A Meeting At Corvallis

Chapter Thirteen

Sutterdown, Willamette Valley, Oregon

March 5th, 2008/Change Year 9

"W ell, there it is, my lords," Conrad Renfrew said.

He accepted a cup of hot coffee from a servant and inhaled the welcome scent that had been a haunting memory for so many years. Coffee was unimaginable luxury, available only to the Protector and a few great nobles even now that a square-rigger from Astoria was on the run to Hawaii.

The command pavilion stood about a mile north of the Mackenzie town called Sutterdown, in open country out of catapult range, with good water from a creek running westward out of the hills. The cloth walls drawn up on the southern side gave the assembled officers a good view; the noise of two thousand troops pitching camp around the great tent came clear, the clink of shovels, hammers driving in pegs, the bawling of livestock and from the other chambers of the command tent the rattle of an abacus and the ca-ching! of a manual adding machine. They'd finally managed to duplicate those, and very useful they were-he didn't know how medieval commanders had managed, since most of them probably couldn't have counted past ten without taking off their hose and looking at their feet.

The big table in the center held maps and papers; there was a buffet along one side laden with lunch, and some of the commanders were holding chicken legs or cheeseburgers or roast-beef sandwiches as they looked at the maps, or at their target.

"And here we are," Renfrew went on after a sip of the coffee and a sigh of pleasure. "Anyone got any brilliant ideas?"

Sutterdown was the closest thing the Mackenzies had to a city. Even by CY9 standards it wasn't much, less than two thousand people in normal times; there were a dozen towns in the Association's territory as big or bigger already. The walls were impressive, though, better than thirty feet high and, by report, nearly twenty thick, and the circuit was big enough to hold a lot more people in an emergency. They were studded at hundred-yard intervals with round towers half again as tall topped by conical roofs sheathed in green copper and shaped much like-appropriately-a witch's hat. A four-tower minifort guarded the gates at the quarters; the one on the south gave directly onto a bridge over the Sutter River, and the town as a whole was nearly contained within a U-shaped bend, giving the south and east and west a natural moat. A ditch across the north side completed the protection.

The crenellations along the top of the walls had been covered over the last few days by prefabricated metal-faced hoardings of thick timber, like a continuous wooden shed with the roof sloping out; that protected the fighting platform atop the wall from missiles, and gave an overhang so that the defenders could drop things straight down on anyone climbing a scaling-ladder. Association forts had the same provision; he'd practiced assembling the hoardings during emergency drills at his own Castle Odell, the Renfrew stronghold in the Hood Valley. Evidently the architects here had been reading the same books the Portland engineers studied-Castle by Macaulay for starters.

It looked more formidable to the naked eyeball than he'd thought it would be from the reports and sketches, and he was surprised the near anarchy of the Clan Mackenzie had managed to put so much labor into something with a long-term payoff. The bright white stucco on the town wall was different from anything he'd seen before, and so were the odd, curving designs of flowers and leaves painted on them. If you looked at them long enough you started to see faces peering out:

It's not altogether like one of our castles, or one of our towns, though: there's no inner keep, he thought, freeing his eyes with a wrench. Though those two hills on the west side of town might serve the purpose:

They were about a hundred feet above the general level of the town, or of the Sutter River that flowed along its southern edge. One of them was topped by some sort of temple or church or whatever the kilties called it, according to the intelligence briefings. He could see a bit of it, a round open structure with Douglas fir trunks smoothed and carved as pillars all around. A drift of smoke came from the center of the conical roof.

Unfortunately the dark-robed Bishop Mateo could see it too, and it had set him off again. Nobody dared interrupt him. "There is the altar of Satan!" he said, pointing; the cleric was a slender brown-skinned man with burning black eyes. "It is a stink in the nostrils of God! You must destroy it!"

There were nods all around the table. "Well, that's exactly what I'm going to try and do, Your Grace," Renfrew said politely.

Does he talk like that all the time? he wondered. Then: I'm not afraid of Leo's men, he thought, slightly defensive. Then again, I'm not anxious to butt heads with them, either.

He'd been an agnostic before the Change. Now he was an ostentatiously dutiful son of Mother Church, like anyone in the Protectorate's territories who wasn't a complete idiot, since the Lord Protector was too.

Does Norman really mean it? some fraction of his mind wondered. Or is it just part of the pageantry to him? Or was his mother scared hy a copy of King Arthur and the Round Table while she was pregnant? Well, I'm not going to kick. I couldn't have put this show together myself.

A fragment of poetry went through his mind, pseudo-Shakespeare:

Lay on, MacDuff

Lay on with the soup, and the Haggis and stuff;

For though 'tis said you are our foe

What side my bread's buttered on you bet I know!

Sometimes he wondered how many were trimmers like himself, and how many had come to genuinely believe. More of the latter than the former, he suspected, and his own un-belief got sort of shaky sometimes these days. When people heard the same story all the time and had to act as if they accepted it, most just did accept it; maintaining private reservations was too much like hard mental work. And it did help the Protectorate run smoothly, and would be even more helpful in another generation, when his children were growing up to inherit what he'd built.

But, oh, how I wish the damned priests would stick to their churches!

The bishop fingered the steel crucifix that hung around his neck; His Holiness Leo disapproved of ostentation, save where ritual demanded it. Fortunately Mateo's gaze stayed locked on the Mackenzie settlement. As they watched, something flashed out from one of the towers, trailing smoke. It landed a quarter mile closer to them, near a knot of patrolling horsemen, and splashed flame near enough to make the cavalry scatter. When they rallied, it was further out.

"Sir Richard?" Conrad asked calmly.

Dick Furness had been a combat engineer in the National Guard before the Change and was in charge of the Association's siege train now; he was forty-two, the only other man in the tent besides Renfrew to have seen his fourth decade, with a sharp-nosed face and brown hair and glasses. He shrugged, making his mail hauberk rustle and clink, and pointed. Another globe of napalm followed the first just as he began to speak, and then two four-foot bolts like giant arrows. They went over the cavalry's heads, and made them canter off again, which was sensible. Those things could go through three horses in a row: lengthwise.

"Well, as you can see, my lord Count, they've got lots of artillery, and it's well protected. Good reloading speed, too-must have hydraulic reservoirs in the towers. I'd say they probably bought the whole system from Corvallis, or the Bearkillers. Probably the Bearkillers, I recognize Ken Larsson's style: anyway, the wall's that Gallic construction, a frame of heavy timbers with rubble and concrete infill, and a layer of mortared stone on the outside and inside to cover the ends. Not as good as our ferroconcrete, but nearly."

"Couldn't you burn it?" someone said. "I was reading in one of the Osprey books"-that illustrated series on the history of warfare was important in the Association's military education system-"that the Romans used to burn 'em when they were fighting the Celts."

Good question, the Grand Constable thought. That's Sir Malcolm, Baron Timmins' son. Have to keep an eye on him. For promotion, he's too young to be angling for my job. Yet.

The engineer answered: "Sure thing, my lord, if you can figure out a way to make wood burn without oxygen."

