Below the salt were the important commoners. Those included the Lord Mayor of the city, the guildmasters who headed their militia regiments, and a middle-aged abbess and a younger attendant in the dark blue habit and white wimple of the Sisters of Compassion, a medical order who’d spread widely in the last generation and who were apparently in charge of the hospital and clinics in the area.

And in a lot of places they’re the only medical care the really poor see, the ones without a guild or confraternity or even a lord.

Tiphaine did more listening than speaking as the meal was served; the locals were talking business, and to the point, although they were also often taking up arguments and discussions they’d been at for months or years. Most of them seemed to be in good heart, and not just because of the Sword and the return of Rudi and Mathilda.

And I’m not one of the youngest present. I’m not even below the average. That’s happening more and more often. It’s a Changeling world, or at least the world of the Changelings and their elder siblings. People like me, who’ve spend most of their lives in the modern world.

Meanwhile she ate; tiny venison sausages with candied apples, a green salad with goat cheese and the famous sweet onions of the area, a frito misto of seasonal vegetables, and . . .

She chewed a bite slowly and swallowed. “That is possibly the best steak I’ve ever tasted,” she said. “And I like steak.”

Tender, the firm marbled meat brushed with an oil infused with garlic and herbs before it was put on the grill, slightly seared at high heat on the outside and red in the center . . .

“We have sacrificed a good deal of our demesne herd of Aberdeen Angus,” Countess Ermentrude said. “With the disturbed conditions it was necessary.”

She was a pale willowy young woman in a chocolate-colored cote-hardie and twin-peaked headdress, about five months pregnant and with a roundvoweled accent that Tiphaine took a moment to identify as from one of the very northernmost baronies.

Barony Dawson, up on our border with the Dominion of Drumheller. Not to mention our border with trackless wilderness stretching to the Arctic Circle. Yes, she met Felipe while she was a lady-in-waiting at court just before the war started. Her parents were locals who’d taken over Dawson before we arrived and decided getting a title and giving Norman a smooch on the hand were a better bargain than trying to fight us. They did well in that war with the Drumhellers.

Sandra had always encouraged marriages between distant fiefs and lordly families of different backgrounds, to keep the PPA’s elite united. In fact, it was one reason why noble houses were strongly encouraged—required, practically speaking—to send some of their scions to Portland and Todenangst and the university at Forest Grove for a few years to mingle with their peers of the same ages.