Then she extended a hand. “Shall we start again, and see what comes of it, Asgerd Karlsdottir? Asgerd Aylward Mackenzie, too?”

Asgerd took it in both of hers. “I would like that. And now let me help with the rest of this feast. I can chop and mince and peel a potato and knead bread and roll pastry and baste meat, even if I don’t have all the kitchen arts you do.” With a wry smile. “Of which I have heard the praises sung near every evening for full three thousand miles of campfire meals, let me tell you!”

Melissa laughed again, carefree this time. “Girl, with that in your ears day and night, it’s surprised and astonished I am you didn’t hate me already by the time you arrived!”

They stood and made for the door, arm in arm.

CHAPTER FOUR

DOMINION OF DRUMHELLER
(FORMERLY PROVINCE OF ALBERTA)
WESTERN NORTH AMERICA
JUNE 21, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

Ritva Havel blinked. “I thought I was fully recovered from the concussion,” she said, stepping back and lowering the point of her wooden blade.

“Aren’t you?” Ian Kovalevsky said anxiously, doing likewise and letting his shield down.

Neither of them went entirely out of stance until they were three paces backward. He was barely limping anymore, and neither was she, though they were still being careful. Not as careful as Dr. Nirasha would have liked; but they were both in their early twenties, in robust good health and in a profession where a fairly casual attitude towards risk was part of the package and wounds just a cost of doing business. Ritva doubted the doctor would have approved of the padded practice gear, or the cloth-wrapped wooden swords in their hands. The hot, bronze, hay-smelling distances of the shortgrass prairie stretched around them, with the white walled mass of the Anchor Bar Seven homeplace tiny in the distance, and the blue eye of the little lake and the green-and-yellow streak of the irrigated land. An eagle cruised not far away, looking over a flock of ewes and lambs, but respectful of the mounted shepherdess’ bow.

“I thought so, but I could swear that’s—”

She went over to her saddle by the picnic basket; their mounts were grazing free, both being too well trained to need hobbles. The binoculars were securely cased; she freed them and trained them to the northwest.

“Ah, the palantír en-crûm,” Ian said; he’d been picking up a little of the Noble Tongue. Then he blinked. “That isn’t a bunch of cowboys or militiamen, is it?”

“No,” she said, without taking the glasses from her eyes; her voice bubbled with delight and curiosity. “I’m afraid not.”

Kovalevsky looked down at the picnic basket with its earthenware jug of beer, roast-beef sandwiches and pickles and salad and Babushka pirozhki, sweet pastries stuffed with sour cherries and nuts. His vanishing hopes were in his sigh. Ritva began stripping off the practice gear. The redcoat did the same.

“Who is it?” he asked in a resigned tone, absently rubbing at the still-sore point on his right buttock where the arrow had struck.