Furness spoke more politely than he probably wanted to-he was a mere knight among tenants-in-chief and their sons, and most of the troops under his command were townsmen, although he hoped for ennoblement and a barony himself if this campaign succeeded. There was still a trace of irony in his voice. "I said rubble and concrete fill. And they used rebar. You'd have to knock the aggregate open before you could burn the frame. It's pretty good protection against battering, too. The timber lattice makes it more resilient than simple masonry; plus there's an earth berm on the inside. We can't undermine, either; the foundations are below the water table. Good luck on draining that with hand pumps."

Renfrew tapped his fingers on the map, where higher land rose just to the eastward of the town. "Emplacements here?"

Furness shook his head again. "That's extreme range for our engines-even trebuchets, even with the height advantage, my lord Count," he said. "And we'd have to build roads and clear timber to get the heavy stuff up there. Not worth the trouble. When we get the battering pieces here, we'll have to work them in by stages-build bastions for our siege engines, then zigzag approach trenches, then more bastions closer in. Hammer at the walls until we dismount enough of their machines, and then more pounding until we bring down a section and get a breech, and then assault parties with scaling ladders going in from the trenches under cover of the catapults and massed crossbowmen behind earth-works."

"That isn't how the books say they handled siegework the first time 'round," |Sir Malcolm observed. "Sounds more like the way they did it with cannon."

Interesting, Renfrew thought. He didn't stop reading at the end of the pre-gunpowder period the way most people do.

Furness spread his hands. "Steel-frame engines with truck springs for power and hydraulic cocking systems can throw things hard, nearly as hard as black-powder cannon did, they're a lot better than that wood-and-sinew crap those dimwits used back in the Middle Ages, and they scale up easier too."

There was a slight bristling, mostly from families who'd been Society before the Change, or ones who'd caught the bug since. Medieval was a word to conjure with, these days.

Oblivious, Furness went on: "So's modern design better, if you've got a good engineer; we know more about using mechanical advantage. Ken Larsson is good."

"Siege towers?" young Timmins said. "If we can get men on top of the wall, it's all over but the rape and pillage."

"Nope. Their engines'd smash a wheeled siege tower into scrap before it gets to the wall, or burn it; anything that could stand up to the stuff they've got would be too heavy to move. We'd have to knock the wall down anyway to silence them. I'd say use the northern approach; that moat will be a problem, but less so than the whole damned river. The town'll be pretty roughed up by then, I'm afraid."

The commanders looked at each other. The Protectorate hadn't fought anyone before who had defenses this formidable, or skill with war-engines to match their own. It had mostly been improvised earthworks they faced, if it was anything beyond barricades of dead cars and shopping-carts full of rocks. "That'll cost, working trenches up to the walls and then going right into a breech like that," someone said. "That'll cost bad."

Everyone looked as if they'd sucked on a lemon: Or on vinegar, to stick to things still available. A nobleman's status depended on how many men he could put into the field. They couldn't just send the infantry in, either-honor meant a lot of the leaders had to lead, and from the front; otherwise the men wouldn't press an attack in the face of heavy casualties. Training replacements for lost knights and men-at-arms would be slow and expensive, particularly since the knights' families had a claim on their manors even when the heirs were too young to fight. Not to mention making vassals' allegiance shaky.

Renfrew grunted and looked at Sheriff Bauer, who'd been promoted to second-in-command of the scouting forces; as the Constable had expected, the Protectorate's forces were critically short of light cavalry, and the man seemed to know his work. The easterner shrugged as well.

"Them walled villages of theirs, duns they call 'em, the ones close to here are all empty and scraped bare-assed. A round dozen we checked are empty as an Injun's head."

They all looked at Sutterdown; that probably meant that the inhabitants and their supplies were within the town walls. Or possibly just the ones who could fight, with the others up in the eastern hills. Or possibly a mixture. That meant there could be as many as fifteen hundred of their damned archers in there, as well as the artillery, ready to deluge a storming party with arrows that went through chain mail as if it wasn't there.

Which is why they kept taking risks to delay us on the way south, Renfrew knew. They had plans for this and they needed time to implement them. Probably those SAS bastards are the ones who set it up. I don't think it's a folk musician's approach to the Art of War, somehow. Damn her and her fucking luck, anyway.

Then again, all the leaders who'd risen to power since the Change had a reputation for being lucky. If they hadn't been lucky, they wouldn't have been leaders, or alive at all. Everyone still around on the eve of CY10 was lucky: lucky so far, at least.

"Some of the ones further south are still being held," Baron Timmins' son said. "They're just villages with an earth bank and log palisade. We could take them one by one without much trouble, burn them out if nothing else. That would hurt them badly. And we could interfere with the spring planting, to demoralize them without hurting the long-term productivity."

Renfrew grunted acknowledgment of the suggestion; it was a good thing for young men to be aggressive, within limits.

"But to do that, Sir Malcolm, we'd have to divide our forces again," he said. "And there are still at least eight hundred of the kilties at large, maybe a thousand by now-the ones who, ah, put up such stout resistance to Lord Stavarov before he drove them off."

Everyone nodded gravely, and all of them knew he meant the ones who beat Piotr's ass like it was a drum. Publicly slapping Alexis son around might have been bad politics: but it felt so good! Still, he'd better be polite now.

"And there are as many again in there," he went on, pointing at the town while he sketched the air over the map with his other hand. "If we left a small screening force here, the enemy bands still at large could attack and catch the screening force between themselves and the garrison of the town. We don't have enough men to circumvallate."

That meant build a double wall around the besieged town; he checked that everyone caught the reference. There was a list of suggested reading, but some of the Association's baronage were what the charitable might call print-impaired.

"If we left a large screening force here, then they could follow any small force we sent against the duns and overrun them as soon as they were out of supporting range of us here. The duns aren't much as forts but they can't just be taken on the fly. Remember what happened to the dog with the bone who saw his reflection in the water. We can't afford to invite defeat in detail. Two thousand men is the minimum we need to be sure of beating off an attack by the Mackenzie forces not yet accounted for."

"Will the Lord Protector send us more troops?" young Timmins asked. "My lord Count, from what you say we need more men to deal with the enemy here."

"There aren't many to spare, Sir Malcolm," Renfrew said-carefully. "Twenty-five hundred are besieging Mount Angel and the town there.''

Everyone nodded soberly. The town of Mount Angel was a lot like Sutterdown. The fortified monastery of the same name on its hill above made either look like a boy's toy castle made of pasteboard. Nobody had even suggested doing anything but starving it out; a siege train built in Heaven and twenty thousand men with the Archangel Michael for commander couldn't take it by storm.

"Another thousand are securing our communications all the way back to Molalla"-which the damned Rangers and stray kilties were doing their best to chop into salami-"and two thousand are facing the Bearkillers-and possibly the Corvallans-around West Salem. Another five hundred are screening the area between the Amity Hills and the Coast Range against Bearkiller raiding parties. That leaves very few back home. With essential garrisons-"

Everyone nodded again; stripping the fiefs and castles bare of armed men would invite peasant rebellion, not to mention attack from other enemies like New Deseret or the United States of Boise or the Free Cities of the Yakima League. Nobody much liked the Portland Protective Association, and that emphatically included a lot of its own subjects.

