The warm air was heavy with sweet scents, drowsy with humming bees; a flock of birds with light gray bodies and bright yellow bellies and underwings went by, swooping after insects. A terra-cotta fountain of descending bowls tinkled nearby, welcome in this arid heat. Baron Maugis was already at the table, along with an older woman in a dark green cote-hardie and white wimple and lace shoulder-veil who was probably his mother, and a younger one with pale tilted eyes and a slim build, dressed in a riding habit with a divided skirt, who was certainly his wife. She was just handing an infant to a nanny and setting aside a broad hat. Her hair tumbled like a black torrent down her back through a light wimple, hardly more elaborate than a kerchief but bound with silk cords. Two other children were there, a boy of about six guiltily wiping his face with a napkin and a girl half that age sitting on her father’s lap.

Mary sighed, and Ingolf nodded. “You know, I could get used to having a place like this,” he murmured to her. “They do look all-’round comfy, don’t they?”

His wife gave a slight rueful chuckle. “I think you could get the land out of brother Rudi after the war, lover, but I doubt he’d hand you a few thousand people to develop it with, the way the Lord Protector did our host’s father. For that matter, there aren’t big bunches of people around . . . loose . . . anymore. Arminger just culled them out of the ones running from the cities and they were glad to get the chance.”

“Well, we can have the kids on our own, when we finally get the time and quiet, and our own homeplace somewhere. Anywhere but a city, eh?”

She nodded agreement with a shudder; both of them had seen the great cities of the world, Portland and Boise and even distant, mammoth Des Moines. They were country folk to the core and the thought of living all their lives in one of those ant-heaps—Des Moines had over a hundred thousand people—was loathsome.

The baron and his lady looked up and rose to make them welcome as the servants led the children away. Mary put hand to heart and bowed.

“Mae govannen,” she said. “Well-met, my lord, my ladies.”

“Uh . . . hi,” Ingolf added. “My lord, my ladies.”

“My wife, Lady Helissent de Grimmond, my lord, Your Highness,” Maugis said.

Ingolf knew enough to bow and kiss the ladies’ hands when they were extended to him palm-down, taking them gently in his. They both started to curtsy to Mary; as the new High King’s half sister her status had to be stratospheric, not to mention that her father and mother had been and were respectively the sovereigns of the Bearkillers and her aunt led the Dúnedain.