Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change (14 page)

Imlos?
Eilir Signed.

“Sent on with the horse,” Alleyne replied. “Going to ground in one of our underground shelters and rejoining later.”

“’opefully,” John Hordle said, in his inimitable burring Hampshire-yokel version of Sindarin. “Good practice sending ’im, though, Oi think.”

Alleyne nodded. “Hopefully they’ll find the horse far away and won’t have any idea
where
their man was lost. They’ve been having a serious desertion problem, we know that. Some coming over, some just going home.”

There were younger Rangers who thought Alleyne’s more plummy Winchester-and-Sandhurst tones were a Quenya high-elven accent and had imitated it. Aunt Astrid had frowned on that and Uncle John had encouraged the rumor to drive her distracted…

Mary sighed a little at the memory as the Boisean was slung onto the second galley.
Aunt Astrid would have loved this op like a bowl of blueberries and whipped cream. With toasted walnuts sprinkled on top
.

Everyone clambered aboard with swift care; the narrow hulls rocked anyway.

“Let’s get him out of the way,” Mary said.

She was smiling at the same time; they were going home. Going home to a giant murdering battle, granted, but the principle was the same. Being isolated among the enemy just
felt
worse than openly confronting them, whatever the odds might be. If a hundred thousand men were going to try and kill her, at least she’d be among Montivalans when they did.

“
Raich
, he’s heavy!” Ritva said, as she took him by the loop of rope tied under his arms. “For a sort of cutely slim guy.”

“Or his armor is,” Mary said, as they navigated the narrow path between the rowing benches.

Mary and Ritva sank into position on either side of the prisoner in the bows. Two of the oarsmen used their shafts to push off, and then both of the boats turned their sharp prows westward. A soft chant of:

“
Leidho…bado…”
started as the oars swayed backward and forward.

Water hissed by outside the thin metal sheath of the hull. The prisoner’s armor was shoulder-protection and a back-and-breast of hoops and bands of plate, fastened with catches at the left shoulder and under the left arm. Ritva pushed him on his side and Mary worked the catches to release the forty pounds of steel. It went overboard with a
plop
as they reached deeper water; the little ship-by-courtesy was crowded enough that the room and weight-loss were welcome, even if it felt a bit wasteful.

The sky was clearing after the rain-shower; she could see more stars now, and the eastern horizon was slowly turning from dark-blue through green to a baleful and somehow ill-omened pink, though she usually liked the pre-dawn hush. The broad expanse of the Columbia revealed itself, with wisps of fog glimmering and vanishing, and the great steep brown bluffs on either bank, with black streaks where the basalt showed through. The air was chilly, on the edge of frost. Her damp clothes warmed only reluctantly, tempting her to take a spell rowing. After a few minutes the rhythmic stroke of the oars and the grunting
huff
of breath settled into a background music. Water purled away from the sharp bows in an endless chuckle.

Someone opened a basket and started handing out cakes made of pressed cracked and toasted grain, honey and nuts and bits of dried fruit, and
cram
sandwiches—flat leathery tortillas wrapped around ham and cheese. The Boisean at her feet was stirring and kicking, so they turned him upright, propped him half-sitting against the inside curve of the bow and bent to look him in the face with theirs side-by-side and filling his field of view.

“You promise to be sensible?” Ritva asked. “No tussling on the boat?”

“So we don’t have to stab you or hack off your head,” Mary added.

“Or cut your throat or drown you,” Ritva finished cheerfully.

“Which would be sort of silly after all the trouble we took to get you here alive,” Mary pointed out. “Which we really didn’t have to do.”

“It was just our inherent Folk-of-the-West niceness.”

“So give us your parole until we reach our dock.”

“It isn’t far,” Ritva clarified.

The prisoner’s eyes flicked from one of them to the other, as blue as their own; his brown hair was short on the top and tight at the sides. They’d shed their war-cloaks and steel caps, and the identical blond fighting-braids lay on their shoulders as they beamed at him. Ian leaned around Ritva to add with a slightly alarming smile:

“And they really mean it, you know.”

The prisoner nodded, and the twins reached to untie his hands and remove the gag.

“Let’s hear your parole,” Mary said.