"-that means we have only about two thousand men as a mobile central reserve. If we commit our last reserve in one place and something goes wrong somewhere else, this whole war's fucked. The Lord Protector feels he should reinforce success. Hence, my lords, if we wish reinforcements, we must succeed."

Bishop Mateo spoke again; some of the warrior nobles started slightly. "You have yet to punish the Satan-worshippers," he said suddenly. "Let fire and sword teach humility, and show them the strength of Mother Church and Her loyal son and champion the Protector! If their walls are too stout to attack now, let them watch their lands burn!"

God, give me strength, Renfrew thought. He does talk like that all the time! I always enjoyed the tournaments and meetings before the Change, but you got to go back to the real world afterwards.

But now this was the real world; a reality that could be deadly. Aloud he went on:

"Your Grace, once the Mackenzies are conquered, you can lead them to the Truth, and punish any who persist in error. But my orders from the Lord Protector are to conquer these lands, not devastate them. The Lord Protector wants productive farmers and living towns to support fighting men and pay taxes. We already have more useless wilderness and ruins than we need."

Despite the churchman's glare, that brought yet another chorus of nods and even a few mutters of fucking right we do. They'd all been impressed by the well-cultivated Mackenzie farms, and the families represented around the table were all ready to jostle for a share after the war was over. And every nobleman in the Protectorate was acutely aware of the labor shortage. The territories the Association held could easily support ten times the numbers they had now, probably twenty or fifty. Their manors were all islands in a sea of resurgent brush and forest.

Mateo pointed eastward. "You could break down the aqueduct there," he said, waving towards the big water-furrow that directed water from the Sutter River south of town into Sutterdown, turning a number of mill wheels on the way. The mills were deserted-they were in the no-man's-land between the invader's pickets and the town walls, ground commanded by the catapults in the towers. "Let their bodies know thirst, even if their souls do not thirst for the Spirit."

And he wasn't even in the Society. He was a junior social worker, for Christ's sake!

Looking into the bishop's eyes, he knew that the cleric meant every word of it, too; you could feel it, coming off of him like the heat from a banked fire.

Oh, well, half of us survivors are a few cans short. I've done plenty of things I couldn't have imagined before the Change, God knows. The bishop's particular breed of crazy is what Pope Leo looks for. He's that variety of lunatic himself. Smart, very smart, but the wing flew off his nut when the Eaters captured him right after the Change.

"Sir Richard?" he said neutrally.

"Easy enough," the engineer said, tracing the way the canal took off from the river, several miles upstream to the east. "Wouldn't even have to wreck it, just block the intake here. Problem is, they've got a reservoir and deep tube wells inside the walls. I mean, they're not idiots, they wouldn't put up that wall with no interior water source and besides our spies got the plans."

He tapped a folder. "They'll have enough drinking water, though not much extra."

"But not enough for baths. The girls might be a bit smelly by the time we get to them," Sir Malcolm Timmins said, and there was a general laugh until the bishop glared around at them, whereupon a few muttered apologies and the rest made their faces grave.

Furness hadn't laughed; he had an old-fashioned squeamishness in many respects. Instead he went on: "It might screw up the sanitation system, yes. Risk of an epidemic if we do that, and it might spread."

"God and the Saints!" someone blurted.

This time everyone crossed themselves as well as nodding. Even those who'd been in their early teens during the aftermath of the Change remembered the plagues; they'd only burned themselves out when people grew scarce. Mateo took a look around and smiled sourly.

"I should not seek to advise you on your specialty, Grand Constable," he said. "You are the man of war here; I serve the Prince of Peace."

You are so right you shouldn't try to advise me, you fucking ecclesiastical commissar, Renfrew thought, but he bent his head with the others as Mateo signed the air in blessing. That hasn't stopped you yet, though. And you serve a fucking lunatic, if we're talking about Leo.

The bishop bowed slightly. "If you will excuse me, there is much work to be done arranging the infirmary with Sister Agatha and seeing to the army's spiritual welfare."

Everyone relaxed slightly when the cleric left. Renfrew spoke formally: "My lords, I suggest you all get your liegemen and contingents settled in according to the plan in the briefing papers, and we'll invest the city and see what we shall see. The patrol schedule is included in the folders. Sheriff Bauer, please remain for a moment."

When he and the Pendleton man were alone-except for Renfrew's personal guard-he raised an eyebrow.

"Well, I got all my boys answering to my orders," Bauer said.

I hope so, Renfrew thought.

"Only had to kill a couple-three of 'em, too." He worked his left arm as if the shoulder were sore. "I'll be good as new in a couple of days my own self."

The Pendleton area's spontaneous, homegrown version of neo-feudalism made the variety the Association had built out of books and Society make-believe look like Prussian centralization. The light horse from east of the mountains had come in the train of several sheriffs and half a dozen ranchers, and though they'd all theoretically been on the same side in the last civil war there, and all-equally theoretically-now accepted the Protector's overlord-ship, half of them had blood feuds born of previous abrupt switches of allegiances or just from the general bloody-mindedness produced by a decade of mutual slaughter.

The easterner went on: "Still, my 'chete-swingers ain't too happy. Nothing useful or pretty to pick up for the home folks, no girls to screw, not even much fightin'."

"They're getting paid regularly, aren't they?" Renfrew said impatiently. "The usual camp followers and sutlers will arrive soon enough and they can buy amusement. Or presents for their families. We've even got the postal service working as far as Pendleton; they can mail packages home."

"Yeah, but what's the point of a fight if you don't get to cut no throats or lift no cattle?" Bauer said.

Talk about rapid reversion to savagery! Renfrew thought. He's too young to have hem more than a high school student, hut I wonder what this hack-country clod's father did before the Change?

Conrad Renfrew had been an accountant, himself, when he wasn't playing at knights.

"Where are the Mackenzies' cattle and sheep, then?" he asked aloud. If anyone can follow a cow, these bastards can. Particularly if they're feeling sexual frustration.

"Near as we can tell, they drove some into town-probably salting those down to eat later-and sent some of the rest south, and quite a few head up into the mountains," Bauer said. "Lot of their folks went up into the high country too, judgin' from the tracks. Woods're heavy up there. Bad country for riders, just right for hiding if they got supplies stockpiled."

And our gliders are nearly useless there too, Renfrew thought. He waved a hand; southward, east to the vast mountain forests that stretched up into the High Cascades, and then west towards the Willamette with its brush and swamp and prairie.

"They're out there somewhere, Bauer. Eight hundred to a thousand kilties, and too mobile by half. They showed that when they corncobbed Lord Piotr."

With bicycles, they could be anywhere in the Willamette Valley south of here in a day or two; they might be hiding in the brush-grown lands between here and Corvallis, for that matter. The only good thing was that they couldn't get past him, not in any numbers, although that would be a reckless move even if they could. The mountain tracks to the east were too narrow and rough. He'd know it if they tried to go north in open country to the westward, and then he could move quickly to force battle on his own terms. Also, they didn't have any cavalry to speak of. Those were the only consolations he had, and he clung to them hard.

