The Given Sacrifice (6 page)

Mother told me once she’d heard from the Countess of Odell that the Armingers stood
by him when he got those burns on his face, way back before the Change.

“Ninety percent absolutely rotten bad,” Tiphaine said shortly.

“Except that we’d all have been gnawed bones without him.
I
sure as shit had no earthly idea what to do when the Change hit and the machines
stopped, and he
did
. Ah, well, it’s ancient history. I think we’ve wrapped up all the essentials and
you’ve had a chance to look over the replacements we’re sending forward. They’re eager
enough.”

“They’re ironhead macho imbeciles who need to be bled, to correct the balance of their
humors,” she said crisply. “Which I will see to. Not to mention learning that there’s
more to war than couching a lance and sticking spurs in a horse’s ass.”

“Better to restrain the noble steed than prod the reluctant mule. Give my regards
to Rudi . . . His Majesty . . . when you’re back in the cow-country.”

“The Prophet’s men did a good cloud-of-locusts imitation out there to slow pursuit.
It’s
gnawed bones
country, since you brought up the phrase, with cows pretty scarce. The buzzards there
have to carry their own rations,” she said.

“Speaking of which, here’s the grant,” he said, pulling a last formidable-looking
document out of a folder and tossing it in front of her. “That’ll keep you travelling
out there the rest of your life!”

“Joy,” she said. “Thank you . . . I suppose.”

“Hey, it’s free! That’s always a bargain.”

“Like getting fifteen million tons of undelivered Arizona sand for sixpence ha’penny,”
she said dryly. “Don’t work yourself to death while I’m gone, Conrad. I’d rather snog
wolverines in a confessional booth than be saddled with the job you’ve got
now
.”

The Count of Odell picked up the ebony cane that leaned against his wheelchair, tapped
it on the marble tiles of the floor and waved it forward as he cried:

“En avant!”

There was a ripple of bows as his squire wheeled him out.

“Clear this up, Tasin,” Lioncel said, when nobody was left but the Grand Constable’s
household.

The senior page—he was Tasin Jones, one of the younger brothers of Count Chaka of
Molalla—slid forward and helped the younger pair clear the remains of lunch. His square
brown face was intent; he’d entered the d’Ath household barely six months ago. Lioncel
had been a page himself until last August, and he remembered how anxious you could
get at the thought something would go wrong while you were attending the lords. It
would be worse for Tasin, since he hadn’t grown up with the Grand Constable, just
knew her fearsome reputation.

He was shaping well, though, now that he’d gotten over homesickness. Lioncel gave
him a discreet wink and a thumbs-up when the job was done, and got a brief broad smile
in exchange.

The plates held the remains of a lunch of cold spiced pork loin, a long loaf of white
bread, sharp Tillamook cheese, sweet butter, a green salad and fruit tarts; the sort
of plain good fare Tiphaine d’Ath preferred even at court. At a gesture, Tasin poured
her another glass of watered wine and one for the squire and left the carafe. The
pages made a little procession as they took the plates out to hand off to the castle
staff; they were eyeing the uneaten blueberry tarts too, since those were their lawful
prerogative . . . though as he remembered it the staff would get them as often as
not.

One of the points of page service was to teach young noblemen humility, learning to
obey among strangers before they commanded at home. And that good things didn’t simply
appear by magic when you waved your hand.

“Lioncel, attend,” Tiphaine said.

They were about as alone as you ever got at court. A tinkle came from a wind chime
near the windows, and one of the interior walls of the big room was mostly bookshelves
and map-racks, with a trophy of crude spears taken in some skirmish long ago crossed
over a shield made from a battered-looking
STOP
sign above the swept and empty hearth. The furniture was understated and strongly
built, mostly rubbed oak lightly carved and brown tooled leather held by brass rivets;
a tapestry showed Castle Ath across a landscape of forest and vineyard and huntsmen
bringing in boars, and the rugs were patterned with birds twining through vines.

