She snorted and pulled out a paper-wrapped something from one of her many pockets. The wrapping had Rat. Bar stenciled on it.
“This is the sum total of my supplies. As the label suggests, it’s made from dried rats.”
Cole did a double take before he was sure she wasn’t serious. He had a couple of pounds of hardtack and some dried fruit in his pack, along with some salt and half a bag of dried chili flakes his mother had sent him. He grinned anyway and felt the edge of his smaller knife, the one he used for general camp work, including skinning. Special Forces were supposed to live off the land in the field-they were known as snake eaters for that reason-but right now he didn’t have to settle for reptile meat anyway.
“We won’t starve today; pity the rest will go to waste and we can’t take the hide, but the coyotes have to eat too. Bear tastes like pork.”
“I always thought it was a little gamy unless you soak it in vinegar a while,” she said. “Or beer.”
The pilot started to smile, then winced as scabs pulled. “Not a feast at Larsdalen or Todenangst,” she said. “But sort of. . fitting.”
CHAPTER THREE
Castle Todenangst, Crown demesne
Portland Protective Association
Willamette Valley near Newburg
(formerly western Oregon)
High Kingdom of Montival
(western North America)
June 15th, Change Year 26/2024 AD
Squire Lioncel de Stafford’s muscles still ached very slightly from the morning’s run in armor up and down the endless flights of stairs, with a shield on his left arm and a weighted wooden practice sword in his fist. Just enough that it felt good standing at parade rest behind the Grand Constable’s chair, where she sat with the document-and-plate-laden table between her and the Lord Chancellor of the Association, Conrad Renfrew, Count of Odell.
The Silver Tower had the exotic luxury of a functioning elevator, powered by convicts on a treadmill in the dungeons, but Baroness Tiphaine d’Ath didn’t believe in letting her menie go soft merely because they were stationed at HQ for a week.
She’d led the run, of course.
A confidential secretary from the Chancellor’s office took notes in shorthand, with an occasional no, not that! to halt the pen about to render permanent an embarrassingly frank opinion about some exalted personage. One of the Count’s squires stood behind his wheelchair, and the Grand Constable’s pages were serving a working lunch when they weren’t standing silently against the far wall out of earshot; still, it was a sign of the trust attached to Lioncel’s position that he was present as the two most powerful officials of the Association conferred in private.
Just now Tiphaine tapped one finger on a note signed in crimson ink:
���Sandra’s gotten a complaint from the Seneschal’s wife at Castle Oliver and passed it on to me with a flag for action after consulting you, Conrad.”
Both the nobles lifted their eyes slightly at the mention of Sandra Arminger, formerly Lady Regent of the Association and now Queen Mother. There was nothing above this level save her apartments, the crenellations, cisterns, a heliograph station, a detachment of the Protector’s Guard and the roof. The Queen Mother was doing pretty much the same work that she had as Lady Regent, and from the same places.
Lioncel carefully didn’t look up. Lately she’d actually been noticing one Lioncel de Stafford a little beyond the pat-on-the-head level. Not in a bad way, but it could be alarming when things shifted like that.
“Castle Oliver. . middle of the Okanagan. . barony held in Crown demesne. . twenty-two manors, the castle and a lot of grazing and woodland. The Seneschal would be Sir Symo Herrera,” the Chancellor said. “His wife. . Lady Aicelena of the Chelan Dennisons. Aicelena’s running the place while Sir Symo’s away, the usual.”
Conrad of Odell was nearly sixty and built like a squat muscular toad, with a face that would have looked coarse-featured and rugged even if it hadn’t been terribly burned long ago. A bit gaunt now, without the spare flesh he’d had before the Battle of the Horse Heaven Hills last year. He’d been smacked off his destrier there and suffered a hairline fracture of the pelvis. He was out of traction, but still wearing a long embroidered robe with wide sleeves, informal garb for an invalid, which looked rather odd with the massive gold chain of office.
Tiphaine nodded. “Sir Symo’s at the front with the Oliver levy. . he’s been doing quite well, too.”
