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  Conrad went on as she mused: “—we’re up to about four hundred thousand people all told. Portland-the-city’s nearly as big as Corvallis now.”

  Sandra shifted her gaze to Tiphaine; the military was her responsibility. She’d been Conrad’s deputy there for years, before getting the top command last year when the Count of Odell decided to concentrate on his chancellor hat.

  “The sons of the knights we lost in the war are grown now, or mostly,” the Grand Constable said.

  Which was fortunate. It took years to train a mounted lancer; the best had to be virtually born at it.

  “What with that and new creations, when we call out the ban and the select militia, we can field twenty thousand men and keep them in the field as long as we need. A thousand knights, four thousand men-at-arms, a couple of thousand good light cavalry—horse archers, mainly—and the rest infantry. Half crossbowmen, who finally all have modern rapid fire models, and the rest spearmen. I think we should raise some pike units like the Bearkillers and Corvallans, but that would take a lot of retraining time.”

  Tiphaine and Conrad started an argument about the relative merits of eighteen-foot pikes versus spear-and shield; Sandra ignored it while she thought. She’d never pretended to be a soldier of any sort, any more than she was an engineer. You found people who knew what they were doing and left them to do it . . . provided you also found ones you could trust.

  “—admit the phalanx has an advantage on open ground but pikemen are too specialized for my taste. Spearmen are more flexible, and—” Conrad said.

  Sandra cleared her throat. “The big picture, please. Proceed, Tiphaine. And if we’re pressed?”

  “In an emergency? Forty thousand if we call the arrière ban for a defensive war, though of course those won’t all be as well trained and it would be awkward during the harvest. The castles in our core territories are all in good shape, the armories and emergency food stores are full, we’ve got reserves of trained destriers to replace horses lost in the field, the river fleet on the Co lumbia is fully ready, and we’ve finally got the field artillery up to spec as well as the siege train.”

  “Problems?”

  “The Palouse. We haven’t had time to get it castel lated properly yet, so it’s vulnerable in a way the rest of our territory isn’t. The strongholds there are mostly earthwork and timber, motte-and-bailey at best. The local lords can’t afford to rebuild right away. Also the roads there are lousy—the fools haven’t even been fill ing in the potholes or keeping bridges from washing out, and the railroads are a wreck. But if we try to make them repair twenty-two years of neglect overnight, they’d be bankrupt. Except that they’d revolt first, of course.”

  “I presume we have the necessary plans ready to fix the situation?”

  “Of course, my liege; we started on that before the an nexation. It’s simply a matter of money . . . a very great deal of money.”

  “How much?”

  Tiphaine named a figure, and Sandra winced slightly. Then she held up a finger.

  “Conrad. Do you think you can get the Lords to ap prove a special subsidy for infrastructure improvements in the Palouse, along the new eastern border at least?”

  The stocky man winced in turn. The Association’s landholders didn’t like paying even the standard as sessments, and an extra one would cost him political capital—which was to say soft-soaping, bribing and threatening.

  “Yes, if you think it’s worth the trouble. And it will cause trouble,” he warned.

  “Twist the necessary arms—I have some files you’ll find useful. It’ll keep the new lordships in the east sweet if we loan them the money and supply engineers and materials. I could pay it out of the Privy Purse, but I prefer to keep that for unforeseen emergencies.”

  Renfrew gathered up his papers. “I’d best get on to it; young Lord Chaka will see sense, I think. His mother will help. Stavarov will cause problems but I can talk him ’round if I offer some of his people land. . . .” He raised an eyebrow at her.

  “By all means, but bargain hard. I want to keep as much of the vacant areas of the Palouse in the Throne’s demesne as I can. Granting land is a lot easier than get ting it back, unless there’s a convenient case of escheat for treason.”

  He nodded and made a formal bow, kissing her ex tended hand and grinning like something carved on a waterspout. “Farewell for the nonce, Sandra, you evil bitch.”

  “That’s ‘my sovereign liege-lady and regent of the Association’ evil bitch to you, Conrad.”

