"And two Rangers."
Mathilda's eyes narrowed dangerously again. "Any particular Dunedain?" she said.
"Well… my sisters." At her look: "Well, half sisters."
She nodded quietly, got up and left. Rudi stayed and sat staring into the fire. Then his eyes turned towards the staircase where his best friend had gone. They'd known each other half their lives…
"That was much too easy," he muttered to himself.
Chapter Nine
Stardell Hall, Mithrilwood,
Willamette Valley, Oregon
January 30, CY22/2021 A.D.
"E-ndan Ingolf warn?" Astrid Larsson said, when Ritva finished the tale that Ingolf Vogeler had told.
Mary and Ritva Havel halted on a footbridge. For privacy they and the commanders of the Dunedain walked the Path of Silver Waters, past waterfalls frozen into arching shapes of glittering white, fantasies that shone with an almost metallic luster beneath the pale bright ness of the winter sun. Likely they would melt in the next few days. Mithrilwood-what had once been Silver Falls State Park, and a good deal around it-was higher than the Willamette valley floor, and colder, but not as winter frigid as the great mountain forests that ran eastward from here until they met the glaciers of the High Cascades.
"Then the man Ingolf surrendered?"
The language they were speaking was Sindarin, the tongue most often used in a Dunedain steading. There was a slight tinge of distaste in her voice.
"Alae, duh! naneth-muinthelen Astrid," Ritva said, in the same language.
Her version used more loan words than Astrid's book-learned variety; she had come to it as a living tongue.
"Well, duh, Aunt Astrid."
Light flickered bright through the boughs of the firs and hemlocks, and the bare branches of oak and maple; it was still three hours to sunset, though there were clouds gathering in the north and she thought it smelled like more snow tonight.
She went on: "E-ndan i guina." Which meant: The man lives.
"His friends asked him to avenge their blood," Astrid pointed out.
There was a persistent rumor that she was an elf, or at least half Elven. Ritva had to admit that as far as looks went it might have been true; her mother's younger sis ter was tall and willowy-graceful, with white-blond hair that fell almost to her waist and features that had an eerie cast, eyes too large and rimmed and streaked with silver through their blue, chin a little too pointed. Which was the way elves were supposed to look, pretty well. Only the slight lines beside those disturbing eyes belied it; she was thirty six this year.
"Apa rasad pilinidi terealdamo mengiel?" Mary Havel scoffed. "Sort of hard to avenge anyone after he'd gotten a dozen arrows through his brisket. As it is, he escaped eventually-we didn't get the details on that-and he still has a chance to get vengeance someday, maybe."
"You have a prosaic soul, Mary," Astrid said regret fully; she used the same tone she would have to diagnose a skin disease.
The Lady of the Dunedain could tell Mary and her sister Ritva apart easily. How, nobody knew; their own mother had more difficulty. Her consort Alleyne was with them, and her anamchara Eilir and her man John Hordle, but the six of them were alone apart from that.
The thing that worries me most is this story about the sword, Eilir Mackenzie said in Sign.
Eilir was the same age as the Lady of the Dunedain, the same five-foot-nine height, and had the same grace ful sword-blade build; her features were a little blunter, her hair dense raven black and her eyes green. She had been deaf since birth, as well.
John Hordle snorted, and spoke in a basso rumble: "Well, if there's a bloody magic sword involved, at least the sodding thing isn't stuck in a stone!"
Astrid scowled at him for a second; the big Englishman could make even the Elven-tongue sound as if it were being spoken in a country pub over a pint. Or possibly at the top of a beanstalk, since she barely came to his shoulder, and he was broad enough that he looked almost squat. Beside him Alleyne Loring walked like an Apollo, six feet of long limbed blond handsomeness, with the first gray threads appearing in his mustache in his fortieth year.
Astrid nodded at her soul sister, speaking with hands as well as voice, as had become second nature since they met in the first Change Year.
"It's the sword that bothers me, too. Obviously, it's important; obviously, this Prophet doesn't want us to get it. Or at least that's the way it looks to me. From what Ingolf said, he made at least two attempts to probe Nantucket-one that failed completely, and then by stealth with Ingolf's band, through the spy they had at the court of the bossman of Iowa."
Alleyne spoke thoughtfully: "Or the Prophet could have planted it all as a story to get Rudi out of the valley and where he could get at him. Plenty of people know that… ah…"
"Prophecy," Ritva said helpfully.
"Yes, that prophecy about Rudi."
Astrid smiled at him. "No, I don't think so," she said. "If they just wanted to kill him, there are a lot less complicated ways."
Which they seem to have tried at Sutterdown, Eilir pointed out.
"No… no," Astrid said. "Rudi got involved with that only by chance-if chance you call it. They were after In golf. Which means they didn't want us to hear the story; and it couldn't have been collusion to give credence to his story; he very nearly did die before he told us."
"They were trying to kill him, all right," Ritva said, recalling the night in the Sheaf and Sickle's upper corridor; her nostrils widened slightly, smelling again the iron-copper rankness of blood and fear sweat.
Her sister Mary nodded: "That slash on his shoulder and arm must have let out half the blood in his body. From the look of it, the Cutter was aiming at his neck."
She described it again, and they all nodded; everyone here was a warrior, and intimately familiar with the ways edged metal had with human flesh.
"We're both going," Mary added flatly, preempting her aunt as she drew breath to speak.
"Going where?" Alleyne said, arching one brow.
"On the quest, Uncle," Ritva said, feeling a great hap piness bubbling up under her breastbone. "The quest for the sword, with Rudi
… with Artos. I mean, isn't it obvious?"
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Aunt Astrid opening her mouth. They moved to forestall her.
"You can't go! You're Hiril Dunedain, the Lady of the Rangers, and there may be war here-you can't go off into the wilderness," Mary said.
"You're like Elrond or Theoden," Ritva added, using the clinching arguments. "You have a people and a place to ward. We're just ohtar."
The word meant warrior squire, one rank down from Roquen, knight-commander.
"But there should be Dunedain involved," Ritva added.
She did not go on to say that it was the best they could do in the absence of real hobbits, dwarves or elves, though the thought made her smile and exchange a glance with Mary. They loved the stories of the elder days-the two of them wouldn't be here if the tale didn't speak to their hearts-but Aunt Astrid took them with an appalling literal mindedness sometimes. So did a lot of other people in the Dunedain Rangers, for that matter.
But this is the Fifth Age of Middle Earth, or possibly the Sixth; the Third was who knows how long ago, and things have changed.
Alleyne caught her eye, and one of his moved in the slightest hint of a wink.
"I think that would be wise, my lady," he said gravely to his spouse. "After all, Thranduil sent his son Legolas on the quest of the Ring, and Gloin sent Gimli likewise-they didn't go themselves."
Eilir and Hordle nodded vigorously. Astrid sighed deeply, and Mary hid her relief. Wild horses hitched up with triple-reduction gearing couldn't shift Aunt As trid once she got her mind set on something; she was the only person the twins knew who could outstubborn them, though their mother, Signe, came close.