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For we know not when the shadows fall,
And the Huntsman comes to claim us all."
"And the shadows have fallen, and now we'd best go back to the camp, before it gets too dark and you two take a chill," Devorgill said, burping her youngest and wiping up the results with a cloth. "Merry part till later, mother Judy, Lady Juniper."
They walked off. As they passed, Juniper could hear Laere talking to his father:
"I wish I was old enough to go with you and Granddad to the war! I'd take a hundred heads, like the Hound did when Maeve invaded Ulster! Chop-chop-chop!"
His sister's outraged tones faded through the forest: " Laere! You blood-thirsty little brute of a boy! That's just in the stories! It's geasa now!"
Juniper looked up, and saw the first stars hovering over the snowpeaks of the Cascades.
"And we must go back to the castle, and smile and look brave at the feast," she said. "What a fraud I feel!"
Nigel faced her as she turned. "My dear," he said, putting a hand beneath her chin and kissing her. "You are without doubt the bravest of us all."
"He is?" BD said, her weathered, wrinkled face blank for an instant. " Murdoch is a spy for Lady Sandra?"
Astrid Larsson leaned back in the chair and nodded-not smugly, she hoped. The little chamber was very private, with only one narrow slit window high up on the curving outer wall; Castle Todenangst was full of places like that, nooks and cra
Unless someone's watching from a secret passage, of course. I think Sandra did a lot of the detail work on the plans for this castle.
The light was good, gas-lamps with incandescent mantles, unaccustomed brilliance for an hour this late and reflecting off wainscoting of blond oak. There was a table of fine polished mahogany, a few chairs, a rug, and a bottle of wine and glasses by a bowl of raisins and walnuts and hazelnuts. Despite the charming little fireplace with its tiled surround of hummingbirds and meadowlarks it was a bit oppressive after a life spent mostly in the wilds or on the open roads, or at most in Stardell Hall with its loose scatter of homes through forest.
She could feel the uncounted tons of steel and concrete above, almost smell them under the odors of wine and burning fir-wood. And imagine the dungeons below, and the great foundations where the Fortress of Death-Anguish gripped the soil of the land.
But there are advantages, she thought. Privacy seems easier to come by amid many people. Odd.
She sipped at her glass of wine and watched the older woman think.
"He's good, then," BD said. "I've dealt with Murdoch and Sons every time I swung out that far East, and I'd never suspected he was her man in Pendleton."
BD was from the Kyklos, a scatter of independent villages around Silverton, not far north of the main Dunedain holding in Mithrilwood. Besides being a High Priestess of the Old Religion she ran the Plodding Pony service, which delivered high-value freight over much of Oregon, and which had employed Rangers as escorts almost as long as there had been Rangers in this Age of the world. That sort of business led to the collection of information as naturally as breathing. It also made you a shrewd judge of character.
Astrid went on: "Murdoch has been working for Sandra since before the War of the Eye. She planted him in Pendleton when we made the Protectorate withdraw from the area, after her husband was killed. And he's got… co
BD looked down at the map and her eyebrows shot up. " I'll say! But how are you going to use them?"
Astrid shrugged. "I'm not altogether sure," she said. "But I'm a little uneasy about just marching up to Pendleton's walls and telling them to surrender so we can guard them against Boise and the CUT whether they like it or not. We can't even prove that either power is pla
"You don't think you can beat the Pendleton Round-Up?"
"I don't want to beat them in a stand-up battle and I certainly don't want to burn down the city or lay the countryside waste. We Rangers generally don't go in for mass head butting. It's… crude. And Pendleton's just badly governed, not evil like the CUT and its Dark… Prophet. Every man we kill will be one who isn't on our side later, in the real war, when Rudi returns with the Sword. We ought to be able to make something of an asset like this Murdoch and his… co
She leaned forward. "You've been there in person. Tell me about the Pendleton Bossman, Carl Peters. The things that don't get into written reports."
TheScourgeofGod
CHAPTER FIVE
Cold falls the night where nothing sounds
Save weeping and the grief of the weak
Hot his heart and ready his hand
He and his companions sworn and trusty
Blade and bow ready for avenging of wrongs
Though wiser it were to think of the Sword
That waited where the Lady had bidden From: The Song of Bear and Raven
Attributed to Fiorbhi
Caravan, Rudi Mackenzie thought. They're putting together a big one, for a place that size. Or a big one's passing through. Not about to leave just now, though.
They were a lot farther north and closer to the edge of the mountains now; the stark foothills of the Pioneers were just ahead on the other side of Silver Creek, mostly summer-bleached grass up steep slopes, with shallow valleys leading northward. A little higher he could see groves of quaking aspen-and, alarmingly, some of them were begi
Maybe we should have headed south through Nevada and tried the mountains there!
The creek was about a mile away, flowing from west to east and flanked by a narrow band of fields watered through irrigation cha
The settlement wasn't large, no bigger than a Mackenzie dun, room for twenty or thirty families if they didn't mind living tight. It had a well-kept fifteen-foot rammed-earth wall on a fieldstone base, topped with a sloping roof of timber and sheet metal, with one square tower beside a gate. Barns and sheds, corrals and vegetable gardens lay outside, but nothing higher than a man's knee rose within bowshot of the wall. The gate was open, and there were animals and people and wagons milling around before it, and herds of horses under the eye of mounted cowboys moving across pasture and stubble to the north and west.
"Get me Nystrup," he said softly, lowering his binoculars and tapping them thoughtfully on the red-gold stubble on his chin. "I don't like this. There's something wrong."
Ritva nodded. "Not enough people working. Too many horses. And where are their herds? And there should be more smoke from inside the town, too-more cookfires and a couple of smithies."
She ghosted away. A sage grouse walked past Rudi a few minutes later, pecking at a grasshopper, and overhead two hummingbirds fought a dive-and-buzz duel like ill-tempered flying jewelry before flitting off towards the river. Some sort of black-and-white insects were a haze over the creek, almost like slow-motion snow; when he brought the glasses back up he could see the silver forms of trout leaping for them now and then. The banks of the stream were green with willows and dense with reeds, and blue herons stalked through them with their beaks cocked. Ducks swam on the waters as well, ci