The decor suited the Grand Constable perfectly, down to the hunting trophies—a stuffed
boar’s head, tiger and bear-skins—but she wouldn’t have bothered about it herself.
His mother had furnished the place, part of her duties as Châtelaine. In effect, general
manager of the whole civilian side of the barony, from interior decoration to keeping
the reeves and bailiffs honest and arranging apprenticeships for deserving youngsters.
In the last few years he’d started to realize just how much
work
that involved, something that had taken a while not least because his mother always
made it look either effortless or enjoyable. And how not only the baron’s interests
but the comfort and livelihoods of hundreds of families depended on it.

“My lady?” he said.

“Time for a little question-and-answer, boy.”

It had also been just recently that he really realized what it meant that Lady Delia
de Stafford lived with the Grand Constable, and that his father was perfectly content
with the arrangement. It hadn’t made all that much difference, though he was a good
Catholic himself. They were the people he’d grown up around, after all, the ones he
knew and loved.

His liege jerked her thumb towards a stool. Lioncel de Stafford was a dutiful young
man. He bowed and sank down with a perfectly genuine expression of alert interest.
Squirehood involved a lot of lectures, if your liege was conscientious; it was the
aristocracy’s equivalent of apprenticeship. His liege-lady was always worth listening
to and didn’t just talk because she liked the sound of her own voice.

“What did you gather from all that?” she said, inclining her head towards the door
the Lord Chancellor had used.

Tiphaine had always been kind enough to Delia’s children, but the Grand Constable
wasn’t a woman who had much use for youngsters. As he got older she was paying more
and more attention to him, which was intriguing and disturbing in about equal measure.
They were a long way from equals; he didn’t know if they ever would be that, since
she was terrifyingly capable at all of a noble’s skills save some of the social ones.
But he’d put his foot on the bottom rung.

“That some of the great families are starting to bicker and complain, my lady. Even
though the war isn’t over!” Lioncel said, trying to keep the heat out of his voice.

He’d had a ringside seat the last few years, old enough to no longer assume victory
was automatic, and things had often looked . . .

Very bad indeed,
he thought
. Before the Quest returned with the High King and the Sword . . . very bad.

“We won the decisive battle at the Horse Heaven Hills, and Rudi killed Martin Thurston
to put the brandied cherry on the whipped cream,” Tiphaine said in a cool even voice,
wine-cup between her long fingers. “That leads to . . . premature relaxation. Mistaking
are winning
for
having won
.”

“Last year the enemy
were winning
, and look what happened to
them.
The Prophet isn’t dead yet! Are these people
stupid
?” Lioncel burst out. “My lady,” he added hastily.

“Some of them are. The rest . . . just arrogant and shortsighted and obsessed with
who’s getting precedence. And in love with their own supreme awesomeness, particularly
since it was a classic chivalric bull-at-a-gate charge with the lance that finished
off the battle, like something out of a
chanson
. They tend to forget the rest.”

Lioncel looked down at his glass. He’d always loved the songs and still did, and the
great charge
had
been like one of the
chansons
about Arthur or Charlemagne and their paladins come to life.

When eight thousand lances crested the ridge in a blaze of steel and plumes and rearing
destriers . . . and then the oliphants screamed the charge
à l’outrance . . .

It would be a thing of pride for the rest of his life to have taken part, even in
a junior squire’s place behind the line . . . but he’d seen enough of real war now
to realize that the troubadours tended to dwell on a very narrow part of it.

And to leave out things like what a man looks like after a conroi’s worth of barded
destriers have galloped over him. Or maybe it was a man
and
a horse to start with, I couldn’t tell for sure in a single glance.

Tiphaine raised one pale brow, as if she was following his thoughts.

“When we were desperate, politics got damped down,” she said. “Now, not so much.”

“Yes, my lady,” Lioncel said. He thought for a moment, then: “Still, it’s better to
have the problems of victory than those of defeat.”

She gave a thin small smile. “True. You’re learning, boy.”

And high politics is a
lot
less boring than classes in feudal law,
he thought.

Then she handed him the vellum folio that the Lord Chancellor had given her.

“Your lady mother will be handling most of this, but give me your take.”

