A Meeting at Corvallis (19 page)

“Little John Hordle? I've heard of him. He's the one put down Mack, Baron Liu's mad dog, isn't he?”

“With help. And with him is Alleyne Loring, who's a good friend of Astrid now.”

Finney cocked an enquiring eye at her. “And where's Sir Nigel Loring? I've heard of him, too.”

Juniper frowned for a second, then shrugged. “He stayed in Dun Juniper, said he had something to do there.”

Then she shook off whatever was troubling her and went on: “And then tomorrow we can talk seriously about the Faculty Senate.”

“Damn right,” Edward Finney said, looking every inch his father's son, despite the stocky frame and the beginnings of a kettle belly. “
Damn
right. I really don't like that proposal they've got that the city should lease out the vacant lands in big lots to the highest bidder. Sure, it would cut taxes, and sure, it's just supposed to be for temporary grazing to keep the brush down, but—”

Mathilda Arminger bobbed her head enthusiastically with the beat and tapped her hands on her knees, perched on a truss of hay. The floor of the big barn had been cleared, except for the loose-boxes behind her that held the farm's draught-horses and some of the visitors' riding mounts; lanterns made it bright, in a flickery way that shifted as draughts swung them from the rafters. Juniper Mackenzie was perched on a bale she'd spread with her plaid not far away, her legs tucked beneath her, grinning and fiddling in perfect improvised accord with a scrawny middle-aged accordion player in bib overalls and a billowy young woman wielding a tuba. The
oom-pa-pa-oom-pa-pa
beat of the polka filled the big timber-frame building, and the feet of a dozen couples thumped on the boards of the floor; fragments of straw glistened gold as they floated around the dance floor amid the scuffing shoes, and she sneezed at the dusty smell.

Not much like home,
Mathilda thought; neither the tinkle and buzz of Society-style music, nor the a capella rap and norteño which were the alternatives, nor the hoarded classical vinyl that her mother adored, even played on a wind-up gramophone.
But I like it. Makes you want to jump!
Home seemed more and more distant now anyway, most of the time. It had been a while since she cried quietly into her pillow for her mother.

The tune built to a conclusion and died away. The dance broke up in laughter and talk, and people headed over to the rough trestle table of planks spread with drinks and nibblements, with hot cider in a big, bubbling pot suspended over a metal brazier, and root beer and soda water as well. Edward Finney's sons Hans and Simon attended to the beer kegs they'd brought in on their shoulders a careful forty-eight hours before, and left in their U-shaped wooden rests to settle and chill; they were big young men, bullock-muscular from hard work, much alike except that one had dark brown curly hair and the other's was straw-colored and straight. They handled the beer barrels with casual expertise, adroitly whipping out the spile bungs on top, and knocking the taps into the corks with a few sharp blows.

Hans shouldered his slightly younger and slightly lighter brother aside and drew a frothing mug, holding it up to the light, sniffing it to make sure no secondary fermentation had spoiled it, and then taking a long draught.

Then he grinned broadly and shouted:
“Das Bier schmeckt gut!”
in German with an execrable American accent.

“Lots of practice there!” someone yelled, and there was more laughter as three sisters ranging in age from seventeen to six set out mugs.

Mathilda belched gently while she considered heading towards the table herself. There were some
very
good-looking things there, and good-smelling;
Honigkuchen
honey cakes,
Elisen
gingerbread made with powdered hazelnuts,
Pfefferkuchen
fragrant with a hoarded package of spices whose like nobody was likely to see for a long time, fluffy
Springerle
with anise…

No,
she thought.
I'm real full from dinner. I'm
really
full. I'd better not.

One thing she remembered well about her father was that he always looked down on people who couldn't discipline themselves. She clutched harder at memories as they faded.

Rudi came back with a slice of cake and sat and nibbled beside her. “This is great!” he said. “I always like visiting the Finneys.”

Epona came over to the edge of the box behind them, drawn by the sound of his voice; the great wedge-shaped black head bent above the wooden railing, and started to gently lip his tumbled red-gold hair. Rudi laughed, and fed her a bit of the cake; she took it from his palm with a delicate twitch of her lips.

Mathilda nodded. “And…well, nobody's being mean to me anymore,” she said.

The son of the Mackenzie chieftain looked at her as he rubbed a hand along the mare's jaw. “Well, yeah! Duh! It's
geasa
. Mom should have done that months ago, you ask me. But she doesn't like to
make
people do things, even when it's something good.”

“Why not?” Mathilda asked.

Rudi frowned. “I think it's 'cause people aren't as happy or good when they think you're pushing them around,” he said after a hesitation. “Nobody should be a bully. It comes back at you, Mom says, and always when it's the worst time. But sometimes you
have
to give them a push, if you're the Chief.”

Juniper came back to her bale with a mug of the beer in her hand, and sat to drink and blow out a
wuff
of satisfaction. She caught the last of the words, and nodded.

“You do, sometimes. Just remember that the world has a way of pushing back.” She took a long drink of beer the color of old honey and raised her voice: “Now, that's a noble brew, Ted. Wheat beer, isn't it, for all that it's dark?”

Gertrud Finney answered from over near the tables; she was a full-figured woman a few years older than Juniper, with dark blond braids wound around her head, wearing a blouse and dirndl that looked as if they spent most of their time in a chest. A slight guttural south-German accent still marked her English.

“It's
Hefe-weizenbock,
Juney, yes, half wheat, half barley. My father and brother worked in the
Aktienbrauerei Kaufbeuren,
and I remember a bit. We experiment, now that we have time for it. It is not perfect, not yet.”

“Not far from it, though,” Juniper said, smacking her lips slightly, with what Rudi called her Chief-face peering out for a moment. “Dennis Martin in Dun Juniper would be interested in the way of making it, and Brannigan over to Sutterdown.”

