Dun Fairfax was a rectangle surrounded by a palisade of logs set in concrete and bound together with steel cable. There were blockhouses at the corners and flanking the gate made from squared baulks of timber; the whole was built from big logs, as thick as her body and many man-lengths high, for the trees grew tall and great here. They’d been stripped of bark, too, and varnished and oiled and polished, and bands across them had been carved with low-relief patterns of twining leaves and vines and serpents and elongated beasts, colorfully painted and inlaid with glass and stone from which whimsical faces peered, human and demi-human, bestial and divine.

Mackenzies were fond of that effect, but it always made her feel as if something was looking at her, just out of sight at the corners of her eyes. Here you always felt that the Otherworld was only a half step away.

A clear space of close-cropped pasture was kept outside the walls. Within were the homes and workshops along cobbled lanes, the tall steep-pitched covenstead that served for ceremony and gatherings and school for the children, and a communal barn and grain elevator and warehouse where things like the reaping machines were kept; there was a pond like a blue eye near the center where ducks and geese swam, surrounded by willows and oaks and a stretch of grass. Smoke drifted blue from brick chimneys in roofs that might be mossy shingle or flower-starred green turf, and very faintly she could hear the tink-tank-clang of a smith at work. The largest house was a pre-Change frame structure not at all unlike some she’d seen as a girl, but it was much altered and painted in a pale blue. The corners and windows and door lintels had all been set with bands of carved planking picked out in gold-yellow and scarlet and green.

Beautiful, but different . . . very strange . . . witchy, she thought.

“Too crowded,” she said aloud, and then again had that disconcerting feeling that Edain was following her real thoughts. “All those households within one wall.”

“Ah, well, it was bad in Norrheim after the Change but worse for us,” he said blandly. “For ten years war hung over us like a thundercloud of threats and raids before it burst; I remember the wars against the Association, though I was naught but a nipper when Rudi was taken prisoner, and the northerners besieged Sutterdown, and I recall Da leading our archers out to the Field of Gold. And bad bandit troubles before and after and during that, gangs of the spalpeens, so it wasn’t safe for families to live apart on their own as your folk do. We got into the habit of dwelling close, so.”

“It’s still as packed with folk as an egg is with meat,” she grumbled.

“Forbye it’s a bit crowded now, yes, what with the easterners we’ve given refuge and our own numbers growing. Perhaps after the war, we’ll get together with Dun Carson and some others and found a new settlement.”