Goddess gentle and strong! This bunch are determined ! Rudi thought.
Aloud, between panting breaths and the deadly flickering and belling of edged metal:
“Surrender! You’ve got no way out!”
They didn’t even bother to reply. Rudi raised his voice and shouted to the others: “We’ll want one alive!”
That did bring a reaction, probably because there wasn’t any way for them to escape now that the cry was raised; there were shouts and noise all over the Sheaf and Sickle. One of the hooded men barked a single order—Rudi couldn’t make out the word, or even if it was in English. Suddenly the pair facing him and Odard leapt backwards, a simultaneous panther bound; then they turned and drove their shetes into each other’s throats. The broad points slashed to the spine almost instantaneously.
Rudi was left gaping for an instant as blood fountained out, splashing to the ceiling before the bodies convulsed and went limp. Ritva and Mary were frozen in shock on the other side; their opponents had done the same.
“Get the other one!” Mathilda called, trying to push between them. “Quick!”
Cursing, all five of them did. Rudi managed to grab his right shoulder just as the left arm drove a dagger into his own throat; the body kicked and died. The young Mackenzie forced down an impulse to stand pant ing and bewildered amid the bodies and the blood that filled the corridor with its copper iron stink beneath the sickly smell of pierced body cavities.
Instead he and Odard moved as if they’d rehearsed for days; they set their swords point-down in the floor, put their backs against the wall of the corridor across from the wedged door, jumped up and lashed out with their feet.
The planks hit his soles with a hard drumming thump that shocked up through his whole body, leaving him feeling as if he’d been folded too far at the hips. There was a tearing, crunching sound as the upper hinge came half-free of the wood. Both young men dropped crouch ing to the blood-slick flooring, sprang upward as if driven by springs, and struck again. This time the upper hinge came completely free and the lower twisted three quarters out. The door fell inward, resting on a body there. Rudi snatched up his sword and jumped through.
The inside was darker than the corridor. It took an instant for his eyes to make sense of what he saw. Two dead men. One half-under the door, with an arm joint bent back in a way not suited to the nature or construction of elbows, a jaw smashed so completely it dangled free within a sack of cloth, and his head back between his shoulder blades. Another was hacked and slashed around the neck and face as if by a bear in a frenzy.
On the bed a woman’s body, naked but looking like a glistening black statue with the blood. It couldn’t all be hers, but a lot of it was; a long curved knife had been driven into her stomach just above the pubic bone and ripped upwards.
The stranger was trying to hold the obscene wound closed, despite the steady flow of blood from his own gash; his shoulders shook with the harsh sobbing of a man unaccustomed to tears. Astonishingly, the woman still breathed a little. As Rudi watched she seemed to speak—he thought he heard Raen in the echoing silence—and went limp. Seconds later the man who held her collapsed.
“Sweet Mother-of-All,” Rudi whispered, darting forward.
Saba was beyond help, but the stranger wasn’t. And if he lived, he could talk.
Chapter Three
Raven House, Sutterdown,
Willamette Valley, Oregon
Samhain Eve, CY22/2020 A.D.
Nigel Loring looked around the great hall of Raven House and arched a wry white brow as Rudi and his friends trooped out to head for the Sheaf and Sickle; people were setting up tables in a long rectangle, leaving a broad patch clear in the center.
“I think my stepson knew more about those visiting diplomats than he said. Otherwise, why dodge dinner here, after a cold day’s hunting?”
“Oh, it’ll be Saba Brannigan he’s thinking of hunting the now,” Juniper Mackenzie said. “That she might be out of mourning, you see, and more inclined to look fa vorably on him now that he’s handsome and full-grown. Not that the poor boy has a prayer of getting between her knees; she’ll always remember him as the spotty lustful sweaty-palmed fourteen year-old she looked down on from the lofty height of seventeen. It’s a woman’s mystery and I know.”
They shared a chuckle. Children do make life more interesting, he thought.
