Laughter came from the space beyond the doors, and then the bright tinkle of a metal-strung cittern, and a woman’s voice raised in song:
“I waited for a sunny day to launch my grand design.
The clouds would loom-
The wind would turn-
It happened every time!
Until at last it struck me:
I should just let it all unfold
The sun is shining somewhere. .
And fortune loves the bold!”
Mathilda smiled at the sound of Lady Delia de Stafford’s clear alto voice; she supposed she didn’t approve of Delia, but she certainly liked her and always had. She turned the smile into one of greeting and nodded to the squire who stood beside the entrance with a white rod of office in his hand. He’d been chatting with Lady Jehane Jones de Molalla, her mother’s amanuensis-confidential secretary-a sleek young woman in a rose-and-gold cotte-hardie and a gold wimple, which set off her chocolate skin.
“Lady Jehane,” she said, smiling and extending her hand for the kiss of homage. “God give you good day, Huon,” she went on to the squire.
“And God and the Virgin be with you, Your Majesty,” Huon Liu de Gervais said, bowing gravely a flourish of the baton in his right hand and the left on the hilt of his sword.
He was in court dress: Ray-Bans, tight hose, ankle-shoes with upturned toes tipped with little golden bells, loose shirt of soft linen, doeskin jerkin and a houppelande coat with long dagged sleeves. And a roll-edged chaperon hat with a broad liripipe tail hanging to one shoulder; that was a mark of near-adult status as opposed to the brimless flowerpot style all pages and most squires wore. At sixteen he was young for it, but he had charged with her menie at the Horse Heaven Hills when the chivalry of the Association broke the Prophet’s elite guard.
If he’d been a little older she’d have knighted him on the field, and not because his elder brother Odard had been one of the companions of the Quest and died for her on the far cold shores of the Atlantic.
Well, not only because of that. Plus his sister Yseult is getting to be really useful in the Household. No flies on that girl at all, as Mother would say, and she’s been invaluable with Fred’s sisters. And I like them both.
The colors were the black-lined-scarlet of House Arminger, which suited Huon’s dark tilt-eyed good looks. She hadn’t had time to put the Household into the High Kingdom’s forest green and silver yet. .
And I’ll still be an Arminger, anyway. That doesn’t change.
“Have you and Lioncel had any time for hawking, Huon?” she said.
Delia’s eldest son and Huon had become fast friends during last year’s campaign; she knew it roweled him to be here behind the lines while his comrade was mostly off as the Grand Constable’s squire in the east.
“Yes, my lady,” he said eagerly, looking less solemn-and he was allowed to entitle her so in an informal setting, since he was her personal liegeman. “We’re going to have some time to fly tiercels along the river tomorrow, we think. Diomede can come along-”
Who was Delia’s younger son, a page in the household of Countess Anne of Tillamook, and just a little too junior to take the field as yet at all. And green with envy, though too good-natured to be a real pest about it.
“The Grand Constable and Lioncel and my lord Rigobert his father have been winning great honor!”
“So have you, Huon Liu de Gervais,” Mathilda said gently. “For I trust you with my life, and more, my daughter, the heir of the Kingdom.”
He flushed a little and bowed again as she and Sandra swept past. Her mother was fighting to keep the smile off her face as she concluded a low-voiced exchange with Jehane that had the girl packing up her lap-desk and gliding off on some errand.
“He’ll remember that,” Sandra said approvingly, and sotto voce.
“It’s true,” Mathilda replied, very slightly indignant.
Even though there’s no actual danger here-stone smooth as polished glass above and below us, and miles of guards between here and the gates. It’s one of the few places we can really relax.
“Truth? All the better!” her mother said happily.
She’d practiced good lordship by sheer political calculation all her life.
And if she weren’t my mother, her approval would make me doubt myself, sometimes! But a ruler must be a good politician too; it’s a duty. So many lives and livelihoods depend on it! It’s when politics fail that the swords come out and homes burn.
