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Two spots of red had appeared on Signe's cheeks; the flush spread downward in a way he found distracting even now, as her chest heaved.
"Is that all you've got to say?"
"No. In the whole time since the Change, I've been with exactly two women, you and her-and with her, it was exactly once. Run the timing, alskling. That was in goddamned April of Year Zero. We weren't married. We weren't involved."
"That was because-"
"Yeah, I know. I was there when we came back and killed the Three Stooges from hell, right? But the fact remains that we weren't involved. Yes, if I'd been screwing around, you'd have a right to want to carve my liver out. But I haven't been; not by any reasonable definition. You're the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with."
"But little Rudi makes it a bit awkward, doesn't he?"
"Yes. Kids have a habit of doing that."
He tossed off the drink, considered getting another, and decided not to-he'd had relatives who tried to solve problems that way.
"But I can't exactly have him killed, now can I?"
Signe opened her mouth, closed it, then stalked to her clothes, pulled them on and walked to the hall doorway.
"Fixing things is your problem," she snapped, then slammed the door behind her.
Well, shit, Havel thought, looking after her. Guess I didn't grovel hard enough.
She'd be all right in a while.
I hope, he thought, with an unfamiliar hollow feeling under his breastbone.
Chapter Seven
Dun Juniper/Dun Fairfax Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 21st, 2007 AD-Change Year Nine
Carefully now, De
Even these days, it wasn't often he got a chance to carve a whole twenty-foot section of black walnut log in a mixture of low and high relief; he gri
This sucker would have been worth thousands before the Change, but I'm doing something better with it than turning it into veneer.
The trees weren't even native to Oregon, although they did well in the Willamette, like nearly everything else except tropical stuff. Juniper Mackenzie's great-uncle the banker had planted thousands of them in the cut-over Cascade foothills around his hunting cabin starting back around 1920, fancying himself a practitioner of scientific forestry and having the period's i
De
Tock. A large chip flipped away to join those littering the gravel beneath the X-shaped wooden rests that held the great baulk of hardwood.
"And that's it for today," he said in satisfaction, caressing the dark wood with its dense hard grain, feeling the strength of it through his fingertips, the gloss it would take when it was oiled and polished and varnished just right, and set up with its twin:
"It's go
"As good, at least, if I do say so myself, Terry," De
Even after nine years he was a little self-conscious about calling the boy son, although "blended" families like his were more common than not these days, given the accidents of survival in the Dying Time, and Terry hardly remembered his birth father. Certainly he had the love of the wood in him, and he wasn't half bad at leatherworking, either, which was De
Terry was half Vietnamese, slender and fine-featured, and he made De
She had the guts and sense to take Terry and get out of Dodge before things went absolutely to hell. She is one fine lady.
He smiled as he caressed the wood with a broad hand, callused from his work and scarred by the accidents inevitable when you used chisel and gouge, knife and awl and waxed thread. The dividing cha
With wood this beautiful, I'm almost sorry to do any inlay work. Just a little to pick out the mouths and eyes of the dragons and wolves. More up top, of course.
He touched the rougher wood at the log's end. That was where the face of the Goddess would go-and that was the real challenge for this piece of work. He'd spent nights and days thinking of it, while he worked on other things or just stood looking. Sutterdown wasn't using the Celtic pantheon to represent some aspect of the twin divinities of the Old Religion, the way most Mackenzies did. They wanted to be different:
Hmmmm. Yeah, the outer form is Aphrodite. But I want elements of all three Aspects here. Sally for the Mother-of-All this time. Eilir for the Maiden? Maybe Astrid, if I can get her to sit for it. Or Lua
He started out of his trance, suppressing a flash of irritation. "Hey, Chuck. Is it that time already?"
Chuck Barstow was in his brigandine and sword belt, with twin sprays of raven feathers on either side of his round bowl helmet for ceremonial swank; privately De
He wasn't fat before the Change, De
"Yup. The Dun Fairfax people sent a horn-call up when the party went past and the road sentry relayed it. Sam's stopped off home there, by the way."
"Damn," De
He brushed chips out of his beard and off his carpenter's apron, laying down his tools. Terry hurried to help put them away in the workshop that huddled against the inside of Dun Juniper's wall beside the family cabin. De