S. Stirling - Dies The Fire

While they talked with Dennis, she hurried down the interior stairway, arriving in time to be composed and dignified as they walked up the roadway, leading their mounts.

They'd come unarmored; all wore broad-brimmed dark hats with silver medallions on their bands, and they were all dressed alike in what wasn't quite a uniform. Boots, loose dark trousers and lapover jackets secured by sashes and broad leather belts, with a bear's head embroidered in red over the left breast:

She felt something of that first shock again, like an echo from distant cliffs. Her body remembered the way he moved, light and quick and easy, with a relaxed alertness..

Mom, Eilir signed discreetly. Stop it with the lascivious drooling! You're practically ripping his clothes off with your eyes!

I am not! she signed, and then thought silently to herself: Not quite. Still, if this one were a movie star in the old days: as the saying goes, there wouldn't have been a dry seat in the house.

The tall young woman beside him. Her looks were Nordic perfection, in an outdoorsy way, down to the long butter-blond braids that framed her face. Except for a small scar across the bridge of her nose, almost a nick, leaving a slight dent, and a continuation on one cheek; her coat hung loose, and her left arm was in a sling. That didn't seem to dampen her spirits, though; she smiled as she walked, curving in instinctively towards the Bearkiller leader.

Ah, well, Juniper thought wistfully. I have my Rudi. and the best of the bargain, perhaps. Lord Bear's luck is hard on those close to him, I think.

As the Bearkillers walked up the roadway, Dorothy cut loose with her pipes, pacing formally back and forth along the battlement of the gatehouse. That was three stories of squared logs up, but it was still loud. Juniper and her Advisors-it was becoming a title, somehow- stood to meet the Bearkiller leaders. She was in full fig; jacket, ruffled shirt, kilt, plaid fastened over her shoulder with a brooch, down to the flat Scots bonnet with antlers-and-moon clasp and raven feather and the little sgian dhu knife tucked into her right stocking. Most of the others were in kilts as well, and as much of the rest as could be hastily cobbled up-some of it had served as costumes, at Samhain.

The blond woman leaned closer to Lord Bear. Juniper had a great deal of experience at picking voices out from background noise; it went with being a musician. She fought to keep her lips from quirking upward as she heard:

"Help, Mike! I've fallen into Brigadoon and I can't get out!"

"It's like. it's like Edoras, and the Golden Hall of Medusel!" Astrid said, waving an arm through the open gates at the carved and painted wood of the Hall. "Didn't I say so?"

"Oh, great, Hobbiton-in-the-Cascades," Eric grumbled.

He had new scars since she'd seen him that spring; long white ones on the backs of his hands, and several the same on his face; he'd also shaved his head, save for a yellow scalp lock on top. It all made him look older and grimmer, and there was a hard light in his eyes now, but his grin was still charming and reminded her of the boy he'd been.

The Bearkiller leader made a slight shushing sound, and his eyes met Juniper's. That gave her a slight jolt; it also made her sure as they narrowed slightly that he knew she'd overheard the remark, and met her suppressed grin with an equally discrete one of his own.

I like this man, she thought, and went on aloud:

"Lord Bear."

She glanced down the laneway; that was where they'd set their rampant-bear flag with with the polished bear skull on the top of its pole.

"Point taken," he said, acknowledging the flamboyant standard and his own title. Then he did grin. "My fianc? Signe Larsson."

"I'm Juniper Mackenzie, chief of Clan Mackenzie," Juniper said, shaking hands and smiling. "And a musician before the Change. I'll play at your wedding, I hope!"

He went on with introductions for the rest of his party: "Angelica Hutton; our camp boss and quartermaster. My prospective brother-in-law, you've met. Only since then he's become Taras Bulba."

Eric snorted as he shook her hand; a strikingly pretty dark-skinned girl stood next to him. "Glad to see you again, Lady Juniper. And Mike has no sense of style. Besides which, I nearly got killed when my hair was caught in some barbed wire. My wife, Luanne. N? Hutton."

Lord Bear- Mike Havel, let's not keep the show going all the time, she thought-took up the thread smoothly:

"My father-in-law to be, Kenneth Larsson, engineer."

He looked to be nearly sixty, though fit: with another small shock Juniper realized he was the oldest person she'd seen in weeks; the first year of the Change hadn't been easy on the elderly. It took an instant before she realized that his left forearm ended at a cup and steel hook where his wrist and hand should be.

The woman beside him was in her thirties, tall and wire-slender, olive-skinned, with a narrow hawk-nosed face and russet-brown hair.

"Pamela Arnstein, our swordmistress-fencing instructor- and historian."

"Also the vet and horse doctor," she said. Her accent was Californian, like Dennis's.

Juniper let herself smile as she introduced her people in turn.

"This way," she said when the introductions were done. "Doubtless you've seen our wall-"

"Very impressive," Havel said, sounding like he meant it.

She nodded, proud, and even more proud of the cabins built against its inner surface; that meant every family living here had its own hearth at last. The rest of the four-acre plateau held the two-story Hall, flanked by two near-identical structures, an armory on one side and a school-library-guesthouse on the other. And sheds, workshops and storehouses, log-built on stone foundations.

It all looked a lot neater now that they'd had time to clean up the litter and lay flagstone paths to connect the buildings. Open space lay at the rear of the U, used for everything from soccer matches to public meetings, with another blockhouse tower to watch over the gully that separated the plateau from the hillside behind.

"This is where we started," she said. "There was nothing here but my cabin and some sheds, back before the Change."

Havel's brows rose; she could see that he was impressed again. "Log construction goes fast, but that's a hell of a lot of timber to cut, considering everything else you had to do."

Dennis cut in: "Lady Juniper's luck-Cascade Timber Inc. felled a couple of thousand trees before the Change, and hadn't gotten around to hauling the timber out. We just dragged it out and set it up."

Juniper nodded. "We've got other sites fortified pretty much like this, except that they're down in the flats," she said. "Dun Carson, Dun McFarlane and Dun Laughton- where the other septs of the clan are based."

Signe Larsson chuckled. When Juniper looked over at her, the younger woman said:

"It reminds me of a story I heard once, about some Scottish pirates who retired and settled down. They built three towns-Dunrobbin', Dunrovin', Dunleavin'."

"God, Mike, they have a salad bar!" Signe Larsson said, licking her lips. "Come on, Pam, give me a hand! That'll make three between us."

"Get me some too, would you, askling?" Havel said. "I won't say I'd kill for a green salad, but I'd certainly maim."

She bounced up eagerly. "And this is the man who said a Finnish salad started with a dozen sausages," she cast over her shoulder.

"Impressive spread," Havel went on to his hostess.

Juniper nodded with what she thought was a pardonable smile of pride at the setting as well as the meal. During the rebuilding they'd taken all the interior partitions out of the first floor of her old cabin, save for the cubicle around the bathrooms; the kitchens were gone too, replaced by a long lean-to structure along the rear of the building with salvaged woodstoves and clan-built brick hearths.