Lioncel suppressed a startled giggle with an effort that made him cough as he struggled to maintain adult gravitas.
Lioncel had the same fair hair and blue eyes as his father Lord Riobert de Stafford and a similar bold cast of features, and his hands and feet gave promise of equal height, but so far a lot of it was adolescent gawkiness and his sire’s easy natural dignity was only an aspiration. It was like your voice breaking occasionally and having impure thoughts about girls every thirty seconds, about which even his confessor had to work to keep the smile out of his voice. Evidently it all just went with his age.
At least I don’t have pimples. Well, not many.
“I wouldn’t like to be in Sir Othon’s boots when the Count learns how he avoided asking for money. Over and above what we’re going to do to him,” Renfrew said.
“His own damned fault and a valuable life-lesson for the lot of them.”
“At least my lord Enguerrand isn’t complaining about stripping his eastern border anymore. They’re still paranoid about the Canuks up there,” the Chancellor said.
As the Grand Constable’s squire-and before that as a page, and before that simply as the son of Lady Delia de Stafford, who’d been the Grand Constable’s Châtelaine since before he was born-Lioncel had been in and out of these rooms for years. He found himself more self-conscious about their function now that he was older and knew more about it. It was no longer simply a place he lived sometimes, like Montinore Manor back in the barony of Ath that he thought of as really home, or the townhouse near Portland.
Tiphaine spread the long callused fingers of her right hand slightly, half a gesture of agreement, half a motion like touching a swordhilt.
“Taking Dawson wasn’t really cost-effective, no matter how much plowland it has or even how many extra workers we got. I remember distinctly at the time Sandra thought Norman was getting Big Eyes syndrome again, pushing our frontier that far north,” she said. “Risky. We were overstretched.”
Renfrew shrugged. “Our big advantage was getting organized first, and at least suspecting where the pointy end of the sword went, not to mention having swords and not just kitchen knives on sticks. That was a wasting asset. Norman knew we had to use it or lose it.”
“Norman just liked looking at the map and rubbing his hands and saying: Mine, all mine! BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA!”
“Yeah, that’s him to the life, but it worked. And half the time back then we hardly had to fight at all to take over, people were so glad to see someone who knew what they were doing and had a plan. Later. . later it got a whole lot harder.”
“We had to fight for Dawson, all right,” she said. “And then fight seriously to keep it when the Drumheller government got their act in gear and decided to restore British Columbia.”
Conrad spread his massive hairy spade-shaped hands. “By then we had some castles built, and they never did manage to cleanse us from the sacred soil. . or permafrost. . of Canukistan.”
“They certainly tried. The Yakima is a lot warmer and closer, and we could have rolled up the rest of the towns there after the Tri-Cities fell, if we hadn’t had so many troops chasing Canuks through the snowdrifts and getting frostbite, also arrows in the rump.”
The Count nodded. “Remember the February campaign? Back in. . Change Year Five, or Six, wasn’t it? You were doing scout work there with. . mmm, Katrina Georges? She died four or five years later, in that ratfuck rescue attempt with Eddie Liu after the Mackenzies kidnapped Mathilda? Dawson would have been your first real war, apart from all that black-bag and spec-ops work you two were doing as Sandra’s Teen Ninjas.”
“Change Year Five and Six,” Tiphaine said, her voice softening a little. “Kat and I were doing scouting, right. . we actually were scouts before the Change, you know. Girl Scouts. It’s the main reason we didn’t die.”
The Chancellor frowned. “I thought you were a gymnast? Olympic hopes and all that?”
“Gymnastics first, but Kat talked me into the Scouts in ’ninety-seven, my mother pitched a fit. . Sandra pulled some strings to have us attached to the reconnaissance element for the Dawson campaign. Norman thought we were a joke, but she wanted us to broaden our skill-sets. And get some mojo with the regulars.”
“Ah, right. I remember you two mousetrapped that Mountie deep-penetration patrol. A nice change from all the times the sneaky bastards did it to us. Yes, and you marched up and plopped the heads down on the breakfast table and said Pray allow us to present some friends, my lord. He didn’t think that was a joke!”
“He laughed, Conrad. He laughed so hard he snarfed his porridge and you had to pound him on the back. Kat offered to do the Heimlich on him and then he turned blue.”
You can always tell when older people are reminiscing, Lioncel thought indulgently. They start using that old-fashioned way of speech, even my lady isn’t quite a Changeling that way.
“He didn’t think you were a joke anymore. The heads, yes, that hit him right in the funny bone.”
“We did think it would cheer people up,” Tiphaine said, a little amusement in her tone.
“That was when I really first noticed you. That girl will go far, I thought, and now you’ve got my old job.”
Conrad shivered reminiscently and crossed himself before he went on:
“I also thought I’d never feel warm again, and it was so damned dark all the time. . ”
Tiphaine gave a half-snort: “I remember trying to pee and my armor being so cold that skin stuck hard to the metal anywhere it touched,” she said. “That and the way the Canuk ski troops kept working around our flanks through the woods. If they’d had more body armor and cavalry it would have been impossible.”
Conrad sighed as he referenced a letter and murmured to his clerk. “Enough about the old days, let’s get the rest of these supply projections sorted.”
“All right, let’s start with the barges and that elderly hardtack we have stockpiled at Goldendale-”
Watching the Chancellor and my lady the Grand Constable do their work is. . educational, Lioncel thought as he stood and directed the page boys with flicks of his hand. Well, I’m the Grand Constable’s squire; I’m supposed to be learning.
They went through the rest of the stack of documents at a pace that made him blink, usually talking in an elliptical compressed way that showed how many years they’d worked together and stopping just long enough to chew when they took a bite of the lunch collation.
“That’s all for now, Mistress Brunisente,” Conrad said to the senior clerk when they came to the bottom of the stack. “Get me a typewritten transcript by tomorrow and do a précis.”
“Copies, my lord?”
“No carbons. We’ll circulate it under seal to the Queen Mother and Chancellor Ignatius after we go over it. No need to bother Their Majesties with this unless the Chancellor-slash-Questing Monk says so. Rudi and Mathilda have enough on their plates.”
The clerk took the hint, bobbed a curtsy and left.
“Good enough,” Tiphaine d’Ath said.
She leaned back, stretching her arms far behind her and tilting her head to one side and then the other until there was a sharp click.
“As far as the Association contingent goes we’re golden on the supply situation for the rest of this campaigning season,” she said. “Especially since His Majesty’s letting a lot of our infantry go back to their villages and plow.”
“The downside of that is that we’re cutting the size of the field force because we can’t feed that many so far from the Columbia, not because Rudi couldn’t use the men,” Conrad grunted. “Anyway, it’s time the rest did their share, and their foot soldiers are just about as good as ours. Nobody else has anything like our men-at-arms, though.”