In her lands in the Tualatin Valley you could pretend the Change had happened centuries ago, that it was a legend. Most people preferred that, and she did too. She had been young then, after all, still flexible, able to get on with her life. Well over half of it had been lived since then.

But Portland was where she’d been born, and lived all her life until the Change. That was long ago, but every so often something around here would jog her memory—the precise silhouette of Mt. Hood’s white cone over some trees—and the ghosts of buildings and cars and people would return in her mind’s eye.

Though it is good hunting ground. Most animals like the edge of a forest better than the depths, and this is all edge. When Heuradys is an old lady dandling her grandchildren, it’ll be like Sherwood and the roots will have ground most of the ruins into the dirt.

Sandra Arminger did a little genteel hawking now and then for form’s sake, or rode to hounds in the sense that she sat on a small gentle horse for an hour or so while other people chased the game, and then she went home. She’d also been known to remark that most hunting was far too much like wallowing in the mud with wild animals for her taste. The New Forest had other uses, though. Interlachen Prison was one, another of Norman Arminger’s mad whims.

He was an evil bastard, but not a stupid one, Tiphaine thought. And there was a touch of demented brilliance to him at times. Well, fairly often, in fact.

She’d always hated the man with excellent reason and she’d inwardly rejoiced when he was killed, along with the better part of a million other people, for all her loyal service to House Arminger. The only sorrow in it for her had been the grief Sandra had had to suffer through. But there were occasions when she thought she understood a little of what Sandra had seen in him—which was a disturbing thing in itself.

The forest thinned out a little as she approached the Columbia. The narrow spit of land known as Interlachen lay between Blue Lake and Fairview Lake, each sixty acres or better of shallow water. Wide channels had been dug at either end of the ridge to turn it into an island in the middle of a shallow marshy swale of water and reed beds and trees.