But the Baron of Forest Grove genuinely liked Delia; they had become close friends, and he had been a good if slightly long-distance father to the children she insisted on. He was also extremely capable, and not only in the straightforward head-bashing style of most Association nobles; he’d been a junior spook of some sort for some agency that didn’t officially exist before the Change, as well as an SCA fighter, and valuable enough that Norman Arminger had put aside his—literally—medieval prejudices on the subject of gay people to make use of him.

Odd. In retrospect as an adult rather than a creeped-out and perpetually seething-angry teenager, I don’t think Norman really hated us, not in the visceral loathing sense.

Rigobert folded the letter, handed it back, and then raised a brow at her expression.

“Just thinking of Norman,” she explained.

“My sympathies, my lady. I hope you recover quickly and don’t lose lunch.”

He raised the canteen in another toast. “May his bigoted, sadistic, rotten soul roast in Hell to the cheers of his innumerable victims,” he went on—quietly—and drank.

She took the canteen and sipped herself. “Though to be fair, as far as the bigotry goes I think he just thought he should hate queers because he was such a fucking Period Nazi purist Society geek, killer psychopath academic subdivision. Sort of like wearing hose and houppelande. He was playing a role twenty-four/seven. And he scared me, frankly.”

“Me too. Not much of a difference on the receiving end whether he was sincere or not,” he said a little sourly. “What was that ancient Greek saying? The boys throw stones at the frogs in sport, but the frogs die in earnest? When Norman cut someone dead, he didn’t do it metaphorically. Usually it involved him laughing hard with blood up to his elbows. I’ve never met a man who enjoyed killing more and I’ve known some ripe evil throat-cutting bastards in my time. Been one myself, at need.”

“True. But you have to grant that at least he didn’t have any racial prejudices. Gender yes. Us, yes. Race, no.”

Which was true; about one in five of the Association’s nobility were what the old world would have called members of a visible minority, as opposed to about one in twenty-five of the general population. Not that anyone gave a damn about that sort of thing anymore; things like class, kin and religion were vastly more important now.

“That’s probably only because William the Bastard and King Roger II of the Two Sicilies didn’t have racial prejudices either,” Rigobert said sardonically. “Hanging around Sandra so long has made you inhumanly rational, my lady.”

“It is catching, my lord Forest Grove,” she admitted. “Though as far as excess rationality goes, remember that Sandra truly loved Norman.”