“So has she,” Conrad said thoughtfully. “Deliveries on time, no major complaints, the books balanced last time I send auditors around, and she doesn’t keep asking to have her hand held. What’s her problem, and why didn’t it come direct to me? Why does the military side need to get involved?”
“Apparently a party of men-at-arms on their way south from County Dawson, seventy-three lances and followers plus some light horse, stopped there. Lady Aicelena quite properly invited the chevaliers and esquires in for dinner and had an ox-roast put on in the courtyard for the rest.”
“Ouch,” the Chancellor said. “I think I can see what’s coming.”
Another nod, this one short and curt. “They repaid her by dropping the drawbridge and then emptied the storehouses in the castle bailey and the barns in the home manor of everything a horse could eat. Nobody hurt and nothing else taken except for a couple of chickens, but from the description it was as near as no matter robbery at spear-point.”
Conrad nodded in turn. “After the Crown emergency requisitions, that was probably the last surplus the area has,” he said thoughtfully. “Except what can be bought in at wartime prices.”
“Right. That cupboard’s going to be bare when the next legitimate call comes.”
The Lord Chancellor and the Grand Constable both had suites on the level just below the Queen Mother; it made conferences like this easier. Much of the Portland Protective Association’s government was handled from here in the great fortress-palace of Todenangst, and the hierarchy of status was quite literal; the higher up the massive ferroconcrete bulk of the Silver Tower you were, the more exalted the rank and the less there was of the tomblike gloom usual in castles. This high there were pointed-arch windows and balconies, letting in a flood of afternoon light through the Gothic tracery along with plenty of fresh air slightly laden with smells of woodsmoke and flowers.
Lioncel still felt a slight chill at the tone of his liege’s voice; calm and even and. . angry. There were reasons her title of Lady d’Ath was usually pronounced Lady Death.
“That was also Royal property they took, especially if they didn’t pay,” the Chancellor said.
“Not a penny. Our northern heroes just made noises about military necessity and hightailed it on down the main rail line towards the Columbia, radiating innocence and dribbling stolen alfalfa-pellets and cracked barley.”
“Who was the Dawson commander?”
“Sir Othon Derby,” Tiphaine said.
Conrad Renfrew closed his eyes, consulting some inner file before he spoke:
“He’s the second son of Lord Hardouin Derby, Baron de Taylor, one of Count Enguerrand of Dawson’s major vassals. Arms: Argent, on a bend azure three buck’s heads cabossé d’or. With a crescent of cadency, of course. Twenty years old, reputation as a hothead, engaged to one of the Count’s daughters. Bit young for an independent command, I’d have thought.”
“Temporary command; Enguerrand sent him back north to bring in this bunch as replacements for others we’re letting go home for one reason or another. The new levy were mostly men who’ve come of age since the Prophet’s War started.”
“How long since they were called up?” the Chancellor asked.
“When they arrived at Oliver it was twenty-three days since they took the oath at Castle Dawson’s muster-yard,” Tiphaine said, a hint of satisfaction in her voice.
Ah, Lioncel thought. That’s the official start of their period of service.
Landholders, from counts and barons down to footmen holding fiefs-minor in sergea
ntry, were liable to war-service whenever their overlords or the Crown called. That was what being an Associate was about, after all-fighting to protect the realm, which was why a special dagger was the mark of belonging to the Association. The first forty days after a summons to the ban were at the fief-holder’s own expense, though. Only after that was the Crown obliged to furnish maintenance, with a right to draw on Royal storehouses.
So they wouldn’t be able to plead even a shadow of lawfulness, he thought.
Unexpectedly Tiphaine turned slightly. “Lioncel,” she said. “Your opinion-concisely.”
Lioncel gulped; having questions like that shot at you was one of the less attractive parts of moving up from page to squire.
“Umm. . definitely unchivalrous conduct towards a gentlewoman, my lady, unworthy of a knight. And a violation of the terms of service. This Sir Othon was obliged to see to his men’s provisioning, but that doesn’t mean he can act like a bandit on Association territory. . or anywhere in Montival. Plus it will leave a hole in our supply plans in that area, and it’s a major north-south corridor. My lady.”