  Laughing, he bowed again and turned to go. Sandra pulled at a tasseled cord; the door opened smoothly and showed the corridor outside, with the guards standing to attention; their mail gleamed with a gray oiled sheen as they brought their spears to the salute.

  When the door closed again, Sandra stood, gently stirring a cat out of her lap. “Come,” she said to Tiphaine.

  The warrior-woman helped her into a long robe of white ermine, and they walked out onto a balcony, closing the sliding glass doors behind them. The day was bright and sunny for January in the Willamette, with only a few drifts of high cloud; you could just see Mount Hood’s white cone to the east, over the battlements. Above it a glider swooped, its long slim wings dark against the aching blue of the sky.

  The two women’s breath smoked as they looked down into a flagged hexagonal courtyard twenty feet below. It was overlooked by two stories of barracks and storerooms on all sides as well as the Silver Tower. Todenangst was full of things like that, unexpected crannies and vantage points. She’d put most of them into the plans herself; Norman had been much more . . . straightforward . . . and not nearly as fond of Peake’s work as she.

  “They say this castle had a man’s bones in it for every ton of concrete poured,” she said, with a nostalgic smile for the grand adventure of those early years.

  Sometimes I think we got away with it only because nobody could believe how crazy we were.

  Tiphaine nodded; she’d been newly come to the house hold then, and barely fourteen. “I remember a bit of it; they used to throw the bodies into the mix, sometimes. You kept telling the Lord Protector it could wait until we had the farms fully up and running again, and he said it could wait, but he just didn’t want to, he wanted his castle and he wanted it now.”

  “Poor Norman, that was his great fault. He was in too much of a hurry to realize his dreams; it killed him in the end, as much as Havel did. If only he’d known how to wait, he’d be alive today . . .and we’d have it all. I miss him.”

  The courtyard below was one where her private guard exercised. Rudi and Mathilda were there now, in Protectorate-style armor, based on early medieval models; she was resting for a moment, watching him take on three knights of the household. Odard called the start with a flourish of his white-painted wand:

  “Kumite!”

  The knights spread out; Rudi waited for a moment, smiling faintly. Then he leapt, so quickly that it wasn’t even a blur, more as if he stretched out impossibly for a second. A flat crack sounded as he slammed into the closest of them, one big kite-shaped shield slapping into another, Rudi’s tucked close into his left shoulder in perfect form. The knight was knocked flying with both feet off the ground, to land flat on his back with seventy pounds of armor and gear to drive the wind out of him. His sword pinwheeled through the air to land with a dull clang.

  Rudi whirled before knight or blade landed, caught a sword on his own shield and cut backhanded into the side of the second’s helmet with a crashing bonnnggg, and met the third blade-to-blade before he could strike himself. The knight was good—the household took only the best, and trained rigorously—but he seemed to be moving like a slo mo scene in the movies in the old days, while Rudi wasn’t.

  Or he moves like that tiger we had at the baiting, the one they matched against the bison bull. So much power, and so fast . . .

  After a flurry impossible for an untrained eye to fol low, the Portlander stopped and looked down at the rounded point of the blunt pra
ctice sword just inside the split skirt of his mail hauberk and prodding at the leather of his breeches. In a real fight it would have ham-strung him and opened the femoral artery.

  He swore admiringly and stepped back, letting the point of his own blade drop to the earth and his shield dangle from the guige, the diagonal strap around his neck. He and the young Mackenzie high-fived each other as the other two clambered groaning to their feet, grinning ruefully.

  “He’s very good indeed, isn’t he?” Sandra asked.

  “Yes, my lady,” Tiphaine replied, without taking her cold gray eyes from the scene below. “When my team took him back in the War, he was ten—and he cut a grown man badly with his knife and would have killed another if he hadn’t had a mail lined jacket on. Now . . . You know what the pagans say of him?”

  Sandra nodded, smiling. “That his secret name is Artos, and that he’s the chosen Sword of the Lady? Yes? There was the prophecy at his birth, and that thing with the raven right after the war, at his mother’s wedding. That was a wonderful touch, if Juniper stage-managed it.”

