“Now this,” he said, “is something on the order of a homecoming, so it is. Or close enough for government work, until the war is over. Which is appropriate, since now we are the government.”

His newly handfasted bride Mathilda Arminger snuggled into the curve of his shoulder, a pleasant solid burden, her brown hair smelling of summer like the sun-warmed grass in which they rested, and her strong not-quitepretty features relaxed as she turned her face towards the sun. The weight didn’t bother him, though Mathilda was a rangy five-nine and had the leanly solid build of someone who’d trained to fight in armor most of her life. He was a tall man, born late in the first year of the Change—which made him a few months older than his bride—long-limbed, broad in the shoulders and narrow in the waist, with a regular high-cheeked face just on the edge of beauty, a shoulder-length mane of hair a color just halfway between gold and molten copper, and light eyes of a changeable blue-green-gray.

“It’s fair beyond bearing, this is. We’ve seen everything from the Sunset Ocean to the lands of Sunrise and nothing can quite compare,” he said softly.

He pulled a strand of long grass free and chewed meditatively on the stem as they looked down through the screen of firs to the open benchland below that made an irregular oval of grassland running east-west along the side of the hill, about a mile long and half a mile wide at its broadest. Most of it was rolling meadowland where horses and red-coated cattle grazed thick green grass starred with pink lupine and white daisies, separated by hawthorn hedge and white board fence into paddocks studded with great garry oaks or the tall black walnuts his mother’s great-uncle had planted long before the Change. Beyond that the forested ground fell away steeply and blocked sight of the little valley of Artemis Creek flowing westward into the great green-gold quilt of the Willamette lowlands. Those faded in turn to the blue line of the Coast Range on the very edge of sight, even to keen young eyes on a day cloudless from horizon to horizon.

Mathilda crossed herself and touched her crucifix to her lips for an instant.

“God made all lands beautiful in their own way,” she said. “But this is our way, or part of it. For Rudi and Mathilda, not just the King and Queen.”

“It’s a good thing to have your heartstrings rooted in one place, small and very dear,” he agreed. “You build from there, but it’s the foundation, as the love of your kin is the starting place for a regard for folk in general.”

When he’d left this place two years ago to journey to the Sunrise lands and return, there had still been a good deal of boy in his face. Though he’d already been a warrior of note and chosen tanist of the Clan, successor to his mother as Chief. There was little of that lad left, though the man the boy had become was contentedly relaxed for the moment. Living out a prophecy every day was much more wearing, he found, than simply living with one looming in his future had been, and he needed to take the moments of peace when he could.