Juniper had borne a daughter named Eilir long ago, when she was a teenager herself, before the Change. Rudi Mackenzie had been conceived in the first Change Year; and now she had two daughters with Nigel as well, the fruit of their middle-aged marriage. His own son Alleyne Loring had accompanied him to Oregon twelve years ago, and had supplied three grandchildren since with Astrid....
Juniper sighed, looking around. “Though I can’t blame the boy for not wanting to sit through a formal dinner at Raven House, when he could be carousing with friends his own age. I have doubts about this place myself, sure and I do.”
In theory Raven House was for the use of the local Raven sept’s ceremonies. In practice the house was part of Sutterdown’s generation-long campaign to get the Chief to spend more time there; they were convinced they could eventually wear her down and/or tempt her enough to get her out of Dun Juniper and into what they considered the Mackenzies’ natural capital. Whatever else the Change had wrought in Sutterdown, it hadn’t put an end to small town boosterism.
“I swear, they’ve gone and made it fancier still,” Juniper murmured.
It had been a rich man’s house once, a timber baron who’d wrung his wealth out of the Cascade forests around the end of the nineteenth century. The townsfolk had added stables to the rear, and built closed passages to the houses on either hand, and cleared out most of the ground and first floors in the central block to make a single great rectangular room, with galleries overlook ing it on two sides. One end held a low dais, with a pair of tall chairs whose backs were worked like the wings of ravens, with the heads looking down as hoods.
Behind it the wall was paneled in lustrous black walnut, polished until it shone with a dark gloss; inlaid in pale birchwood was the Triple Moon, waxing and full and waning, a circle flanked by outward-pointing cres cents, the sign of the Threefold Goddess—the Maiden, the Mother and the Hag. If you looked closer you saw what was subtly drawn behind that, barely a suggestion in slivers of rosewood and yew, pear and rowan, a face that might be young or old or ageless. . . .
Down at the other end was the big fireplace where they stood now, crackling with six-foot fir logs and sweet-smelling incense cedar. Above the hearth was another great image inlaid into the wall and towering up to the high ceiling, this time in copper and gold and silver. It showed a wild bearded face with curving horns springing from its brow, forever looking towards the Ever-Changing One.
“I can’t really resent it, though,” Juniper said, shaking her head. “It’s all done from love; and They never turn that away.”
“And Sutterdown does have some splendid artists now,” Nigel said meditatively, taking a sip from a glass of red wine. “As good as any at home in Dun Juniper. As good as any I’ve ever seen all my life long.”
The image of the Horned God stared down at him, golden locks surrounding it like the rayed Sun, the full sensual lips slightly parted over white teeth. The eyes swallowed the flames until they were like windows into a moonlit forest at night, infinitely deep with rustling mystery, glinting with silvery flickers. Here in the warm well-lit room, within the strong-walled town bowered among tilled fields tamed by the hands of humankind . . . here they still brought the breath of the wildwood, and the lonely sound of pipes heard over hills by moonlight.
“That too.” Juniper sighed.
He looked up at the image and murmured a quota tion. “ ‘The face of Power that says: O man, make peace with your mortality—for this, too, is God.’ ”
Her mouth quirked; she knew he wasn’t easily impressed. “Skilled indeed! And who’d have thought we’d breed so many fine makers,
with only as many folk as one small city in the old days?”
“Perhaps it’s because they don’t have great cities full of professionals and critics and academics telling them what to like, or television and books to bring it to them. It’s like music, in these latter days; if you want it, you have to make your own. Athens itself in its time of greatness was a small place, after all.”
“But it all makes me feel guilty,” Juniper said, looking around. “We’re doing well the now, but not so well that we can afford to make all this for an occasional visit by a middle-aged couple and their children.”
She gestured helplessly at the rest of the room. It had been done with some cunning and by people who knew Juniper fairly well; the lower parts of the walls held books and pictures and musical instruments on shelves of wood delicately carved with running vines and flow ers; above were the brackets that held four great multi branched lamps at the Quarters, and weavings showing the ancient tales—Niall of the Nine Hostages and the Lady of Tara, Ishtar’s descent into the Underworld to free her lover, Odin grasping the runes of wisdom below the branches of the World Tree.
