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Rudi finished grinding a nick out of the edge of his sword, ran a swatch of oily sheepskin over the blade, sheathed it and laid the scabbard aside wrapped in the broad belt that also held his dirk. His stomach twisted in hunger at the savory smell from the cookfire, but he winced a little as he accepted a bowl and some biscuits and took his first sip.
The swelling bruises on his throat made swallowing painful; they made breathing a matter of care, though thank Her of the Healing Hand that they hadn't had to insert a tube or anything of that sort. He ate cautiously, a little at a time. That was one of a symphony of pains and aches, from minor cuts to bone bruises. At that, he'd been lucky and gods-favored. The memory of those troll-strong dead hands on his throat still made an unpleasant sensation crawl over his scrotum and up his belly. It had been seconds away from being too late. If he hadn't decided to put on the coif before the fight…
Remembering Someone looking through Kuttner's eyes into his was worse yet.
"My throat's raw," he said, and hid a slight shudder. He turned to Odard instead of dwelling on the eerie otherness of what had happened:
"I didn't see your man Alex," he croaked.
I can talk. As long as I'm careful.
The young Baron's eyes usually held a cool reserve. There was no mistaking what was in them now.
And if Alex could see them, he'd not stop ri
"I didn't either, and that's why he's not dead," Odard said grimly. "And if I had him back in the castle at Gervais… I do believe I'd have him flogged to death. Usually having the High Justice is a bit of a bore, but there are times when it can be very satisfying."
Mathilda had mopped her emptied bowl with a piece of the ba
Rudi suppressed an impulse to smooth them back, then decided not to bother and did it. She smiled at him; it died away as she spoke:
"He laid Odard out with a crossbow butt and held me at the point of the bolt while he surrendered us to the Cutters."
Rudi shaped a silent whistle. "That is a surprise. I'd have said he was a brave man-and loyal to the House of Liu, too."
Odard's hand closed reflexively on the hilt of the sword across his lap; he was a little less than a year younger than Rudi, and several inches shorter, with a handsome high-cheeked, snub-nosed face, raven-black hair and slanted blue eyes the brighter for the natural olive-umber hue of his skin. His voice recovered a little of his usual ironic detachment as he went on:
"He is. Loyal, that is. Unfortunately he's loyal to my mother.. . the Dowager Baroness. And she's been in contact with the Church Universal and Triumphant. Apparently she told him… passwords, codes… to use with them if he thought he had to."
He looked away slowly. "I told her to stop it. I thought she'd listened. Apparently she didn't, even though I'm of age and Baron now. I'm going to have a little talk with her when we get back."
" My mother is going to have a little talk with her," Mathilda said. "Sovereigns before vassals, Odard."
The young nobleman looked alarmed; however furious he was with her, Lady Mary Liu was his mother. She'd conspired with foreigners against the Crown Princess-her man had pointed a crossbow at the Crown Princess-and they both knew that meant arraignment for high treason against the Throne.
"That… is for you and the Lady Regent to decide, Your Highness," he said. "I… I really can't say anything in her defense, only plead for mercy."
Rudi was angry enough himself, but he winced a little inwardly at the thought too. Not that Sandra Arminger, Regent of the Portland Protective Association, took any particular pleasure in inflicting pain and death. She just used it as a tool, which was considerably worse, if you were on the receiving end. Policy kept going when a sadist's pleasure in cruelty might be glutted and stop.
Then her daughter frowned. "Well… the way it was, they had us cornered. We would all have died, probably, if we'd fought. Alex might just have been trying to save your life. And they didn't, well, do anything to us except tie us up."
Odard shrugged expressively. "I'll still have him flogged to death if I can."
Rudi ate a biscuit to hide a slight grimace of distaste. Odard Liu wasn't the complete bastard that his father had been. Edward Liu had been – what was the pre-Change word?
What lots of Norman Arminger's original supporters had been; they'd had a term for it in the old world, not bandit or outlaw as people would say these days, but Ah, sure, and that's it. They said gangster back then. Or gangbanger.
Odard's mother had been from a Society household-a lot of people who'd been in the Society for Creative Anachronism had ended up as leaders in various places, Arminger himself among them, though only the most ruthless had been able to stomach Matti's father. For that matter, the PPA as a whole wasn't nearly as bad as it had been in Norman Arminger's day, before Rudi's blood-father killed him and died himself in a spectacular duel between their armies at the end of the War of the Eye.
Better does n 't necessarily mean good, though, Rudi thought. Then he said: "It's a little early to be pla
Mathilda sat up and focused her hazel eyes; there was puzzlement in them now, as well as relief and affection.
"Yes, we do! What in the name of all the saints happened back there, Rudi? You were weird enough-"
"The Morrigu was with me," he said matter-of-factly. "I'd have been dead about… seven times, else."
Matti nodded. "But what about Kuttner? He wasn't just… just berserk, the way you got. That was… what was that?"
"I'm not altogether sure," Rudi said, his voice still hoarse.
He touched the bruises on his throat with gingerly caution, the mark of fingers that had squeezed through mail and padded stiffened leather and neck muscles as strong as braided rawhide.
"But I think," he went on thoughtfully, "I truly think that I was near as no matter throttled to death by a man already dead himself three times over. Both parts of which sentence are a bogglement and enough to make a man run into the trees screaming for his mother, so."
He gri
It would be fu
Juniper Mackenzie could do many remarkable things. Raising dead men wasn't among them, any more than she could change lead into gold or fly by wishing it or throw lightning bolts from her fingertips. Verbal ones, yes, but not the literal split-the-tree type.
Ignatius looked up from his task. "That was a case of demonic possession, I think," he said calmly, and handed out more filled bowls. "I've never seen anything like it myself, but the old accounts from long before the Change describe very similar things."
Rudi nodded. Allowing for the different words Christians used to describe it, he thought the soldier-monk was right.
"The Powers are many, and not all are friendly to humankind," he said, and rubbed his throat again. "As I can now painfully testify!"
Ingolf Vogeler looked up from where he sat, a blanket around his shoulders.
"I… I thought Kuttner was just an asshole with an eye for other people's boodlebags," he said, in his Wisconsin rasp. "When I thought he was working for the Bossman of Iowa, when Vogeler's Villains went East on that salvage mission from Des Moines. Then when he turned out to be a spy and a traitor working for the Prophet and killed my people and dragged me off to Corwin, I thought he was your common or garden-variety evil shit. And yah, there was a lot of mystical crap in Corwin, but I cut that eye out of Kuttner's head when I escaped and I thought that proved it was all just a show for the yokels."