He finished the food, extracted some gristle from between his teeth and went to check on his horses, including his favorite, a big brown gelding named Boy he’d picked up in Nebraska years ago. He made a point of feeding them some of the apricots. A horse wasn’t like a water mill where you pulled a lever and got a given result. It was important that it liked and trusted you as well as knowing you were boss.

Then he went back and waited, thumbing through a copy of The Silmarillion from his saddlebags, which was more or less essential if you were going to be part of the Dúnedain Rangers, into which he’d married. This edition was from the Mithrilwood Press. The cover was gilt-stamped tooled leather over board, and it had annotations by her aunt Astrid Loring-Larsson, the Lady of the Rangers, along with her Helpful Hints on Modern Spoken Sindarin at the end. She had started the Rangers a few years after the Change, she and her anamchara Eilir, Juniper Mackenzie’s daughter. They and their husbands still ran the outfit.

That priest I met in Fargo said Christians and Jews are People of the Book. Well, so are the Dúnedain Rangers! Or Books, plural.

He’d actually read some of the other stories by this guy when he was younger...

OK, hold that thought. According to Astrid Loring, the Hiril Dúnedain, those aren’t stories, they’re the Histories and the Englishman was The Historian, inspired by the Valar demigods even if he didn’t know it and every word is goddamned gospel true. I don’t know if all the Rangers actually buy that . . . I’m not really sure how seriously Mary takes it . . . but on brief acquaintance with her aunt I think that living in the woods with Astrid for a couple of years would convince pretty well anyone, much less a bunch of impressionable teenagers who wanted to believe in the first place . . . It’s the official line anyway, sure as shit stinks. What the hell, it works. And it’s no sillier than all these Protectorate guys ready to draw swords over who gets to paint what stuff on their shield. All your perspective, I guess.

When you considered what the Cutters believed about their Ascended Masters and the Nine Rays and whatnot, it wasn’t even very strange. Nor was the Church Universal and Triumphant just imagining things. There was something there, it just wasn’t what they thought it was.

A soft call came from one of the sentries and he stuffed the book away. A few minutes later two figures came up leading their horses.