Despite the splendor it wasn’t a forbidding room; just right for music and dancing, or a ritual gathering, or for children to play in on a winter day and listen to a story, or for simply sitting by the fire reading in the comfort able chairs and sofas that surrounded the hearth, a bowl of hazelnuts and apples at your elbow and a cat curled up on your lap.
“They do use it when we’re not here, my dear; it’s a civic center and doesn’t sit empty and sorrowing. And making you feel guilty so you’d come and use it more often was a large part of the intent!”
Just then a sound came from the vestibule that gave on the street door. An apprentice bard named Mabor—he was living with a family at Dun Juniper and study ing with Juniper herself, and several others—came in. He was a young man with black hair and eyes and olive brown skin; his father had been Mexican. Now he cleared his throat and straightened his plaid, face shining with excitement.
“Lady Juniper!” he said.
He was young, just seventeen, but his voice already had a trained singer’s resonance. Mackenzies thought highly of bards, not least because Juniper herself had fol lowed that trade before the Change, busking and playing the RenFaire circuit. Every dun wanted one trained at her hearth, and they served as heralds and messen gers as well, and their songs nurtured the Craft. A little self importantly he went on in the formal cadence that for some reason always made Juniper sigh and roll her eyes a little:
“Emissaries from abroad, bringing the word of their king. They ask audience and guesting of the Mackenzie.”
“Well, they’re welcome,” Juniper said. Her brows rose. “Not another cardinal, I hope?”
Nigel hid a grin. The papal nuncio had visited when he came to reestablish contact with Oregon’s Catholics, and not so incidentally put an end to the schism of the Portland Protective Association’s homegrown antipope. Despite being an American by birth himself, the good cardinal had found it a bit of a strain, since while Juniper was polite to a fault she was as sincere in her fashion as the ecclesiastic was in his. . . .
“No, not a cardinal, lady.” Mabor drew another breath, delighted. “I am to herald the right honorable the Count of Azay, ambassador of His Britannic Majesty, William V, called the Great, Defender of the Faith, King of Eng land, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, King of France and Spain and his dominions beyond the seas, Ham mer of the Moors, Rex Britanniae Maioris et Imperator Occidentalis!”
Nigel’s eyebrows shot up. “Good God,” he said quietly.
They’d heard some news from Europe since he arrived here on a Tasmanian ship, fleeing Mad King Charles and dropping all unknowing into the War of the Eye. But no direct contact . . .
There were two guards in full fig by the entranceway, longbow and quiver over their backs, sword and buckler at belt, and spears with the long heads polished bright in their hands—a mistake by Sutterdown, for while Juniper loved ceremony she hated swank. Now the two snapped to attention and rapped their spear butts on the ground.
Six of the party that entered were guardsmen, one in the full plate of a man-at arms and the others longbow men in chain mail shirts and open-faced sallets. Nigel knew the gear; he’d designed the green-enameled armor himself on the Isle of Wight, that first winter while they were fighting off the hordes of starving refugees and wondering if they’d survive to the next harvest.
A tall man with a limp came through behind the soldiers; he was in riding breeches and a coat of Harris tweed, with a plain sword belt around it and an equally plain longsword whose hilt had sweat stained rawhide bindings. The man was near Nigel’s own mid-sixties, countenance scored by years and turned ruddy by a youth spent under the unmer ciful sun of the hot countries. He still had a full thatch of hair, white with some gray, and his hard scarred face was dominated by a great beak of a nose above a wide thin-lipped gash of mouth and a knobby chin; the little finger on his left hand was missing. His eyes were dark green, level and watchful, marksman’s eyes.
“Good God,” Nigel said, still quietly. “Tony Knolles!”
The last time they’d seen each other had been more than a decade ago, over lowered lances. Charles had still been king then, and Knolles still a strong supporter. . . .
“Nigel!”
