Eilir went on, signing emphatically: I'm not leaving Beregond and Iorlas. They're too young. And I'm your anamchara, not your nanny; you're most certainly not dumping your three on me and going off on an adventure!
"I suppose so. Though Thranduil was thousands of years old and I'm thirty-six. Oh, well, it's the Doom of Men."
"I suspect we're all going to get our fill of adventure much closer to home," Alleyne said grimly. Then he shook off his mood. "But we'll have some time to get ready… and time to live in."
Astrid sighed again. "Yes, yes, Mary and Ritva have leave go on the…" She hesitated, then brightened. "The Quest of the Sunrise Lands."
"Ring!" Mary said.
"Cool!" Ritva echoed.
You have to admit that Aunt Astrid has a way with words. She always comes up with a neat phrase.
Voices were singing as they turned and walked along the path beneath the cliff towards Stardell Hall, a party of hunters in from the woods with their dogs trotting at their heels, bows in their hands and a brace of elk over their packhorses. But it might have been anyone here; a good singing voice wasn't exactly an essential qualification for membership in the Dunedain Rangers, but it helped. This tune had a happy sound with a fast-tripping chorus:
Sing ho to the Greenwood!
Now let us go Sing hey and ho!
And there shall we find both buck and doe
Sing hey and ho!
The hart, the hind, and the little pretty roe
Sing hey and ho!
Stardell had been old when the Change came, origi nally built by the CCC as the headquarters for the park. There was some cleared land nearby for turnout pas ture and gardens, snow covered now. But this steading got more from hunting, and more still in payment for the services of the Rangers. The core of it was tall forest with the high-pitched shingle roofs of the log buildings scattered beneath; homes and workshops, stables, barns and a granary built of rough stone, a Covenstead and a small chapel for the Catholic minority.
Ritva looked up. Several of the larger trees bore flets, round platforms cunningly camouflaged high above the ground, some with walls and roofs above; there were more of those farther up in the mountains, and cave re doubts as well. The flet on the big Douglas fir was where she and her sister stayed when they were in the steading; it had bunk beds and a very pleasant little cast-iron stove.
There were people in plenty bustling about on the ground, near two hundred at this time of year. This was the largest of the Ranger stations, and their main work was as seasonal as farming: guarding caravans and running down bandits and evildoers, with a sideline in destroying man eaters, carrying messages and small valuable parcels, rescuing the afflicted and defending the helpless. Evildoers liked camping out in the cold no more than respectable folk, bandits were no more able to cross snowed in passes than mer chants, and this was the time of year when messages could wait.
There were shouts of greeting as the Hiril Dunedain and her kinfolk came back from their long stroll. A pair of tow-haired girls of not quite three came out of the hall, stumping along in their snowsuits with the mittens dangling on strings. At the sight of Ritva and Mary they sent up a shout:
"Gwanun! Gwanun!"
"Yes, we are twins," Mary said, and took Fimalen up on her hip; Ritva took Hinluin.
"And so are you, little Yellow Hair," Ritva said.
"And you too, little Blue Eyes," Mary said.
They're so cute, they almost make you want some of your own, Ritva thought. Someday. Not yet! And it was a bit thoughtless of Astrid to give them interchangeable names like that.
The Larsson family ran to blonds, as did the Lorings. The Larssons also tended to produce twins, both fraternals and identicals, but Astrid's eldest-her son Diorn-was a singleton. He was also black haired and gray-eyed and preternaturally serious for a ten-year-old.
"Mae govannen, gwenyr," he said gravely, putting hand to chest and bowing: Well met, my kinswomen.
They replied with equal formality; Ritva remembered her struggles with the complex vocalic umlauts in the Elvish plural form and envied his being brought up with it from birth. Then everyone trooped into the hall, after shaking out their cloaks. Stardell looked a little like the hall in Dun Juniper, but there was no second floor, only a gallery around what had been the roofline before they raised it. And the carving on the pillars and vaulting raf ters above was more restrained, the colors mostly greens and pastel blues and silver-grays, and the old gold shade of oak leaves in the fall.
The style was what her mother, Signe, had once told her was more Art Nouveau and less Book of Kells than that the Mackenzies favored, eerily elongated dancing maidens and their lords, sinuous trees with blossoms of iridescent glass, and little gripping trolls grinning with bone teeth, peering from corners and holding up the stone finials of the hearth.
The sisters went over by the fire; there was a pleas ant smell of pine boughs and hemlock amid the grateful warmth, and a scatter of children's toys on the floor-a hobbyhorse, a little elk on wheels, a stuffed tiger on a rug made from the hide of a real one. The black gold embossed leather covers of the Histories stood above the hearth on the mantelpiece, flanking images of the Lord and Lady as Manwe and Varda. A Corvallan was waiting there, a small rather dumpy man in the four pocket jacket and pants that people from the city-state favored when they were traveling.
Ritva hadn't seen him here before, and he was look ing around with the I'm seeing it but it can't be real ex pression outsiders often got in Stardell, lost amid the pleasant liquid trilling of Sindarin conversation.
"Mae govannen," Astrid said curtly, and then dropped into English: "Well met, if you prefer the common tongue."
"Lady Astrid, Lord Alleyne," he said, bowing courte ously. "I'm here about that little problem you were concerned with."
Alleyne grinned to himself. Ritva caught the expres sion and suppressed an urge to giggle, and heard Mary snort as she did the same. It wasn't a good idea to diss Aunt Astrid at the best of times; right now she was feel ing sore as a tiger with a nail in its paw because there was finally a real quest, for a sword of power… and she couldn't go.
I'd feel mangly bitter about that myself, in her position, Ritva thought. Mary gave her a little nod. Squared. This is going to be fun
… to watch.
"It isn't a little problem," Astrid said, glaring at him with a cold fury that made him wilt visibly. "By the treaty which ended the War of the Eye, all the realms of the Meeting pay a subsidy to the Dunedain Rang ers for the work we do. By the same treaty, the People and Faculty Senate of Corvallis, as hosts of the Meeting, are responsible for collecting it and forwarding it to us. Quarterly."
"There have been problems-not everyone pays on time, and I'm sure you realize that means we have to take out short-term paper-"
"And I'm sure that is your problem and not mine!" Astrid roared, an astonishing husky sound.
Everyone in the hall stopped and looked; Fimalen and Hinluin hid their faces in Mary's and Ritva's necks, and Diorn stared with bristling suspicion at the man who'd angered his mother.
Astrid went on: "Spay snur khug! What do you think I am, some huckstering dog of a merchant like you, a banker, a debt collector? I have my people to feed and my warriors to arm! You have a debt of honor for the blood we shed in the wilds to keep you fat!"
The Corvallan looked around, licking his lips. The eyes on him were not particularly friendly, and in un conscious reflex he searched for someone who wasn't glaring. Eilir tapped her ear with two fingers and shook her head at him with a look of pity that he found disqui eting. John Hordle was smiling… but he was also lean ing an elbow on the pommel of the four-foot sword he usually carried slung across his back, with his right hand on the long quillions of the guard. When their gaze met, his thumb jerked out to point to Alleyne Loring.