Juniper lowered her voice. There was enough background noise to let her speak privately with the stocky brown-haired man next to her.
"Any progress?" she said.
"Judy's pretty sure I was right about it being a Altendorf code," Aylward said. "But for what, we don't know. My guess: "
She raised a brow, and he went on: "My guess would be it's an updated operational plan-a contingency order, so he only has to give a codeword and set things in motion. But that's just a bloody guess. Maybe they could work it out over to Corvallis. Judy's a bright lass, but: "
Juniper frowned. Judy Barstow Mackenzie-nee Lefkowitz- was bright. She was head of the Clan's healers, and had been a registered nurse and midwife before the Change, with three languages under her belt to boot, not counting English.
Not to mention a good grasp of Yiddish and Russian profanity. She'd gotten that from her grandfather, who'd fought from Moscow to Berlin with Zhukov and then taken off his uniform and kept right on westward until he reached New Jersey. But she isn't a cryptographer, either.
The university people would be far more likely to have someone with relevant skills. An Altendorf code was based on correlations with a book or other document, and it was infernally hard to break-you had to have not only the book it referred to, but the right edition so the page and line numbers corresponded. Or you could break it by sheer number-crunching, but that really required computers.
On the other hand:
"We have some chance of keeping a secret. Corvallis does everything by 'committees of the whole' and leaks like a sieve," she said. "The Bearkillers can keep their mouths shut, but I don't want to get Mike in more trouble at home: And I really don't want the Protector knowing that we've got a hold of a copy of his little scheme."
"You think his faithful marchwarden the good Baron Gervais hasn't told him?" Aylward said with a grin.
"Is a bear Buddhist? Does the Dalai Lama defecate in the shrubbery?" Juniper said.
"Tsk! Why-ever-for shouldn't he tell his old gaffer that he had a folder of plans stolen?"
Aylward spoke with a wolfs grim amusement; he was enjoying Marchwarden Liu's possible discomfiture a lot more than she was. Not that she could blame him, but:
"Arminger: Goddess, I don't like imagining what he'd do to the man if he found out-even Eddie Liu wouldn't deserve that."
"I'd say it's poetic justice, Lady Juniper. Hmmm. I don't suppose we could blackmail Liu by threatening to grass him up?"
"Now isn't that the interesting thought, now!" Juniper said. "I always did prefer being sneaky to straightforward bashing: tricky, though. Perhaps we could blackmail him into giving us more information about the Protector's schemes? By the Threefold Shadow, I don't think he'd hesitate out of loyalty."
"And speaking of the Threefold Hecate: " Aylward said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.
Which means Judy's back from her mission of mercy.
Juniper gave him a reproving thump on the shoulder-her friend wasn't that terrifying-and turned to look. A buckboard wagon drawn by two horses was bumping along the gravel road westward from the watermill, with six Mackenzie archers on bicycles following along behind as escort. They peeled off for the gates of Dun Juniper as the wagon turned towards the Chief's party, whooping and increasing their speed as they pumped the pedals towards home and baths and beer. Judy Barstow was driving the buckboard-she and Juniper had been classmates in high school in Albany back when the other's name was Judy Lefkowitz, and they had discovered the Craft together in their seventeenth year.
Right now Judy looked a bit travel-worn; it wasn't an easy journey past the ruins of Eugene, especially if you were taking the overgrown back roads and dodging bandit gangs often dozens strong.
"Juney!" she called, waving.
"Judy!" Juniper replied, reading the other's pursed-lip expression with the ease of long experience as meaning roughly:
For this piece of limp celery I missed the Sabbat?
She had a passenger, a woman Juniper knew only by correspondence since the Change, though they'd run into each other a few times at RenFaires and Pagan gatherings before that. Laurel Wilson wasn't any older than Juniper's late-thirties, but from her looks could have given her a decade or more; those were the lines of privation and strain, and there were streaks of gray in her long dark hair. Bright sunlight brought out the wrinkles and weathering. She was looking around at the bustling scene with open awe, and even more so as the real size of Dun Juniper's walls became apparent-the shining white of the stucco coating and the painted roundels of flower and vine under the battlements gave an appearance of grace that belied the sheer massiveness of it.
"Merry met, the both of you!" Juniper said, as Judy pulled on the reins and the horses halted, bending their heads to graze. "We'll be through in just a second."
Judy's children-Tamsin, a girl of twelve, Chuck Junior, still toddling, and the three adoptees, who were nineteen or twenty now-abandoned their father's scorekeeping station and came trotting over; or the teenagers did, with Tamsin running at their heels and Chuck the Small toddling in their wake and setting up a howl as he tripped and fell on the close-cropped turf. Judy tied off the reins, jumped down and comforted the two-year-old with brisk efficiency.
"This is worth watching," she said over her shoulder to the visitor; Laurel stood, and shielded her eyes with a hand.
Westward down the meadow men and women were following loaded carts, taking out scores of target outlines shaped like a man with a shield, made of a double layer of thick planks. The targets were propped up against successive fence lines at fifty-yard intervals out to three hundred yards, with each figure a few feet from its neighbors to left and right-the same formation as armored footmen would have in battle. This was a harder test than battle in some respects, because the real thing would involve shooting at a formation many yards deep; a little over or under usually didn't matter much.
Of course, nobody's shooting back at you, Juniper thought, settling the baldric that carried her quiver with a shrug of her shoulders. Not far away, a signaler raised a silver-mounted horn to his mouth and blew Assemble in line, a long modulated dunting howl.
Those of her clan with pre-Change battle experience had told her the hardest thing to unlearn had been the instinct to spread out and take cover. You couldn't do that in a big battle these days. Longbows were deadly, but they weren't machine guns. To stop a mass of armored men charging with bladed weapons you had to pack your archers together, which meant you had to stand upright and just take whatever came back at you.
The shooters drifted over from the other clout rings and the butts, chatting as they did. She heard Aylward sigh, and hid a smile; he'd taught them all a great deal, but they weren't the Guards, or the
SAS.
"Line up by squads, you horrible lot!" he barked, and scowled harder at the genial remarks he got back. "Sod this for a game of soldiers, you idle, useless maggots-move it!"
The nonshooting spectators had a high proportion of nursing mothers and the visibly pregnant, including Melissa Aylward.
"Watch your tongue, Samkin!" she called, and laughed at his scowl along with more than a few of her friends and fellow onlookers. "I know where you sleep!"
The squads each had nine bows, with subgroups of three-mystically appropriate and solidly practical as well; there were three squads here from Dun Fairfax and eleven from Dun Juniper's larger population. A hundred and twenty-six archers in all, not counting the juveniles, overage and hopelessly shortsighted who helped hustle more arrows up to the shooters. The arrangement had the added advantage of keeping everything friends-and-neighbors, which put heart into ordinary folk if they had to fight.
Juniper stepped into her place beside Chuck and the Dun Juniper banner, looking to either side with fond pride. They might not have quite the guards snap that Sam remembered nostalgically, or the Bearkiller habit of doing everything at a run, but they got where they were going-a staggered triple line formed, with a yard between each of the Mackenzie warriors.