Ingolf crooked a smile. "Yah, he got back worse than he gave me, didn't he?"
He was cored out as a cook does a pepper for stuffing, Rudi thought, and swallowed painfully.
"The command laid on you could be posthypnotic suggestion," Ignatius said with a scholar's precision; the Shield of St. Benedict were a learned order as well as a militant one. "Not necessarily magic."
Rudi grinned at him, and quoted a saying of Juniper Mackenzie: "It doesn't stop being magic because you can explain it, Father."
Ingolf's haunted dark blue eyes met his, and the Easterner touched his mouth and winced a bit before he spoke.
"You stuck a yard of sword through his brisket, and he didn't stop. Then I crushed in the back of his head, and he still didn't stop. Cry-yiy, that sounds an awful lot like magic to me."
"And I cut his leg mostly off," Mary Havel said. "That didn't stop him, either. It did make me feel better about his clouting me on the head with a sword earlier, though."
"It didn't stop him, but it did make him fall over," Ritva pointed out cheerfully. "Which helped everyone else cut him up and smash him and things. Carth mag, sis."
Which meant useful deed in Elvish. Neither of the twins seemed much put out; at least, they didn't show much of the dread that several of the others did. But then, they were witches, and Initiates; two-thirds of the Dunedain Rangers were, after all. Even if they did call on the Lord and Lady as Manwe and Varda, which he considered an affectation, rather than using more conventional names like Lugh and Brigid.
Everyone fell silent for a moment, turning in to their own thoughts. Mary and Ritva each hugged her knees and rested her chin on them, which emphasized their mirror-image likeness. It brought out their resemblance to Rudi, too-the high cheekbones and slightly tilted almond-shaped eyes they all showed were probably from that shared blood. Mike Havel had been one-quarter Anishinabe Indian, the rest mostly Finn with a dash of Norse, all strains common in the upper Peninsula mining country of Michigan he'd come from, long before the Change-fifty-odd years ago, now.
Their mother, Signe, probably contributed the wheat-colored hair and their eyes, which were just the shade of a morning sky; the Bear Lord had been flying her and her parents and brother and younger sister, Astrid, over the Idaho mountains not all that far from here when the machines died, and had got them down alive. And brought them to the Willamette country, and from that much had flowed… not least a fleeting encounter on a scouting mission that had produced one Rudi Mackenzie!
I wonder what flying like that was like, Rudi thought wistfully. He'd been up in balloons, and flown gliders and hang gliders a few times, and that was better than anything but sex. But to be able to fly where you wanted for as long as you wanted, as fast as a bird.. .
Frederick Thurston spoke. "I've been thinking," he said.
He was the youngest there, a year younger than Edain, still a little gangly with the last fast growth of adolescence, though at six feet he'd probably gotten all his height. His face was the color of a well-baked loaf, and his hair a short-cut black cap of tight curls; President-General Thurston had been of that breed miscalled black before the Change.
"Sure, and that's often advisable," Rudi said. "And we've all cause to be grateful for the direction of your thoughts, so."
"I… I don't think I should try to fight my… fight Martin. Not right now."
His full-lipped mouth twisted as he spoke his elder brother's name. Rudi nodded in sympathy. Hard, hard to be betrayed by close kin, and see your own father killed by your brother's hand.
The commander of the little Boise cavalry detachment looked at him in alarm; Rosita Gonzalez was a dark wiry woman in her early thirties, with a sergeant's chevrons riveted to the short sleeve of her mail-shirt.
"Sir, we can't let him get away with it! He killed the President.
"
Frederick nodded. "No, Sergeant, we can't let him get away with it
… and bear in mind that the President was my father. Though he'd want us to think of the country first." Grimly: "Though in this case, the personal and the political go together. He has to die."
And your late President was the man you resembled, as you said that, Rudi thought. Suddenly you didn't look young or uncertain at all. Which is interesting in itself, eh?
The younger of the Thurston men-they had two sisters, both still girls-went on:
"But from what we've heard, he has gotten away with it for now. The Vice President and half the top command died at the Battle of Wendell."
"What a coincidence. Convenient for the bastard."
The usurper's brother winced; it was plain he'd loved his elder sibling.
And love doesn't die as clean as a heart-shot deer, Rudi thought.
He'd liked Martin Thurston himself, on short acquaintance and before his treachery was revealed.
A dying love kicks and thrashes, and then the carcass of it festers and it can poison the waters of your soul as surely as a dead goat in a well. Fred here is still trying to draw what he saw down into his gut and believe it.
But he went on doggedly: "And the others, the brigade commanders and regional governors… they'll be his men soon enough. He's even got a fairly good excuse for restoring the State of Emergency powers, with a war on, and canceling the elections Dad… the President.. . was going to call. This wasn't something he… did on the spur of the moment. It's long-planned. If I tried to come out in the open now, not only would there be civil war, but I'd lose. And that would be the end of any hope of putting things right."
Gonzalez looked at him. "What do you want to do, then, sir?" she said carefully. "Since defeat is not an option."
"Give him enough rope to hang himself. Look… this isn't just about us, about Boise. This Prophet son of a bitch… it's more than a warlord with a big appetite, those are a dime a dozen. I believe what Rudi says, now, and I believe Ingolf about what he saw out East on Nantucket. I want you and the others to spread the truth. Cautiously! When the time's right, I'll be back to do my part. By then, things will be ready. I'm willing to fight Martin, it's worth it, but not without a chance of beating him."
"Yes, sir," she said respectfully. "If you don't mind my saying so, that's a very… adult way to look at it."
"I know when my birthday is, Sergeant," he said.
Her dark hard face turned to Rudi. "And you'll have this Sword you say is waiting for you on Nantucket?" she said skeptically.
"If I live, Rosita," the Mackenzie said gently. "Nothing's sure. .. except that there's no hope or luck to be found turning away from a task the Powers have laid on you."
"Frankly, I never really believed Ingolf here," she went on. "No offense! I know you believe it, Ingolf, but… well, a lot of stories come from the outlands. Creepy places with enchanted swords and extinct animals…"
"There's a passenger pigeon at Dun Juniper," Rudi said quietly. "Most of us here have seen it. That came from Nantucket."
"And the Prophet believes the story," Ingolf said. "He put Kuttner in when the Bossman hired me to go East, and Kuttner was his main secret agent in the household of Iowa's Bossman. And when I escaped from Corwin, he risked pissing off everyone on the West Coast by sending his Cutters after me. They near as damn-all did kill me; if Rudi and his friends hadn't been there that night…"
Rudi touched one hand to the livid bruises that Kuttner's dead hands had left on his throat, through the mail collar and padding.
"You were there," he said. "You saw this."
Gonzalez swallowed and looked away. "Yeah… Yeah, I was." She shuddered. "Hell, I saw a dead man keep fighting until we cut him to pieces. Christ. So maybe a magic sword isn't so loopy after all."
Ingolf nodded; he seemed to have cast off most of his chill, but he held out his big battered hands to the coals of the fire.
"It's there," he said flatly. "I saw a hell of a lot of things on Nantucket, and some of them may have been me going bugfuck, but the Sword is there. And the Voice, the voice that told me to go find the Son of the Bear Who Ruled and tell him about it."