She snorted. Her costume was full-fig formal for a prosperous Powder River rancher’s daughter in this twenty-fifth year of the Change, acquired here since they got back to Montival and at some trouble and expense. Linen blue jeans with copper rivets, heeled riding boots of tooled and colored leather, a buckskin jacket worked with colored quillwork and fringed along the seams, a colorful bandana about her neck and a broad-brimmed black Stetson on her head. Her belt was covered in worked silver conchos, and a smaller strip of the same went around her hat; the hilts of her shete and bowie knife were jeweled, if also perfectly functional. More silver and tooling made the saddle and bow case and tack on her gray Arab match the arch-necked mettlesome horse itself, with ribbons woven into its mane. He’d noticed that when it came to horseflesh she was cheerfully rapacious in a way that was probably influenced by the close contact her family had had with the Sioux to the east of them. Or possibly just the obsessive focus on horses natural in a place where they were the difference between life and death.

“You made me drop the chaps, honey,” she pointed out. “Those were good chaps.”

“You look like there’s a sheep in your family tree with those things on. And anyway, this is the best way to approach them, believe me. They’re going to be sensitive as a singed wildcat, seeing me on the other side.”

“OK, darlin’, you know your own folks best.”

They mounted outside the front gate of Brannigan’s Inn, where they were staying like most visitors to the Clan’s only large town, and rode through the crowded streets and out from Sutterdown’s west-facing gate. Fred looked up at the walls; Sutterdown wasn’t very large, no more than five or six thousand people, but the defenses were strong. There were still scars beneath the stucco, where cast-iron shot and steel darts had struck in sieges long ago, in the wars against the Association.

Beside the gate on either side were two great statues twice man-height, wrought from the trunks of whole black walnut trees and cunningly carved in the likeness of a woman with long golden hair standing on a seashell on the left, and a naked man holding a bow and crowned with the sun on the right.

He’d been with Rudi and Edain on the Quest all the way from Idaho to Norrheim on the Atlantic and back; he understood something of the theology of the Old Religion, the faith nearly all Mackenzies followed. Sutterdown worshipped the Lord and Lady in the form of Apollo and Aphrodite; that didn’t stop them from being just as obsessed with Celtic paraphernalia as the rest, but then the Clan regarded consistency of that sort as small-minded. The smile died on his lips as he looked up at those forms.