“Not even Abbot Dmwoski gets this formula!” Gertrud said, with a mock-ferocious scowl, shaking a finger. “Much less you heathen witches!”

They made signs at each other—the Horns and the Cross—and then raised their mugs, laughing across the barn's floor. Aoife Barstow came up to Juniper as she finished and bent to murmur in her ear. The Mackenzie chieftain nodded, looked around and called a few names. A drummer with the bodhrans under her arms came to sit beside her, and a piper—the uilleann pipes, not the great war-drones—and a young man known for his voice stood smiling nearby.

Juniper exchanged a few words with the other musicians and then raised her voice; the buzz of talk instantly dropped away.

“We'll be doing a piece named ‘Donnal MacGillavry,' and perhaps a final song or two, then allowing everyone to seek their beds, or their straw,” she said, tucking the violin under her chin. “And if you'll clear a space for them, Aoife Barstow and Liath Dunling here will dance a bit.”

The bodhran drum began, beaten slow but gradually speeding its tempo, and then the pipes behind it. The young man's clear tenor joined as Juniper's fiddle did:

Mathilda leaned over, looking at the kilted dancers; Aoife was familiar, but the other woman was a little younger, just turned eighteen, with long brown hair in a single braid and an unremarkable round face made pretty by youth and health and happiness. She wore her shirt open a little to show a new tattoo at the base of her throat. That might have been a crescent moon, but it wasn't; it was a strung bow, the Warrior's Mark, a fashion among the younger Mackenzies when they passed the First Armsman's tests and became liable for the Clan's fighting levy, and for duties like this trip escorting the Chief. Sam Aylward himself disapproved of it, as he did painting faces before a fight, but both new customs had spread nonetheless.

Rudi thought it had come from one of the old songs or stories, but he wasn't sure; he
was
sure he intended to have it done himself, just as soon as he was old enough.

Mathilda whispered in Rudi's ear as the two Mackenzies unsheathed their dirks and held them overhead, the bright metal catching the lantern light; they stood side by side, left hand on hip, weight on that leg and right toe just touching the floor, and they'd put their flat bonnets back on, with the signs of their sept totems, Aoife's raven-feathers and Liath's tuft of wolf-fur.

“Liath…I thought her name was Jeanette?” she said. “Doesn't she live at Sam's place?”

“She's his wife's youngest aunt's daughter,” Rudi said automatically, leaning forward as the dancers took their first step forward. “Changed her name when she was Initiated just a little while ago—you know, the way a lot of people do, if their birth-name's old-fashioned and silly. Aoife used to be called Mary, I think.”

“Oh,” Mathilda said. “I think some people do that up north, too. Different stories, though, so the names are different. Arthur and Roland and Ger and Lancelot and Verranger.”

Liath and Aoife bowed and twirled and leapt, their feet flashing faster and faster, the sound of them on the worn oak boards of the barn's floor like the skittering throb of the bodhrans themselves, dancing side-by-side, then face-to-face, then back-to-back. The audience clapped to the rhythm and roared out the chorus:

“Oh, no!” Rudi said suddenly, slapping himself on the forehead.

“What?”

“That's what Dan meant about Aoife falling in love again!
He
was bummed about it too!”

“I thought her boyfriend's name was Connor?”

“Connor Ianatelli? He dumped her and got handfasted with someone over at Dun Carson and moved there just after Yule. Didn't you hear about it?”

“Who cared about that soppy stuff? I was sooooo excited when Sam gave me that bow. A new one! All my own!”

Rudi smiled. “Well, Mom
did
lay that
geasa
on all of us, you know. So Sam had to be as nice to you as he was to me. Besides, he likes you. It's hard to tell that with Sam if you don't know him.”

“So Connor got married and left?” Mathilda said; she liked to keep things straight and orderly in her mind.

“Yup. To a cousin of Cynthia Carson, a girl named…named…” He slapped himself on the forehead again. “A girl named Airmed! Her family's got a part of the new vineyard there. I remember it all 'cause Mom yelled at Aoife about it.”

“Yelled at Aoife because Connor dumped her for Airmed?”

“No, 'cause Aoife was so mad she tried to cast a spell to make Airmed's toenails split and her hair fall out and things.”

“Can't you witches do that?”

“Well, of course we
can
, we're just not
supposed
to, it's against the rules. Besides, Airmed's a witch too. That's really really
really
not a good idea, putting a hex on another witch. They can tell.”

“Oh. Well, so who's Aoife in love with now?”

“Liath, of course,” he said impatiently, gesturing towards the dance, and rolled his eyes upward.

“But Liath's a girl too!”

“So?” Rudi said, puzzled. “Sometimes that's the way it happens.”

Mathilda looked at him. “But
that's
against the rules. And it's…icky.”

“Why?” Rudi asked, and then nodded as he remembered. “Oh, yeah, it's
geasa
for you Christians, isn't it?” he said tolerantly. “Like not eating meat in Lent? It's different for us witches.”

“But then why was Dan bummed about it?”

“'Cause Aoife's cool most of the time, but she's a complete
pain
when she falls for someone, everyone knows that. You weren't around the last time, with Connor. She gets real boring; all she wants to talk about is how wonderful whoever-it-is is; she won't do anything that's fun at all, it's all gooey eyes and mushy songs and stuff like it wasn't just the same way the
last
time. And we're gonna be stuck listening to her 'cause Uncle Chuck has her
guarding
us all the time…maybe it'll be better this time…Oh, Lord and Lady, Liath's in the First Levy now, she'll be on guard with us too! You're my best friend, Matti, but this guarding thing is a pain in the
arse
. Really. I wish your folks would…oh, never mind.”