They were both in half-armor, the articulated lames of the back-andbreasts covering their torsos, pauldrons and faulds on shoulders and thighs; with their junior squires standing by, the rest of the gear could be donned in less than two minutes. Sweat and dust clung to their faces beneath the peaked Montero hats—the type she’d always thought of as a Robin Hood hat, from an old movie she’d watched on TV before the Change. Nobody put their head in a steel bucket if they didn’t have to right that moment. She could feel more sweat trickling down her neck and flanks and between her breasts, itching and chafing in the padded arming doublet and her underwear as it baked to a rime of salt in the hot dry air and then more dripped in, long-familiar and still irritating. The interior was hot this time of year, and its mountain-fringed geography made the Walla Walla valley warmer still.

“Is the Count due?” de Stafford asked.

He was seven years older than she, in his mid-forties, a tall broad-shouldered man with pale blond hair like hers worn in the usual nobleman’s bowl-cut, eyes of a blue that was startling against his tanned face, and an unfashionable short-cropped beard that emphasized his square chin and ruggedly masculine good looks.

In fact, we look enough alike to be brother and sister. Rigobert might actually have been a tolerable sibling, unless he was a lot less bearable as a teenager.

The thought was oddly wistful; she’d been an only child.

A few of the less experienced or more naive staff officers and messengers in the group around her looked surprised that he dared to bandy words with the Grand Constable, who had a reputation for a cold, distant masterfulness. Tiphaine’s mouth quirked a little more as she jerked her head slightly and the circle around them widened to allow more privacy.

Or to put it differently, I have a reputation for being a murderous evil reptilian unnatural bitch who’s inhumanly good with a sword and under the Lady Regent’s protection, she thought. Rigobert’s a special case, though.

She looked at her watch, a self-winding mechanical model from the old world.

“Not for about another fifteen or twenty minutes, my lord, assuming he’s punctual. We got the encampment settled just a bit faster than I anticipated and told him we would.”

“Any news from Delia?” he asked.

“A letter just in,” she said, fishing it out from where she’d tucked it into her thigh boot. “She’s well, Diomede sends his love and wishes he were here and not in Tillamook, where incidentally he’s going to stay if I have to tell Baron de Netarts to chain him to a dungeon wall, Heuradys has learned to say ‘no’, and our beloved Delia herself feels like an overripe watermelon about to split, she says. Also she sends greetings to my beloved beard.”