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. Nйe 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.
That made it easier to use the ground floor of the Hall for public occasions; tonight tables along the rear wall held the food, and clansfolk and guests sat along the outer perimeter elsewhere; the old fireplace was freestanding now, crackling and adding a reddish glow to the butter-yellow of the kerosene lamps. Holly and ivy festooned the walls, to invite the Good Folk in and bring luck; there were baskets of apples and hazelnuts laid in evergreen boughs, twined with wheat stalks and dusted with flour. Above the hearth where the huge Yule log burned were candles: red, green, white for the season; green and gold and black for the Sun God; and white, red and black for the Great Goddess.
And a big barrel had been set up, full of water and thick with apples.
"Bobbing for apples?" Havel said.
Juniper grinned. "Symbolizing the apples of eternal life," she said. More gravely: "After the past year, we need reminders."
Two roast wild pigs and a haunch of venison held pride of place on either side of it, and roast chicken and barons of beef. But there were heaps of greens as well, the last of the winter gardens: tomatoes, onions, peppers, steamed cauliflower and broccoli, boiled carrots, mashed turnips, potato salad with scallions and homemade mayonnaise, and potatoes grilled with pepper and garlic, mashed and whipped…
For dessert there were fresh fruit and dozens of pies, apple and blueberry and strawberry with rhubarb-honey sweetener instead of sugar, although next year they might be able to cultivate some sugar beets. There was even whipped cream, now that they had a decent dairy herd.
Dennis had the product of his brewery-it was getting a bit large to call it a micro-set up in barrels, along with the mead and wine and applejack.
Juniper waved a hand. "Yule is a major holiday, of course, and… well, right after the Change, we-my original bunch-just planted every garden seed we could get, regardless. So did most of the people around here, the ones who joined us later. Things were very tight until about June, and we're storing all we can, but you can't keep lettuce or green peppers, and we might as well eat the last of them while they're here. Things will be a lot more monotonous again come January and February."
Monotonous, but ample, she thought with profound satisfaction.
The thought of the storehouses and cellars full of wheat and barley and oats, of potatoes and cabbages and dried tomatoes and dried fruit and onions and parsnips and turnips and beets, of the herds and flocks in paddock and byre and pigpen, the full chicken coops, gave her a warm glow she'd never known before the Change. She'd never cared much about money, but hunger and hard work had taught her what real wealth was; it was being full and knowing you could eat well every coming day to next harvest-and that the seed for that harvest was safely in the ground.
Havel nodded. "You're certainly doing very well," he said.