The others were sitting around the tables as the dappled shade played across the pale cream and blue Redondo tiles in patterns that shifted with the breeze. They rose as Huon announced her, calling out The High Queen! and The Queen Mother! briskly but without the annoying bellow heralds used sometimes.
The Associate ladies sank in deep curtsies, the skirts of their cotte-hardies spreading in a display of colors brighter than the flowers overhead and the long sleeves touching the tile. The combination of their own high rank and the relaxed social setting meant they didn’t have to kneel. That sort of thing was one reason why sometimes more could be done during a tea party than at an official council-meeting.
Though this is rather formal dress for a tea party. . I know, I’ll get Delia to start drawing up a manual of court etiquette and costume for the High Kingdom. Something more relaxed than Association protocol. We can call it a political compromise to make the non-Associates feel more at home.
“Lady Delia, Lady Ermentrude, Lady Anne,” she said-deliberately informal modes, as she extended her hand again. “Lady Signe.”
Signe Havel gave her a stiff salute with a little frost in it.
No hand-kissing there! Mathilda thought, as she returned it with a Protectorate-style gesture, right fist to chest-which looked a little odd when you were wearing a cotte-hardie since it was usually accompanied by a clash of armored gauntlet on breastplate, but she couldn’t think of anything more appropriate.
Signe wasn’t an Associate, of course. The Lady of the Bearkillers was a handsome blond woman in her forties, in the plain practical brown uniform her folk wore in the field and with a basket-hilted backsword leaning against the arm of her chair. She’d never really forgiven any member of House Arminger for the spectacular and mutually fatal public duel between Norman Arminger and Mike Havel that had ended the Protector’s War.
“And Virginia! You’re glowing. . and looking uncomfortable. Believe me, I sympathize.”
Virginia Thurston was in a housedress, of very expensive printed cotton but cut simply, what a well-to-do woman in Boise would wear though she’d never yet seen the city. It was a maternity style, though, and she looked every day of her seventh month.
“I feel like I’ve swallowed a pumpkin,” she grumbled; her face was still narrow, framed by her yellow-brown hair. “And my ankles hurt and I have to pee all the time. Least I ain’t. . I’m not puking so much.”
“Don’t worry. It gets better,” Mathilda said.
Delia chuckled. “But not before the birth. And that’s anything but comfortable, let me tell you. The pumpkin has to come out.”
All the mothers present laughed, which meant everyone except Countess Anne, who winced slightly in sympathy. Juniper Mackenzie was still grinning as she came forward and hugged Mathilda. Countess Ermentrude blinked slightly, showing that she knew more of the theory than the practice of Court etiquette. Everyone made allowances for Mackenzie irreverence, and Juniper was a sovereign herself as Chief of the Clan, albeit one in vassalage to the High Kingdom now. Plus after the Protector’s War Mathilda had spent months every year in Dun Juniper with her and her family, just as Rudi had come north. That made Juniper her second mother as well as mother-in-law.
“My darlin’ foster girl!” she said, and Mathilda squeezed her back through the fine soft wool of her arisaid.
“Your unrecognizably fat foster girl!” she murmured into the older woman’s ear.
“Nonsense. Just a few healthy curves; the Maiden becomes Mother.”
> Mathilda hugged her again, and felt that little familiar shock that she was so much taller than the Mackenzie.
She and Mother are about the same height. One of the few things they have in common, besides their wits. And that you forget it because they both feel bigger in your mind.
Signe’s face turned a little chillier. She’d also never completely forgiven Juniper Mackenzie for meeting Mike Havel and bearing his son, who was now Mathilda’s husband and High King. Not just for the usual reasons a woman would, even though that had been a single night and before Signe had married him, but because Rudi was High King, instead of one of her children.
The wet-nurse-an Associate herself, a younger collateral of the great Jones family who were Counts in Mollala and who’d lost her own child not long after birth-brought Órlaith to Mathilda. Objectively Mathilda’s daughter looked like any three-month-old. .
But by the holy Mother of God, she’s beautiful! Mathilda thought.
For a moment the feeling clenched her eyes shut like physical pain. When she opened them again her daughter was baring her gums in a broad smile and kicking within the linen smock, reaching for her.
