"Of course you are, darlin' girl," her mother said. "There! Isn't it just ready, now?"
The plain suburban kitchen was just as she remembered it, down to the chipped white enamel of the old Maytag four-burner gas stove and the crayon drawings she'd made in sixth grade clipped onto the refrigerator with magnets, and the mixing bowls soaking in the sink. Her father's galoshes were by the screen door; it was spring, from the look of the lilac bush outside the window, but a gray, rainy, western Oregon day whose raw chill wind swung the seats of the swing in the middle of the little backyard.
She knew this house, the white frame Victorian in the Hackleman District on Elsworth and Seventh. A modest two-bedroom, not quite shabby, the water damage in the upper rear corner of the ceiling from the windstorm back in October of '62 neatly repaired by her father's own clever hands-it hadn't been when her parents bought the house in 1968, the year of her birth, which had cut the price to something they could afford. It even smelled the same: waxed linoleum and a sachet of dried lavender and the peculiar smell of the mutton-based shepherd's pie her mother made, overlaid with the good scent of the raisin-studded soda bread she was lifting out with her oven mitts. The same print of a Madonna and Child taken from a Church calender in 1982, the same checked tablecloth:
Mary Mackenzie was in her late thirties, as she'd looked a year or two before the accident, wearing an apron over a plain housedress, the first gray strands in her fiery molten-copper hair:
Just like mine, Juniper thought, looking down at herself.
The homespun saffron shirt and patterned kilt should have looked out of place; with the curious logic of dreams somehow they didn't, not even the dirk with its carved bone hilt and the sgian dubh in her boot top. Neither did Nigel Loring sitting across from her, smiling as he dropped the little perforated silver ball full of tea leaves into the pot on the end of its chain.
"Never could abide those tea-bag things, Mrs. Mackenzie," he said.
"Inventions of the devil," Mary said, shaking the triangles onto a plate. "A nice cuppa to welcome you to America, Sir Nigel-and sweet soda bread with raisins, if you like it."
"I'm very fond of it," he said, breaking one open and applying the butter and homemade strawberry jam. "My wife and I took our honeymoon in a little place in Donegal, and the good lady there made something very like this at teatime. Just the thing after a long walk in the wet."
Juniper took a piece as well and bit into it; the scent and the rich sweet taste were like a flood that stung her eyes with tears and broke down the gates of memory. Helping Mom with the dishes, standing on a little wooden footstool so she could reach the counter. Judy Lefkowitz and she bicycling on the banks of the Willamette and singing Beatles tunes together at the tops of their lungs. Dad coming in from his beat and her running out to meet him, and he put his cap on her head and hoisted her on his shoulders as he walked up the driveway:
"You'll be looking for a place here, then?" Mary asked Nigel. When he nodded, she went on: "Then you'd best be remembering is folamh fuar e teach gan bean. A house without a woman is empty and cold."
He smiled, a charming expression in his normally impassive face, one that made him look younger despite the laughter lines beside his faded blue eyes; then the smile died. "Well, perhaps if I could find one like you, Mrs. Mackenzie: or my Maude."
She touched him on the shoulder. "Grief is the tribute we pay the dead," she said, matter-of-fact sympathy in her voice. "But they don't ask more than we can afford to give. They've never really gone from us, you know, those we love; they're part of our story, and we of theirs."
Just then the door blew open. Eilir was there, and Nigel's son Alleyne, and Astrid, and the great slab-shouldered form of John Hordle. The youngsters' cheeks were flushed with wind and exercise; there was a minute of laughter and jostling and dripping cloaks before they were seated around the table and fresh plates of the soda bread set down, and tea poured.
Juniper gripped her cup in both hands as she sipped, then set it down.
"Mom?" she said, murmuring under the buzz of conversation. The infinitely familiar face leaned down by her. "Are you: are you really my mother?" Her eyes flicked to the blue-robed mother and god-child in the print.
Soft lips touched her brow. "To be sure I am, my heart, my treasure! For aren't all mothers one, in the end?" Her eyes went to Eilir, laughing silently as Astrid showed the two men how to shape the sign for wet. "And don't we all return what we're given?"
"Oh, Mom, I've missed you! I hated it when you went away!"
She pressed her face into the apron, flung her arms around her mother's body and felt the infinitely familiar soft warmth and scent. A hand stroked her hair. "Shhh, mo chroi. It was only for a little while I left you: "
Suddenly she was sitting up in bed, in the comfortable darkness of the Crossing Tavern's room. With Eilir and Astrid and herself they were near to filling even the big king-sized; the place was too crowded for the luxury of a private room. The girls were asleep, dark head and fair on two pillows, with a tavern moggy curled up at the foot of the bed and only a little starlight and moonlight shining in through the cracks around the shuttered windows.
What a dream! she thought, waiting while her quickened heartbeat slowed. What a dream!
She was smiling as she laid her head down once more. When in doubt, ask the Mother.
"This is getting to be entirely too much like the Decameron," Juniper Mackenzie grumbled as the leaders sat down to breakfast, with the Lorings present as well.
They were eating al fresco, as much for privacy's sake as for the bright spring sunlight. The stretch of courtyard was still pleasant, with a peach orchard beyond-pink blossom above, and sheep cropping amid grass below starred with yellow penstemon. The cold sweet scent of the peach blossom mixed with cooking, horses and woodsmoke.
"Ah, you like Boccaccio too?" Sir Nigel said. "Chaucer as well?"
"Indeed," she replied. She'd requested soda bread for breakfast, and Crossing Tavern's staff included someone who made a very passable batch. "I do that, professionally and personally."
"You were a musician before the Change?"
"Mostly," she said. And he seems genuinely interested. It's a rare man who's a good listener on first acquaintance.
"Celtic and folk. Which meant you were a stage performer as much as a singer, and a tale-teller nearly so."
"And now you're a ruler," he said.
"By some yardsticks," she replied, and they both laughed. "Immeasurably so."
Mike Havel cleared his throat, obviously anxious to get down to business. It's a grim sort you are at times, Mike, she thought. And besides that, it's a terrible habit, putting mustard on bacon like that.
The sausages were very good; a little spicier than the cooks at Dun Juniper made them. She waited as Sir Nigel sipped his semitea and smoothed down his white-streaked yellow mustache.
"Well," he said, clearing his throat. "It didn't take long to learn what it was that the Protector wanted. The problem was that Captain Nobbes was rather more taken in than I'd have liked: "
Portland Protectorate, Willamette Valley, Oregon
April 6th, 2007 AD-Change Year Nine
The dinner ended with apples and a cheese board; both were excellent. But then, so had been the fresh oysters, the lobster bisque, the crusted stuffed pork loin, the fresh baguettes-and the coffee, a gift from Captain Nobbes's dwindling store.
"So you see," Norman Arminger said, leaning back and turning the stem of his wineglass in his long fingers, "I'm sympathetic to your mission. Certainly I've no desire to see nerve agents brought back into common use! A pity the Change couldn't have taken care of those as well."
The crackling fire on the hearth behind him left his face in shadow, despite the candles on the table-only a half dozen of those had been lit. Nigel suspected that was calculated, to let him see his guests' faces clearly without revealing all of his own. His wife was smilingly inscrutable in her wimple and cotte hardi.