The Tears of the Sun (30 page)

In theory I don't really
approve
of Tiph,
Mathilda thought, as she smiled in greeting.
She's an unrepentant sinner in a lot of ways. In practice I'm extremely glad to have her around and besides that I
like
her and Delia. I hope my children will have the chance to be glad of it as well; a dynasty can't have too many loyal, able supporters. Or friends. Swords about a throne.

“Your Majesty,” Tiphaine said, making a leg-bow and sweeping off her hat.

“My lady Grand Constable,” Mathilda said. “Or as some dare call you . . .
Tiph
.”

That startled a rare snort of laughter out of her. Mathilda went on: “Sit down and have a drink, Tiph. You look as if you could use one.”

Tiphaine was in boots and trews and padded arming doublet with mail grommets under the arms. All were black; that was part of her image, and also better for not showing stains. She looked dubiously at the furniture—one of Mother's salvage teams had furnished the domestic parts of this castle from a raid on a Gustav Stickley exhibit in a Seattle museum—and then decided her war-gear wasn't going to do any harm to the Craftsmanschool solidity. She poured herself a glass of wine from the delicate Venetian-style glass decanter turned out recently in a Portland workshop and sat back, easy as a cat—though a tired cat pushing forty now.

“And no formality in private, Tiph. We don't have time.”

“I've been jumping around like a Tinerant tambourine dancer,” the Grand Constable admitted. “You look a bit frazzled too, Matti. Are the local nobility and burghers adequately soothed and stroked about having armies assembling in their fields? Better you than me for that, frankly.”

“You could do it.”

“Yes, but I don't
want
to do it. What sort of reaction did you get?”

“I subtly pointed out that the manor-lords and their tenants would make a lot of money by having so many hungry wage-packets walking around, and that the city was creaming off a lot of gold,” Mathilda said. “They're nervous, but reassured. It was worth sitting through one banquet. Rudi managed to escape because it was all Associates and they needed to be reassured by one of their own. Or at least that was his excuse! Plus he had some Mackenzie politics to take care of after the military stuff, and he really
did
have to handle that himself.”

Tiphaine sipped at the wine. “His Majesty just gave me my marching orders; I'm off tomorrow. Well, the
army
he just gave me is off tomorrow, I'm probably going to have to arrive first
and
last to chivvy everyone along, particularly the Yakima contingents who aren't used to working with the Association. Including them is a good move in about four separate ways, but I'm going to have to sweat to make it work the way he wants.”

Mathilda tried to imagine Tiphaine doing anything else with a mission, and failed.

“Rudi's brilliant about that sort of thing,” she said instead, with a glow of pride. “Not just a pretty face! Young for it, but he's a first-rate general.”

“I've observed that,” Tiphaine said dryly; she
had
been one of his trainers, during his months every year in Association territory since the Protector's War.

Then with something that might have been the barest hint of a wink: “He's even sort of cute . . . for a guy.”

“You're impossible!” Mathilda said.

“No, just improbable. Fortunately only stories have to be plausible; real life just has to exist. Otherwise I'd simply refuse to believe the Sword of the Lady was there at all, for example. Now, what's on your regal mind?”

“First, let Delia know that I'm sorry you two—and Rigobert—couldn't be there for the wedding up at Castle Corbec. We're going to have a commemoration ceremony after the war in the Cardinal-Archbishop's cathedral in Portland, and I want Delia as one of the Matrons of Honor.”

“Thanks, she'll love that. We'll come and she can be matron enough for both of us,” Tiphaine said, refilling her glass. “What's the serious business?”

“Ah, there's some information I need. Chancellor Ignatius has his old boss Abbot-Bishop Dmwoski working on getting an overall view of the CUT's espionage and infiltration operations in our territory.”

“Good choice, Matti,” Tiphaine said judiciously. “He was uncomfortably smart when he was fighting against us, and he's still plenty sharp even if he is semiretired. Plus he has extensive contacts. We need
some
people who aren't rushing around being too busy to see the big picture.”

Mathilda nodded agreement. “And the CUT's going to be a long-term problem even if we manage to decapitate them. Right now he's getting down to the bottom of the House Liu matter. Incidentally I'm going to swear Huon Liu as one of my squires tomorrow and take his sister Yseult into the household as a lady-in-waiting later; if she's got the smarts, and I think she does, I'll have work for her.”

Tiphaine frowned into her glass. “Are you sure that's wise? Speaking of decapitation I
did
do in several of their relatives, one way or another . . . chopped their mother into dog-meat scraps personally and with my own hands, for starters. Had a nasty turn with the rabid bitch
infecting
me somehow, like a bite from a mad dog.”

Mathilda sighed. “Those were necessary measures. I think their personal experiences will make them know, not just know but really
understand
, that it was necessary. That's also why I'm having Dmwoski brief them fully, not just pump them for their perspective. They're smart kids, and besides I owe a rather large debt in that direction for what Odard did. Right now I want you to give me your own impression of what happened with Guelf Mortimer and that agent right after the Battle of Pendleton.” She quirked one corner of her mouth up. “Or the
Cluster-Fuck of Pendleton
, as I understand you christened it.”

Tiphaine shrugged. “I'm actually rather proud of how I handled that. A fighting retreat may not get the bards and troubadours excited, but it's technically the most difficult battlefield maneuver, especially with an army made up of contingents from all over, none of whom love each other that much . . . good practice for the opening phases of this campaign, in fact. Oddly enough, Guelf Mortimer helped a good deal while we were breaking contact, him and Sir Constantine ‘Raging Bull' Stavarov. Stavarov's just an obnoxious idiot, of course.”

