That all showed to better advantage because of the tailor's-style three-valve wall mirror. The rest of the room was mostly bare and lined with sheets of salvaged marble and shelves bearing spare parts, polish and tools. Empty armor racks like skeletal mannequins showed where her field kit had been packed up. The room had a rich clean odor halfway between metallic and that of a saddler's shop.
Maintaining a chevalier's armor was something pages worked on, under the supervision of squires, as part of the noble career path. The two boys walked around her with anxious eyes and ready cloths, to see if anything needed touching up, from gorget to the golden rowel spurs of knighthood.
"Now make your devoir to your lady mother. And then go and tell my lords the commanders that I'll be along shortly," she said, picking up her gauntlets. "Lioncel, take the helmet for me. Diomede, my sword belt."
They did, glowing with pride and pacing side by side, making a pretty picture in their dark liveries and brimless caps, one black-haired and the other almost as white-blond as Tiphaine herself.
Nice kids, she thought. Even if they are males.
Tiphaine had never had the slightest impulse to reproduce, even via turkey baster; Delia was enthusiastic about children, though, enough to use that venerable pre-Change technology. And the proforma marriage to de Stafford had served to ennoble her as well as to make her offspring respectable.
" I'll do this part," she said.
She stood, a little awkwardly in her seventh month and the maternity version of the long-skirted cotte-hardi; the pregnancy had fleshed her delicate brunette prettiness out a bit, too. Tiphaine bowed her head for the flat, round black hat with its roll about the brim, and then stood as Delia arranged it on the Grand Constable's straight blond hair, twitching the broad tail to fall down past a steel-clad shoulder. A small livery badge at the front bore the d'Ath arms, quartered with Sandra Arminger's.
"And this," Delia said.
She unwound a long silk scarf from her headdress-a tall pointy thing with a passing resemblance to a brimless version of a witch's hat Which is ironic, Tiphaine thought.
– and looped it around the Grand Constable's neck, tucking the ends beneath the mail collar. Tiphaine fell to one knee for an instant, took her hand and kissed it; their goodbyes had to be private.
And since I ended up in this Paleo-Catholic feudal wet dream of Norman's, that's the way it's going to stay, dammit…
"Come back safe," Delia said, fighting to smile.
"With my lady-love's favor to hearten me, how can I fail?" she said whimsically.
Her hand touched the silk. For a single moment, as their eyes met, the neo-chivalry didn't seem silly at all.
"And if you start dallying with any pretty cowgirls, it'll choke you," Delia said, smiling through eyes shining with tears. "I've enchanted it… and I'm a witch, you know."
They both smiled; Delia actually was a witch, albeit closeted in that respect as well. While the Old Religion wasn't illegal in the Protectorate anymore, it wasn't anything you advertised if you were a member of the nobility, either.
"Never, my sweet," Tiphaine replied over her shoulder as she turned to go. "I don't like the smell of the rancid butter they use as face cream out East."
Signe Havel noticed that Chuck Barstow, First Armsman of the Clan Mackenzie, was humming under his breath as they walked towards the banner of the Dunedain Rangers-protocol said the commanders of all the allied contingents should be there for this. Technically she should have been riding out from the castle with the other heads of state, but damned if she'd spend even one night beneath the same roof as the widow and partner-in-crime of her husband's killer.
And since Mike killed Norman Arminger too, I don't think Sandra Arminger feels very hospitable where I'm concerned, either. Though she'd hide it faultlessly.
Then Chuck began to sing, very softly indeed beneath the crowd-noise, his eyes on the splendors of Castle Todenangst and the feudal state of the party riding out through the gates amid caracoling horses and the snap of lance-pennants:
"Em Eye Cee, Kay Eee Wy, Em Oh You Ess Eee…"
He was a lean sinewy man in his early fifties, with thinning sandy hair and long muscular legs showing beneath his kilt, and he'd been around thirty when the Change struck. It took Eric Larsson and his sister a bit longer to recognize the tune; the Bearkiller leaders had been only eighteen then, forty now. Eric coughed into a fist like an oak maul encased in a steel gauntlet to conceal his initial bellow of laughter, the plates of his composite armor rattling, and Signe shot them both a scandalized look.
Well, yes, it does all have a touch of Disney, but this isn't the moment!
And that castle wasn't a fantasy for children made of plaster and lath; the walls were very real mass-concrete many yards thick, and the towers held murder machines and flame throwers and lots of completely serious soldiers with spears and swords meant for use, not show. If you had the men-at-arms, you got to decide what constituted reality.
Eric grinned, a piratical expression with his Vandyke beard and yellow locks flowing to his armored shoulders. A golden hoop earring glittered in his right ear.
"Says the man in a kilt and a feathered bonnet," he said to the Mackenzie Armsman. "Not to mention a golden torc."
Chuck snorted. "Hey, the torc's just our equivalent of a wedding ring, nowadays. And I was doing this stuff"-his fingers tapped the hilt of his sword-"when I was eighteen."
"Geezer! So was I, but by then it was real life, not fantasy," Eric said cheerfully.
"Says the man whose younger sister thinks she's the greatgranddaughter of Aragorn son of Arathorn and Arwen Undomiel," Chuck shot back.
"It's not quite that bad; she just thinks she's their remote descendant," Signe said. "Anyway, we Larssons do come from a very ancient line of sand and gravel magnates in the eastern part of Middle-earth."
"I thought your folks made their money off wheat and timber here in Oregon," Chuck said. "Back about a hundred years pre-Change."
"Yeah, but before then we farmed sand and broke our plows on rocks in Smaland for Freya-knows-how-many thousands of years."
Eric inclined the ostrich-feather plumes of his dress helmet towards the Dunedain banner for an instant.
"Chuck, did I ever tell you the one I made up for Astrid, back before the Change?"
He whispered; they were getting closer, even with the general hubbub.
"No, Eric, I don't think you did. But feel free."
As softly, Eric went on:
"Ho, Tom Bombadil!
Tom Bumboydildo!"
" Shut up," Signe said, suppressing an unwilling smile. "Besides, you need to dance and click your heels with that simpering look and the daisy stuck up your nose, for the full effect."
The Bearkiller banner was borne by Bill Larsson, Eric's eldest son; he was nearly as tall as his father, with hair of brown curls and a skin the color of lightly toasted wheat bread and just this year the brand of an A-lister between his brows. He exchanged a look with Mike Havel Jr.; the fourteen-year-old rolled his eyes slightly despite the tight discipline of the Outfit his father had founded. They were both obviously wondering what the hell their elders were talking about. Chuck's foster son Oak carried the Clan's moon-and-antlers flag; he was thirty-one, and about as bewildered.
Changelings, Signe Havel thought, with fond exasperation.
And a stab of pain. Even that slight tilt to Mike's head and the habit of raising a single eyebrow was so like his father…
They fell in beside Astrid and the others. And she's being the Noble, Stern, Wise, Grave, Kindly Leader, Signe thought as she took in her younger sister's pose. Well, she can carry it off with style. A bull-goose loony she may be, but she's still a Larsson.