“So you say!”
The Hrossings and Bjornings bristled at each other, and the men of other tribes looked alarmed; that was perilously close to calling Bjarni a liar. Artos stepped forward and pulled the sheathed Sword from its frow.
“Hold!” he said, and held it pommel up between them. “Look. Look and see the truth of each other’s hearts!”
They did, their eyes meeting through the crystal. Artos felt a humming, a meeting and merging. Bjarni’s face went pale. The long horselike countenance of the younger Norrheimer seemed to waver. Then it firmed as he clenched his jaw.
“I have wronged you, lord. I say it. Accept me as your handfast man!”
“I will. It’s right to grieve for a father, but this day Syfrid feasts with the heroes in Valholl. He waits your coming, and your sons, and the sons of your sons.”
Halldor went to one knee, and Artos stepped back smiling very slightly. He and his party faded away, to leave the Norrheimers to settle their own affairs. A man in a long mail hauberk rode up and slid from the saddle with the ease of one who’d lived on horseback.
“Mr. Mackenzie?” he said, extending a hand. “I’m Avery McGillvery, the Rancher here. Many thanks! Your sister gave us just enough warning-she’s in our infirmary, resting.”
“Ah, and that’s good news!” Artos said. He felt something inside him thaw.
“And then you showed up just in time. They’d have been over the wall in another ten minutes.”
Inspector Rollins came up, grinning as well. “A and B troops are nearly here,” he said. “Another four hundred men.”
“So, the Force is with us!” Artos said.
The Rancher and the Inspector laughed. Artos and his party looked at them in surprise.
CHAPTER TWENTY
DOMINION OF DRUMHELLER
(FORMERLY PROVINCE OF ALBERTA)
JUNE 3, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD
Ritva opened her eyes and winced as pain speared into both. A hand was under her head, and held a glass of water to her lips; it was well water, cold and good, and she swallowed it and let her head fall back. A light shone in both her eyes, candle-flame reflected from a mirror in a little box. She was in some sort of big open room, a long whitewashed rectangle with a high ceiling of beams and planks, a school or a church or something of that order. There was a slight smell of blood, and a stronger one of medicines and antiseptic.
“Hi, sis! It’s the day after the battle, if you need to know. We’re visiting the wounded. You count, sorta.”
Mary was grinning down at her-a few scratches on her face and hands, bruises, the white mark a helmet’s padding made across your forehead. Her eye patch had a new silk ribbon, and her hair was back in a neat fighting braid, and she was in formal Dunedain black with the crowned tree and seven stars on her sleeveless doeskin jerkin. She held up a helmet, a plain sallet which after a moment Ritva recognized as her own; it had a crack in the crown and Mary stuck the tip of her little finger through it.
“You keep getting banged up like this, people will be able to tell us apart!” she said, wiggling the finger again.
They smiled at each other wordlessly. Rudi’s face moved into view. “And how are you feeling?”
Ritva made a mental effort-her head ached and he was a little blurry around the edges-and switched to English.
“I feel,” she said, “as if someone shot me in the leg and the shoulder and then hit me over the head with an ax. But you ought to see the shape he’s in.”
“Worse than yours, though you’ll have to stay here for a bit and heal. They’re good people, and much taken with you.”
A groan came from the bed beside her. She looked over; it was Ian Kovalevsky, and the doctor was changing the dressing on his buttock. Rudi chuckled, and for a moment he was the brother she’d known all her life.
“Now there’s an unfortunate,” he said.
“Why?” Ritva asked. “It’s an honorable wound and no worse than mine.”
Kovalevsky groaned again, and the doctor-she was a short slim middle-aged woman in a green tunic and cap and trousers, brown-skinned and gray-haired, with a bird’s fine-boned grace-said in a pleasant chirping singsong accent: “Shut up, babyish boy. There are many more injured than you, oh yes indeed.”
Two younger women helped her, dressed in outfits of the same color and cut and sporting the same stethoscopes around their necks: they were obviously her daughters, and equally obviously their father had been someone who looked more like the Constable.
“It’s not the pain,” the young redcoat said.
Rudi laughed. “No. It’s the thought of being. . what’s your name, lad?”
“Kovalevsky, sir.”
“Being Half-Ass Kovalevsky or something of the sort for the rest of his mortal days.”
“They wouldn’t. .” Ritva started, then thought; she knew young men, including Dunedain. “They would. Even his friends.”
“Especially his friends,” Artos amplified, and the injured man nodded mournfully into his pillow.
“And how am I supposed to show off the scars?” he asked. “Moon everyone?”
“Men,” Ritva and Mary said simultaneously.
The doctor and her helpers pronounced the same curse in almost the same breath. Ritva’s brother laughed-heartlessly, she thought-as the young man hid his head in the pillow.
“And my sister, Dr. . ”
“Dr. Padmi Nirasha,” the woman said, and then looked surprised and pleased as he pressed his palms together before his face and bowed slightly.
“The leg and shoulder wounds are muscle damage and need only time and perhaps some physiotherapy to heal properly, given her excellent physical condition. The blood loss was not too serious, so we used only saline drip. I have disinfected and debrided. There was a concussion also. That is never to be taken lightly, no, no. But recovery is progressing. Strict bed rest for at least the rest of the week is indicated.”
“That’s good to hear,” another voice said; Avery McGillvery. “Your warning saved us, Ms. Havel.”
“And she should be allowed to rest,” the doctor said tartly. “Even by a tyrant and oppressor such as yourself, Rancher, if I, a mere captive put to hard labor may say so.”
He grinned at her. “Going to burn the place down again, Padmi?”
“I think of it every day! Now remove your large carcass out, and leave my patients in peace!”
Ritva felt her eyelids fluttering; she was very tired. Rudi held his arms up and spread, palms skyward, and Mary joined in the gesture. They both chanted softly as she drifted away:
Father Ignatius and Mathilda waited for him outside the schoolhouse-turned-infirmary. He nodded at them and they relaxed in relief; they and the Rancher strolled out the gate. People were busy with repairs; the bodies were all gone, and the dead horses, but flies still buzzed over the places where blood had soaked the soil, and the faint smell was unmistakable. A group of Cutter prisoners was working over near the wrecked warehouse, helping put back what they’d destroyed. A tent town had sprung up on the banks of the little lake to house the troops; the Norrheimers, the First Richland, and the newly arrived redcoat bands. Cowboys were driving in herds to the complex of corrals, to be slaughtered for the feast to come, and neighbors had arrived as well with help and supplies.