“Thank you, old friend, and take care of yourself. I need you still, your loyalty and your wits and the fact that you were never afraid to tell us when we’d made a mistake. Mathilda will need you, too.”

“I’ll do my best. I haven’t seen my grandchildren yet, though Érard’s little Alaiz is expecting! To tell you the truth, I don’t know how much the kids need any of us fogies anymore, Sandra. It’s their world now, and they’re more at home in it than we can ever be. Let’s give it to them in good condition.”

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SIX

SUTTERDOWN
DÙTHCHAS OF THE CLAN MACKENZIE
(FORMERLY THE EAST-CENTRAL WILLAMETTE VALLEY, OREGON)
HIGH KINGDOM OF MONTIVAL
(FORMERLY WESTERN NORTH AMERICA)
AUGUST 1, CHANGE YEAR 25/2023 AD

Frederick Thurston was the second son of the founding General-President of the new United States—the country everyone else called the United States of Boise. He wasn’t in its green uniform, though. He’d insisted on that, wearing a nondescript outfit of coarse-cloth shirt and trousers and brown boots instead, and he was unarmed except for the beltknife that virtually everyone carried as an all-purpose tool. He took a deep breath, and drew calmness on himself like a cloak; this wasn’t going to be any easier if he waited.

I’ve made my decision. Now I’ve got to do it.

“You should be fancied up a bit,” his wife said. “Your uniform, or somethin’ to show you’re someone.”

There was a Powder River rasp in her voice; Virginia Thurston (née Kane) had been born and raised there in the grassland country of what had once been eastern Wyoming, until the Church Universal and Triumphant and its local allies killed her father and seized her family’s Sweetwater Ranch and she’d stumbled into Rudi Mackenzie’s camp on the edge of the Sioux country on a blown horse. The two of them were nearly of an age, not quite twenty-one, but their looks were very different. Virginia was middling-tall for a woman, slender but whipcord-tough and tanned, with long brown hair worn in a braid, a narrow straight-nosed face and blue eyes.

Fred was a lithe, long-limbed broad-shouldered young man a little over six feet, with bluntly handsome features; his skin was a light toast-brown color, and his short black hair curled naturally. He grinned at his wife; they’d been together just over a year, and married for less than half of that—a handfasting ceremony in Norrheim, on the borders of the Atlantic.

“You look good enough for both of us, honey,” he said.