“You knew him?” Astrid asked. “Personally, I mean.”
If he had, it had been after she went through. Of course, a good deal could happen in twenty-five years. Thurston had been one more refugee trying to get out of metro Seattle then.
“Yeah. I worked with him when we joined up with Boise, which was relatively peaceful, back in Change Year Four. OK, he was always a serious hard-ass, but he was an honest man too, and he meant it about putting the country back together, as near as anyone could after the Change. Then suddenly after the battle at Wendell back two years ago the President was dead and his boy was running things.”
“Which I recall you weren’t altogether against,” the Nez Perce chief said.
“Not at first. I knew Martin was smart. But then we were allied with the Prophet, who’s all of a sudden supposed to be helping us restore America, and then we’re fighting off in the west. And the story about Frederick Thurston being behind his father’s death. Damned suspicious I said right off, you’ll recall.”
“Not too loudly,” Eddie added.
“Nope. Lately things have happened to folks who got too loud about being unhappy. Or who say they don’t think young Fred was to blame for his father’s death, especially if it sounds like they had Martin in mind instead.”
“Like, Fred Thurston is any better than his big brother?”
“Much better,” Astrid said firmly. “And we have eyewitness testimony that it was Martin who killed his father. Finished him off after the Prophet’s men wounded him, that is. And strong suggestive evidence that he let his father’s command center be attacked by the Cutters in the hope that the President would be killed. In collusion with the Prophet.”
Woburn nodded slowly. “Yeah. I can see that. And. .” He hesitated. “That’s what Mrs. Thurston thinks, too. Thinks that blond bitch he married put him up to it, as well. Not that he needed much persuasion, probably.”
Eddie Running Horse sat upright. “You never mentioned that, Bob!”
The rancher-Sheriff chuckled dryly. “Well, now, what were we saying about what happened to folks who went around flapping their lips a lot, these days? Yeah, I know Cecile. And I know some other people who know her, people who live in Boise and can pass word along.”
“Ah,” Astrid said neutrally, feeling things moving in her head, like the Watcher at the Ford beneath the waters by Durin’s Doors. “That is quite interesting, Sheriff.”
“Poor lady, I sure don’t envy her any, stuck in Boise with that son of hers, and two daughters to look after,” Woburn said. “It’d take a hard man to harm his own kin, but if the rumors are right Martin’s exactly that sort of hard man. Bad man, come to it.”
“Perhaps something could be done about that,” Astrid said, her eyes looking beyond the circle of fire for a while. “That would let young Frederick tell everyone the truth and hope to be believed, if his mother was backing him up.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Woburn said, taking a final ceremonial puff on the pipe. “He’s fallen in with some mighty strange company-this Artos fellow we hear tell of, and those knights-in-armor people and all.”
“Hey, let me tell you about Rudi,” Three Bears said, speaking up in the company of his elders for the first time. “That’s what his friends, Fred Thurston included, were calling him when he showed up in our country. Then-”
Astrid smiled to herself as the highly colored tale of adventure and derring-do sounded. Even compared to the Histories it made a stirring epic; and her nieces were involved with it too, to the honor of the Dunedain and her House.
“OK, that’s impressive,” Woburn said, and Eddie nodded. “But I’m still not sure. . I don’t want to see Idaho invaded.”
“That’s see the United States invaded, Bob,” Eddie said. “And if you don’t believe me-”
“Just ask Martin Thurston, yeah,” Woburn said. “It’s still our home, whatever it gets called.”
He wrapped his hand in a kerchief to reach out and pour more chicory from the tin pot balanced on a stone at the edge of the fire. At his raised brows Astrid held out her own cup. He went on as he clunked the pot back on the fire:
“Still, fighting and killing and burning on our own land. . and then what? Those weirdos building castles here?”
“No, that’s not what we had in mind at all,” Alleyne said smoothly. “We. . we Rangers and the other free communities. . fought the Portland Protective Association and beat them, ourselves.”
More or less beat them, Astrid admitted to herself. Beat them enough that they abandoned any ambitions to conquer the rest of us. And that may be as much due to Norman Arminger dying as anything else; they got less greedy without him to drive them on. Or more patient, perhaps. Certainly Sandra is. Saruman in a cotehardie, if you ask me.
“They’re just one power among many, and nobody’s going to let them hand out fiefs,” her husband went on. “But we do think it’s time we stopped having wars among ourselves.”
Astrid waved her cup. “Why should we fight each other? There’s all the land and all the game and all the grazing any of us need or our children’s children will need for a very long time. Trade will make us richer than stealing.”
She signed and one of her ohtar handed her two small sealed bags of waxed paper, each exuding a faint rich scent.
“For example. .”
She handed them to Woburn and Running Horse.
“The real bean?” Woburn said reverently.
“Jesus!” the Nez Perce chief whispered.
Astrid nodded. She’d never liked coffee all that much herself, despite Swedish and Danish ancestors, but she did love tea, and it had been a good day when the real leaf started trickling in through Astoria and Newport.
“We Rangers make our living guarding caravans and putting down bandits in peacetime, and believe me, the bandits enjoy the holiday when we’re on war-duty. And this is the new world, the Changed world. We can’t have a government that ties everything up in paper and forms anymore. The land is too big.”
“Got a point there,” Woburn said. “Still. .”
“Wouldn’t it be better for Boise to be part of something bigger, but still fully autonomous within its own borders?” Alleyne asked. “And for the ruler in Boise to leave the rest of Idaho to govern themselves in most things, rather than taking your young men and crops and horses for its wars? Especially if, umm, Reunification could come anyway.”
“With a King?” Woburn asked, shaking his head.
“An Ard Ri, a High King. Who presides, but has only enough power to keep us from fighting each other and enforce a few clear rules. No costly standing armies to support, no armies of clerks telling everyone what to do, either.”
“How does that work?” Woburn said. “I like the bit about the clerks. If you knew the forms and regulations they’ve brought in this past year-and there were enough before. .”
“The High King has only what the founding laws and the member realms give him, what they are willing to levy on themselves in money or troops. There will be a Meeting of delegates from each people, to oversee things, as well, and a High King’s court to decide disputes between them.”
Eddie Running Horse nodded. “Sounds OK. I’m not dead set on Boise being the capital of whatever but it would be nice not to have to worry so much about the neighbors.”
Woburn frowned. The talk flowed on late into the night. When she lay at last in her sleeping bag, Astrid cuddled her back up against Alleyne’s and stared at the fading banked embers, glowing like red stars in the deep velvet blackness of a moonless night.
That poor lady, held captive in Boise by a murdering usurper, she thought. Something has to be done about that. Eilir and I swore that oath to succor the defenseless. .