She glanced over. Juniper shrugged:
“It would be more accurate to say that everyone else trusts you to do the negotiations. . and trusts me to keep watch on you, Sandra. And that Corvallis can’t do anything without six days of debate, including deciding on what’s for dinner, much less who short of a committee of dozens should have plenipotentiary powers. Which is why the people there, if not the Faculty Senate, are keen for the High Kingship.”
John Red Leaf looked around, apparently noticing that he and his son were the only males in the room. “Ah. . you folks got some sort of matriarchy thing going here?”
“Not exactly,” Sandra said dryly. “Though it can seem that way at times.”
Tiphaine spoke for the first time; she had a strong soprano, with a tone like cool water sliding over gravel in a mountain stream:
“You might say that a lot of our first-generation leadership came down with mutually terminal cases of testosterone poisoning.”
Three Bears looked puzzled, but his father barked amusement. “Yeah! Seen a fair bit of that in our neck of the woods too. A bunch of guys who thought they were a lot more like Conan than they really were. Watching the wrong movies’ll do that to you.”
Then both he and his son took a sudden second look at the Grand Constable. Juniper had fought occasionally with her own hands in the early Change Years, but she didn’t claim to be any sort of warrior; at only a little over five feet she just didn’t have the heft, for starters. But she had a very good fighting-man for her handfasted husband, and had been around many others for decades now. She knew exactly what they were looking at-details of stance and subtle movement, the wrists and hands, the thin scars that showed under the sleeves of the surcoat and shirt and on her tanned face. Other things that showed only in the chilly gray eyes, and the worn sweat-stained look of the leather and wire wrapping on the longsword’s hilt, shaped by constant use to fit the wielder’s palm. A sudden slight wariness showed on both their faces, and a small, brief, bleak smile on Tiphaine’s; she gave them a very slight nod.
The Sioux leader turned back to Sandra and hesitated. “Ah. . you understand, this place has been a bit of a shock. I mean, your daughter Mathilda. . the Princess Mathilda. . and the others described things for us but I thought she was, ah, maybe being a bit colorful.”
Juniper intervened. “They’re finding the Association a little. . picturesque, Sandra.”
“Perfectly understandable,” the PPA regent said.
One slim, tastefully plucked brown eyebrow went up at the headdress the Sioux leader had put aside on the table, and the rest of the tribal finery. Red Leaf’s heavy-featured face split in a smile.
“OK, I admit, you’ve got a point. . Lady Sandra. This stuff’s your warbonnet.”
“And then there’s Dun Juniper,” Sandra said.
“It’s as big as this?” Red Leaf said, surprised.
“No, not nearly as large, but it’s every bit as picturesque. I’ve heard it described as looking like. . ah. . the biggest, gaudiest Celto-Chinese restaurant in the universe.”
Juniper stifled a laugh, and Sandra went on: “But enough pleasantries.”
Her slight smile died: “Can you commit the Seven Council Fires, then, Chief Red Leaf?” she asked, with gentle implacability. “Can you say yes or no to this alliance?”
“In theory, no,” Red Leaf said. “Yeah, we’ve got a lot more organization than we did the last time we were independent, but we don’t have a King or Bossman or Dictator or anything like that. We didn’t want anything like that. Mostly the tunwan, the nation, handles foreign affairs and leaves us alone except for keeping us from fighting each other.”
“Except for horse theft, from the intelligence reports,” Tiphaine commented, in her cool-water-over-rock voice.
“Yeah, that’s the national sport. That and football. But I helped put the whole thing together at the beginning, I talked things over with the other VIPs before I left, I’m pretty damned influential, and this is about foreign policy. So I can make promises for all the Seven Tribes, provided I don’t go completely. . off the reservation. .”
Sandra and Juniper both winced very slightly. Red Leaf grinned and continued:
“Everyone will be together for me to talk to when I get back. We’ve got a mutual problem, and his name’s Sethaz, aka the Prophet, and his merry band of fanatics and magicians and general all-around cutthroat scumbags out of Corwin. And his buddy in Boise, General-President Thurston.”
“Or his name is legion,” Juniper said.
Sandra nodded. “They are. . alarming in some respects.”
“Yeah, our Sacred Men say the same thing, and I’ve met some of the Cutter. . High Seekers they call them. Once was more than enough; those bastards seriously creep me out. They’re not natural; there’s something else living in there, like. . what was that Howard guy, not the one who wrote Conan, the one who wrote the horror stories. .”
“Lovecraft,” Juniper and Sandra said together.
“Yeah, like that. And just before we left to make this trip, all our Sacred Men and Wise Women and whatnot went bananas about something. Especially my uncle, who did the hunkalowanpi, the making-relatives ceremony for your kids when we adopted ’em last year. Started talking about the akacita wakan. That’s some. .”
His mouth twitched ironically. “. . heap big medicine.”
“Akacita wakan: Sacred Messengers, specifically,” Juniper said clinically.
She’d studied more Ways than her own from her girlhood, and had looked up more when her son’s letters spurred her interest; that had led to her arranging this meeting.
Red Leaf spread his hands in a balancing gesture. “You know, I was always all for the old ceremonies. It reminds us of how we’re a people. . which with all the, um, volunteers we got right after the Change was a pretty good thing. But I never took it all that seriously before, myself.”
Three Bears looked uncomfortable; his father nodded at him. “Right, I know it makes you antsy to hear it, Rick, but this is time for putting cards on the table.”
Sandra nodded. “I had very much the same attitude,” she said. “Allowing for local circumstances. Until recently, as you said.”
“Until recently, and that’s a mouthful. I was wrong. My uncle said the wakan people, the spirits, were finally getting real tired of the Cutters. About fff. . time, if you ask me, the way their spirits seem to have been beating on everyone in the vicinity.”
“That would have been at Imbolc,” Juniper said crisply. “I doubt that anyone who has the Sight. . anyone on this continent at least. . didn’t sense that something had happened.”
“I’ve had a dozen new crazed preachers proclaiming that a Crusade against Corwin is God’s Will since then,” Sandra said. “One of them’s traveling around with a tame wolf, talking to the birds, too. Not to mention bishops. Even bishops I didn’t put up to it myself. Marvelous are the works of God.”