Two roads ran north-south down the lowland to his right, the easternmost crossing the river on a bridge still intact; someone had gone to the trouble of clearing off the vehicles from that one.
"And that's where the Crossing Tavern is." he said. "Just this side of where Webfoot Road crosses the creek."
"Where the innkeeper's feeding travelers to Crusher Bailey's gang for a cut of the take. The ones who won't be missed too bad," Will Hutton replied grimly.
"Let's not jump to conclusions, Unc' Will," Signe said. "Crusher's gang is working this area, but we don't know their MO and we're not sure the innkeeper's in it with them. My people haven't been able to find out anything one way or another."
Havel pulled a grass stem and stuck it meditatively between his teeth, enjoying the fresh sweetness and inhaling the welcome smell of new spring growth crushed under the rings of his hauberk.
My darling wife has come a long way, he thought, grinning inwardly. She was a vegetarian before the Change, and now she's head of the CIA, as well as a mean hand with a backsword. Well, we probably suit a lot better than I would with Juney Mackenzie-that woman's conscience can make you feel real uncomfortable.
"You been able to find out what the hell the Protector is doing up the Columbia?" he said.
"He's back, but not with most of the troops," she said. "Haven't been able to find out what he was doing. He just ordered a task force together and sailed out of Portland, leaving the Seal with his wife. Then he got back two days ago, headed straight out of Portland west with an escort, and while he was on the road there Sandra called out a hundred crossbowmen and fifty knights and their banners and sent them east over the Willamette-towards Molalla, remember? Arminger went after them hot-foot. Must be something important going on over there. Those visitors of his were involved."
"Can you guess at anything?"
"Well, his daughter's staying with Molalla. The guy was a Blood before the Change, name of Jabar, but he's more sensible than a lot of Arminger's baronage. Firm supporter of the Protector, worse luck."
"Well, whatever's going on over there, it does make it the perfect time to take care of Crusher Bailey," he mused.
He looked carefully at the roadhouse that stood just south of the creek and the bridge, nearly hidden by the trees. He'd never been up here himself, not this far eastward at least; no sense in giving the Protector a free chance at a coup de main. There was a fair amount of traffic on the road; the Protectorate and the other Valley communities were formally at peace despite the occasional skirmish, and everyone benefited from trade in the meantime. He could see individuals on foot, mounted on bicycles or on horseback, carts of wildly varied construction ranging from wooden replicas of nineteenth-century models to cut-down pickups, small herds of sheep or cattle:
The ridge they were using for cover was the last easternmost outlier of the Amity Hills, themselves the northern fringe of the Eolas; none of the heights were over a few hundred feet, but in sharp contrast to the flat open land ahead and to his right. For a while he examined the territory, and the wisp of smoke rising from the sheet-steel chimneys of the way-stop.
"It's on the south bank of: Holdridge Creek, right?" he said.
Hutton nodded. "That runs east into Palmer Creek, an' that goes north to meet the West Fork and join the Yamhill at Dayton, then that hits the Willamette past the big east-trending bend."
The Texan pointed slightly north of east: "That bit there, though, the sloughs over a couple-two miles thataway, they're a lot worse than they were before the Change, com-parin' the maps to the firsthand look I had last week. Swamp and nothin' but. Braided channels and islands, all shifted around. What roads an' bridges there were are damn near all gone and we couldn't tell which wasn't yet, not without being pretty noticeable."
Eric whistled agreement; he'd been on that downriver scouting mission too, drifting along disguised as a barge-load of grain.
"No shit!" he said. "Part of that area was a state park, wetland preserve. Lordy"-a trick of tongue he'd picked up from his Texas-born father-in-law-"but it's wet now! A duck could drown in there if he didn't know the pathways."
"Yeah, and the bad guys can hide out in it," Havel said. "They do know 'em."
Signe chuckled. "It's like the Debatable Land," she said.
"Que?" Havel said.
"Something my esteemed stepmother mentioned. Pam says a long time ago there used to be this stretch of ground between England and Scotland; they both claimed it, and neither one would let the other put in its laws and sheriffs. So there wasn't any law-not even as much as the rest of the border had-and outlaws made their home there."
"Sort of like the Hole in the Wall gang," Hutton said meditatively.
Will Hutton had been a noted wrangler and horse tamer before the Change, with a small ranch in Texas and customers for his horses all over the Western states; a delivery had caught him in Idaho that March nine years ago. He'd never graduated high school, but he was widely read in Western history and anything to do with horses.
"Yeah," Havel said. "Only this Crusher Bailey bastard's a lot nastier than Butch and Sundance, and too many of his hits are around here. His gang's not going to go on raiding our people and stealing our cattle and horses. Now that I've eyeballed the terrain, I say we go with the plan. The Protector's barons are having some sort of kerfuffle over on the east side of the river, a problem with raiders or something like that-less chance they'll try to interfere right now. There won't be a better time."
Signe sighed. "Yeah, and Arminger still has some of his cadre at Bonneville, after the whatever-it-was he was doing up the Columbia. Let's get moving, then."
"You sure you want to do this, sis?" Luanne Larsson-nee Hutton-said. "I thought you were: "
"Lost it," Signe replied shortly. "It was only a month along, anyway."
Eric grumbled in turn as they turned and slid down towards the Bearkillers waiting in the swale. "I still say you should let us do it, bossman."
Havel snorted. "It's not so easy to get known by sight without pictures or TV, but there still aren't many six-foot-two blond guys with wives who look like Luanne wandering around the Valley. You two are both pretty well known by name and general description this close to Larsdalen. People would be a lot more likely to twig if they saw you side-by-side."
Oregon had been a pretty white-bread state before the Change, particularly outside the cities, and the survivors had tended to be rural folk. You saw the odd Asian around, some blacks and rather more Hispanics, but all were few enough that they stood out. Some contrasts would just attract the eye and prompt the memory; Luanne's chocolate-colored features were a compromise between Hutton's blunt face and the strong-boned Tejano-Mexican comeliness of her mother, Angelica, all the more striking next to her husband's Viking looks. It was a pity; they wanted a woman along on this because it tended to disarm observers a little, and Luanne's skill set would have been perfect. Signe would do nearly as well, though, with a little cosmetic work.
"You just want all the fun," Eric said.
He grinned as he spoke, but his eyes flickered to his sister in momentary unease; this would be dangerous in ways that a straight-up fight wasn't.
Havel shrugged. "It beats reading and annotating reports on sugar-beet production and having meetings about management of the mint, but then so does getting nibbled to death by giant cockroaches."