  Tiphaine shuddered slightly at the memory. She had been there, although not in the front rank, and she tried not to remember it . . . because when she did the all sufficient cynicism her mentor had taught her was shaken. The rumors hadn’t lost in the telling over the years, either. Instead she hung on to her clinical detachment as she went on:

  “Well, he’s so far up the bell curve that I’m tempted to believe it myself, sometimes. It’s not natural—and I helped train him these past twelve years, on his visits.”

  “I do believe in his legend,” Sandra said, then chuckled quietly at Tiphaine’s raised brow. “Oh, not the pagan gods; they’re as much a myth as Jehovah or the Risen Christ, whatever dear Juniper thinks. Myths are lies; but I believe in the power of myths the way I believe in rocks . . . rulers have had the various pantheons carry ing water for them since the first con man met the first sucker, and priestcraft was born. That was long enough ago that they were probably both walking on their knuckles.”

  Mathilda took up her shield and walked out to face Rudi. The mail hauberk she wore rippled in smooth gray white, a treasure that had taken a team of experts more than a year to make from double coils of titanium wire.

  “And my daughter?” Sandra asked.

  Tiphaine pursed her lips; her duties had included the warlike part of the Princess’s education since the girl turned nine. She also knew that Sandra Arminger hated inaccurate information with a passion.

  “It’s a disadvantage being a woman, of course, even if it’s not as much of one as our macho idiots think. The Princess is . . . very good, enough to hold her own on most battlefields. About as good as Odard, say. That means she’s better than him in natural talent, since he has an extra twenty odd pounds of muscle on his upper body. And she really works at it. But she’s not in the same class as Rudi. Not in mine, either, frankly. She’s fast, far faster than average, and very strong for her weight . . . but Rudi’s faster than that.”

  Sir Odard was standing ready again with the referee’s white baton. He waited until they faced off, then brought it down sharply and shouted, “Kumite!”

  Tiphaine hesitated for a moment, then went on: “He’s faster than me—and I’ve lost only a hair off my best speed so far.”

  Tiphaine was a little past thirty five, and she’d been an up-and-coming junior gymnast before the Change, only out of the running for future Olympics because she was too tall. Sandra had rescued her and seen the possibilities. . . .

  “And he’s strong even for his size; he can lift and toss twice his own body weight, even in a full hauberk. I’ve got a lot more experience, which makes up for it . . . so far.”

  “Interesting,” Sandra said, narrowing her eyes. “Of course, Mathilda will be ruling, not fighting with her own hands. She only has to be good enough to win respect among, as you so accurately put it, our macho idiots. Iron on their shirts, iron between the ears.”

  Tiphaine chuckled slightly, which was the equivalent of a belly laugh for her.

  “And the joke is?” Sandra Arminger said; normally the remark would have won only a slight narrowing of the eyes in amusement.

  “Here we are in the Land of the Iron Shirted Ma chos, and the people making the decisions at the top are nearly all women. You, my lady, me . . . Mary Liu, the Dowager Baronesses of Dayton and Molalla. And Juniper Mackenzie and Signe Havel, down south.”

  Sandra’s own laughter was warm and genuine. “Well, not so surprising, Lady d’Ath, Grand Constable of the Association. So many of the first generation of the male upper nobility got themselves killed, one way or another.”

  “That happens in this business,” Tiphaine replied, tap ping at the long hilt of her own blade. “You have to be smart and lucky to die old—which our distinguished chancellor looks to be doing. I probably won’t,” she added clinically. “Too many people hate me and more will before it’s over. You should start grooming possible replacements.”

  Mathilda and Rudi were circling, the big round topped kite shaped shields up under their eyes, longswords held over their heads hilt forward. Mathilda attacked first, boring in with a fixed snarl visible even from above and through the bars of the practice helmet.

  “Haro, Portland! Holy Mary for Portland!”

  “Morrigú! Morrigú! Blackwing!”