“But a good Anvil,” Mathilda said with a chuckle, pouring herself a glass of the wine.

It was a local vintage from the Columbia gorge, a red Malbec with a taste of plums and herbs in its inky purple depths.

Anvil
was a phrase Tiphaine had taught her, originally coined by Conrad Renfrew back when he was Grand Constable; someone solid iron from ear to ear whether he had a helmet on or not, useful primarily for dropping on or throwing at the enemy like a large hard heavy weight. And if the anvil broke . . . you got another anvil.

“If you can imagine an Anvil with a really bad temper and testosterone poisoning,” Tiphaine said. “Guelf, besides being a traitor had delusions of intelligence . . . and if he'd been twice as smart as he thought he was, he'd have been a half-wit. I
did
submit a full report on the business, though.”

“You don't have to hint if you think I'm wasting your time, Tiph. I've read the report and Ignatius forwarded it to Dmwoski; it's got all the
facts
but nothing more. What I want is the rest of it, all the details, how it
felt
at the time. I need to get what Mom calls the
gestalt
of the whole business. Also I have to know how much to tell Huon and Yseult. I'm not going to hide the essentials but there may be personal details they
don't
need to know. They're going to be here in a while, they're fighting traffic on the rail line from Portland, but we'll have time.”

Tiphaine sighed; the younger woman knew that talking about her own emotional states was something her Grand Constable didn't like, as in
would rather juggle live squid in a confessional booth
. She also knew that likes and dislikes weren't all that important to Tiphaine d'Ath when business was involved.

“Well,” Tiphaine said, letting her head fall back against the sofa and closing her eyes. “We finally managed to shake the CUT light cavalry off and consolidate around Hermiston, right on the old border we got after the Protector's War.”

“Just a strip along the south bank of the river there, though.”

“Right, I spent my last day or so there securing the south flank with the CORA levies, who had all the organized cohesion of a bucket of snot. I left the rearguard there and headed back to Portland to get my finger on the pulse and start getting ready for the next enemy offensive because them getting Pendleton really screwed our position, especially south of the Columbia. Nothing between them and the Cascades except the CORA, barring Odell, though we had the castles along the river at the dams and bridges. The first thing
I
knew about what was going on was—”

Tiphaine d'Ath woke to the sound of a little bell tinkling, and made the hand on the hilt of the sheathed dagger under her pillow relax. It was a little dangerous to wake her up directly when she'd been in the field, though even unconscious she knew Delia's touch. She could tell Delia was not in the bed, though. At seven months gone she was a significant weight, dipping even a really good pre-Change mattress like this one.

She sighed, rubbing one hand over her eyes. Candles and two alcohol lanterns lit the room and she couldn't tell what time it was, or for a moment where she really was. Her eyelids were a little crusted with sleep, but they didn't burn as badly as they had when she'd collapsed into bed whenever-itwas before. She'd had a vicious migraine yesterday too, the usual one you got if you wore a helm all day with the inside padding tight around your head and were clouted a couple of times to boot, but by now it was down to a slight throb. She could still feel every overstretched tendon, bruise, wrench and minor abrasion and nick.

Long dismal experience told her that getting up and moving would warm the injured muscles and make her feel a little better. The rest needed willow extract and time; more time than it used to, at that. Her sword hand and wrist in particular felt as if someone had driven a laden wagon over them. Her page Lioncel de Stafford was standing by the bed, muffling the little bell he'd rung and looking disgustingly young—which he couldn't help, at twelve—and fresh and blond and rested.

She sat up, running her fingers through her own tangle of pale hair and then spreading her hands out and looking at them:

“I'm awake, brat, you can put the bell away. Are your mother and father here? What time is it?”

“Yes, my lady. No, my lady. Six fifteen in the morning, my lady. A train arrived with a number of badly wounded men from Hermiston at four a.m. Dowager Molalla and the train master sent for help.”

Tiphaine frowned.
Shit, what went wrong
now
? Did they take a slap at Hermiston? The way I had it set up we should have fed them their livers if they did and the Viscount knows his business.

She tossed the covers back.
I usually wake up when Delia gets out of bed; I must have been really wiped this time, as well as getting older.

This was Delia's room, and she could have told that at a glance even if she hadn't woken up here often enough before; pale pastel colors, controlled and elegant froufrou around the canopy of the four-poster, a spectacular tapestry on one wall showing a mountain scene that looked as if it were taken from a Maxfield Parrish poster and probably had been. Some books, a dressing table that looked as if you needed a seven-year apprenticeship and an examination before a panel of guildmasters to handle all the stuff, an embroidery frame, a fretwork door leading to a clothes closet nearly as large as the bedroom.

There was a gentle scent of sachets and bouquets of roses and rhododendrons, and—

“Oh, God, coffee,” she said.

About one ship a year came in from the Big Island of Hawaii to Astoria or Newport, with coffee as part of its cargo. There were definite perks to being a baron and Grand Constable.

Lioncel brought it from a wheeled tray; it already had the cream and two spoons of sugar she liked. She drank, yawned, swallowed the paper of bitter powdered willow bark extract he handed her, drank more of the coffee and thought as her brain lurched back into motion. Barony d'Ath's town house was smaller and several blocks away.

Lord Rigobert de Stafford, Baron Forest Grove and Marchwarden of the South, had been waiting at Union station. He'd slapped her on the back, told her that everything was in hand and bundled her exhausted form into his pedicab and sent her to his town house and his wife: her lover, Delia. Who had poured several glasses of something sweet down her throat and gotten her into this room, nightshirt and bed, and then darkness had walked up and clubbed her unconscious when she was halfway to the pillow.