"Find them for me, Sheriff. I don't like sitting here with my thumb up my ass and a blindfold on."

"Will do, boss," Bauer said cheerfully, and left in his turn.

Renfrew stood for long moments looking at his map, and then traced a thick finger down from Mount Angel, through the Waldo Hills and over the Santiam, past the ruins of Lebanon and down to Sutterdown and past it to the Mackenzie clachan at Dun Juniper. Somewhere out there the First Levy of Clan Mackenzie were hovering. Somehow he didn't think they were just waiting to react to what he did. Which meant they were planning something themselves, the dirty dogs:

"Not thinking of going further south, my lord?" Sir Buzz Akers asked him, handing him a blue plastic plate heaped from the buffet. "Heading for Dun Juniper, on the hope that they'd come out and fight us if we attacked their holy place?"

Renfrew started slightly. "With an open left flank all the way from Molalla to here, sixty miles as the crow flies and half again as much on foot? Christ, no!" he said.

Then he smiled unwillingly as he realized his younger vassal was teasing him out of his brooding mood, took the plate, ate a spring roll and forked up a mouthful of potato salad. When he'd swallowed, he said: "We should be back up around Mount Angel, doing one thing at a time. It'd take a while, but we could do it, nice and safe, and our good Pope Leo could send the wicked abbot to the stake, he does love a nice cheerful blaze at an auto-da-f. Then we could move on the Mackenzies with Mount Angel as a base of operations, not a hoe handle stuck up our collective assholes."

Sir Buzz looked at him oddly. "Do you think this campaign is in danger of failure, my lord?" he asked.

"Hmm? Oh, no, we'll win all right, there's not much doubt of that. We outnumber them so heavily we can afford to make mistakes, and they can't. I just don't want it to cost us more than it has to. That's why we should have taken Mount Angel first. Then I'd have four thousand men here, and we'd be able to leave plenty west of the river to make sure the Bearkillers didn't interfere, as well. Alexi uses his brains instead of just his balls and his fists like that idiot son of his, but I'd be happier if he had more troops, too."

He pointed his white plastic fork at the symbol on the map that represented

Dun Juniper, less than a day's march away to the southeast, even going around the spurs of hill which thrust out into the flat valley; that would be even nastier to take than Sutterdown, although not as bad as Mount Angel. From the descriptions the terrain would be a nightmare for a large force, and ideal for the sort of sneaking-through-the-trees business the kilties delighted in.

"Besides," he went on thoughtfully, prodding at the map, "I don't think Juniper Mackenzie is home right now."

Near Dun Juniper, Willamette Valley, Oregon

March 5th, 2008/Change Year 9

Dennis Martin Mackenzie stopped with a wheezing groan and shouldered his way through the circle of watchers, his long war ax in his hand. The three-mile run from Dun Juniper had left him purple-faced; he was a heavy-built man, and his usual trades of brewing and carpentry and leatherworking didn't do much for his cross-country ability. But that wasn't what made him feel as if his heart was squeezing itself up through his lungs. He recognized the smell of blood- a great deal of it, like iron and salt and copper, and the other unpleasant scents of death. Two horses down, and "Oh, Hell," he said, falling into old habits. Then: "Lords of the Watchtow-ers of the West."

Aoife lay with her head on Liath's chest; from the blood trail, she'd crawled there, though it was hard to imagine anyone having the strength to do so, with those wounds. A man lay not far away with his face cut open, and another with a spear standing up from his chest. The pale features of the dead looked very white in the dusk, but the blood was nearly black.

Poor kids. Too damn young – He'd seen a world die in the Change and its aftermath, but this was far too personal-he'd watched these two grow from childhood. A rising babble of talk cut across his thoughts.

"Quiet!" he said. "In fact, why don't the rest of you folks get back to the Dun? We're going to need some space here and we don't want the traces all trampled over. Jack, Burach, stay up at the edge of the woods and turn people back, would you? And send for a cart."

Most of the bystanders left. His eyes took in the scene and he stooped to examine the bodies; someone handed him a lantern, and he turned up the flame. That gave brighter light, but it made the space under the tall black walnut into a cave of light in a great, dim reach. Leaves rustled above him, turned ruddy by the flame.

The crossbow bolt that had killed Liath was pre-Change, the shaft made of some light metal; so was the one sunk behind the ear of Aoife's horse, lodged immovably in bone. There were three more bolts in the other horse's chest and throat, and another standing three inches deep in the dense hardwood of the walnut tree, at about head height. There was no sense in trying to get that out; instead he gripped one that was sunk in the horse's breast by the inch of wood still showing and withdrew it, the pinch of his powerful hand and thick-muscled arm pulling inexorably. It was modern, lathe-turned from dense ash-wood, the head a simple four-sided steel pyramid designed to pierce armor, and the vanes cut from salvaged plastic-credit cards, Visa, to be precise. "Protectorate issue," he said, swallowing a curse.

So were the mail-lined camouflage jackets on the two dead men; that was what a forester wore in the Association's territory-foresters being a sort of rural police-cum-forest warden. These, however:

He picked up one of the dead men's hands, ignoring the unpleasant limpness, and the little chill that always ran up his neck at the thought that his own hands-those marvelously precise and responsive instruments-could be so easily rendered futile and lax, already blotched purple beneath the skin with settling blood no longer kept in motion by the heart. There was a thick curd of callus on the inner web of the man's right hand, extending up the inside of the index finger and thumb, and more on the heel of his hand. Swordsman's callus, exceptionally well developed. Scars showed white on the thick right forearm; there weren't any scars on the left arm, but it had another band of callus just inside the elbow, where the inner strap of a horseman's kite-shaped shield ran. The man was young, although the great slash across his face made it hard to be sure; he was broad in the shoulders and long in the legs, well fed but without an ounce of excess flesh, and his hair was cut longer at the front, cropped close behind the ears.

"Knight or man-at-arms," Dennis said grimly. "Probably a knight." He looked around. "OK, they took off with Rudi and the girl. We and the Dunedain aren't the only people who can do commando raids. Laegh."

A young man who'd stayed when the crowd left looked up from quartering around the trampled ground. His sister Devorgill had stayed as well. They were both noted hunters, only two years apart in age, tall and lean and with brown hair drawn back into a queue; the quickest way to tell them apart was by Laegh's mustaches. "How many of them?" Dennis said.

"Six came here, Uncle Dennis. Four left-with eight horses, and the one the little princess was riding. First one came up here and climbed the tree- climbed it with irons on the feet, look, you can see where it scarred the bark. The others waited in the thickets lower down. Then they came up to wait in ambush, leaving the horses there with one to hold them, and I think the first, the scout who called them, was a woman. A large woman, or a boy nearly grown. Walking light, not digging her heels in like the others. She watched the Dun for hours from a high branch; it wouldn't carry my weight well. Then she slid down quickly-when she saw the riders headed this way, I guess. First the princess came, galloping fast, and on her heels the Chiefs son-he fell from his horse-and then Aoife and Liath. After the fight the strangers went down the north slope, riding hard, taking both children with them."

"How long ago?"