“Correct,” Tiphaine said, making a small gesture that stiffened him back into anonymity.
“Sandra so does not like getting ripped off,” Conrad of Odell said, looking upward. “We used to call it an aggressive zero-tolerance policy.”
“You don’t say,” Tiphaine said dryly, glancing in the same direction. “She is my patron too, Conrad.”
She snapped her fingers without looking around. “Boy! The Count of Dawson’s status reports,” she said.
The Baroness of Ath was forty and looked ageless in the way people who spent their days outdoors in all weathers often did, a tall woman with a build like a swordblade, her sun-faded silver-blond hair cut in a bob much like those worn by pages, and eyes the gray of sea-ice. Her male-style court dress of curl-toed shoes, hose, shirt, jerkin and houppelande coat were as plain as ceremony allowed and mostly shades of rich dark fabrics, relieved only by her chain of office and the small golden spurs of knighthood. A round chaperon hat hung on one ear of her tall chair, the liripipe dangling.
Lioncel slid the logistics file she’d called for forward and stepped back behind her chair, standing in the formal posture with one hand on the hilt of his sword and the other over the heavy cut-steel buckle of the sword belt. That let him feel more than hear the rumbling of his stomach. He’d had a very substantial lunch and he was hungry again hours short of dinnertime; everyone laughed and told him it was being fourteen and shooting up like a weed.
“Oh, by Our Lady of the Citadel,” Tiphaine said after a moment, flicking pages.
Odd, Lioncel thought. I’ve never heard that used as one of the Virgin’s titles before.
She went on: “Did the man seriously expect to ship fodder all the way south from Dawson for his destriers? Without the railway draught teams eating everything they were pulling by the time they got to the Okanagan country? Enguerrand’s a Count these days; it doesn’t give him supernatural powers.”
Conrad flicked through the same file and grinned, an alarming expression as the thick white keloid scars on his face knotted.
“They’ve got a lot more oats than money in the Peace River country and Dawson levies haven’t fought down here in the south much. At a guess, back when the ban was called out at the start of this war my lord Enguerrand told his quartermasters to get the fodder wherever it was cheapest and then forgot about it. Then they tried to draw on his own elevators full of nice cheap tribute grain before they realized how shipping costs would screw their cash flow, and ever since then they’ve been robbing Peter to pay Paul. Coming up short now and then, which was where young Sir Othon found himself, I’d wager. And there’s not much coin circulating up there even now, too remote. Just not used to paying cash for grain.”
“The Count will pay for this, and a fine, plus compensation-money to Lady Aicelena for the abuse of her hospitality,” Tiphaine said flatly. “Or Baron de Taylor will. And the bold Sir Othon can see how he likes a month of attitude adjustment in Little Ease.”
Lioncel winced behind an impassive face as the older nobles smiled, or at least showed their teeth. Little Ease was a dungeon oubliette beneath the Onyx Tower, a cramped cell carefully designed to make it impossible for an inmate to either lie or stand or sit properly, not to mention the rough knobby surface and utter blackness and total silence and cold and filth and damp. Sending people there was done by the prerogative Court called Star Chamber. . over which the Queen Mother would preside.
“Oh, a month. . that’s a bit much, unless you want a gibbering madman,” Conrad said cheerfully. “A week would be about right. It’ll just feel like months. Like forever and a day in Hell, in fact.”
“All right, a week. You’re getting soft, Conrad.”
Conrad’s smile grew more alarming. “You can be a bit. . drastic. . when you’re peeved. That’s probably why Sandra had you consult me, you know. We want to discipline Sir Othon and his lieges, not drive them to desperation. Besides, we’ve reformed. We’re the good guys these days. Sorta.”
“Sorta, kinda.” Tiphaine rubbed one hand across her forehead. “I don’t have time for this crap. Our command structure is still scrambled six ways from St. Swithin’s Day. I’m being bounced back and forth from here to Portland to the front like a Ping-Pong ball. Trailing files and letters like a comet’s tail. And you would be too, Conrad, if you weren’t in that wheelchair.”
Conrad Renfrew shrugged.
