The Protectors war

"Well, it's off to the clachan we'll be going, then," Juniper said cheerfully, pushing the plate away after she mopped it with a piece of pancake and swallowed that. "It's been grand guesting here, Mike, and meeting you ladies and gentlemen again, but there's much to do at home."

Mike frowned in disappointment and his wife hid a smile.

Mike, you are a darling man, strong and handsome as the dawn, and clever in a heavy-footed male way, and I wouldn't regret that lovely night even if it hadn't given me Rudi: but it's surprised I am Signe hasn't knifed you: yet, Juniper thought, and went on aloud, wiping her fingers on the napkin: "Ah, there's some good in every turn of fate. Now calories are what keep you alive, not what make you fat."

"We all have things to talk about," Mike said, waving a hand to the others at the head table. "We're not finished yet, Juney."

You've gotten used to telling people what to do, Mike, she didn't say aloud. Now when you have to persuade them you should remember there's a time to talk, and a time to stop hammering and let the arguments filter through on their own.

"We've had three days of talk and we've all agreed to wait and see," Juniper replied.

Much to your displeasure, Mike, and a bit to mine, but the Corvallis people aren't coming 'round this month; I think Abbot Dmowski scared them green with his talk of a Crusade to crush Evil, not to mention his anathemas against Arminger's own pet pope.

Aloud: "The Protector's not going to attack tomorrow, is he now?"

Unwillingly, Mike Havel shook his head. "Nah, he's too cautious," he said. "But-"

"But we Mackenzies need to prepare for Ostara."

That argument was true-the spring equinox festival came very soon-and had the additional merit of being religious and hence unanswerable. Good-byes were made, horses rounded up-so was a protesting Rudi-and the Mackenzies mounted, a double-twelve of them not including her son on his pony.

Mom? her daughter signed.

My heart? Juniper replied.

Eilir Mackenzie had been born long before the Change; fourteen years before, to be precise, and on the day of Ostara, the festival of the vernal equinox in the Old Religion. Not that that had meant anything to the teenaged single mother Juniper had been then; she'd been a nominal Catholic then, and only started to study the Craft after the fight to keep her child. That hadn't been made any easier by the daughter being deaf.

Now she's twenty-three herself! Juniper thought, bemused. Well, twenty-three in four days. How swift the Wheel spins!

Astrid wants to come along, Eilir signed. And Reuben- it's Ranger business. That OK?

Juniper hid a sigh. The two girls had come up with the Dunedain Rangers the year after the Change, and she'd thought it an excuse to playact with their friends-an equivalent of the Scouts. Maybe it had been, then, but they hadn't grown out of it. She looked over the heads of the crowd and raised a brow to Mike; he nodded. Astrid Lars-son was his sister-in-law, for all that she'd been adopted as an honorary Mackenzie years ago, and Reuben one of his people.

Eilir waited, taller than her mother and black-haired, but with the same green eyes, straight-featured face and pale freckled skin; slender and strong, able to outrun a deer and ride like Epona Herself and dance the night through. Back in high school her blood father had been Juniper's first lover, if you could call him that-the backseat of a Toyota had been involved, just the once. He'd turned out to be a faithless fink as well, but at least Eilir had gotten the good points of his splendid athlete's body and his charm, with a lot more character; Juniper flattered herself she'd supplied some of that.

To be sure, Juniper went on. I'll be as glad of Astrid's company as any of her friends, and Reuben is a good lad.

Astrid had spent a good part of her time among the Mackenzies these past nine years, and she was a dear, and much admired by the younger generation. Also wild and: not crazy, but perhaps touched by a Power more mischievous than kind.

Juniper's hands went on: But she'll have to stay a few weeks, maybe a month. Rangers or no, they can't come back across the Valley alone. It'll have to wait until we drive that horse herd over, and it's not in from the Bend country yet.

Eilir gri

Juniper nodded, and gave a final wave to the Larsdalen folk. Then she made the Invoking sign-a pentagram, drawn in the air from the top point down-before she chanted:

"Lord and Lady, bless this journey

Keep it safe to wandering's end;

Yours in parting and in meeting Guard loves and hearth as home we wend."

The rest of her riders and a fair number of the bystanders joined in with the final "Blessed be." The youth beside her had the pole of the Mackenzie ba

Folk shouted farewells as the horses' hooves beat out a grinding clop on the old crushed shell and new gravel of the long driveway. Juniper looked over her shoulder for a moment; Mike raised his hand in salute and turned.

Looking that way, the big yellow-brick house with its white pillars didn't seem very different from the time before the Change when it had been a Portland industrialist's toy-set at the head of a long east-facing valley in the Eola Hills, gracious with a century's mellowing amid gardens and lawns and giant trees.

It was when you turned and looked down the broad V of the valley that you returned to the Changed world with a vengeance. The Bearkillers hadn't been idle since they got here towards the end of the first Change Year, nor the folk they gathered around them. There were buildings flanking the roadway; the original manager's house and sheds and barns, and others ranging from the rawly new to seven or eight years old. Some were log-cabin style, in squared timber; if there was one thing you weren't going to run short of in western Oregon, it was logs. Others were frame, disassembled and reerected here. Digging an earth dam and berms turned part of the creek into a pond; below it a waterwheel turned to power sawmill and gristmill. Next were the big storage warehouses and grain elevator, the rows of workshops, then the cottages, and the low-slung barracks, last, closest to the fortifications.

A steep-sided earthwork thirty feet high and twenty thick spa

Their mounted leader was in the more elaborate harness of an A-lister-the Bearkiller elite force-and there was a crisp lordliness in the gesture he made to the troops.