“Son,” he said, “what did I tell you assume does?”

“Makes an Ass Out of You and Me,” Mark answered automatically. Then: “Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh.”

Mary rolled her eye skyward. “If you knew the number of times people up here in the PPA have just taken it for granted I like girls because I wear pants and I’m not the flounces and furbelows type. . since we got back and there’s this starry-eyed Companions of the Sword-Quest thing going around I’ve had to literally kick them out of my bed at least once. .”

Ingolf started to laugh helplessly; it wasn’t the first time he’d done that on a battlefield with the stink of death in his nose, or Mary either. That was where and when you needed a laugh most. Worry aside, there was a lot to be said for having a wife who was in his line of work. They could share things that most couples couldn’t.

Mary pointed an accusing finger at him. “You didn’t help! You stood there and brayed like a laughing jackass, just like you’re doing now. And then she cried.”

“Welcome to the club of them as has been cried at by girls, honey. I’ve been a member of that one a long time, too, and it’s sort of a hoot to hear a woman complaining about it.”

She snorted, and turned back to Mark, who was crimson to the ears. Ingolf sympathized, abstractly. The kid was probably also longing to be able to adjust his jock-cup.

I remember what it was like to be a hard-on with legs at that age. Thinking about gargling vinegar would give me one, much less imagining that situation!

“It’s just so annoying!” she said. “And it’s true about ‘assume,’ Mark.”

Ingolf reached over to tousle his nephew’s hair. “I couldn’t tell everything about de Stafford there, but I could tell he is a fighting man to be careful of, and I’d still say he’s exactly that. The guy whose brains were decorating that war hammer would say just the same, only he’s doing it sitting on a rock in hell. . or the Halls of Mandos. . cursing him as the world’s most dangerous killer faggot. Don’t assume about that. Don’t assume about anything, Mark. It can get you killed.”