"Mack wasn't so strong as you and your son Alleyne and John Hordle put together," Juniper said. "Since he was trying to kill my son, I would consider that a fortunate thing, so. I won't forget whose shield it was covered Rudi."
Her hand tightened on his shoulder for an instant, and he covered it with his as briefly before she leaned back, arranging her kilt and plaid gracefully and then taking one of the muffins from the plate beside Nigel's chair. They were made from stone-ground flour, rich with eggs and thick with dried blueberries and hazelnuts; one steamed gently as she broke it open and buttered it.
"And if one has to convalesce from a broken arm and a cracked head, this is as good a spot as any," he went on with a smile, waving his mug. "And as good a season of the year."
With the summer's wealth stored and the next year's wheat and barley in the ground, supporting a guest too weak to work or fight was no hardship. The Great Hall of Dun Juniper was comfortably warm in the chill, rainy gloom of the west-Oregon winter, too, not something you could count on in a large building after the Change in a place like the Cascade foothills.
Or in a large British building even before the Change, he thought mordantly. But the Yanks always were better at heating. Snow beat at the windows with feathery paws amid December's early dark, but the great room was bright with firelight and the lanterns that hung from the carved rafters.
"The winters weren't the Willamette's strongest selling points," Juniper said. "Though with my complexion, I find them soothing. At least I don't turn into a giant freckle!"
"I like your climate. The tropics wear after a while"-she knew he'd had plenty of hot-country experience in his years with the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment before the Change-"but this is homelike enough for comfort and just the right bit milder."
Juniper laughed, and waved a hand around the great room and its flamboyant decoration. "Now, this I don't think you'll find homelike."
He found himself laughing with her, although he'd been a rather solemn person most of his life. "I grant it isn't what you'd find in Hampshire, even after the Change."
He recognized the symbolism of her faith and he could interpret most of it, partly from his readings in ancient history, partly from occasional contact with practitioners of the Craft-some had been on the Isle of Wight, the main enclave of British survivors, and a few had even managed to hide out in the New Forest to be discovered by his scouts in the second Change Year. And his son Alleyne had been a re-creationist before the Change, one of those who played at medieval combat, and the odd Wiccan had overlapped with that set.
Extremely odd, some of them, he thought with a smile.
Then he raised his gaze to the brooding, feral face of Pan, and the smile died. The heavy-lidded eyes were shadowed as they stared into his, given life by the flickering firelight. They brought with them a hint of green growth and damp, moldering leaves; the dark scented breath of the wildwood, and the fear that waits to take the souls of men who wander too far beyond the edge of the tilled, tamed fields.
That isn't just good carving, he thought.
It reminded him of medieval art in ancient churches; not the style or the imagery, but the raw power of bone-deep belief. The Wiccans he'd known in England before the Change had mostly seemed at least slightly barmy to him, when they weren't playacting. He didn't know what Juniper and her friends had been like before the modern world perished, but they weren't putting it on now. Not in the slightest.
Juniper's green eyes twinkled, following his thoughts with disconcerting ease; she linked her fingers around one knee and considered him with her head tilted to one side.
"It wasn't like this when I inherited it from my great-uncle, that good gray Methodist," she said, her tone mock-defensive. "We didn't have much to do but carve, those first winters after the Change, and it was useful with so many new Dedicants, sort of a visual training aid. At first it was just me and my coveners and a few friends like Dennie. Then we had to help other people, get the farms started again and make tools and save the livestock, fight off the bandits and Eaters and: It all just sort of: snowballed."
"I had the same feeling of riding the tiger in directions unpredictable over in England, my dear," Nigel said. "I've seen it elsewhere. While things were in flux, one strong personality with luck and, hmmm, baraka, could set the tone for a whole region, like a seed-crystal in a saturated solution. As Charles and I did in England, until I fell out with His Majesty."
Juniper shivered very slightly as she looked around. "And as I appear to have done hereabouts."
"I should think you'd be glad to see more come around to your way of thinking?" he probed gently.
"The Craft never did hunt for converts the way the religions of the Book do; we waited for those who were interested to seek us out. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. Then suddenly there were so many: "
"Are you sorry?" Nigel asked.
She thought for a moment, then shook her head. "No: no, I'm not really sorry. The old world was dead the instant the machines stopped working. The new one needs a strong belief, a hearth-faith to strengthen folk through hard times. That's helped us make as good a life here as humankind can live nowadays, I think. Or it would be if there weren't robbers and hostile neighbors, sure."
"It's certainly taken on your, ah, coloration, your Clan Mackenzie." He nodded at her pleated kilt and the plaid pinned at her shoulder with a silver brooch. "Symbols become important at a time like that."
"That was Dennis!" Juniper protested, laughing; then she grew grave. "Do you remember that flash of light and the spike of pain, when the Change came?"
"Indeed I do," he said. "It was the middle of the night in England and I was asleep, but-"
Inwardly, he shivered a little at the memory. He'd woken shouting, with Maude's scream in his ears. The pain had been over in an instant, but it was as intense as anything he'd ever felt, even when the RPG drove grit into his eyes in the wadi back in Oman, and he'd thought he was blind for life.
Every human being on Earth-and every other creature with a spinal cord- had felt the pain and seen the wash of silver fire. Half London had been screaming. The sound had come clearly though the window, in a place where the throb of machines was absent for the first time in centuries. Then the beginning of the city-consuming fires had broken the utter darkness: The failure of everything electrical and of all combustion motors had been obvious within an hour. It hadn't been until troops under his command tried to put down rioters and looters next day that it had become apparent that explosives didn't work either, starting with CS gas and baton rounds and moving up to live ammunition.
Juniper shook herself, casting off dark memories of her own; anyone who'd survived had them. "I've wondered whether that moment, the white light and the pain, didn't do something to us. To our minds, you see."
"Hmmm," he said. "That's an interesting thought, though. My wifeMaude-said something similar to me once: "
Her fingers touched the back of his hand, lightly, for an instant. "I wish I could have met her," Juniper said gently. "From the shape of her man and her son, she must have been a very special lady."
He drank the last of the mead to cover his flush. "She wouldn't want me to brood."
Juniper made a tsk! sound. "Nigel, grief's nothing to be ashamed of. It's the tribute we pay our dead, but they don't ask more than we can give."