When he approved, they went down to the breakfast nook where Rigobert’s staff had laid out bread, butter, cheese, jam, platters of sausages and bacon and scrambled eggs and more coffee, plus a large bowl of oatmeal cooked with apples for Lioncel to start with. Tiphaine let Lioncel pour her coffee; an Associate learned to command by learning to serve.

First Armand and Radomar, teaching me how to accept service; now Lioncel and Diomede. And I can’t steal one tittle of what they consider their job without them raising a very, very polite ruckus.

“Thank you, Lioncel. Please sit and eat, yourself.”

This was her usual command when eating alone and her pages had learned to eat with her; however, they always sat after they had served her. Tiphaine shook her head in private amusement at the size of the portions she had to eat these days. A Bearkiller doctor she’d enjoyed talking with a few times had worked out that a knight actually burned off nearly half again as many calories as a peasant on average.

Government by pro athlete, had been the way he’d defined the PPA’s neofeudalism.

And the last few weeks in camp had been short enough rations that she ate with gusto.

“Aunt?”

Tiphaine nodded; the keyword told her this was Lioncel to Tiphaine, not a page to his knight.

“Yes, Lioncel?”

“Aunt, how bad is the situation?”

Tiphaine sighed as she met the serious pale blue eyes.

Looking more and more like Rigobert every day . . . and me, since Rigobert and I have similar coloring and builds. He’s going to be tall, too . . . which both of us also are.

“It’s bad, Lioncel.”

She bit off a piece of bread and Tillamook cheese and stared at the ticking grandfather clock against the far wall of the room for a moment, composing her thoughts. He was old enough to be a squire soon; nearly old enough to be treated like an embryonic adult, by modern standards. Certainly old enough to get the unvarnished truth.

“The expression I like to use is cluster-fuck. It’s very rude and describes the situation to a T. It also means that more than one thing went wrong at once, and the things that went wrong each made the other things worse than they would have been by themselves. We did very well to get out of it without being wrecked beyond recovery.”

“What’s it called when everything goes wrong at once?”

“Dead and defeated.”

A flash of fear shadowed the boy’s eyes for an instant. His jaw clenched. “That means really bad things to Mom and Diomede and the baby she’s going to have, doesn’t it?”