“If the High Kingdom of Montival were a human being it’d still be in diapers,” he said. “And His Majesty is trying to run a war with what used to be six or seven separate armies two years ago. Us, and six separate armies built to fight us plus bits and pieces of odds and sods. It’s not our command structure, even if we’re the biggest single element; it’s Montival’s command structure. And yes, it’s fucked.”
The Lord Chancellor chuckled like gravel shaken in a bucket.
“And Ping-Pong? Pre-Change metaphors are so twentieth century for a near-Changeling like you. You’re dating yourself, Tiph.”
“Dating myself? Doesn’t that make you go blind?”
Didn’t dating also mean something like courtship before the Change? Then-
Lioncel suppressed a startled giggle with an effort that made him cough as he struggled to maintain adult gravitas.
Lioncel had the same fair hair and blue eyes as his father Lord Riobert de Stafford and a similar bold cast of features, and his hands and feet gave promise of equal height, but so far a lot of it was adolescent gawkiness and his sire’s easy natural dignity was only an aspiration. It was like your voice breaking occasionally and having impure thoughts about girls every thirty seconds, about which even his confessor had to work to keep the smile out of his voice. Evidently it all just went with his age.
At least I don’t have pimples. Well, not many.
“I wouldn’t like to be in Sir Othon’s boots when the Count learns how he avoided asking for money. Over and above what we’re going to do to him,” Renfrew said.
“His own damned fault and a valuable life-lesson for the lot of them.”
“At least my lord Enguerrand isn’t complaining about stripping his eastern border anymore. They’re still paranoid about the Canuks up there,” the Chancellor said.
As the Grand Constable’s squire-and before that as a page, and before that simply as the son of Lady Delia de Stafford, who’d been the Grand Constable’s Châtelaine since before he was born-Lioncel had been in and out of these rooms for years. He found himself more self-conscious about their function now that he was older and knew more about it. It was no longer simply a place he lived sometimes, like Montinore Manor back in the barony of Ath that he thought of as really home, or the townhouse near Portland.
Tiphaine spread the long callused fingers of her right hand slightly, half a gesture of agreement, half a motion like touching a swordhilt.
“Taking Dawson wasn’t really cost-effective, no m
atter how much plowland it has or even how many extra workers we got. I remember distinctly at the time Sandra thought Norman was getting Big Eyes syndrome again, pushing our frontier that far north,” she said. “Risky. We were overstretched.”
Renfrew shrugged. “Our big advantage was getting organized first, and at least suspecting where the pointy end of the sword went, not to mention having swords and not just kitchen knives on sticks. That was a wasting asset. Norman knew we had to use it or lose it.”
“Norman just liked looking at the map and rubbing his hands and saying: Mine, all mine! BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA!”
“Yeah, that’s him to the life, but it worked. And half the time back then we hardly had to fight at all to take over, people were so glad to see someone who knew what they were doing and had a plan. Later. . later it got a whole lot harder.”
“We had to fight for Dawson, all right,” she said. “And then fight seriously to keep it when the Drumheller government got their act in gear and decided to restore British Columbia.”
Conrad spread his massive hairy spade-shaped hands. “By then we had some castles built, and they never did manage to cleanse us from the sacred soil. . or permafrost. . of Canukistan.”
“They certainly tried. The Yakima is a lot warmer and closer, and we could have rolled up the rest of the towns there after the Tri-Cities fell, if we hadn’t had so many troops chasing Canuks through the snowdrifts and getting frostbite, also arrows in the rump.”
The Count nodded. “Remember the February campaign? Back in. . Change Year Five, or Six, wasn’t it? You were doing scout work there with. . mmm, Katrina Georges? She died four or five years later, in that ratfuck rescue attempt with Eddie Liu after the Mackenzies kidnapped Mathilda? Dawson would have been your first real war, apart from all that black-bag and spec-ops work you two were doing as Sandra’s Teen Ninjas.”
“Change Year Five and Six,” Tiphaine said, her voice softening a little. “Kat and I were doing scouting, right. . we actually were scouts before the Change, you know. Girl Scouts. It’s the main reason we didn’t die.”
The Given Sacrifice c-7 Page 4