“Órlaith,” she said as she picked the solid little weight up. “My golden princess!”
“My granddaughter,” Sandra said.
“And mine,” Juniper Mackenzie said.
“But my only granddaughter, so far. Your fourth.”
“Give me time, Mom!” Mathilda said.
She was that post-Change rarity, an only child. Juniper had what she thought of as a more typical middle-of-the-road total of four.
Mathilda kissed her daughter on the forehead and handed her over to Sandra, who gave a short odd laugh as she took her competently in the crook of an arm. Juniper looked a question.
“I was just thinking,” Sandra said, “of how often I’ve wondered what the world will be like when the last of us oldsters have shuffled off to our-literal, as it turns out-rewards and the Changelings like Mathilda are left to run things without us.”
“And I’ve had the same thought, many a time,” Juniper said. “But?”
“Just now,” Sandra said, tickling the tip of the baby’s nose with one finger as she smiled and kicked, “it struck me that I should wonder what the world will be like when Órlaith’s generation is in charge. . people who never knew the people who knew the world before the Change. When she’s my age it will be. . Good Lord, it’ll be Change Year 84! Nearly a century! Will they really believe anything about our world by then, except as myths? And of course her children. .”
Juniper’s face froze for a moment, though the Changelings showed polite incomprehension. Then she said, slowly:
“It never fails; in a conversation with you, something truly disquieting will be said. Now I’ll be having that thought every time I look at a baby, instead of just enjoying the little ones. Thank you, Sandra.”
“You’re welcome, dear Juniper.”
Mathilda sat with a slight snort; talking to Mother did keep you on your mental toes, the way sparring with Rudi sharpened your reflexes with the sword. She arranged the skirts of her cotte-hardie and nodded to the others as a maidservant offered a tray.
Everyone occupied themselves pouring tea and passing plates of tiny sandwiches and pastries-potted shrimp and cucumber and deviled chicken and little glazed things with raspberries and cream. The tea was the real luxury, even more expensive than coffee. Local equivalents were still experimental, and this was the genuine article, imported by a profoundly unreliable chain of middlemen through desolate pirate-haunted seas from the few revived plantations in Asia to Maui in the Kingdom of Hawaii and then to Astoria. The world was a very large place, these days. Even larger than it had been in the Jane Austen novels that were so popular among the female nobility, and which probably helped keep the beverage so prestigious.
“Please, no formality, Mesdames,” Mathilda said, and picked a pastry off the chased silver, making herself nibble graciously rather than bolting it. “Speak freely, and don’t worry about precedence.”
I’m hungry. Getting back into shape is brutal but I don’t dare go anywhere near a battlefield until I do. Even commanders end up fighting with their own hands at least occasionally, God knows I have often enough, and if you get tired first you die. I want to help Rudi the way I did on the Quest, not burden him.
She’d managed to hack out a two-hour session every morning from her impossible schedule, and sparring in plate armor with a fifteen-pound shield on one arm and an oaken drill-sword in the other hand was about the best overall exercise there was. The changes in her body during pregnancy had been. .
Interesting, she thought. And certainly worthwhile. Though the mood swings. . poor Rudi! He was probably glad to get back to the field.
Her lips thinned a little as a muscle-memory of her sword-edge hammering into bone ran through her fingers and up into her gut. That was the sort of thing you remembered in the middle of the night sometimes; that and the faces.
She worked her right hand, the way you did to get the kinks out after a fight. Unexpectedly, she found herself crossing eyes with Signe Havel, who nodded very slightly with a small wry smile. They’d never be friends, but for that instant across the gulfs of family and rivalry they shared something-something incommunicable to anyone who hadn’t been in the place they’d both visited and from which you never entirely returned.
