Fred’s eyes flicked aside from it, though he was a brave man, and not just about physical danger.
“Was Roberts telling the truth?” he asked.
Rudi’s hand fell to the pommel in a gesture that had become habit. “What do you think?” he asked.
I try to keep from being too dependent on this, Fred. You should too. The more so as neither I nor the Sword will be with you whenever you might need them.
“That he was reasonably sincere, and he’ll keep his word-as long as he still thinks we’re the winning side,” Fred said.
Rudi flipped up his hands in a gesture of agreement. “See, you don’t need the Sword of the Lady to tell you that.”
Fred looked at it again, obviously forcing himself a little.
“That thing is useful. It had better be, after we went through hell and high water to get it-”
Rudi chuckled; that was uncomfortably close to being literally true.
“But. . better you than me, Rudi! I can judge men pretty well, I think, but it would be sort of stressful to know what I read was true. And I’d hate to be incapable of half-believing some little white lie.”
Rudi laughed; he’d been born late in the first Change Year, but there were already a few faint lines beside his eyes that showed he was a man who laughed often.
“My sentiments exactly and in precise measure, Fred. But I’m stuck with it; worse, my children after me.”
Fred’s smile died quickly. “Speaking of an inheritance. . what I really hate about making deals with Roberts and the others who backed Martin after he killed Dad is that he gave them land, land from the public reserve that should have been kept for division into more family farms. Dad always said yeomen are the bedrock.”
“More than they deserve, sure and it is,” Rudi said. “Though finding folk to work it for them. . that’ll be another matter.”
Land-who held it, and on what terms; who worked it, and how; and for whose benefit besides their own-was what most of modern politics, and much of modern life for that matter, were about.
“They deserve what Martin got, what you gave him,” Fred said.
Which had been the Sword through the gut. Though at the last that had been a mercy, freeing his soul even as he died.
Fred’s face hardened as he spoke. Rudi reflected that the younger man normally wasn’t much of a hater, which was a very good thing in a ruler for more than one reason. But Fred had hated his elder brother Martin, for parricide and killing their father’s dream of a restored United States and allying Boise with the malignancy that was the Church Universal and Triumphant.
Possibly most of all for killing the love they must have felt once, he thought sympathetically. I have no brothers, but of my sisters I am most fond.
Fred went on: “And I have some ideas about tax policy on unused land. . ”
A cough at the entranceway brought their heads around with a caution ground in by short but extremely eventful lifetimes. Hands relaxed from weapons as they saw who stood there, a young man of middling height but broad-shouldered and thick-armed, with a square face and oak-colored brown curls beneath his Scots bonnet.
“Merry meet, Edain,” Rudi said to his guard-captain.
Edain Aylward Mackenzie put down the trays of food he was carrying. They looked a little incongruous with the outfit of the High King’s Archers anyway. That was the Mackenzie kilt and plaid and the green brigandine the Clan’s warriors usually wore, though the outer layer of leather bore the Crowned Mountain of Montival rather than the Mackenzie crescent moon cradled in antlers. He had shortsword and buckler at his belt, a dirk, and a sgian-dubh tucked into his knee-hose.
Across his back was a quiver of gray-fletched arrows, with a great yellow yew longbow thrust through the carrying loops on its side. The Mackenzies were a people of the bow, and old Sam Aylward their first teacher had been known as Aylward the Archer in his time. His son bore that nickname these days, for very good reason.
Right now he prodded a thick callused finger at the food. “Merry meet, and merry part, Chief; and you, Fred. Now eat, both of you.”
Rudi blinked in surprise. “Arra, and is it that time already?”
“It’s sunset,” Edain said.
Then with a show of thought, tapping a thumb on his chin: “It happens nearly every day in these parts, and then most often it grows dark!”
“And how would I remember such things without you to remind me, blood-brother?” Rudi grinned.
Edain snorted. “The Lord and Lady may know, but I don’t even ken how I got you to Nantucket and back alive. I’m here because Fred’s batman came to me near weeping, Not now they tell me, not now, we’re too busy. . and to think a crew of fancy cooks have toiled and moiled all the day to whip up this feast for you, sure and they did like Lughnasadh come early, what with the well-basted roast suckling pig with the honey-garlic glaze and the spiced meat pies with their fragrant flaky crusts and the succulent fresh-picked asparagus and steamed sweet peas and glazed carrots and stuffed eggplant and four types of bread hot from the oven and sweet butter and the cakes and ices and whipped cream and all!”
Rudi chuckled; the food consisted of two bowls containing chunks of mutton stewed with dried beans and desiccated vegetables, a stack of tortillas and a block of ration-issue cheese the size, shape and consistency of a cake of soap. It was the same food anyone in the US of Boise contingent would be eating tonight, officer or enlisted.
“Sit, man,” he said to Edain, as he pulled the little knife out of his sock-hose and shaved rock-hard dry cheese onto the bowls of stew. “There’s work to be done and I’ll need you to hear and speak. You’ve eaten?”
“Aye, Chief. Asgerd saw to it.”
Fred uncorked a wine bottle and poured three glasses as Edain unhooked his baldric and hung the longbow and quiver from a peg on one of the tent poles.
“You should have gotten Asgerd pregnant, the way Rudi and I did our wives,” the Boisean said, then looked at his King.
“And I won’t have to envy you much longer, Rudi. I wouldn’t have your job on a bet, but that, yeah. To hold our daughter-”
The longing was naked in his face for an instant, and the remembered joy in Rudi’s own.
“Son,” Rudi said absently. “For you two it’ll be a son, first.”
All three men looked at his hand on the pommel of the Sword.
“You’re going to name him Lawrence,” Rudi went on. “And Dirk after Virginia’s grandfather. He’ll go by Dirk, mostly. . sorry! I should have left you to find that out; it comes on me unawares, betimes.”
Fred’s face unfroze. “Well, in the old days they had machines. . x-sounds, did they call them? To tell you ahead of time.” His smile grew wide. “A son! Our son!”
Then he laughed. There was a silver hammer on a chain around his neck; he touched his jacket over the spot where it lay.
“Son or daughter, Freya knows it’s the only way I was going to stop Virginia coming on campaign with me,” he said. “Freya keep her and our kid both safe, too.”
“They’re a fierce lot in the Powder River country,” Rudi acknowledged, drawing the Invoking pentagram over his bowl of stew. “Hail and thanks to the Mother-of-All who births the harvest, to the Lord who dies for the ripened corn, and thanks to the mortals who toiled with Them,” he went on, before taking up the first spoonful.
The Powder River plains in old Wyoming were where Fred had first met his spouse, when she stumbled into their camp on the run from the followers of the Church Universal and Triumphant who’d taken her family’s ranch. She’d ended going to Nantucket and back with the Quest.
Fred hammer-signed his bowl, murmured: “Hail, all-giving Earth,” and went on: “And Mathilda’s meek and retiring, Rudi, yeah, right, she certainly wouldn’t be here even if she hadn’t gotten knocked up. And I’ve never seen her charging over a barricade into a mess of Saloum corsairs right beside you, shield up, visor down and sword swinging and screaming Haro, Portland! Holy Mary for Portland! at the top of her lungs.”