"Half an hour or a bit less. The trails there are good. They could be ten miles away by now if they headed west into the Valley."

Devorgill touched the blood and smeared it between the fingers of her left hand, sniffing it and then offering him the evidence. "Twenty minutes or a little more," she said.

Laegh's sister was the one who'd ridden out to find what was delaying the children and their escorts; right now she was gripping her horse's reins right under the bit to control its rolling-eyed fear as it pivoted its rear end about that fixed point with nervous side steps, and she was looking pretty spooked herself. Dennis glanced up at the sky and cursed to himself; the sun was already on the western horizon, and it was a wonder even a tracker of Laegh's skill had been able to see anything with the gloom growing beneath the trees.

"Laegh, can you follow them in the dark?"

"Not quickly, Uncle," he said, using the usual term to address someone a generation older. "My dogs can follow the trail if they don't break it in water, though. Worth trying, they'd get too far ahead if we just wait for dawn. And they might split up."

"Devorgill," he told the man's sister. "Get back to Dun Juniper, fast. Get the hounds, get four or five people, you pick them, the gear, weapons, spare horses and get back here fast. You-" He picked out another. "Get down to Dun Fairfax and tell them what's up and that we need another six who're good in the woods, and some more horses."

The woman vaulted into the saddle, reined her restive, snorting horse around, and switched its rump with the long end of the reins. It neighed and reared and broke into a gallop; the messenger ran in its wake, his bow pumping back and forth in his left hand. Dennis grinned mirthlessly at Laegh's unspoken protest at waiting for a war party.

"Not much use finding them if you can't fight 'em when you do, eh?" he said.

The young man hesitated. "And don't worry; I know I'm about as much use on a hunt as a hog at a handfasting. You're in charge. I've gotta stay here and see to things and figure out what to tell Juney."

There was a rustle through the watchers, and Dennis felt his stomach clench again. And I'm really not looking forward to that. Poor little kid… no, Rudi won't be scared, not Rudi. But he should be.

Someone else was coming down the trail, someone on a bicycle. Dennis swore again under his breath, feeling harassed; there were still five hundred people in Dun Juniper, and he didn't want any of them here right now. Then the bicycle came to a halt, and Judy Barstow let it fall and ran forward.

Oh, shit. Sanjay last year, Aoife this time. The dice are being really hard on her and Chuck Thank Everyone that all my kids are still too young to fight.

She halted when she saw her foster-daughter's body. For a moment her strong-featured face was blank, and then she sank to her knees. There was no sound save the soughing of the evening wind in the trees, and the rustling flicker of the lantern flame.

"My little girl," she whispered, touching the dead face, and then holding the eyelids closed and doing the same for her child's lover; tears dripped from her own eyes, runnels along the weathered olive skin of her cheeks. "My little red-haired girl. You were so brave and so scared that day on the bus when we found you, and I loved you then. You grew so fast-"

Her hand shook as she touched fingers to the blood and marked her cheeks and forehead, and then fumbled with the knot that held her hair. It fell loose around her face and shoulders, grizzled and black, as she raised her hands northward.

"I am the mother and I call the Mother's curse on you who did this, by the power of the blood of my child spilled on Her earth! I curse you with cold heart and hearth and loins and colder death! Curse you-"

Her voice broke into a low moan, then rose into a keening shriek-literally keening. Then it sank again, then rose; she rocked back and forth on knees and heels, her hands tearing at her hair as the wailing scream sounded long and lonely in the darkened woods. Dennis stood back from it, shivering slightly under the thick wool of his plaid; so did Laegh, looking more frightened still as his hand moved in a protective gesture-a High Priestess so lost to herself was frightening. Curses tended to spill over and bounce back.

Then the young hunter's sister rode up, a dozen others with her and each leading a spare horse; four big flop-eared hunting hounds trotted along with them, curious and alert but too well trained to break free. One of the riders tossed a spear to Laegh. He caught it with a smack of palm on ashwood, whistled the dogs in sharply, dipped spearhead and head and knee to Judy, and led his hunting-party into the darkness. Before the hooves had faded from hearing the belling of the hounds sounded, echoing through the nighted hills, a hunter's salute to the rising moon.

Others came up the pathway with a cart, and torches trailing sparks. Hands lifted the bodies of the Clan's warriors and laid them on the straw in the cart's bed, folding their hands over their breasts and pulling their plaids across their faces. Others helped Judy to her feet, supporting her as she stumbled blind with tears behind the slow pace of the oxen. Dennis sighed, shouldered his ax and fell in with the rest of the party. Her kin and friends would spend the night at the wake, talking of the dead and keening them: but he intended to break into his own brewer's stock-in-trade more privately, with his family, and then sleep as long as he could.

As he walked, a voice began to sing; one at first, haltingly, and then with more and more joining in to the hypnotic rhythm of the chant:

"We all come from the Mother

And to Her we shall return

Like a stalk of grain,

Falling to the reaper's scythe

We all come from the Wise One,

And to Her we shall return

Like a waning moon,

Shining on the winter's snow

We all come from the Maiden-"

Near Appletree, Willamette Valley, Oregon

March 6th, 2008/Change Year 9

Tiphaine Rutherton looked at her watch. It was a sign of Lady Sandra's favor, a self-winding Swiss beauty made forty years ago, just before electrics became common, with a heavy tempered-glass cover and secondary dials showing the day and month. The glider pilot's timepiece was probably a good deal less fancy, but it would be functional.

In which case, where is the moron? she thought impatiently, scanning the sky above.

They were in the shelter of a patch of Garry oak, not far from a ruined farmstead whose chimney poked up among vegetation gone wild, and well beyond the settled part of the Mackenzie territories, just south of a height called Famine Hill. They were still well within the notional border, and hunters and traders used these lands-they'd seen a small shrine to Cernnunos not far back, an elk's skull and antlers fastened to a tree with the hooves below and signs of small parties camping repeatedly not far away. That made signal fires far too dangerous, or any fires at all for that matter. The men were caring for the horses, feeding them rolled oat pellets from the saddlebags because they couldn't let them out in the open to graze.

She looked over to where the children were seated side by side beneath a tree. The Mackenzie brat had a light chain hobble on, and gave her a steady, defiant glare when he felt her gaze. Princess Mathilda Arminger looked almost as hostile; if Tiphaine had dared, she'd have handcuffed them together. The glare grew narrow as she walked over and went down on one knee.

"Young lord," she said. "I'm truly sorry about chaining your legs, but unless you give me your oath not to try to escape-"

"No," he said shortly.

"And I can't have my men shoot at you if you do try to run away," Tiphaine went on. "Not with the princess so: loyal a friend."

Actually I will, and keep the princess sedated until we get back if I have to, she thought. Once I hand her over to Lady Sandra alive, my job's done. But I can't say that where she's listening. Mary Mother, what a situation!

Aloud she said: "So I have to be very sure you don't try to escape. Please forgive me, but this is war, and I am the faithful vassal of Lady Sandra-the princess' mother. I did what was necessary."

The chiseled features softened very slightly, and the big blue-green eyes grew a little less chilly.

