Fred was a lithe, long-limbed broad-shouldered young man a little over six feet, with bluntly handsome features; his skin was a light toast-brown color, and his short black hair curled naturally. He grinned at his wife; they'd been together just over a year, and married for less than half of thatâa handfasting ceremony in Norrheim, on the borders of the Atlantic.
“You look good enough for both of us, honey,” he said.
She snorted. Her costume was full-fig formal for a prosperous Powder River rancher's daughter in this twenty-fifth year of the Change, acquired here since they got back to Montival and at some trouble and expense. Linen blue jeans with copper rivets, heeled riding boots of tooled and colored leather, a buckskin jacket worked with colored quillwork and fringed along the seams, a colorful bandana about her neck and a broad-brimmed black Stetson on her head. Her belt was covered in worked silver conchos, and a smaller strip of the same went around her hat; the hilts of her shete and bowie knife were jeweled, if also perfectly functional. More silver and tooling made the saddle and bow case and tack on her gray Arab match the arch-necked mettlesome horse itself, with ribbons woven into its mane. He'd noticed that when it came to horseflesh she was cheerfully rapacious in a way that was probably influenced by the close contact her family had had with the Sioux to the east of them. Or possibly just the obsessive focus on horses natural in a place where they were the difference between life and death.
“You made me drop the chaps,
honey
,” she pointed out. “Those were
good
chaps.”
“You look like there's a sheep in your family tree with those things on. And anyway, this is the best way to approach them, believe me. They're going to be sensitive as a singed wildcat, seeing me on the other side.”
“OK, darlin', you know your own folks best.”
They mounted outside the front gate of Brannigan's Inn, where they were staying like most visitors to the Clan's only large town, and rode through the crowded streets and out from Sutterdown's west-facing gate. Fred looked up at the walls; Sutterdown wasn't very large, no more than five or six thousand people, but the defenses were strong. There were still scars beneath the stucco, where cast-iron shot and steel darts had struck in sieges long ago, in the wars against the Association.
Beside the gate on either side were two great statues twice man-height, wrought from the trunks of whole black walnut trees and cunningly carved in the likeness of a woman with long golden hair standing on a seashell on the left, and a naked man holding a bow and crowned with the sun on the right.
He'd been with Rudi and Edain on the Quest all the way from Idaho to Norrheim on the Atlantic and back; he understood something of the theology of the Old Religion, the faith nearly all Mackenzies followed. Sutterdown worshipped the Lord and Lady in the form of Apollo and Aphrodite; that didn't stop them from being just as obsessed with Celtic paraphernalia as the rest, but then the Clan regarded consistency of that sort as small-minded. The smile died on his lips as he looked up at those forms.
Even in the bright warm sunlight of a summer morning there was something disquieting about the face of the Lady of the Doves. At first glance a welcoming beauty as of a woman grown, a mother and lover, but underneath it a childlike wonder, and behind them all a sternnessâsomething not evil or wicked, but as implacable as a winter storm or a glacier grinding its way down a mountaintop. And the face of the God was clear and bright as the sun-rays above it, but in the eyes was a darkness and a mystery, something that you could meet alone in a nighted wood.
“Man, but the fellah who carved that knew somethin' about his business,” Virginia said soberly. “I like the Mackenzies well enough, but they're sorta spooky sometimes. You think you've got 'em pegged . . . and then you don't.”
“I know what you mean,” Fred said, touching the Valknut around his neck.
“Now,
that
was spooky, too,” Virginia said. “OK, the Old Man likes you. But him showin' up and saying so, that was just a mite scary, you ask me. Methodists don't have that problem and I like it that way.”
Fred nodded. He'd acquired the sign of Odin in Norrheim, when the
seidhkona
sat on the Chair of Magic in the hall of Bjarni Eriksson and the spirit of the High One had possessed her.
Before then, I was looking for a faith. That's when I really found it. Not the most reassuring one, but . . .
