The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series) by S. M. Stirling Read Free Book Online Page A

whether she was in hose or skirts, and it wasn’t undeserved. Right now she was still feeling too shocked at the High King’s murder to take her usual full innocent pleasure in a good turn-out, but it never hurt to seem as you wished to be and vice-versa. Or to keep up standards.
    Heuradys cinched the belt that held sword, dagger and pouch around her hips, tucked a pair of long leather riding gloves through it, and picked up her chaperon hat—a round thing with a rolled brim and long dangling liripipe and a livery badge that quartered her own arms with the Crowned Mountain and Sword of the High King’s house. A chaperon was almost as much a marker for gentlefolk as the spurs.
    “Droyn!” she said briskly.
    Droyn Jones de Molalla was the senior Household squire, a grandson of the first Count of Molalla and a younger son of the current one; Molalla was a smallish but very rich County southeast of Portland, one of the first established by the PPA after the Change, during the Foundation Wars. The young man was three fingers taller than her five-ten-and-a-half, with a cap of curled black hair and skin somewhere between dark olive and very light brown.
    He
was
in armor with his visor up as he ducked into the tent, and his kite-shaped shield was slung over his back, but then he was on duty. There was a clash of steel on steel as he brought his clenched right fist to his breast in salute.
    His face might have been carved from seasoned oak, but she thought he’d probably been weeping himself, when he was alone. There was enough sorrow to go around, a kingdom’s worth, a continent’s. Millions would be mourning, soon enough.
    Then they’ll want blood. Hades in the Underworld,
I
want blood. Armies will march and cities will burn because of this,
she realized with a slight chill.
    “My lady?” he said, and inclined his head with formal deference.
    Quite properly; she was a knight, even if she hadn’t been in his chain of command until now, and he wasn’t one yet, though he was about Órlaith’s age. Heuradys was two years older but still young to wear the golden spurs in peacetime, though she’d passed all the tests and done very well in tournaments and won a couple of duels to first blood. Including one where she was pretty sure the man who’d challenged her had been planning to kill her and claim it was an accident. There hadn’t been any wars to speak of since she came of a squire’s years, though.
    Until now. I’m young for the accolade in what
was
peacetime,
she thoughtgrimly. That’s
about to change too. And obviously, I’m going to be close to the Throne, and Droyn realizes that.
    They were about equal as far as birth went, though that counted less in the Household. Her father Rigobert de Stafford was a Count too, of Campscapell just north of the Eastermark in the Palouse, and had estates in the Willamette as well—he’d been Baron of Forest Grove since the Lord Protector’s time, not long after the Change.
    There was the added complication that her adoptive mother Baroness Tiphaine d’Ath was a noble in her own right, seigneur of Ath and Harfang and a tenant-in-chief, but Heuradys wasn’t in line to succeed to those either. Her elder brother Diomede d’Ath would be Baron under the Association law of primogeniture, as their eldest sibling Lioncel de Stafford would inherit the Barony of Forest Grove and the County of Campscapell.
    She’d take livery of seisin of three good manors on Barony Harfang eventually, held in free and common socage, which would make her a vavassor—a minor but well-to-do landed noble holding directly from the Crown, rather than from a baron or count or duke. That was as much as she really wanted, that and being Orrey’s household knight. She’d absorbed the knowledge that being a baron involved a lot of hard dull work through her skin as a child. At least if you wanted to do it right.
    The complex balance of status went through both young Associate nobles’ minds in a