"I understand that, my lady," he said, with self-possession beyond his years, a voice like a well-tuned harpstring, giving promise of a chest-filling resonance when he came to a man's years.

Mathilda looked at him in surprise as he went on: "I don't hate you. You're a warrior doing your duty to your folk and chief, like Liath and Aoife did. I know people die in wars. But: remember it's my duty to stop you doing yours."

He smiled then, and shook back his mane of curling Titian hair, glorious even in the forest's shadow and tangled with twigs and leaves.

Mary Mother, she thought, slightly dazed. What's he going to be like when he grows up? No wonder the little princess was taken with hint!

Normally she just wasn't affected by male looks one way or another, adult or child, but she had to grant Rudi Mackenzie was beautiful by any standard, like a cougar or an otter; and she could see the thoughts moving behind the blue-green eyes. He wasn't exactly precocious, but he was disconcertingly sharp for someone his age.

And at nine years old he gave Ruffin all he could handle with a knife right after being thrown from a horse: Well, he's half the Witch Queen, and half Lord Bear: I wish we could have kept that horse. It was beautiful too, and it would be a hold on him.

The wounded man came up with the rations-waybread, cheese, smoked dried salmon, raisins-and handed the children theirs with a smile, despite the pain he must be feeling from the cut arm and the dozen hasty stitches they'd had to put in at the first stop to keep him from leaking all over the backtrail. He said something to the boy; Rudi laughed and made a gesture as if holding a knife, and Ruffin grinned and slapped the hilt of his sword with his good hand.

I hope to hell Lady Sandra knows what to do with him, if she doesn't just have him thrown back at the kilties out of a catapult. Though it'll probably be a lot more subtle than that.

The raisins were lousy, particularly if you could remember what Sun-Maid tasted like, sticky and a little mushy; Oregon didn't have the right sort of climate for drying grapes, and she swallowed them as quickly as she could. The double-baked waybread looked like crackers, and had the consistency and taste of salty, sun-dried wooden slats from a fruit crate; she gnawed at hers cautiously as she ate the perfectly acceptable crumbly yellow cheese and deep pink salmon.

"The kilties are probably still on our trail," Joris observed.

"I think we shook them-" she began. Then: "There it is!"

Bird-tiny, the shape of the glider showed against a cloud. Tiphaine pulled the wigwags out of her saddlebags and stood in the open, signaling Girl-Scout fashion. She'd met Katrina in the Scouts, just before the Change:

After a frustratingly long wait the glider turned and banked lower. Tiphaine repeated the signals patiently, amusing herself thinking how the so-called Lady of the Dunedain was going to react when she heard about Mathilda's rescue- and the capture of Rudi Mackenzie, and that Tiphaine Rutherton had done both, and brought the children through what the murderous bitch called her territory.

And I did it, Katrina, she thought. No, we did it, together.

The glider circled three times as she repeated the message; she could imagine the pilot with one hand on the control yoke and the other holding his binoculars. Then he waggled his wings and banked again, turning north. The glider mounted skyward in a smooth, arching rush as it hit the updraft on Famine Hill, turning on one wingtip in a narrow circle as the sheet of rising air flung it skyward. When it was insect-tiny it banked again, heading north. The

Willamette Valley was good sailplaning country, and it ought to have no trouble making the thirty miles to the launching field near the castle at Gervais.

She was grinning to herself at the thought when one of the men started up with a curse.

"It's those fucking dogs again!" he said. "Hell, don't the kilties ever get tired?"

"Get mounted, everyone!" she snapped, cocking an ear.

Sure enough, a faint belling sound was coming from the southeast, harsh and musical at the same time. It took only moments to get the tack back on the horses; the beasts were looking weary, but with remounts they hadn't come anywhere close to foundering them. Ivo unshackled the Mackenzie boy and then cuffed his ankles to the stirrups, and passed a chain on his wrists through the loop on the saddlebow. That was mildly dangerous, but the knight would be taking his horse on a leading-rein as well, so it was unlikely to bolt, and the boy rode as if he'd grown out of the horse's spine anyway. Mathilda had been good in the saddle before she was kidnapped and was even better now; evidently the Clan hadn't been neglecting her education in the equestrian arts over the past year. She'd pitched in with the camp chores without complaint as well, which was a bit surprising.

The sprayer was a simple thing like an old-time Flit gun. Tiphaine checked the direction of the wind-out of the north-and began methodically pumping a mixture of gasoline and skunk oil over their campsite in a fine mist. Rudi wrinkled his face, and so did Mathilda; it smelled awful to a human, but it would stun the sensitive nose of a tracking hound for hours.

"Out of the way, Ruffin, unless you want to smell so bad your leman sends you to sleep in the outhouse when we get back. What are you looking at, anyway?"

The young knight chuckled as he moved aside to avoid getting any of it on his clothes, and held up a ring. "The kid tried to drop this!" he said. "I like the little bastard, dip me in shit if I don't."

Tiphaine nodded; Rudi grinned impudently back at her. She checked the ground; sure enough, he'd moved leaves aside, drawn an arrow with his heel and then covered it again without anyone noticing. She looked back at him impassively as she scrubbed it out with her foot. Mathilda looked unhappy again; she must be feeling very torn.

"We'll go up the old railroad line until we hit Apple Creek," she said to the others as she swung into the saddle. "Then we'll wade up the creekbed half a mile."

"Then?" Joris said. "We should know, in case we're separated."

Tiphaine met his heavy-lidded eyes. He was a vassal of Lady Sandra's household like her, and he'd obey whoever the Lady told him to, even an untitled woman. That didn't prevent him from resenting it, and needling her subtly.

"No we shouldn't, Joris, in case the kilties catch one of us," she replied. So you don't have to know we'll head for Sucker Slough, cross the North Santiam there and make for Miller Butte, where there ought to he a couple of troops of men-at-arms to escort us home.

"Yeah," Ivo said. "That might be the Witch Queen after us." He crossed himself. "Maybe that's how they're following us-magic."

"Sounds awful like a bunch of plain old hound dogs to me," Tiphaine said dryly, and reined her horse around. "Let's go!"

Missouri Ridge, Willamette Valley, Oregon

March 5th, 2008/Change Year 9

Juniper Mackenzie felt slightly guilty that she wasn't pushing one of the mountain bikes as she leaned into the welcome warmth of her horse's flank. It was cold and wet here in the foothills near Trout Creek, and the old gravel cutting was chilly under a slow morning drizzle and a low, gray sky; fifteen hundred feet was high enough up to be a bit colder than the Valley proper, and they were a thousand feet higher than Dun Juniper as well as sixty miles north and east. Fog drifted over the hills about them, hiding the tops of the trees and drifting down the slopes in tatters and streamers, dull gray against the second-growth Douglas fir; everything smelled of wet; the wet wool of her jacket and plaid, wet leather and horse from her mount, wet earth and brush from the ground. There was little sound, save for the slow sough of wind, the occasional stamp of a horse's foot, and the gruk-gruk-gruk of ravens that were the first birds she'd seen in hours.