The hardest part now was that unlike a lot of warriors she had never really enjoyed the utterly essential life-preserving process of keeping in tip-top shape. She enjoyed the results, the feeling of strength and capacity, she was a pretty good natural athlete and sparring was fun in limited doses, but it wasn’t the passion for her it was with-say-Rudi. Or for that matter Tiphaine d’Ath, whose idea of rest was flipping through a back issue of Tactical Crossbows between bouts in the salle d’armes. And if she was better than average with a sword, it was because she’d pushed it doggedly all her life with the finest tutors.
Not least of that had been Rudi. Just trying to keep up with him made you do things you hadn’t imagined were possible.
God, I miss him, seeing him smile and touching him and even the way his hair smells. Oh, well, at least my sword-calluses are recovering so my hands don’t hurt as much. For once I’m not sorry to be in a cotte-hardie; I still feel shapeless without lacing.
Delia de Stafford exchanged a glance with Sandra; she was in her thirties and smoothly beautiful, with raven-black ringlets hanging artlessly from under an open lace wimple topped by an embroidered cap. Baroness Forest Grove by marriage to Baron Rigobert and Châtelaine of Ath because of a rather less. . orthodox. . arrangement with the Grand Constable, as the two sets of ceremonial keys at her belt indicated. Sandra had always been her patron-she had an Associate’s dagger because of the then Lady Regent’s favor, as well as the Grand Constable’s-and the whole rather complex quasi-family were pillars of the throne.
“It’s wonderful that the news from the east is so good,” Delia said. “Not only more victories, but so far bloodless ones. Well, mostly bloodless. As far as our blood goes.”
“Thanks to Fred! Ah, General Thurston,” Virginia Thurston-née Kane-said. “President Thurston, soon.”
“He’s certainly done a wonderful job,” Mathilda said.
And truthfully again! she thought, and went on:
“We both saw what he could do on the Quest.”
Though we also saw him grow up a lot getting there and back again. Or at least I did. You never saw him in his father’s shadow.
Delia’s eight-month-old daughter Yolande was with her, and a very active toddler named Heuradys in a lace-fringed shift and mob cap controlling unruly mahogany hair, both playing quietly to one side under the direction of a nanny. Though Heuradys had apparently learned the word no and liked using it with lordly insouciance. Mathilda chuckled at the sight, not least because of the names.
Yolande and Heuradys, Lioncel and Diomede. . all of Delia’s children were named from a s
et of books her mother had always liked, set in a skewed version of France seven hundred years ago. Mathilda liked them too; they were far more realistic than most pre-Change fiction, even Austen or Mallory. They fitted in perfectly with the archaic-French naming pattern the PPA nobility mostly favored anyway; Spanish was the second choice. The Grand Constable, Tiphaine d’Ath, had taken her Associate name from them too, long before, when Sandra had taken her under her wing and recognized her. . unique. . talents.
The Countess Anne of Tillamook looked at the children wistfully. She was in her twenties and handsomely strong-faced, a pale blonde with sea-green eyes; and she ruled that coastal holding by her own hereditary right as her father’s heir, as yet without a consort. She was more or less betrothed to Ogier, the youngest son of Count Renfrew of Odell. Young Sir Ogier was with the host, of course; another thing to resent about the war was the way it delayed things you were looking forward to.
The other noblewoman was Countess Ermentrude of Walla Walla, a slim dark-haired willowy woman in her mid-twenties, still looking a little uncertain in this company but hiding it well. By birth she was from County Dawson on the Association’s far northern border, and her husband’s holding-the County Palatine of the Eastermark, centered on the great fortress-city of Walla Walla-was on the PPA’s far frontier eastward, what had been the border march with Boise before the war. Neither she nor the young Count Palatine, Felipe de Aguirre-Smith, had been much at court, beyond the essentials.
She was making a strong effort to be gracious to Delia, too; the last year had given her and her spouse good personal as well as military reasons to be grateful to Tiphaine d’Ath and Rigobert. And Ermentrude herself had won considerable troubadour-spread fame by commanding the defense of the city of Walla Walla during its siege by the enemy, while the Count led his vassals in the field with the High King. She’d commanded the all-important political side at least, which included keeping the city’s guilds and her lord’s war-captains in order, and that despite being heavily pregnant at the time.
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