Then he grinned. “Remember what Father Ignatius went through? So Methodists don't have that problem . . . not
yet
.”
Virginia laughed too, and then suddenly her face went serious. “Well, dang, that would be funnier if it was funny, you know?”
They crossed the bridge beyond the gate, where the Sutter river curled around two-thirds of the town named for it, in a natural moat. Rudi Mackenzie and his guard were waiting for him at the edge of the tented encampment east of town; a dozen had sprung up around the little city as the Clan's levies mustered and moved northward, amid the orchards and reaped fields. Most of the High King's Archers were with him, their racked bicycles behind them, leaning on their unstrung bows or against the trunks of the cherry trees.
Their commander Edain was playing a long side-blown wooden flute bound with silver bands, what the Mackenzies called a Patten, a slow wild smoky sound. His wife Asgerd and Mathilda were standing as Rudi sang to the tune, looking halfway between abashed and laughing-happy:
“From far away I'm coveting
Your white violet skin
And missing the fall of your hair
Worlds away I'm courting your everything
And giving you all that I dare
The wild foxes danced
When you laughed in your cradle
The magpies fell silent
When you learned to sing
Imagine my luck
To be part of your fable
Where you hold my heart
Like the fruit in your hand . . .”
Fred wasn't much surprised. Most people sang or played; it was the only way to have music, unless you were able to hire specialists or acquire the fabulous rarity of a windup phonograph. Mackenzies made more music, and better, than any group he'd run across in very extensive travels; they'd been founded by a musician, after all, and they associated it with both holiness and leadership.
The song ended, and Edain wiped down the flute and tucked it away in a boiled leather tube.
“Merry met, Fred, Virginia,” Rudi said, seriousness dropping over him like a veil.
He
was in plain Mackenzie gear, kilt, plaid over one shoulder, knee-hose and green-dyed shirt and flat bonnet with a spray of raven feathers in its silver clasp. And at his right hip, the Sword of the Lady. Fred found his eyes skipping aside from that, and made them steady. After all, if there was one phrase which summed up
his
faith, it was “don't flinch.”
“Let's be going, then. Do I need guards for this?”
“No,” Fred said.
“Yes,” Edain said, simultaneously.
They looked at each other, Fred glaring in frustration; Edain folded his arms over his barrel chest and the green-leather surface of his brigantine armor.
Rudi looked at his follower. “I need to persuade them, Edain,” he said mildly. “They're fighting men, and you know how such react if you point an arrow at them.”
“That's your job,
Ard RÃ.
My job's to be in a position to kill any evil bastard who might take it into his head to win the war at a stroke by killing
you
. And that, by the Dagda, I will do if I have to knock it into your head with His club.”
“All right. A score, no more; there are the camp guards, and the prisoners aren't armed.”
“No, they're not
supposed
to be armed. And by your own word, they're fighting men. The only time such aren't armed is when they're dead.”
Edain turned and barked an order; twenty archers fell in, and strung their bows with the left tip against one boot and the leg over the risers to bend the heavy staves. The High King's Archers were the hundred-odd best in the Clan and the pick of the followers the quest had acquired along the way, and Fred doubted that the fabled weapons of the old world could have done much better than their bows at a pinch.
“I'd better not come at all,” Mathilda said thoughtfully. “There was a lot of tension between the Association and Boise, even if we never fought, and Fred's father used us as a boogeyman. Feudal isn't a word with, mmmm, positive connotations over there.”
Fred shot her a look. Before he could speak Rudi did, grinning: “
Mo bòidheach
, back then you . . . collectively speaking . . .
really were
the boogeyman.”
“Hmmmf. Well, anyway, they don't have any history with Mackenzies, except recently. And you and Edain saved Fred's father's life during that brush with the Cutters, right after we met them out east over the mountains.”