Her thoughts went homeward, and she imagined Rudi and Mathilda reading by the hearth with old Cuchulain wheezing in sleep on the rag rug, cider mulling in thick mugs:

And oh, Mother-of-All witness, I'd rather he there than here! she thought ruefully, taking another bite from a dried, salted sausage.

It wasn't exactly eating in the usual sense: more like worrying a bit off an old tire, and then chewing until your jaws were tired and you gave up and swallowed the whole barely touched lump the way a snake did a dead rat. She gave journeybread to her horse, and the animal gratefully crunched the hard biscuit in sideways-moving jaws.

"And you don't have to worry about the sorry state of our dentistry, sure," she said. Then when it lipped at her fingers for more, smearing them with slobber: "Niorbh a fhiu a dhath ariamh a bhfuarthas in aisgidh!"

A hundred or so of the First Levy were in the cutting too; most were squatting by their bicycles, eating or looking to their gear or just patiently waiting despite the general, damp misery. Two near her were even chuckling softly about something. Ten times that number were scattered through the woods within a quarter mile of her, but they made little noise and gave less sight of their location. That and the wretched weather ought to hide them from the Protector's aerial scouts, even though they were far north, near his bases.

A clop of hooves brought her head up. Sam Aylward was riding towards her from the path to the east, his horse's hooves throwing up spatters of mud as it came. That coated his boots and stockings and kilt with gray-brown muck. The man with him had started out that way, clothed in leather pants and jacket of similar hue, his round helmet and steel breastplate painted dull brown, and his face and hair and eyes were all shades of the same color as well; he wore a long, hooded duster over the armor and carried a short pre-Change compound bow in a case at his left knee, with a long, slightly curved saber at his waist. Juniper grinned and moved away from her horse, extending a hand as the two men pulled up and swung down from the saddle; two young Mackenzies took their mounts.

"Sam!" she said happily. "And John!"

John Brown was most of a decade older than her; it had been a year or so since she saw him, and she was slightly shocked at how much more gray there was in his close-trimmed beard. As usual, he looked worried, the deep squint lines of a plainsman graven further into the skin at the corners of his eyes.

But perhaps with more reason than usual, she thought.

"Well, we're here, Juney," he said, and she sighed slightly with relief. "All of us as could make it. Less than I hoped, more than it might have been."

"Four hundred twenty-five combatants," Aylward amplified. "Plus twenty-five youngsters along to help with the horses and gear. That's all they could spare. Raids from the Pendleton country on the CORA territories are keeping them hopping."

"Bastards," Brown said. He'd been one of the movers of CORA since the Change, and they'd fought the Protector's men together more than once. They've been goin' downhill these whole ten years. Bunch of murderin' hillbilly bastards, the ones that came out on top there, and then they got into bed with Arminger. Might have been as bad with us, if we hadn't had that help from you the first couple of years."

Juniper nodded, smiling and acknowledging the compliment; the help had been mutual. Even then her fine ear noticed that his accent sounded a little stronger; speech was changing faster than it had in the old days, without national media or recorded sound to stabilize it. Highway 20 connected the Mackenzie territories with the CORA lands around Bend and Sisters, and the two communities were friendly and traded a good deal, but by pre-Change standards they had less contact than America had had with Bolivia back then.

"Four hundred riders's about all we could bring anyways," Brown went on. "Sneakin' over the mountains, that is. Not much fodder. Still snow lying up there. As it is, we don't have near as many remounts as I'd like."

He jerked a thumb behind him, at the invisible peaks of the Cascades. She nodded again, respecting his reticence. One of her Mackenzies would likely be boasting of the feat, unless it was Sam; the Clan was a talkative bunch. To get here from Bend you'd have to leave the route of old US 26 in the Warm Springs reservation-tribal country once more, but friendly to the Clan and CORA- and use old logging trails through the mountains. Hard work with hundreds of horses, and with the season too early for much grass. If they didn't get the mounts down into the low country soon, they'd start to take sick and die.

She said so, and added: "The which would apply to the people as well, so."

That included her folk as well. Most Mackenzies had some woodcraft but only a few from each dun were real hunters who spent much time away from the tilled lands; the rest were crofters and craftsfolk, used to sleeping under their own good roofs within tight log walls every night. Plus they were traveling light in a season still cold and wet-no tents, not much gear and most of what they had brought was extra arrows. In summer these cutover hills growing back towards forest were rich in game-deer, elk, rabbit, birds, boar and feral cattle-but it was early in the season for foraging, and there were far too many of them to live off the land without scattering recklessly. She'd been getting anxious about supplies.

"Where are your folks?" Brown asked. "You got more than this out before they reached Sutterdown, didn't you?"

Behind his back, Sam Aylward grinned. Juniper did too, and waved a hand around. "All within horn call. Just over a thousand, my friend."

"One thousand ninety-seven as of this morning's call," Aylward said. "Got a few more in from the southern duns day before yesterday."

Brown's eyes went a little wider; he'd ridden through their position. "Sneaky," he said. "They won't be expectin' this at all, hey?"

"Hopefully," Juniper said, not joining in the smiles of the men this time.

She'd taken nearly half the Clan's fighting strength right out of their territory while the Protector was invading it, and the best half at that, leaving only enough to hold the walls of Sutterdown and Dun Juniper and the southern steadings. It was a calculated risk, but her stomach still clenched and pained her at the thought of the enemy loose among her folk and their fields.

"I see your people all have those funny-looking shovel things," the rancher went on. "Somethin' new?"

"Eilir's idea," she said, turning to her First Armsman.

"Eilir's idea, and I hope they work," Aylward said, shaking his head. "Otherwise I'm the latest in a long line of inventive buggers who dreamed up something extra for the poor bloody infantry to lug about."

"Any word from the south?"

"Last news from the Rangers is that the enemy 'ave crossed the North San-tiam, united their columns and invested Sutterdown. The Rangers slowed them down, though."

Brown slapped his hands together; there was a jingling from the stainless-steel washers riveted to the backs of his steerhide gloves, and water dripped off the hood of his oiled-linen duster.

"You mentioned a plan," he said. "What sort?"

"Well," Juniper Mackenzie said, "first my fiance is paying a social call. There are advantages to marrying into the SAS: "

Sam Aylward's chuckle matched her own, but he shook his head as he spoke: "Well, strictly speaking, Lady Juniper, Eilir gets the SAS, and you'll be marrying into the Blues and Royals. Officers don't make a career of the regiment. Didn't, you know what I mean."

Brown looked between the two of them; it started to rain again, making small tink sounds on his helmet and breastplate. "You guys are crazy," he said with conviction.

"Sure, and that's what's brought us as far as we've come," Juniper said. "But na comhair do chuid sicini sula dtagann siad amacb, and the bird's still very much on the nest."

Then her head came up, and Sam's with it. A cry like a wild swan's echoed through the drizzle; that was the signal for courier. Moments later a man on a lathered horse came up. Juniper stiffened at the look on his face: whatever it was, the news was not good.

"Lady," he said, dipping head and knee. "It's about your son-"

Near Sucker Slough, Willamette Valley, Oregon

March 6th, 2008/Change Year 9

"Get the kids ahead, Ruffin," Tiphaine said.