“I won’t try to escape or attack you until I’m taken off this boat,” the man said, his voice rough from the near-throttling. “Or it sinks. On my honor as an officer.”

“That’ll do,” Mary said. “But we’ll get
really cranky
if you don’t keep it.”

“Even a bit mean and bitchy,” Ritva said, pointing a warning finger at his face.

“And they
really mean
that,” Ian said. “Have a sandwich.”

Mary grinned to herself as he glanced from one to the other, startled by the unison of their movements. It had been even more effective in the old days.

Uh-oh,
she thought when he frowned.
He’s recognizing us.

The problem with heroic deeds like the Sword Quest that brought undying fame was that it made you…

Sort of famous. Which can be awkward when people just recognize you out of the blue. Sometimes they think they
know
you just because they’ve heard the stories, too.

His face changed: “Christ. You’re Ritva and Mary Havel, aren’t you? The woo—” He visibly reconsidered something that was probably on the order of
woot-woot
. “The Dunydain? That King Artos guy’s sisters?”

“Yup. Though that’s Mary Vogeler now that I’m married and respectable. Sort of.”

“And we’re the High King’s half sisters; same father, different mothers,” Ritva said.

“
Very
different,” Mary clarified.

The Boisean was a young man but older than they were, with a lean weathered face. Ian’s hand snaked in with a canteen, and as he drank cautiously—chloroform didn’t make you feel all that good when it wore off, and being throttled didn’t either—the shape of his cheekbones tugged at Mary’s memory…

“You wouldn’t be named Woburn, would you?” she said. “Of the Camas Prairie Woburns? Head of the family is a Rancher and Sheriff there, a big landholder near Grangeville?”

The man nodded. “That would be my father. I’m Centurion Dave Woburn.”

She shot a covert glance at her sister; it wouldn’t do for her to mention the visit Ritva and the Rangers had paid to Sheriff Woburn’s ranch on their way to the rescue mission in Boise. The elder Woburn was willing to give actual help to Martin Thurston’s opponents; as far as they knew his oldest son was just dissatisfied. Ritva gave her an annoyed
do-you-think-I’m-stupid
glare in return.

“I met your brother!” Mary said instead to the prisoner.

That had been far east of here, in Barony Tucannon, in one of the opening skirmishes of the campaign. The enemy alliance of Boise and the CUT occupied that area now…except for the walled cities and castles, which they didn’t have the time or resources to take, and the guerillas who were making their life less than joyful every hour of the night and most of the days. She’d heard someone describe it as the flies conquering the flypaper.

“My brother Jack?” the man said, suddenly eager. “But he was taken prisoner—”

“A couple of months ago. My husband and I were in that fight,” she said happily. “We had lunch with your brother afterwards at the Baron of Tucannon’s manor house at Grimmond-on-the-Wold. Lovely place, I hope you guys didn’t burn it. He’s OK, and the left arm healed well, I heard. In fact, he’s working for Fred now. You know, Frederick Thurston. The one of your ruler’s sons who
didn’t
kill his father.”

Dave Woburn gave an alarmed glance to either side by pure involuntary reflex, which said something about the United States of Boise under Martin Thurston. Mary raised a brow as he became conscious of what he’d done, and his jaw tightened as he saw it and took the implication.

“Fred’s also the one who
didn’t
sell his soul to demons,” Ritva added helpfully. “Well, pretty much demons. We’ve met
them
, too and it’s close enough.”

“Fred’s actually sort of a nice guy,” Mary put in. “He was on the Quest with us and we got to know him.”

“Pretty cute, too,” Ritva said. “This lovely cinnamon skin and a nice tight butt…Hey, Ian, I’m just recognizing it in a sort of abstract way! I’m at least serially monogamous. Plus Virginia would kill me.”

“Literally,” Mary said judiciously.

She liked Fred’s wife, Virginia, nee Kane, who was a Rancher’s daughter from the Powder River country in what had been Wyoming.

