Eilir Signed: But we know St. Hilda’s still there. Sheriff Woburn said it’s thriving, in fact. And it’s friendly; it should be, the way you guys rescued them from those awful bandits back in the day. He said he’d have the Abbess . . . Reverend Mother Dominica . . . warned to expect us. We need local help approaching Woburn at his own ranch. There’s sure to be some sort of government surveillance.

Ritva winced slightly at the reminder of what was fairly ancient history to her, because the tendrils of it came down to her own time. The bandits’ leader, the self-proclaimed Duke Iron Rod, had turned out to be working with Norman Arminger, who’d tried to push the PPA’s borders this far in the early days—Lewiston was the head of navigation on the Columbia-Snake system. Eddie Liu, the first Baron Gervais, had been his liaison with them, supplying weapons and advice; he’d been the Lord Protector’s right hand in any number of malicious plans. But his son had been Odard Liu, and he’d been one of the nine questers who’d gone to Nantucket. He’d saved Mathilda’s life in battle at least once on the journey, and might well have saved them all in Iowa by the way he’d kept the mad tyrant Anthony Heasleroad amused and distracted.

And he’d died just short of the goal on the shores of the Atlantic, in a last stand that left him lying like some paladin from a Chanson with a broken sword in his hand and dead Moorish corsairs in a ring around him. She’d watched him die, making his last farewells calmly despite the bone-spears in his lungs and smiling as he felt the breeze of Azrael’s wings.

Not fair to blame us in the younger generation for our parents’ sins. You have to keep that in mind a lot with the PPA. Odard could be a pain in the ass, especially all that time when he was trying to get into our pants just so he could notch the Havel Twins on his belt, but he really shaped up on the Quest and got over himself. That last part of it he was like an obnoxious brother you love anyway.

“We should approach them carefully, even with the password from Woburn,” Astrid said. “The probability of running into enemy agents goes up very sharply from now on, and nothing attracts the eye like group movement. This here would be a good place to keep the horses; there’s cover, water, and grazing. And the tiger’s scared off a lot of the game, so hunters are less likely to stumble across us.”

Hmmm, Ritva thought. You know, she’s right. I haven’t seen any elk or black-tails or buffalo or antelope for the last hour or so. And there should have been sign of muskrat and beaver around here, it’s prime for them.