"Ere," Ritva agreed. Shit seemed appropriate.
"There's one of the pagans!" a scrawny man in well worn clothes screeched, pointing at the tree-and-stars on her jerkin, visible in the doorway. He threw a rock at her.
Crash. The two pound cobblestone went through an irreplaceable pre Change window and knocked over a stand of arrows. A number of people in the crowd-turning-into a-riot started their way.
Ritva and her sister looked at each other and picked up two of the round shields, slipped on their helmets, and each grabbed a yard long ax handle from a bin.
"Isaac! Reuben!" Isherman called.
His two sons were seventeen and eighteen; otherwise they looked almost as much alike as Mary and Ritva, and much like their father, down to the skullcaps. The young men scooped up helmets and shields and clubs. Half a dozen other shopkeepers from up and down the street were coming out as well, carrying everything from sledgehammers to blacksnake whips.
In Bend, most respectable citizens were sworn in as deputy peace officers in advance. You could riot here pretty freely, as long as you accepted that the local taxpayers were just as free to bash your head in for it.
Bang!
Another rock cracked off the two-foot circle of bullhide covered plywood on her arm as she hopped down into the street off the board sidewalk. She took a dozen paces and made a long lunge of the sort she'd have used with her sword and poked the man in the belly with the end of the stick, hard. He went uffff! and folded over. Unlike someone stabbed in the gut with a longsword, he'd be getting up again; Mary rapped him behind the ear with carefully calculated force as they went by to make sure his resurrection didn't happen too soon or too comfortably.
"Adventure," Ritva said, as they moved in well-drilled unison and tried to watch all directions at once.
I really wouldn't like to get stabbed in the back here, or have my brains knocked out with a brick.
"Ere," her sister said, nodding.
The High Cascades, Central Oregon
April 20, CY23/2021 A.D.
"We're not moving fast enough," Ingolf said, hitching his thumbs into the straps of his pack.
His teeth wanted to chatter. It was an effort of will not to be depressed-the sensations of being wet and cold were similar enough that it was easy to let the one slip into the other. And another effort not to snap at Rudi's indecent cheerfulness.
White flakes were falling out of the sky, drifting down silently between the tall dark green firs and hemlocks, muffling sound, making even the smells of sap and wet earth seem faded. The flakes that landed on him were big and fluffy and a little wet, the sort you got at the beginning and end of winter back home as well. So far they were sticking on the branches but not much on the ground, and the rocky dirt of the game path was turning to rocks mixed with cold mud. But the temperature was falling with the sun, somewhere up above the gray ceiling that was coming closer and closer.
The breath of the three men steamed in the cold air, and Garbh was walking along with her head down and a white scruff starting to build up on her black-and-gray fur.
The clouds already hid the mountaintops, and now the thin air was wet at the same time. Luckily the pathway ran along the slope here rather than up and down the forty degree mountainside. You could trust a couple of generations of deer to find the easiest way through.
"At least you two know how to handle cold weather in these mountains," Ingolf said. "Cold winters I'm at home with, but I was born a lowlander and I nearly got killed coming over the Cascades last year."
Something in the way Rudi's shoulders set ahead of him made him go on a little sharply: "You are experi enced at handling winter weather here, right? It's only a couple of days' walk from where you live."
Rudi stopped; behind Ingolf, Edain did as well. "No, I'm not," Rudi said shortly, turning to face him. "No body comes up this high except in summer, usually. Not even bandits."
"No point," Edain said helpfully. "The big game all migrates down to the foothills or the valley in winter-time. And these are wet mountains, here on the western side, as wet as wet can be."
Rudi chimed in: "They get a lot of snow, twenty, thirty feet in a winter, sometimes more. And it can happen right up until June."
"Yeah, I can see that," Ingolf said dryly. "If we really didn't want anyone to notice us, this was the way to come, by God."
He looked up the boulder-strewn slope where the old granulated drifts were still waist deep, the surface rap idly disappearing under the new fall. Off to the right a fair-sized river was rushing unseen in a deep cleft, hard enough with the first of the spring flood that sometimes it shook the rock under his feet. The temperature was dropping faster now, and the snow fell more thickly. But not in straight lines out of the sky; the tips of the tall pointed trees were beginning to move a little, and the snow slanted as it picked up speed.
A low moaning began as the wind strengthened, at first the sort of teasing almost sound that you couldn't swear to, then louder and louder.
"Look, we have both lain out in the woods often enough in wintertime," Rudi said.
Ingolf nodded, but that was not the same thing. Down on the floor of the Willamette snow lasted a week at the outside, usually a lot less. He'd been told that some win ters didn't have any at all. There was nothing like the months of hurt-your-face freezing weather he was used to back home in the Kickapoo country on either side of Christmas. Or the blizzards that he'd experienced out on the high plains in the Dakotas, which could kill a man trying to get from the campfire to a tent fifteen feet away. Up here, six or seven thousand feet higher than the valley floor, it probably got just that bad-or possibly even worse. Judging from what he'd gone through last year in the Santiam Pass, which was lower and warmer than this area… it was worse.
The trouble was that every particular stretch of the world had its own way of killing you, and the countermeasures were usually highly specific too. What worked in the Kickapoo country wouldn't always work in the north woods, and neither set of skills would map right onto the shortgrass plains of the Dakotas. He guessed that went double for mountains… which, to date, he'd mostly traveled in the summertime.
"OK, it looks like our luck has run out," he said, jerking a thumb upward.
Rudi and Edain looked up, took deep breaths to taste the weather, looked at the snow, blinking as flakes drove into their faces.
"You could be saying that," Rudi said with a wry smile, and the other Mackenzie added:
"Just a wee bit."
Rudi went on: "I'd say we're in for a really bad one-last of the season, perhaps, but bad. By tomorrow morn ing it could be twelve feet deep. Good day to stay home drinking mulled cider and roasting nuts by the fire and telling stories."
Ingolf joined in the laugh. They were experienced woods runners and hunters, after all. Just not in as many environments as he'd seen. Rudi wrapped his knit scarf around his face, leaving only the eyes uncovered.
"And cold enough to freeze off your wedding tackle," Ingolf said. At Edain's grin: "I'm not joking, kid. I've seen it happen."
The young man looked stricken and visibly refrained from a reassuring clutch at himself. Rudi thumped him on the back.
"And are you glad you switched to trousers the now, eh?" he said.
Edain shuddered and nodded. They were all in thick wool pants over long johns and fleece-lined boots of oiled leather, with bulky sheepskin coats worn hair side in and knitted caps and good gloves; that and the heavy packs made them look like fat white snowmen in the growing blizzard. They had their cased bows and quivers over their backs as well, and the two clansmen wore their plaids and carried six foot quarterstaves of ashwood with iron butt caps. The warm clothes weren't perfect protection against freezing to death, particularly if they got wet. And they would, if they kept walking too long, or they'd simply get buried, if the snow could come as deep as the other two said.