  Blades clashed, banged on shields, rattled on mail, thrust and cut and parry in arcs that glittered silvery cold in the winter sunlight, striking at head, hip, thigh, neck without pattern or warning. The supple young bodies moved with a beautiful minimalism despite the weight of the metal confining them.

  “Mathilda seems very determined,” her mother said.

  The heir to Portland moved aside from a shield-up rush by letting one bent knee relax and swing her out of the way, cutting at the back of Rudi’s leg with a vi ciously economical swipe. He caught the blow aimed at his hamstring on the long tail of the shield, whirled. . . .

  “Oh, she is. She’s got the anger, the fire in the belly; most of the best fighters do. She hates being taken lightly or coming in second in anything, which I can sympathize with, and it drives her hard. It’s like fuel, once you learn to ride it rather than be ridden.”

  “Rudi, on the other hand, always struck me as a very sunny-spirited boy,” Mathilda’s mother observed.

  Tiphaine’s long fingers tapped at the vines carved into the marble of the balustrade. “True . . . and he kills with out fear, or anger, or hate, with regret even, simply be cause it’s necessary. That’s rare, and it’s rarer still among the really first-rate. God help the enemy that finally frightens him or makes him mad.”

  When they went back into the chambers, Tiphaine sank to one knee and formally kissed Sandra’s hand.

  “My lady liege,” she said. “I’d better start getting things ready, if you scent a war.”

  “My dear, as one evil bitch to another . . . it’s beginning to smell very much like that.”

  Alone, Sandra sat again and toyed with the cat that leapt into her lap, teasing it with the ends of her wimple. She had always found that an aid to thought.

  * * * *

  “Hello? Mother?” Mathilda said, as the guards thumped the door shut behind her.

  “Ah!”

  The slight figure in the chair started, and the cat gave a silent meow and jumped down. Mathilda turned and called, “Agnes! The lights, please.”

  A silent maid-cum-secretary in double tunic and tabard came out and turned up the gaslights and returned to wait against the wall at the far end of the chamber, hands folded.

  “I was deep in thought, love,” her mother said. “Is it dinnertime already?”

  The early January sun had set; Oregon was farther north than you might think from the climate, and the winter days were short. Soon the yellow flame made the mantels glow bright, and Mathilda sank down on the rug near Sandra’s feet, taking off her hat; it was the usual round flat type with a roll of cloth around the edge and a broad s
ilk tail at one side.

  “Not quite. I thought I’d sit with you awhile, if that’s OK and you’re not too busy. I always enjoy sparring with Rudi; it makes me better even though he wins. But I don’t like it as much as he does.”

  “Likes to fight, does he?” Sandra said thoughtfully.

  “Oh, yeah. He says there are only two reasons to fight.”

  “Which are?”

  “Joy and death.”

  Her mother’s brows went up. “Joy in death?”

  “No, no . . .For joy, to stretch yourself with a friend; or death, to kill as quickly as you can. Nothing in between.” She frowned. “I can see what he means, but it isn’t that way for me, not most of the time. I mean, I like practicing with arms, but you put a sword in Rudi’s hand and he’s . . . transported.”

  “And waxes poetic about it. He’s a young man of some depth, our Rudi . . . but if it’s going on for dinner time, you should change to a cotte-hardi for the meal,” Sandra said gently. “We’ll have important company. You have to wear skirts occasionally, you know, or . . . ah . . . people will talk.”

  “Or people will think I’m Lady Tiphaine’s girlfriend?” Mathilda said dryly. “Or vice versa, accent on the vice.”

  Sandra gurgled laughter. Her face was still smooth in her fifties, and the wimple was kind to it, but that made the laughter lines stand out around her brown eyes. Mathilda joined in the chuckle; in fact, Tiphaine’s lover was and had been for twelve years a miller’s daughter from Barony d’Ath by the name of Delia. Who was in theory a lady in-waiting to the baroness and who’d been ennobled by an equally theoretical marriage to a knight who had no more interest in women than the current Grand Constable had in men. Her children had been the result of intervention by a pre-Change turkey baster. The two women were quite ridiculously devoted to each other and completely monogamous.