The aquiline face split in a smile—not much of one, but a great ear to ear grin if you knew the man, who made Nigel Loring look like an excitable Latin. Nigel stepped forward, hand outstretched; they gripped with sword callused strength and each searched the other man’s face. Nigel was suddenly conscious of how he’d gone egg-bald himself except for a fringe and his mus tache, and white haired except for a few fading streaks of yellow. For the rest he was still trim and upright, even if things creaked and moved more slowly nowadays.
“Good God, Tony!” After a moment of struggling to find words: “And a count, no less!”
“His Majesty was badly advised enough to do me that honor.”
Nigel shook his head again, hauling his wits together by main force. “My dear, an old friend and comrade in arms, Tony Knolles, who saved my life many times.”
“And only tried to kill him once,” Knolles said, bowing over her hand. “Lady Juniper.”
“My husband has told me a good deal of you, Lord Anthony,” she said. With an impish smile: “Both the good and the bad of it, sure.”
Two small figures came through the crowd. Nigel went on:
“Our eldest daughter, Maude.”
At twelve Maude was already nearly as tall as her mother’s five foot-and a-bit, slender and all limbs and hands and feet, her hair a darker red, her eyes blue as Nigel’s. She curtsied, solemn in her green shirt, silver buckled shoes, kilt and plaid and feathered Scots bon net. Knolles winced slightly; Maude had been the name of Nigel’s first wife, Alleyne’s mother. She’d been killed by the Icelandic mercenaries holding the Lorings prisoner on Charles’s orders, during the rescue and escape.
“And Fiorbhinn, our youngest,” he said.
“Hello, Lord Anthony.” The eight year old had her mother’s leaf-green eyes; her long hair was the yellow white color of ripe wheat. She gave the English emissary’s hand a confident shake.
“Fiorbhinn means Truesweet,” she went on, with a wide white smile. “It’s the name of a famous harp. I can play the harp already! And Mom says I have perfect pitch. She knows ’cause she does too.”
Nigel smiled, watching Knolles blink, and knowing that that hard-souled man of war was instantly made a slave for life.
The visitor cleared his throat. “And this is my son Robert, Lady Juniper. Robert, your godfather.”
The guard commander in the suit of plate slid the visor of his sallet up. The face within was Knolles’s own, minus forty-odd years and with the nose shrunk to more human proportions, though paler and freckled and with a lock of raven hair hanging down on the forehead.
Nigel shook his hand after he made his bow to Juniper?
??carefully, which you had to do when the other man was wearing an articulated steel gauntlet; he marveled a little, remembering the gangly child he’d known. . . . Where did the years go?
Down into the West without returning, he thought, and added aloud, “I hope your mother’s well? She was expecting when I . . . ah ... left England.”
“Mother is very well, thank you, Sir Nigel,” he said, with a charming smile of his own. “And I have two younger sisters and a brother now. My brother’s name is Nigel, by the way.”
“Ah . . .” Knolles senior pulled himself together. “My credentials?”
Nigel saved him from embarrassment with a quick flick of the eyes, and he presented the ribbon-bound documents to Juniper.
She took them gravely. “Be welcome here as my guests and the guests of Clan Mackenzie, Lord Count, Lord Robert. Welcome as the voice of your king, and still more for yourself.”
Then, raising her voice slightly to take in the whole party and the lookers-on: “Well, if you good people would like to share dinner, there’s just time to get freshened up.”
She clapped her hands as the watching crowd buzzed. “The Clan has guests from afar, bringing luck beneath our roof on Samhain’s holy eve! Rooms for them! Hot water and soap! See to their horses! And tell the cooks dinner is going to be very welcome!”
* * * *
Nigel saw Knolles blink as the bagpipers paced around the inner side of the tables, the wild skirling sound filling the great room. Below, knives flashed as a roast pig—a yearling, with an apple in its mouth—and a smoking side of beef were reduced to manageable proportions. The other dishes came in with a proud procession of polished salvers.
When the musicians had marched out of the room—to shed their instruments and scurry back in for the meal—Juniper Mackenzie rose to her feet and lifted the silver-mouthed horn from its rest before her to make the invocation and libation: