And this whole pavilion is so Sandra, Juniper thought. She's gone camping… with a palace wrapped around herself, so.
The ground was covered in softly glowing not-quite-Oriental rugs, and the walls with tapestries, both made in the workshops of Newberg and Portland; flowers and vines, lords and ladies hawking or hunting boar and tiger or dancing stately pavanes in pavilions out of dream. Lamps of fretwork in gold and silver and carved jewels hung from the peaks of the ceiling. The light folding furniture was inlaid with mother-of-pearl and rare woods. A prie-dieu and icon of the Virgin stood in one corner; Juniper made a gesture of respect to the Madonna and Child there.
"You can tell the economic pyramid up North comes to a demmed sharp point," Nigel drawled under his breath, echoing her thought.
"And that we've been married so long we're starting to finish each other's sentences," Juniper replied. "Even the unspoken ones!"
A minstrel wearing a great hood with ridiculously long liripipes and tippets elaborately decorated with foliated dagges strummed a lute and sang softly from a corner:
"Her only will I sing
Who, challeng'd by the Boy
Or bids him wing or crowns him King
In courtesy and joy."
Serving girls in tabards and double tunics were carrying around trays of drinks and nibblements, salty cured sturgeon roe on crackers and bits of caper and smoked salmon and goose-liver paste-what Sandra insisted on calling canapes-and pyonnade, fabulously expensive because the main ingredient was candied pineapple shipped in from Hawaii or the Latin countries.
Juniper grinned as she accepted a glass of white wine from the Lady Regent's demesne estates and a little sausage on a toothpick. She'd heard that when she was being informal Sandra Arminger referred to this sort of thing as faculty fodder. Her gossoon of a husband, Norman, had been a medieval history professor, of all things-specializing in the Norman duchy and its offshoots-as well as a Society fighter before the Change. After March 17, 1998, he'd branched out into warlording, conquest, torture, murder and general wickedness, with the gleeful relish of a man at last living out the dreams of his heart.
Though it's true he saved many a life in that first year, if only so they'd be alive to serve him.
"Speak of the devil's widow," Juniper murmured beneath her breath.
Sandra came towards her, hands extended, the silk of her pearl-gray cotte-hardi skirts rustling, her face framed by an elaborately folded noblewoman's wimple of white satin confined by a net of diamonds and platinum. The buttons from waist to high lace collar and down the long sleeves were carved from old ivory and mother-of-pearl.
"Juniper, dear, it's wonderful to see you again," she said with a smile. "And to visit your home at long last."
For the rest she was no taller than Juniper, and her face was quite unremarkable except for the care which made her look younger than her mid-fifties… and the depth of thought in her brown eyes, like a shifting complex pattern at the edge of sight, never quite glimpsed.
They exchanged the air-kiss of peace; Nigel bowed over her hand. "I like your little twelve-bedroom pup tent," Juniper said. "It takes the rough out of roughing it, sure and it does. Though a little heavier than a sleeping bag on a trip, I'd think."
Sandra chuckled. "Getting in touch with nature or back to the land always struck me as more a matter of wallowing in the dirt with the bugs. And the railroad runs most of the way here now."
Which was a point; horses could pull fifteen times more on rails than on the best road.
And why do I suspect Sandra would have brought the pavilion just the same even if she had to have it carried on the backs of porters?
There were two grandees with her. Juniper was glad to see she hadn't brought any of the ordinary Protectorate nobility along-the Stavarovs in particular gave her the crawls. But she could tolerate Conrad Renfrew, Count of Odell and now Lord Chancellor of the Association. He was a thickset, shaven-headed man in his fifties, with a face made hideous by old white keloid scars. His arms of sable, a snow-topped mountain argent and vert were in a heraldic shield embroidered on the breast of his T-tunic.
"I never managed to haul as much freight this way during the Protector's War," Renfrew said, grinning like something squatting on a cathedral's waterspout. "Even with an army of two thousand men to feed. The logistics were hell."
Nigel gave the man who'd commanded the Association's armies in the War of the Eye a nod of wary respect.
"We didn't expect you to besiege Sutterdown so quickly," he said.
Renfrew chuckled. " I didn't expect you to corncob me by looping through those damned mountains and cutting our siege lines at Mt. Angel and beating Lord Emiliano's army." A pause. "Though he was a complete idiot, granted. Most of those jumped-up gangbangers never did learn a war isn't an enlarged drive-by."
Juniper shivered slightly, remembering the earth shaking as the knights charged into the arrowstorm, and the sound of the horses screaming, louder and more piteous than men in their uncomprehending agony.
"Their sons, however, have learned better," Tiphaine d'Ath said. "Conrad and I have seen to that."
The woman in her thirties on Sandra's left was in what the PPA considered male dress, which was a rare thing in the Protectorate. And she was a Baroness in her own right rather than by marriage or inheritance, which was still more uncommon, her arms of sable, a delta or over a V argent self-chosen. Before the Change she'd been named Collette Rutherton, a Girl Scout and up-and-coming junior gymnast of Olympic caliber at Binnsmeade Middle School in Portland. Sandra had seen her potential.
And took the girl under an elegant, batlike wing. Better to be Sandra's girl ninja and hatchetwoman than starving or being eaten by cannibals or dying of plague in those camps around Salem, I suppose.
Together she and Conrad were the Regent's right hand, and a portion of the left.
Both sides exchanged equally courteous murmurs in a protocol that sounded ancient and was no older than the Change, cobbled together out of novels and remembered stories and playful Society anachronisms turned deadly serious. She knew Nigel found it all hilarious, despite his poker face; his family had come to England in the train of William the Conqueror.
Sandra clapped her hands twice. The minstrel fell silent with a final stroke of his fingers across the strings, and the buzz of conversation died.
"Thank you all for your company, my lords and ladies," she said. "And now, if you will forgive us…"
The heads-of-state and their closest advisers went through into an inner room with a table clad in white damask; servants set out a cold collation. Juniper took a chair near Sandra's and waited politely while Abbot Dmwoski of Mt. Angel spoke:
"Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts which we are about to receive from Thy bounty, through Christ our Lord. Amen."
Half the people around the table joined in as he signed himself with the Cross; Eric Larsson the Bearkiller war-chief did, for example. His sister Signe Havel made the sign of the Hammer over her plate as Juniper spoke:
"Harvest Lord who dies for the ripened grain Corn Mother who births the fertile field Blessed be those who share this bounty;
And blessed the mortals who toiled with You
Their hands helping Earth to bring forth life."
"I'm Church of England, myself," Nigel Loring added dryly, and there was a general chuckle. "All this sincerity gives me hives, rather."
Dmwoski shook his finger at him. "And the Anglicans have returned to Holy Mother Church," he said in mock reproof.