Her quiet voice went slowly on: "And They can be as harsh as sleet and iron, as the wolf in winter and Death itself. They have given you so many of Their gifts for a reason. And a man who refuses a duty They lay on him is… not punished… but… forsaken. And he will never know love or honor or happiness again."
He shivered at the look in those infinitely familiar green eyes; they were looking beyond.
Then they squeezed shut, and tears leaked out, sparkling in the lamplight; she grabbed him by the plaid.
"But how I wish you didn't have to go to that dread ful place! I am so frightened for you, and it will only get worse!"
"There, and I was just grousing," he said, holding her close and remembering her rocking his troubles away. "I'll come back with a shining sword and fine tale, since the Powers would have it so. It's just that I would have them be a bit more open about the reasons for it all!"
Rudi Mackenzie dreamed. The air was sweet and mildly warm, smelling of earth and growing things; some crop that grew in leafy blue-green clumps stretched to the edge of sight in neat rows separated by dark, damp turned earth. A well-made road ran through it, neatly cambered with crushed rock, and a milepost stood nearby. It was granite, hard and smooth, and the rayed sun on it was cut deeply, but time had still worn it down until the shape was visible only because of the slanting rays of the real sun setting in the west.
A crack and a wretched gobbling sound came from behind him. He turned, or at least his disembodied view point did. A score of… creatures… were working their way down the rows of the crop.
They look like men, he thought absently.
A little; they stood on two legs, and their hands held tools, digging sticks of polished wood set with blades of smooth stone. But their legs were too short and the arms that hung from their broad flat shoulders too long, and the heads sloped backward above their eyes. Those eyes were big and round, on either side of a blob of nose and set above big chinless thin-lipped mouths; it made them look like children, somehow, and the more horrible for that. The naked bodies were brown, sparsely covered in hair.
A nondescript-looking man with a loose headcloth covering half his face rode a horse behind them, a long coiled whip in his hand. He swung it again, seemingly to relieve his boredom; the creatures were working steadily and well, jabbing the sticks downward in unison every time they took a step forward. Another worker jerked and moaned as the lash laid a line across his shoulders, then turned his too big eyes down and drove the stone-headed tool into the earth again.
No. They're not men, but their ancestors were, Rudi's bodiless presence thought.
Then he woke. Shudders ran through him, and he could feel sweat running off him to soak the coarse brown linen of the sheets. That turned chilly quickly in the damp cold air of winter. The girl who was sharing his bed had awoken too; she snapped a lighter on the bedside table and touched it to the candle in its holder.
"What a dream." He gasped, clutching at the blanket as if it would help him keep the shattered, fragmented images clear. "My oath, what a dream!"
"It must have been, Rudi!" Niamh said.
Her blue eyes were wide as she tossed back tousled straw-blond hair. Like half the people in Dun Juniper she was an apprentice from somewhere else, in her case studying under Judy Barstow. They'd been friends and not-very serious occasional lovers for years; she didn't want anyone long term here, since she planned to go back home to Dun Laurel when she was consecrated as a healer.
"You clouted me a bit, thrashing around the now, and I couldn't wake you."
"Sorry, Niamh," he said contritely, shaking head and shoulders and letting the dream go. "Maybe it was just a sending from the fae."
Who weren't all kindly, he knew, particularly those from the wildwood. Looking around grounded him; he'd slept in this room ever since he stopped using a pallet in his mother's. It had a cluttered look and a lot of souvenirs; there was his baseball bat and glove-he'd been first baseman for the Dun Juniper Ravens Little League team as a kid-and the images of the Lord and Lady over the hearth he'd carved when he wasn't much older.
A shelf was stuffed with his books and ones he had out from the dun's library. A stand in the corner held his armor and weapons.
The blanket was of his mother's weaving, done while he was a captive of the Association in the War of the Eye, a bit worn now but still beautiful with its subtle pattern of undyed wool in shades of white and brown and gray. He smoothed it and lay back.
"What was it, then?" she said, yawning and laying her head on his shoulder. "A sending? Or just a dream?"
"It's never just a dream," he said. "But… you know how it is."
She nodded. There were dreams, and then again there were dreams, and deciding which meant what was as important as it was difficult.
"On the whole, I think it was the Powers telling me to get my shoulder to the wheel and my arse in gear." He sighed.
"Oh," she said. Then: "Something to do with that cowan Ingolf?"
His mouth quirked in the candlelit dimness; cowan was a term for those who didn't follow the Old Religion… and not an altogether polite one, either.
"So much for secrecy. Yes, but don't ask me anything more about it
… yeeep!"
"Anatomy. I'm just studying anatomy."
Castle Todenangst, Willamette Valley
Near Newberg, Oregon
January 14, CY22/2021 A.D.
"Yes, I gave them hospitality in Gervais," the dowager baroness of that holding said, glaring at the three faces across the broad malachite table from her. "Why shouldn't I?"
She was a gaunt woman with gray streaks in her blond hair; Sandra thought the green silk of her long cotte-hardi dress went badly with her rather sallow complexion.
The Lady Regent of the Portland Protective Asso ciation answered calmly: "Why? Because it would have made me look very bad if it came out that a noblewoman of the Protectorate had done that, particularly if this man they attacked had been killed… and our own children were there. Questions raised in the Lords. Questions raised in Corvallis at the next Meeting. Embarrassment, fines laid on the whole Association… I do not like being embarrassed, Mary. Do you understand?"
Sandra was an unexceptional woman in her fifties, pe tite and round-faced. Her stare could still make others flinch; it did now.
"I understand, my lady regent."
"Good. Then don't let it happen again. You have my leave to go. In proper form, Mary, " she said.
The baroness halted, made a sardonically precise curtsy that bowed her head just a hair more than manners required, and stalked out.
Sandra steepled her small elegant fingers and cocked her head a little, looking at the door through which Mary Liu had just gone in high dudgeon. It was massive, of light-colored oak over a solid steel core, and Liu hadn't been able to slam it, which must have annoyed her no end.
"Do you know the problem with the Dowager Baroness Gervais?" the Lady Regent asked.
Conrad Renfrew, Count of Odell, took a walnut out of the bowl on the table between them and cracked it between finger and thumb, tossed the nut meat into his mouth and thought for a moment while he chewed.
"Is the problem that she's an evil, murderous, spiteful bitch who's conspiring with these assassins from the cow country?" he replied meditatively.
He was a thickset man in his fifties who'd always been built like a fireplug and had put on a little solid flesh lately. He wore casual-formal dress, a wide-sleeved shirt of snowy linen beneath a brown T tunic cinched with a studded sword belt, and loose breeches tucked into half boots; a heraldic shield on the tunic's chest held his arms-sable, a snow-topped mountain argent and vert. His face was hideous with old white keloid scars, his eyes blue under grizzled brows, and his head as bare as an egg with less need of the razor he'd used in his youth.