“Right you are, acushla. It's not as if you had nothing to do, sure!” Fred blinked and took a deep breath. His father's death still
hit
him, occasionally. He remembered that occasion just after Rudi and the others had showed up in Boise territory vividly; it was barely two years ago. The last time the world was
right
, before what he thought had been solid dissolved beneath him into a morass of treachery. The desert road in the bright sunlight, the taste of dust, the steady tramp of the troops, his father a grimly competent tower of strength, and still the man who'd been there all his life, the private man the iron reputation didn't know. Then the sudden paralyzing horror as he realized there were assassins hiding in the guard detail itself, and the cloth yard shafts going by with a
whippt
and driving into armor with hard ringing impacts . . .
Before Martin was a traitor. But he was, even then: I just didn't know it. Rudi and Edain killed those Cutter infiltrators, but his own son killed Dad later at Wendell. I didn't think I could hate anyone in all the Nine Worlds as much as I hate Martin now, but he's still my big brother. Even when he was an asshole I loved him, but now . . . I guess you hate someone who's turned on you worse than someone who's just an enemy.
He took a deep breath.
Duty first.
That was something his father's training and that of his new faith agreed on utterly.
“Let's go, Your Majesty,” he said formally.
A little to the north was the canal that supplied the town's water and powered its mills; they could hear a grumbling sound through the screen of trees, as grain was ground and wood sawn and flax pounded. Then they turned south and crossed the Sutter river itself and its band of oaks and firs, willows and shaggy meadows; that was Clan land, sacred to Cernunnos and Flidais, barred to heavy use by humankind and the tame animals that lived with men. Its edges were marked at intervals by tall stakes carved with a stag-headed man or a white deer, and the Mackenzies made a reverence as they passed. Several had small offerings of flowers at their feet.
Or it's a State park,
he thought dryly.
And protecting stream banks from trampling and erosion makes excellent sense. Though . . . I do remember Dad complaining about how hard it was to enforce regulations like that. Maybe it's easier for people to defer to a Lady who drives a chariot pulled by snow-white deer through their dreams than to bend their necks to a rule in a book written by a bureaucrat far away.
Of course, you can just kill anyone who breaks your rules. I know someone who thinks like that . . .
“Somethin' on your mind, Fred?” Virginia said softly, under the clop of hooves and creak of saddle leather.
“I was thinking about home, honey,” he said. “My mother and sisters, trapped there with . . . him.”
“We'll see to that,” she said stoutly.
He took a deep breath.
Don't flinch,
he told himself. And in the meantime it was a fair day in pretty country, riding a good horse past orchards and fields, with the fir-sap smell of the mountains that reared westward coming on the warm breeze. And he was young, and the woman he loved rode at his side, and he was going to set his people free.
The prisoner-of-war camp was a mile south across flat open land; close enough to the town to be convenient, but beyond the ring of crofts worked by people living within the walls and equally far from the nearest farming dun. It was shaggy rough pasture and clumps of burgeoning young forest in normal times, with low wooded hills beyond. The camp was rows of tents, or rough barracks built of poles, wattle-and-daub, and salvage goods from nearby ruins. A board trestle brought in water from a spring, and a few more substantial buildings had been run up to serve as an infirmary, cookhouse and bathhouse; there were piles of boards from the sawmills near Sutterdown, ready to be turned into weather-tight winter quarters. Neatly tilled vegetable gardens surrounded it all, and he could smell that it was well policed, just turned earth and woodsmoke and the warm scents of vegetation with no reek of unwashed bodies or overfull latrines.
Rudi reined in, and gave a slight sideways inclination of the head to indicate that Fred and Virginia should ride in first. There was a fence around the camp, but no wall; it was a marker rather than a barrier, and the two-score of Clan warriors with spear and bow looked relaxed enough, like the pack of big shaggy hunting dogs at their feet. A parade ground was already crowded; most of the seven hundred men here had been taken near Dayton, back in March.
Frederick shivered a little. He'd heard about that. A CUT Seeker had been with them. And Juniper Mackenzie had been there too . . .
“Ten-
hut
!” a sergeant barked as they rode up.