Rudi spoke as gently as his abused larynx allowed: "After what you saw on Nantucket-the Sword-and the message you got there, I'd have been less dismissive of mystical crap, myself, Ingolf."

The Easterner shivered. "Yah, tell me. I was wrong. When the Cutters had me cornered, Kuttner just… he said a word and made a sign with his hand, and I couldn't move. That's how they took me alive. I couldn't move, couldn't do anything but what he said… It was like some sort of spell."

Rudi leaned over, gripping the other man by one thick-muscled shoulder and pouring strength through the contact. He could see the Easterner was bothered by the very word, although that was strange. Or maybe not; he wasn't a witch, after all, and Rudi was, even if he was no great spellcaster or loremaster like his mother. He'd seen before that those not of the Old Religion could be spooked by the commonest things sometimes.

How to hearten him? Well, the truth never hurt:

"Ingolf, my friend, you did move, despite the spell. You smashed in the back of his head with that yoke; and I'd be dead now, if you hadn't. At a guess, he laid an evil geasa on you before you escaped him last year. There are ways of doing that, for good as well as ill, and planting them deep in a man's mind with a word of power to call them out. And working harm that way leaves a man open to… other things; the Threefold Rule, you know."

Ingolf crooked a smile. "Yah, he got back worse than he gave me, didn't he?"

He was cored out as a cook does a pepper for stuffing, Rudi thought, and swallowed painfully.

"The command laid on you could be posthypnotic suggestion," Ignatius said with a scholar's precision; the Shield of St. Benedict were a learned order as well as a militant one. "Not necessarily magic."

Rudi grinned at him, and quoted a saying of Juniper Mackenzie: "It doesn't stop being magic because you can explain it, Father."

Ingolf's haunted dark blue eyes met his, and the Easterner touched his mouth and winced a bit before he spoke.

"You stuck a yard of sword through his brisket, and he didn't stop. Then I crushed in the back of his head, and he still didn't stop. Cry-yiy, that sounds an awful lot like magic to me."

"And I cut his leg mostly off," Mary Havel said. "That didn't stop him, either. It did make me feel better about his clouting me on the head with a sword earlier, though."

"It didn't stop him, but it did make him fall over," Ritva pointed out cheerfully. "Which helped everyone else cut him up and smash him and things. Carth mag, sis."

Which meant useful deed in Elvish. Neither of the twins seemed much put out; at least, they didn't show much of the dread that several of the others did. But then, they were witches, and Initiates; two-thirds of the Dunedain Rangers were, after all. Even if they did call on the Lord and Lady as Manwe and Varda, which he considered an affectation, rather than using more conventional names like Lugh and Brigid.

Everyone fell silent for a moment, turning in to their own thoughts. Mary and Ritva each hugged her knees and rested her chin on them, which emphasized their mirror-image likeness. It brought out their resemblance to Rudi, too-the high cheekbones and slightly tilted almond-shaped eyes they all showed were probably from that shared blood. Mike Havel had been one-quarter Anishinabe Indian, the rest mostly Finn with a dash of Norse, all strains common in the upper Peninsula mining country of Michigan he'd come from, long before the Change-fifty-odd years ago, now.

Their mother, Signe, probably contributed the wheat-colored hair and their eyes, which were just the shade of a morning sky; the Bear Lord had been flying her and her parents and brother and younger sister, Astrid, over the Idaho mountains not all that far from here when the machines died, and had got them down alive. And brought them to the Willamette country, and from that much had flowed… not least a fleeting encounter on a scouting mission that had produced one Rudi Mackenzie!

I wonder what flying like that was like, Rudi thought wistfully. He'd been up in balloons, and flown gliders and hang gliders a few times, and that was better than anything but sex. But to be able to fly where you wanted for as long as you wanted, as fast as a bird.. .

Frederick Thurston spoke. "I've been thinking," he said.

He was the youngest there, a year younger than Edain, still a little gangly with the last fast growth of adolescence, though at six feet he'd probably gotten all his height. His face was the color of a well-baked loaf, and his hair a short-cut black cap of tight curls; President-General Thurston had been of that breed miscalled black before the Change.

"Sure, and that's often advisable," Rudi said. "And we've all cause to be grateful for the direction of your thoughts, so."

"I… I don't think I should try to fight my… fight Martin. Not right now."

His full-lipped mouth twisted as he spoke his elder brother's name. Rudi nodded in sympathy. Hard, hard to be betrayed by close kin, and see your own father killed by your brother's hand.

The commander of the little Boise cavalry detachment looked at him in alarm; Rosita Gonzalez was a dark wiry woman in her early thirties, with a sergeant's chevrons riveted to the short sleeve of her mail-shirt.

"Sir, we can't let him get away with it! He killed the President.

"

Frederick nodded. "No, Sergeant, we can't let him get away with it

… and bear in mind that the President was my father. Though he'd want us to think of the country first." Grimly: "Though in this case, the personal and the political go together. He has to die."

And your late President was the man you resembled, as you said that, Rudi thought. Suddenly you didn't look young or uncertain at all. Which is interesting in itself, eh?

The younger of the Thurston men-they had two sisters, both still girls-went on:

"But from what we've heard, he has gotten away with it for now. The Vice President and half the top command died at the Battle of Wendell."

"What a coincidence. Convenient for the bastard."

The usurper's brother winced; it was plain he'd loved his elder sibling.

And love doesn't die as clean as a heart-shot deer, Rudi thought.

He'd liked Martin Thurston himself, on short acquaintance and before his treachery was revealed.

A dying love kicks and thrashes, and then the carcass of it festers and it can poison the waters of your soul as surely as a dead goat in a well. Fred here is still trying to draw what he saw down into his gut and believe it.

But he went on doggedly: "And the others, the brigade commanders and regional governors… they'll be his men soon enough. He's even got a fairly good excuse for restoring the State of Emergency powers, with a war on, and canceling the elections Dad… the President.. . was going to call. This wasn't something he… did on the spur of the moment. It's long-planned. If I tried to come out in the open now, not only would there be civil war, but I'd lose. And that would be the end of any hope of putting things right."

Gonzalez looked at him. "What do you want to do, then, sir?" she said carefully. "Since defeat is not an option."

"Give him enough rope to hang himself. Look… this isn't just about us, about Boise. This Prophet son of a bitch… it's more than a warlord with a big appetite, those are a dime a dozen. I believe what Rudi says, now, and I believe Ingolf about what he saw out East on Nantucket. I want you and the others to spread the truth. Cautiously! When the time's right, I'll be back to do my part. By then, things will be ready. I'm willing to fight Martin, it's worth it, but not without a chance of beating him."

"Yes, sir," she said respectfully. "If you don't mind my saying so, that's a very… adult way to look at it."

"I know when my birthday is, Sergeant," he said.