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Lua
"God, did Dad get furious when she sprang that one on him," Eric chuckled. "On the one hand, I sympathize. On the other, it was sort of fu
And here we have a whole slew of generational gaps, Juniper thought. Not to mention social ones.
Eric had been eighteen when the old world ended; and a rich man's son, attending high-priced private schools, interested in the sciences when he wasn't playing football or chasing girls or drinking beer with his friends and being resentfully angry at his father in the usual testosterone-poisoned head-butting of male adolescence.
But a third of his life-everything beyond that last tag end of childhood- had been spent in the Changed world. That was where he'd become a man and a lord of men, a husband and a father, not to mention a warrior of fearsome repute. Things like rockets, asteroids and nuclear weapons were real to him, in a detached and intellectual fashion, instead of not-particularly-interesting myths the way they were to those a bit younger, but they didn't really matter. Not the way a horse with splints did, or an attack of brucellosis in the cattle, or getting a good clear shot at a deer with his bow, or how well a line of pike-men kept alignment while advancing over rough ground. Lua
The thought ran through her mind in an instant; she turned and met Nigel Loring's eyes, and knew that the thought was shared.
"We adapted," he murmured. Unspoken was: Those who couldn't are dead. "But never completely."
"No, never completely," she replied in the same undertone. "Although dean cronan cupla barrai agus cuirfidh me breagriocht air:
"
His involuntary chuckle helped her shake the gloom off; in Erse, she'd just said if you hum a few bars, I can fake it. Looking into his eyes, she knew she'd lifted his mood as well, and that was a pleasure in itself.
Glancing around her Hall, she made it come real again with a mental effort. The younger Larssons had finished chuckling over their own joke.
"Well, whatever or Whoever caused the Change, I doubt they did it so we would be done in by celestial debris," Juniper said.
"They could certainly have finished us off without doing anything so elaborate," Nigel confirmed.
"Moving back to practicalities, what did your father say about our : guest, Lua
Will Hutton was at least as intelligent as Ke
"Pretty much the same thing as my honorable father-in-law, for once," Lua
"I don't know precisely what we can make of Matti's being here. Still, the Lord and Lady wouldn't send us an opportunity if there weren't some way to use it."
She reached for the horn again. The wine was made by Tom Bra
"But," she went on, after she'd rolled a sip around her mouth, "do consider what happens if he doesn't manage to beat us. Say that we beat him. Are we going to destroy the Portland Protective Association utterly, root and branch?"
"Nope," Lua
From her other side Sir Nigel Loring nodded and spoke. "And while the man is a tyrant of tyrants, I saw last year that his obsession with feudalism means that you can't destroy that kingdom of his by chopping off the head. It's decentralized, and he built that into its bones. If it split up, the parts would be nearly as troublesome."
"Yeah," Lua
"And there are limits to what we can do by encouraging the common folk to snipe at his barons," Juniper said regretfully. "Especially now that things there have had a chance to settle down. I have hopes for that, sure, and contacts there-but the farmers can't hope to rise up against his new-made knights unless they have more help than it seems likely we can offer. We have a network of informants and sympathizers there, but I can't ask them to take up arms if all it gets them is dead, so."
"Guns are great equalizers," Loring agreed. "Guerilla warfare isn't impossible without firearms and explosives, but it's: much harder to pull off."
"Not as many force multipliers, Mike says," Eric added. "Plus it's harder and takes longer to learn to use the weapons we've got."
"So," Juniper said. "Let's be optimistic. Say that Norman and Sandra Arminger are sent off to the Summerlands to make accounting for what they've done and select an appropriate reincarnation."
"I'd prefer a nice, fiery, eternal hell for 'em, Juney," Eric said, more than a trace of grimness in his voice.
"I confess the thought is tempting but that's not my mythos. So then, hy-pothetically speaking, they're off to choose their reward or punishment: "
They all shot a glance at Mathilda; she was laughing, with a forkful of beets halfway to her mouth, as one of the other children told a story; Chuck and Judy's Tamsin, born three years before the Change.
"I don't think they'll wait ten years, and then take back a Princess Mathilda who's a Mackenzie in all but name to rule them," Loring said. "The thought is tempting, my dear, but I fear it's not likely."
"Not exactly that, no," Juniper said. "And trying to deliberately shape her outright, that would be: futile, as well as unkind. She's a proud little thing, and no fool-I've known her for half a year, which is quite a while for a child that age. Best to just: leave her be, and treat her like any other, and wait to see what opportunity offers."