“My darlin’ foster girl!” she said, and Mathilda squeezed her back through the fine soft wool of her arisaid.
“Your unrecognizably fat foster girl!” she murmured into the older woman’s ear.
“Nonsense. Just a few healthy curves; the Maiden becomes Mother.”
Mathilda hugged her again, and felt that little familiar shock that she was so much taller than the Mackenzie.
She and Mother are about the same height. One of the few things they have in common, besides their wits. And that you forget it because they both feel bigger in your mind.
Signe’s face turned a little chillier. She’d also never completely forgiven Juniper Mackenzie for meeting Mike Havel and bearing his son, who was now Mathilda’s husband and High King. Not just for the usual reasons a woman would, even though that had been a single night and before Signe had married him, but because Rudi was High King, instead of one of her children.
The wet-nurse-an Associate herself, a younger collateral of the great Jones family who were Counts in Mollala and who’d lost her own child not long after birth-brought Órlaith to Mathilda. Objectively Mathilda’s daughter looked like any three-month-old. .
But by the holy Mother of God, she’s beautiful! Mathilda thought.
For a moment the feeling clenched her eyes shut like physical pain. When she opened them again her daughter was baring her gums in a broad smile and kicking within the linen smock, reaching for her.
“Órlaith,” she said as she picked the solid little weight up. “My golden princess!”
“My granddaughter,” Sandra said.
“And mine,” Juniper Mackenzie said.
“But my only granddaughter, so far. Your fourth.”
“Give me time, Mom!” Mathilda said.
She was that post-Change rarity, an only child. Juniper had what she thought of as a more typical middle-of-the-road total of four.
Mathilda kissed her daughter on the forehead and handed her over to Sandra, who gave a short odd laugh as she took her competently in the crook of an arm. Juniper looked a question.
“I was just thinking,” Sandra said, “of how often I’ve wondered what the world will be like when the last of us oldsters have shuffled off to our-literal, as it turns out-rewards and the Changelings like Mathilda are left to run things without us.”
“And I’ve had the same thought, many a time,” Juniper said. “But?”
“Just now,” Sandra said, tickling the tip of the baby’s nose with one finger as she smiled and kicked, “it struck me that I should wonder what the world will be like when Órlaith’s generation is in charge. . people who never knew the people who knew the world before the Change. When she’s my age it will be. . Good Lord, it’ll be Change Year 84! Nearly a century! Will they really believe anything about our world by then, except as myths? And of course her children. .”
Juniper’s face froze for a moment, though the Changelings showed polite incomprehension. Then she said, slowly:
“It never fails; in a conversation with you, something truly disquieting will be said. Now I’ll be having that thought every time I look at a baby, instead of just enjoying the little ones. Thank you, Sandra.”
“You’re welcome, dear Juniper.”
Mathilda sat with a slight snort; talking to Mother did keep you on your mental toes, the way sparring with Rudi sharpened your reflexes with the sword. She arranged the skirts of her cotte-hardie and nodded to the others as a maidservant offered a tray.
Everyone occupied themselves pouring tea and passing plates of tiny sandwiches and pastries-potted shrimp and cucumber and deviled chicken and little glazed things with raspberries and cream. The tea was the real luxury, even more expensive than coffee. Local equivalents were still experimental, and this was the genuine article, imported by a profoundly unreliable chain of middlemen through desolate pirate-haunted seas from the few revived plantations in Asia to Maui in the Kingdom of Hawaii and then to Astoria. The world was a very large place, these days. Even larger than it had been in the Jane Austen novels that were so popular among the female nobility, and which probably helped keep the beverage so prestigious.
“Please, no formality, Mesdames,” Mathilda said, and picked a pastry off the chased silver, making herself nibble graciously rather than bolting it. “Speak freely, and don’t worry about precedence.”
I’m hungry. Getting back into shape is brutal but I don’t dare go anywhere near a battlefield until I do. Even commanders end up fighting with their own hands at least occasionally, God knows I have often enough, and if you get tired first you die. I want to help Rudi the way I did on the Quest, not burden him.
She’d managed to hack out a two-hour session every morning from her impossible schedule, and sparring in plate armor with a fifteen-pound shield on one arm and an oaken drill-sword in the other hand was about the best overall exercise there was. The changes in her body during pregnancy had been. .
Interesting, she thought. And certainly worthwhile. Though the mood swings. . poor Rudi! He was probably glad to get back to the field.
Her lips thinned a little as a muscle-memory of her sword-edge hammering into bone ran through her fingers and up into her gut. That was the sort of thing you remembered in the middle of the night sometimes; that and the faces.
She worked her right hand, the way you did to get the kinks out after a fight. Unexpectedly, she found herself crossing eyes with Signe Havel, who nodded very slightly with a small wry smile. They’d never be friends, but for that instant across the gulfs of family and rivalry they shared something-something incommunicable to anyone who hadn’t been in the place they’d both visited and from which you never entirely returned.
The hardest part now was that unlike a lot of warriors she had never really enjoyed the utterly essential life-preserving process of keeping in tip-top shape. She enjoyed the results, the feeling of strength and capacity, she was a pretty good natural athlete and sparring was fun in limited doses, but it wasn’t the passion for her it was with-say-Rudi. Or for that matter Tiphaine d’Ath, whose idea of rest was flipping through a back issue of Tactical Crossbows between bouts in the salle d’armes. And if she was better than average with a sword, it was because she’d pushed it doggedly all her life with the finest tutors.
Not least of that had been Rudi. Just trying to keep up with him made you do things you hadn’t imagined were possible.
God, I miss him, seeing him smile and touching him and even the way his hair smells. Oh, well, at least my sword-calluses are recovering so my hands don’t hurt as much. For once I’m not sorry to be in a cotte-hardie; I still feel shapeless without lacing.
Delia de Stafford exchanged a glance with Sandra; she was in her thirties and smoothly beautiful, with raven-black ringlets hanging artlessly from under an open lace wimple topped by an embroidered cap. Baroness Forest Grove by marriage to Baron Rigobert and Châtelaine of Ath because of a rather less. . orthodox. . arrangement with the Grand Constable, as the two sets of ceremonial keys at her belt indicated. Sandra had always been her patron-she had an Associate’s dagger because of the then Lady Regent’s favor, as well as the Grand Constable’s-and the whole rather complex quasi-family were pillars of the throne.