It was an unremarkable bird at first glance; a long-tailed pigeon with a bluish-gray head, the back and wings mottled gray with black patches, paler underparts blush red at the throat and fading to rosy cream. The only thing startling about it was the bright red eyes… .
Juniper made a small choked sound, putting her hand to her torc as if the twisted gold were throttling her. Her eyes went wide as she turned to Nigel.
"Do… do you…" she stuttered, something he'd never heard before, her eyes so wide the white showed all around the pale green iris.
"Yes, my dear," he said quietly, and pushed a crust into the cage.
Then he began to smile, joy and awe struggling with natural reserve as the bird pecked. "It's a passenger pigeon."
"What is it, my dear?" Nigel asked sleepily.
"I don't know," Juniper Mackenzie said, sitting up in the bed and reaching for her robe. "But-"
A fist knocked on the door; she turned up the bedside lamp and hurried over. Nigel was on his feet, hand resting inconspicuously on the hilt of the longsword. When she threw open the door a man stood there, white-faced and stuttering.
Nigel's hand closed on the rawhide and-wire binding of the sword hilt. He knew the signs of raw terror.
"Lady Juniper! Sir Nigel! There's been a fight at the Sheaf and Sickle, terrible bad. Folk hurt and killed!"
Sheaf and Sickle Inn, Sutterdown,
Willamette Valley, Oregon
Samhain Eve, CY22/2020 A.D.
Juniper Mackenzie pushed through the door into the familiar taproom of the Sheaf and Sickle, the armsmen at her heels; Nigel was outside, seeing to the circuit of the town walls lest any killers still at large try to es cape. She let out a quiet breath of relief at the sight of Rudi standing beside a table where a healer worked; the twins and Mathilda and Odard were nearby, and all five were unhurt. The smells of blood and violent death were there, mingling horribly with the familiar homey scent of the place.
"Well?" she said. "It's a slaughter this is, of my people on my land, and I'd know the meaning of it! It's the Mor rigu and the Wild Huntsman we're dealing with tonight, and no mistake."
Rudi nodded and gave her an account, succinct and neat as his tutors in the arts of war had taught him; she gasped at his account of Saba's death. His mouth tight ened as anger drove the grue of horror out of him. Up stairs Tom and Moira and their close kin were keening their daughter; the muffled sound of the shrieks rose to a crescendo, then died away into rhythmic moans, laden with unutterable grief, before rising again.
"I'm a warrior by trade," Rudi said bitterly. "Saba wasn't. She shouldn't have had to fight her last fight alone. First I couldn't save her husband, and then this… May she forgive me, and speak kindly of me to the Guardians."
"She's with her Raen in the Summerlands, and with all her beloveds," Juniper said quietly, putting an arm around him for a moment.
"I know, Mother. It doesn't make me feel any better, much less her children."
"It isn't meant to," Juniper said, a little sternness in her voice. "That's why we keen over the dead; grief is for the living."
He nodded; they couldn't even do that, not being close enough in blood.
"I'm glad we came here, though," he said. "It would have been worse if we'd stayed at Raven House. These dirt were already here, waiting to strike; they might have gotten away over the town wall."
They glanced aside. The healer's lips were pursed in disapproval as she worked at the big dining table; far too many of the inn's guests were milling about and babbling nearby, despite its still being hours to dawn. A stranger was helping her, a monastic in a black Benedictine robe, with the loose sleeves pinned back up to his shoulders.
Most of the rest weren't making themselves useful. Some of the outlanders had even had the nerve to try to demand service from the staff. Rudi looked at Juniper, and she nodded slightly; he made a chopping gesture to his friends.
The twins pushed the crowd back-once by the simple expedient of seizing a man by the elbows and pitching him four feet into the air, to land mostly on his head-and then drew their swords and stood like slender black and silver statues with the points resting on an invisible line across the room, and Odard and Mathilda beside them. Nobody stepped over it; after a moment a few neighbors came to stand around them, glowering at the strangers. Some of the wiser foreigners headed back to their rooms.
That gave them space and time to go view the bodies of the assassins, laid out on tarpaulins. Juniper had never become entirely inured to the sight of violent death, but she could make herself ignore the wounds and the tumbled diminished look of a corpse when she must.
"This is a strange thing, and you're right, my darling one; these weren't bandits; they're too well fed and they've the look of trained men."
"They were," he said grimly. "Well trained, at that."
"Nor was this any random killing, despite the wealth yonder stranger has in his baggage. Some ruler is behind this-and not one we're familiar with."
"The Association?" he said reluctantly.
Mathilda was standing out of earshot, her face still white as a sheet beneath her tan.
She handled the fight well, from what Rudi says, Juni per thought. But she's not as hard-bitten yet as she'd like to pretend, the which is all to the good. Lord and Lady preserve us from rulers who kill without regret or look on it without being shaken. Of which her mother is a horrible example…
Rudi sighed in relief when his mother shook her head.
"Not… not quite their style, and those men"-she nodded towards the bodies-"are strangers to this land."
"Lady Sandra's ruthless enough," Rudi said quietly.
"More than ruthless enough, but she has far more sense, and so do Grand Constable Tiphaine and the Count of Odell who's chancellor now. None of them would risk anything while Mathilda is with us. No, this is… I feel something moving here. We've had the rest we were promised, after the war with Arminger. Perhaps it's coming to an end, and the Powers sing a new song, with us as instrument and melody both."
Her gaze grew wholly human once more, but harder now and shrewd: she was Chief as well as High Priestess, the woman who'd pulled her friends and kin through the time of madness and the death of a world, and built the Clan from refugees and shards.
"It's best you know. It wasn't just an old friend of Nigel who was calling after you left Raven House and came here, and I don't think it's entirely coincidence. We'll have to learn how the threads knit."
Chapter Four
Sutterdown,
Willamette Valley, Oregon
November 15, CY22/2020 A.D.
Father Ignatius, priest, monk and knight-brother of the Order of the Shield of Saint Benedict, stopped and looked around casually as he wiped his quill pen and sharpened it with the little razor built into the writing set that was part of his travel kit. The writing was a combination of letters and numbers that would make no sense to anyone who didn't know the running key-it was based on a medieval Latin version of the Gospel of Mark preserved in the Mount Angel library, and used letters based on their position in the Greek alphabet for numbers under twenty-six-but he didn't want anyone to know it was in code.
A balance of risks, he thought. If I were to write in my room, everyone would assume it was a secret message, since the light and space are so much better here.
Nobody paid much attention to him, which he'd counted on. Mount Angel, the town and fortress monastery that held the Mother House of his Order, was only fifty miles north of here, and the Clan and the Benedictines had been allies since the early days after the Change. They'd fought the greatest battle of the War of the Eye together, not far from his parents' little farm. He didn't remember that well-he'd been ten-but re lations had stayed friendly, and a traveling cleric wasn't rare enough to be noteworthy in Sutterdown.