Another set of sentries stopped and identified them, and then they began to pass horses picketed on either side of the arroyo, tethered to ropes strung from pegs driven into the sandy soil. Most simply stood hipshot, their tails swishing regularly; others were being watered, with buckets filled at holes dug in the lower parts of the sandy bed of the seasonal watercourse. The homey, familiar smell of horse-piss, horse-sweat and manure added to the odors of damp sand and sun-baked earth and grass and sagebrush.

Lord Maugis de Grimmond, Baron Tucannon and enfeoffed vassal of the Counts Palatine of Walla Walla, was a year or two younger than Ingolf, which meant he’d been four or so at the time of the Change. His parents had both been SCA members in Oregon who threw their lot in with Norman Arminger and ended up with a barony here.

Mathilda is a fine person, but her dad was one heap big bad badass, from all I’ve been able to gather, Ingolf thought. Still, needs must. Those were hard times. Mary’s father, Rudi’s dad Mike Havel, killed Arminger.

Though he’d only survived it by about forty minutes before dying of the wounds Arminger inflicted; and now Rudi was married to Norman Arminger’s only child. The family politics here got twisty, and he was still learning his way around them. For one thing, Rudi’s mother Juniper Mackenzie hadn’t been married to Mike Havel, either. Mary’s mother, Signe, had married him. She still wasn’t what you’d call overenthusiastic about Rudi or Juniper, though she and the outfit Havel had founded and she ran, the Bearkillers, had accepted High King Artos gracefully over around Larsdalen on the other side of the Willamette from Clan Mackenzie. Mary and her twin Ritva had moved out from there in their teens to live in the woods with their Aunt Astrid, who was . . . strange. Even by comparison with other people who’d had a rough time in the first Change Year.

Like most Changelings his age Ingolf had elastic standards when it came to what was or wasn’t outright barking madness, having grown up among an adult population many of whose members had been strained beyond the breaking point by what they’d seen, suffered and done to survive. They were functional most of the time or they’d have been bones in a ditch somewhere, but screaming sweating nightmares or people who suddenly burst into tears or rages at odd moments were pretty common, and every year brought a trickle of suicides done one way or another. His own father had just taken a bottle out to a barn and drunk himself unconscious now and then; you could see it coming on in his eyes, when he got to remembering.