“I like the beard,” Mathilda said, tickling his jaw; he arched his neck and purred like a cat. “Very distinguished looking. This time. Not mangy, like the previous attempts.”

“Like a wheat field struck by rust and weevils and blight that was, the black sorrow and shame of it, but the third’s the charm.”

“I remember when you were sixteen and tried for a mustache. Your mother said: And aren’t you getting old enough to shave that peach fuzz on your lip now, boyo? You blushed crimson.”

The short-cropped growth was a slightly darker shade than his head hair, and had come in dense and even this time.

It adds a few years to my looks, Rudi thought. Which cannot hurt when I’m dealing with so many touchy men and women of power. Human beings are like that; buried memories of our childhoods, perhaps, when age is authority.

She sighed. “Remember how we used to come up here as kids and lie finding shapes in the clouds?”

“It drove your attendants mad. Not that some of them ever liked your spending part of the year here.”

“Those ones didn’t last. Anyway, it was in the treaty.”

Off to the left was the little waterfall, falling like a strand of silver lace over a lip of rock and into its pool, and below it the dam and querning gristmill, busy with grain from the just-completed harvest. Beyond that the distant snow peaks of the High Cascades glittered like islands of white against blue heaven in the east; the enemy held the Bend country overmountain, up to the forts in the passes. To his right he could just see the white stucco on the walls of Dun Juniper, and over it a blink of paint and gilding from the Chief’s Hall. The wind down from the crags carried a hint of the glaciers, and the strong wild scent of the great fir-forests that rolled mile after mile along the west-facing scarps.

“We’re still driving them all crazy,” Mathilda said. “Just in different ways.”

The oval of pastureland and garden on the knee of the hill below was a little crowded, with tents in many of the paddocks and far more horses than usual, including those of Dun Juniper’s share of the eastern refugees quartered in every Mackenzie settlement.

“I wish we’d been able to do more than a flying visit in Portland and Castle Todenangst, though,” she added. “They’re home too.”

She was in a kilt and plaid herself, not for the first time. She’d spent half of every year here since they were both ten, back at the end of the War of the Eye, and had often gone in Mackenzie dress for convenience’s sake. Now it was also a statement that the High Queen belonged to all her peoples, not just her native Portland Protective Association, the same reason she’d taken to wearing jeans and turtleneck when they were in Corvallis.

Which was wise, given the long and well-merited grudges many bore from her ghastly bachlach of a father’s reign and the wars against the Association; there were still people to whom the sight of a cote-hardie or hose and houppelande were like a red rag to a bull. Some simply feared the Colossus of the North because it had more territory and as many people as all the rest put together. The War of the Eye had trimmed it back, but it had recovered quickly and had been growing steadily stronger in numbers and wealth and power all three under Sandra Arminger’s farsighted rule. That had made everyone nervous until the rise of the Prophet and the Church Universal and Triumphant had buried old feuds in a common fear.