She’d joined the Quest as a refugee from the CUT’s seizure of her family’s ranch as they passed through to the Seven Council Fires territory, and she and Fred had fallen for each other. She was smart and loyal and brave, a superb horsewoman and a pretty good fighter, if not up to Ranger standards, and even well-educated for someone from the back of beyond; she’d read the Histories, though just as stories. You could forgive her habit of scalping people who really pissed her off as a local foible; after all, there were people who were all censorious and judgmental about Dúnedain customs too. And she always killed them before she scalped them, which showed a certain basic moral goodness. But…

“Virginia
is
sort of possessive about Fred,” she concluded. “And anything connected with Fred. And anything she thinks Fred should have.”

Like being General-President of Boise,
she added mentally; that was another thing that would be tactless to say right now.

“She’s sort of…carnivorous,” Ritva said. “But in a
good
way.”

Dave Woburn shook his head as if trying to clear it and get his thoughts back on track, then winced.

“You want some willow-bark?” Mary said sympathetically. “I’ve been choked unconscious before…have you? No? It gives you a
terrible
headache
every time, just really ugly. And a
rumal
totally puts your neck out of alignment.”

Even when it doesn’t kill you,
she added to herself; it would be tactless to say that aloud, too.
And even when you have to kill someone, it doesn’t cost anything to be polite.

“Ah…yes. Thanks. But did you have to drug me too?”

“The chloroform was safer than thumping your head—”

Knocking someone out meant a concussion, which was
not
like going to sleep, whatever some people thought or some stories said. She’d been knocked out several times herself, and once the headaches had lasted for weeks. You could just suddenly die from it, too, or end up a drooling idiot. If it happened too often you
did
end up as a drooling idiot.

“—and we couldn’t risk you yelling at the wrong moment if we ran into your friends.”

She passed him a paper twist of the powdered extract from her field-kit pouch. He threw the bitter stuff into his mouth, washed it down with a grimace and a drink of water, then doggedly started in on his honey-and-nut cake and sandwich. He probably wasn’t feeling very hungry, but she approved. If you weren’t actually nauseous, it was better to eat something after an experience like the one he’d gone through. The body burned up its reserves when it sensed approaching death and got ready to fight or run, and if you didn’t eat you risked a sort of shivering feeling and lethargy and weakness.

“So Jack went over to the enemy?” the Boisean said quietly.

He probably believed them; there wasn’t much point in a lie that he’d be able to check on so soon.

“Depends on who you think of as
the enemy
,” Ian put in. “I’m from the Dominion of Drumheller myself.”

The man nodded warily. “The Canucks, right. I’d heard you’d gotten into the war.”

“My parents were Canadians. There’s really no Canada now, any more than there is a United States. That’s why they chose the new names. Our Premier…Premier Mah…said it was because, mmmm,
Nostalgia isn’t a politically productive emotion.
”

“That’s…debatable.”

“But either way I don’t have a dog in this fight, except that we’re at war with the CUT. And hell, I’m from the
Peace River
part of Drumheller, north of that it’s trees and Indians all the way to the tundra and then it’s Eskimo and polar bears all the way to the Beaufort Sea. The only people my district have really fought since the Change are the PPA, when they took over the old British Columbia part of the district and split it up into fiefs and built castles on it. Would have taken the rest too, if we hadn’t punched them out of the idea.”

“Why are you here, then?”

“They’re part of Montival now, and we believe the new management when they say they don’t have big eyes. We’ve got no problem with Rudi…with High King Artos…as a neighbor.”

“You’re a monarchy too,” Woburn said a bit sourly.

“Theoretically.
Very
theoretically. We have contact with Greater Britain maybe once every three or four years. Thing is, we didn’t have any problem with
you
people in Boise as a neighbor, when Fred’s father was running things; he left us alone and we returned the favor. But we sure as shit have a problem with the Church Universal and Triumphant as a neighbor. Or anyone who carries water for them.”

“We don’t want a King,” the prisoner said tightly.

“You’d rather have a Prophet?” Ian said dryly. “A deranged one with
evil incarnate
tattooed on his forehead? Hey, mister, I was in Boise when we took your guy Martin’s
wife
out, and
she
said Martin is the Prophet’s puppet
and
that he killed his dad. In fact, when she started shouting that, he tried to kill
her
—personally shot a crossbow at her while she was holding his son in her arms.”