Her voice was dragging with weariness, and she blinked against what felt like grit rubbed under her eyelids. The impulse to simply topple out of the saddle and sleep was overwhelming. They all looked weary, even the horses, though they'd been changing off every couple of hours. The children sagged in their saddles, eyes dull.

"Hey-"

"Your shield-arm's hurt and you can't fight well," she said bluntly. "We may have to delay them. Now get going!"

The wounded man-at-arms nodded grimly, and turned his horse up the far bank of the little creek. The strong legs of the warmblood took it in three surging heaves; Rudi's horse was on a long lead-rein, and even half-conscious Mathilda followed with the effortless ease of someone who'd been riding crosscountry as long as she could walk.

The little guy keeps his seat well too, she thought. Tough kids, those two.

"Joris, get your crossbow. Ivo, have the horses standing by, and get the decoys ready."

She led the blond warrior back to the edge of the brush. He moved fairly well in the brush; she'd picked experienced hunters for this trip, and the chuckling of water in the brook behind them covered most noise. Tiphaine slung her crossbow, took three deep, quick breaths to force her blood to start moving again, aimed herself at the big white-barked alder that grew from the top of the bank and hit it running. She climbed it with the scampering speed of a squirrel despite the way the papery surface crumbled under her hands. Twenty feet up she hugged the trunk with one arm, reached down to slip the irons into place on her feet and felt them sink into the soft wood of the streamside tree. That gave her a secure stance once her elbow was over a branch.

A flick of her fingers opened the quiver of bolts on her belt, and then she unslung the crossbow and brought the telescopic sight to her eye. The magnification was three times; she could see things more closely, at the cost of losing a wider scan. But there was only one convenient way past the hulk of that overgrown tractor:

There. The whiplike tails of four dogs showed above tall grass that was mingled dead stalks and new growth. Occasionally a questing head came up, black nose leading in a tan-black-and-white face, trying to catch her scent on the air, but the wind was from the west right now, and the overcast sky promised rain.

Even to her human nose the air felt wet and muffled. Long range, very, a good two hundred and seventy yards, but with this height:

Her hand curled around the pistol grip of the weapon, the checked metal surface rough and firm through the thin chamois leather of her glove. One finger stroked the hair trigger, light and delicate. Tung! The kick was solid, always a surprise if you aimed well.

The quarrel flew in a long, shallow curve, dipping down towards the leading hound, the one with its nose back down on their trail. A sharp, yelping cry of pain, and the big brown-and-white dog leapt into the air, biting frantically at the light-alloy shaft in its side. She'd never be able to recover that one, which was a pity. The dog disappeared again as she turned the crank built into the high-tech crossbow, but the grass thrashed where it lay. That was also a pityshe'd never have shot at an animal so far away if she were hunting. A kill should be clean and quick.

The animals were disturbed; the scent of blood and their pack-mate's pain would do that, and cover the trail a bit. Their belling sounded louder through the afternoon air, arrooo, arrooo, calling for their master's help. She slipped another quarrel into the groove, and brought the crosshairs on a white-furred throat.

Tung. Her fingers were reloading as the dog collapsed; quickly this time, simply falling down. If only there was time for one more The third dog turned, yelping. Riders came around the big tractor just as it would have fled; it stopped in glad surprise, and her bolt went home between its shoulder blades. The hindquarters collapsed, but before the dog died four of the riders were sliding out of the saddle, bringing up their bows and reaching over their shoulders for arrows even as they swung down. She kicked her feet clear of the climbing irons and abandoned them, sliding down the sloping trunk of the alder in a flurry of papery bark and taking a nasty whack on one elbow from an iron even as she did. She'd seen Mackenzie archers in action before.

"That leaves just one dog," she said to herself with satisfaction.

And before she'd slid ten feet, three thirty-inch arrows went w heet-wheet-wheet through the air on either side of the branch she'd used to rest her elbow. The fourth went crack into the base of the branch itself, and punched through it with brutal force. After an instant the limb ripped free as its weight levered against the strip of bark still holding it, hitting her on the head as her boots struck the ground. It was only a slight, muffled impact through the mail-lined hood she was wearing, but enough to make her blood race uncomfortably even so. If she'd stayed and tried for one more shot:

"Christ!" she said. Then: "Go, go, go!" to Joris, turning and racing back for the horses.

He paused for an instant to aim, and the heavier tunnnngg of his military crossbow sounded under his chuckle before he turned and followed.

"Got one, or at least a horse," he said as they all vaulted into the saddles and spurred their mounts up in Ivo's tracks.

"Let the spares with the drag go free," Tiphaine said curtly, and the leading-reins were dropped. Dickhead. We didn't have time for a fight

One of the spare horses had a ball of cloth dangling from its harness on a line; that was Rudi Mackenzie's bundled kilt and plaid. As long as the horse dragged it, it would lay a scent trail for the last hound to follow. The horse curved away to the east across the open country, panicked by her slash at its rump with the loose end of her reins. Two more followed it, with the natural impulse of horses; their saddles bore crude child-sized dummies of grass and twigs stuffed inside spare clothing they'd brought along for the princess. They wouldn't fool anyone for long, but they might at a distance, for a little while.

"Boot it!" Tiphaine cried.

They spurred their mounts in the children's wake, and overtook them faster than she'd expected. Ruffin's haggard face turned towards her, grinning despite fatigue and pain.

"The little chief there managed to get away-tangled his lead-rein on a stump and made the horse snap it. I had to chase him down."

Tiphaine looked at the small jewel-cut face; it had dark smudges under the eyes now, and lack of sleep had stripped away the jaunty humor. What was left was pure determination. She bowed her head in respect, and then spurred her horse back into a gallop.

The three knights matched it, but Joris looked a little worried as he glanced over his shoulder. "We could founder the beasts in a couple of miles at this pace," he said. "We don't have remounts any more and the kilties probably still do."

"All we need is a couple of miles," she said. "You wanted to know? We're heading for Miller Butte. There's a conroi of men-at-arms there and a company of mounted crossbowmen, hiding and waiting for us."

Joris' heavy-lidded eyes narrowed. And I'm not going to let you behind me until we get there, she thought grimly. I'm collecting the reward jor this, and I'll see Ivo and Ruffin right. Lady Sandra will give you something, but as for me, you can piss up a rope jor it.

Then his head jerked back. The belling of the last hound had faded; now it was louder again. The Mackenzies must have found the decoy, backtracked and gotten onto the real trace. Tiphaine hunched in the saddle and headed her horse straight for the river ahead; it was the North Santiam, and she recognized the old transmission line to their left from maps and their trip south.

"Wait a minute!" Joris said. "We'll have better cover if we veer past those old poles. There's woodland there, they can't shoot at us."

Tiphaine jerked her head up, fighting the hypnotic rhythm of the hand gallop; the horse was beginning to labor, wheezing between her knees, foam spattering back on its neck and onto her.

"They'd shoot at us, Joris," she said. "They might even shoot at the princess. But sure as Christ died for your sins, they're not going to shoot when they might hit their Chief's son." She looked ahead. "Four more miles. Go for it!"