He picked it up and read. The snowy material of split lambskin smoothed with pumice
and lime was reserved for the most important documents, ones that went into the permanent
record for reference and had lots of brightly illuminated capitals. The text was bilingual
in English and Law French, which he could follow after a fashion, even done in the
distinctive
littera parisiensis
Fraktur typeface of the Chancellery of the Association. It included a map and references
to the cadastral land survey.

The familiar forms leapt out at him; every nobleman took a keen interest in land grants.
There was going to be a new entry in the next edition of
Fiefs of the Portland Protective Association: Tenants in Chief, Vassals, Vavasours
and Fiefs-minor in Sergeantry.

His eyebrows went up and he stopped himself from whistling softly with a conscious
effort at the acreage listed.

The signatures were
Conradius Odeliae Comes, Dominus Cancellarius Consociationis Defensivae Portlandensis
and
Mathilda, Dei Gratia Princeps Regina Montivalae et Domina Defensor Consociationis
Defensivae Portlandensis
, complete with all three privy seals in red wax over ribbons.

That translated as Conrad, Count of Odell, Lord Chancellor of the Portland Protective
Association and Mathilda, by the Grace of God—

And marriage to Rudi Mackenzie, Artos the First, of course.

—High Queen of Montival and Lady Protector—

That in her own hereditary right.

—of the PPA.

“That’s . . . that’s a
very generous
fief you’ve been granted, my lady. Much bigger than the Barony of Ath! Congratulations!”

His warm glow of delight was entirely unselfish; Lioncel was heir only to Barony Forest
Grove. As adopted son of the Grand Constable his younger brother Diomede would inherit
the title and lands of Barony Ath, the original fief in the Tualatin Valley west of
Portland and the new grant too. His sister Heuradys was an adopted daughter of d’Ath,
too, for similar reasons; it left House Stafford and House d’Ath each with one son
to inherit and one daughter to dower, a perfect set for succession purposes.

Tiphaine nodded, her long regular face tilting a little to watch his, her ice-colored
eyes considering as they met his bright blue. They looked enough alike in face and
feature and build as well as coloring to be close blood kin, though they weren’t.

“Not quite as generous as it looks at first glance, boy,” she said. “It’s in the Palouse
out east, not the Willamette.”

Lioncel frowned. He’d been too young then to really follow things, but . . .

“Didn’t we—the Association—split the Palouse with old President-General Lawrence Thurston
of Boise just before the war, my lady?”

“Right, and a couple of armies have passed that way since, so the only other living
claimants are pronghorns and prairie dogs. Good wheat and sheep land, though; it’s
near a rail line when we get that fixed, and there’s water enough given work and money.
By the time Diomede’s my age, it’ll be valuable.”

“Their Majesties are generous,” Lioncel said, thinking hard. “But you certainly deserve
it, my lady. You’ve been a, ah, a pillar of the dynasty”—that had started with her
working as an assassin for Lady Sandra, early on. Right after the Change, during the
Foundation Wars, when she was only a little older than he was now—“since the beginning!”
he concluded, tactfully.

She’d also been a duelist in the Crown’s interest, and still had a chest full of expired
lettres de cachet
signed “Sandra Arminger” and inscribed with the dreaded phrase:
the bearer has done what has been done by my authority, and for the good of the State.

“And you commanded the rearguard on the retreat from Walla Walla last year, and led
the charge at the Horse Heaven Hills. A good lord rewards his most faithful vassals
with land. It’s the only wealth that’s really real.”

My lady wants me to pick something out here. What is it? What am I missing?

“OK, Lioncel, look at it as if
you
were on the throne. What’s the reason
not
to spill land grants wholesale like candied nuts out of a piñata?”

“Ummm . . . well, God isn’t making any more land, my lady. Fiefs are hereditary so
it’s a lot easier to give it out than to get it back into the Crown demesne.”

“Right. Now, specifics: Sandra Arminger already sponsored me into the Association
in the first place, knighted me with her own hands, and gave me everything I have.
She was your mother’s sponsor too. And I was one of Mathilda’s tutors for a long time.
I . . . and your parents . . . owe everything to her family.”