A Meeting At Corvallis

Constable of the Portland Protective Association, Count of Odell, and Marchwarden of the East, as
well."
They murmured my lord Count together. "Mistress Kowalski, Master Turner," the Constable
replied, in a voice like gravel and sand shaken together in a bucket.
Kowalski frowned suddenly, and looked at Arminger's commander more closely. "Lord Count,
didn't we meet before the Change? At a tournament … Was Renfrew your Society name?"
The Grand Constable was a thickset man built like a barrel, with a shaved head and bright blue eyes
in the midst of a face hideously scarred. The two from Corvallis looked at him a little uneasily, but they
didn't show much fear despite his reputation. Arminger nodded to himself; they'd be useless to him if they
did. Although if they were going to be afraid of anyone in the room it ought to be him, with Sandra a
close second.
"No it wasn't, Mistress Kowalski," Renfrew rumbled. "Yes, I think I remember the occasion. But I've
put all that behind me. The time for playing at things is past. We don't have the luxury of make-believe
anymore."
Arminger cut in; pre-Change connections in the Society could be a sore issue these days, considering
how badly its survivors had split between his followers and the rest. Not to mention that if he
remembered correctly that particular tournament had been the Day of the Ox, about which memory he
had mixed emotions himself.
"You know Lady Sandra, of course."
She gave each of them a nod as she sat, adjusting the skirts of her cotte-hardi and smoothing back
her headdress. Both were in fabrics rich but subdued, in shades of dove gray and off-white, the jewels
silver and diamond with a few opals.
"And this is Father McKinley."
McKinley was a lean young man in his early twenties in a coarse, black Dominican robe with a steel
crucifix and rosary at his belt. He also had a quill pen and blank paper, and took unobtrusive notes; the
priest-monk was Pope Leo's man, of course, but he and the Holy Office of the Inquisition also reported
directly to the Lord Protector.
It was best to remember that Leo's Dominicans took their nickname—the Domini Canes, the
Hounds of God—quite seriously.
Sandra poured coffee with a smile of gracious hospitality. "Sugar? Cream?" she asked.
Arminger added a small dollop of brandy to his; it was the genuine product of Eauze, the crop of
1988, and aged in black oak, recovered from a warehouse in desolate Seattle by his salvagers in '05.
From what he'd learned from the Englishmen who'd arrived last spring, and the crew of the Tasmanian
ship that brought them, there wouldn't be any more even if traders crossed the waters again. France was
a howling wilderness, without even the tiny band of survivors that King Charles the Mad and his junta of
Guards colonels had brought through in the British Isles. The English and Irish would resettle France in
due course and prune the abandoned vines, but he doubted they'd ever rival the French as vintners and
distillers.
"There's more coffee where that came from; it's fresh-roasted bean imported by sea, not pre-Change
leftovers," he went on. And our own brandy's passable, and will get better as we master the knack.
In the meantime …
He poured small glasses of the amber liquor. "Do have some of this as well. Genuine Armagnac,
Larressingle, nearly twenty years old and quite marvelous."
Carefully he did not sneer at the way the pair's ears pricked in trader's reflex when he mentioned the
coffee. There was no more point in despising a merchant for being a merchant than a dog for being a
dog.
Not that you don't kick a dog if it gets out of place, he thought. How did the poem go? Ah, yes,
something like:
Gold for the merchant, silver for the maid.
Copper for the craftsmen, cunning at their trade.