Dies the Fire

"That's Astrid for you," Hutton said dryly.

"Generous?"

"Sort of, if you don't mind it goin' off 'round corners. That there horse and saddle was supposed to be a diplomatic gift from the outfit for you."

Juniper laughed. "In that case, I'd have to put it in the common pool. But Eilir will enjoy it more; she's entranced with horses. Myself, I like them well enough, but… "

"But you ain't a teenager," Hutton said dryly.

"I don't think having Astrid around for a month or so will be any great hardship," Juniper said. "But why exactly does Lord Bear want it so? Doesn't he like the girl?"

"He likes her fine-says he always wanted a sister," Hutton said. "And I do too, like she was my own. But… well, the girl's a handful, and we've got somethin' coming up where she might. let's say she had a hobby befo' the Change that would sort of expose her to danger."

Aha, a mystery! Juniper thought; she recognized a don't-ask-me-now as well as the next person. And an opportunity. it would be well in years to come to have a good friend of the Mackenzies among the Bearkillers, I think.

"I'd be delighted to put her up," she said aloud. "We can say she's an envoy; she'll like that… at least, Eilir would if the positions were reversed. Didn't Mike say Astrid's prone to whimsy and romantical gestures?"

"Lady, you got no idea." He hesitated. "Thing my Angel wanted to ask?"

"You have a personal angel?" Juniper replied, interested. "That talks to you?"

Hutton gri

"Don't we all, ma'am? Sorry; I forgot we'd just met, y'all were so friendly-like. I mean Angelica, my wife. When she heard you folk were Witches, she wanted to know if you're a hexer or a healer-she comes from down around San Antonio way."

Juniper nodded. "Ah, you mean whether I'm a bruja or a curandera, then, in her terms. Definitely a healer, Mr. Hut-ton. Definitely."

But sometimes a healer has to cut.

Mike Havel whistled softly as he looked through the binoculars up the route of Highway 20, where it wound upward into the eastern slopes of the Cascades.

"Oh, my, they do like digging, don't they?"

A cluster of Bearkiller fighters kept watch, but he rode among the commanders of the allied force; the Bearkillers, the Mackenzies, and the CORA.

Sam Aylward grunted and passed his glasses to John Brown, the CORA delegate. The road was at three thousand feet just east of Echo Creek, and November was getting definitely chilly. Now Havel was glad of the warmth of his padded gambeson, and of the horse between his thighs; he'd added good wool hiking pants. When it started raining- or snowing-they were all going to be very, very miserable in tents. A while after that, people would start getting sick.

While the Protector's men sit fat and happy in nice warm barracks. We can't even really besiege the place because we can't get around it. Christ Jesus, did these ranchers have to go take a poll of all their cows before they could do what was fucking obviously the one possible thing to do? The only result being that we lost a month of passable weather to do it in.

"We aren't going to get into that by walking up and pissing on the gate, that's for sure," Brown said.

The fort-castle, Havel told himself-was mostly reddish brown dirt, and then light-brown log palisade above that, stout ponderosa logs with their bases set deep amid rock and poured concrete; the whole of the earthwork was covered in a dense net of barbed wire secured by angle-iron posts driven deep into the soil. The mound that bore the tower was just behind the wall, northward from the east gate; starting high, the thick-walled timber structure had a hundred feet of vantage over the bridge that spa

About twenty feet of the bridge's pavement had been removed from the western edge, leaving the steel stringers exposed. A notch in the earth wall held the fort's gate, a massive steel-sheathed timber structure with a blockhouse over it; a drawbridge winched up by woven-wire cables covered the gap in the bridge when it was down, and reinforced the gate when it wasn't.

Right now it wasn't, and he could see the tiny figures of men walking on the parapet above, behind the heavy timbers. The morning light glinted on edged metal as they moved.

The wind down from the heights had a tang of iron and ice in it, along with the cold scent of pine and damp earth. He looked from the steep heights of Echo Summit to the north, across the little valley's flatlands to Browder ridge five thousand feet above to the south; both were timbered, but not densely-stands of Ponderosa and lodgepole pine for the most part, interspersed with scrub and open meadow. The creek tumbled down from the north, crossed the prairie-making a little U-shape with the bridge at its apex-and then joined another, larger stream that flowed at the foot of the southern hills; both had water now, though they were dry most of the summer. The U gave the castle what amounted to a natural moat over nearly half its circumference to supplement the one its builders had dug themselves.

The valley floor was sere autumn grassland; it had been called Lost Prairie once.

Aylward snapped his fingers. "Bugger! The location looked wrong, but of course that's why they put it there!" he said, evidently continuing an internal argument. "No mortars! I've ruddy well got to get my reflexes adjusted to the way things are now!"

Brown looked puzzled. Ken Larsson spoke without looking up from where he balanced a map board across his saddlebow.

"My son-in-law will enlighten you."

Havel nodded: "Before the Change, you wouldn't put a firebase-a fort-down on a low spot like that, not with high hills so close to either side. Death trap. Anyone could have put a mortar on the hills and hammered them there. We have to get a lot closer, a trebuchet is sort of bulky- and what we throw isn't explosive."

The CORA leader's name fitted his appearance-his hair, eyes, and skin were all shades of that brown, and so were his rough outdoors clothing and wide-brimmed hat, and the horse he rode.

"And they've got that wall and tower an' about two hundred men with crossbows," he said, and spat aside in disgust. "Got dart-throwers there, and something inside the walls that lobs rocks, and containers of gasoline; they can hit all the way from the south hills to the north. Our local council of the Association tried havin' a run at them before you fellahs arrived-didn't like the thought of 'em settin' up shop here-and they stopped us before we got started, so we yelled for CORA."

And CORA insisted on talking about things for most of a month, Havel thought. God knows how long it'd have gone on without the Mackenzies. Though to be fair, with the way they're spread out meetings aren't easy.

"Siege?" he asked. He suspected the answer, but…

"Nope." Brown pointed south at the low gnarled mountains. "That's bad country, all wrinkled like an ol' lady's… ass."

Then north. "That's worse. Oh, you could get around on foot, even take a horse, we got people who know the country real good… but it wouldn't be no damn use at all. This is the perfect place for a cork on Highway 20. And according to Ellie Strang, they've got plenty of food in there anyway. Enough to last to spring if they aren't picky."

"Ellie Strang?"

"She, ah, sort of works there. Local gal, not what you'd call respectable, but patriotic."

"Be a right butcher's bill, trying to storm it, even if it weren't for that riverbed between," Aylward said.

Will Hutton cantered up along the roadside verge; avoiding the pavement was easier on the horse's hooves, when you could.