"Not mine, not mine," he said modestly, smoothing his mustache with one finger. "His Majesty has a system like this at his country estate, Highgrove. I've overseen building dozens of them in England. All you need is a head of water for the flow."

Tom Brannigan of Sutterdown was there as well; a large contingent of the volunteers was from his settlement, with the experience of putting up their own town wall fresh in their minds and hands.

"Could we hire you to put one in for us?" he said hopefully. "Our present system is expensive as hell, and we're running out of those treatment chemicals."

"Possibly," Nigel Loring said, starting a little as Juniper trod on his foot.

"Don't do it for free!" she whispered in his ear. "Laurel needs all the help she can get without adding to her folk's debts, but Brannigan can afford to pay."

"Ah, perhaps we could discuss it later," he said. "At this horse fair you were telling me about, perhaps?"

The mayor of Sutterdown nodded. Just then Eilir and Astrid pushed through the crowd, blinking at the worksite, followed by the two young Englishmen.

Aha, thought Juniper, reading the signs. You could tune a harp to the tension there. No resolution to that little problem, yet.

Astrid whistled. "Lady bless, but you've made a lot of progress on that!"

Eilir nodded emphatically. What's with, excellent Mom? You've got twice as much up as I thought you would! At this rate, we'll be able to break a lot of land for the Dun Laurel folks before everyone has to go home to get their own crop in.

"Nigel here has been a wonderful help," Juniper said, squeezing his arm. "With tricks of the trade, and organizing."

Nigel Loring shrugged. "Experience, don't you know. Glad to be a bit of help. And I had basic engineering training."

"Speaking of helping," Astrid said, and pointed.

The Rangers were coming down the road, striding out beside a long train of horses with packsaddles loaded high.

We've got half a ton of meat, Eilir amplified. Wild hog, mostly, and some deer, and a feral cow. I don't suppose you could use any of it, Tom?

Tom Brannigan grinned; he was in charge of feeding the workforce. In theory it went towards the debts Dun Juniper would owe the Clan as a whole, but it would be years before those tallies were paid in full. Even if the first draft was Dun Laurel folk helping harvest his vineyard that Mabon season, and prune it over the winter.

"I'll say!" he said, enthusiastically. "Thanks for the contribution, Rangers."

Eilir put a hand on Astrid's sleeve and raised an eyebrow at Sutterdown's Mayor, High Priest and wealthiest resident.

Brannigan sighed and nodded. "OK, I'll throw in one hundred-gallon barrel: OK, two hundred-gallon barrels of the Special for your Rangers." A silence dragged. "OK, some wine too, and two hundred pounds of barreled salt pork this Yule, and sixty bushels of flour when you want to draw on the town mill. That enough?"

"We're both making goodwill gifts," Astrid said sweetly. "You'll have to be the judge of that."

Sutterdown, Willamette Valley, Oregon

August 21st, 2007 AD-Change Year Nine

"I can't tell you how much help this has been, Nigel," Juniper said.

"Oh, you've got some very capable chappies," the elder Loring said, self-depreciatingly. "You've accomplished a great deal. I've just given them a few ideas."

They sat their horses just east of Sutterdown; he nodded towards the tall walls that surrounded the town, shining in their white stucco.

"Those are quite remarkable. I'd never have thought of using the old Murus Gallicus, and me with the remnants of a classical education, at that."

"We've got a fair number of craftsmen and builders," she said. "And we've done larger projects mostly by brute force and rule of thumb. I never suspected how useful it would be to have someone who could calculate things."

She nodded towards the water-race before them. "This, for example," she said, and grinned. "I'd have missed some of the implications, if you hadn't pointed them out."

Sutterdown had tall hills just north of it, outliers of the Cascade foothills. The Suttee River ran south of town, but the pioneers who'd founded the settlement had dug a mile-long canal to take water from the river higher up. Now it provided power again; besides the tannery half a mile away-that was a smelly business-a big four-stone gristmill stood by the canal just outside the town, wood-built oh a stone foundation, with its twenty-foot overshot wheel turning briskly and water pouring off it in white foam. A wagon left as she watched, piled high with sacks and barrels of whole meal, and another sent bags of wheat up a rope hoist to the second story; under the creak of wood and rush of water went a burring rumble as the granite millstones worked.

The men walking towards the Mackenzie chieftain had more uses for the water in mind: Tom Brannigan, and two others in the brown jean trousers and four-pocket wool jackets common among the well-to-do in Corvallis, with businesslike short swords by their sides and broad-brimmed hats on their heads. One was a short, stocky dark man, and the other a tall lanky woman with her barley-colored hair gathered in a ponytail. They were sweating a little in the warm late-August sun; Juniper nodded politely, but kept to her saddle.

Height as a psychological advantage is not to be despised, she thought. And as one shorter than most for most of my life, don't I know it!

"You don't like them, do you?" Loring murmured.

She shot him a glance. Perceptive of you, Nigel, she thought. I'm not an easy person to read, when I don't wish to be. Aloud: "Not much, but we can do business with them, perhaps. Tom Brannigan likes to do well out of a bargain, which I don't grudge him. Those two might as well be adding machines in human form, and that I do not like. Besides which, they're also leaders of the faction in Corvallis that thinks it can do business with the Portland Protective Association. The which I do not like or sympathize with or agree with at all, so."

The Corvallis men cut the pleasantries shorter than most Mackenzies would have considered polite, and came to business sooner:

"It's a viable proposition," one said; his name was Turner, and he was as close as the Willamette Valley came to a banker these days, as well as half-owner of a big met-alworking shop and foundry. "Provided the contract is reasonable. Obviously, a project this big requires long-term guarantees for the amount of capital we'll have tied up. It's not like selling a load of anvils or sledgehammers."

"My thought exactly, Mr. Turner," she said. "And your papers were quite detailed. Ms. Kowalski, we've done business before."

She cast a sidelong glance at Nigel before she went on: "That's why I'm inclined to reject the deal as it stands. Or to recommend to the town's assembly that it be rejected, that is. Of course, if you can persuade them better than me, or refer it to the Clan as a whole:

"

Turner's eyes went wide; Brannigan's closed in a wince. The chance of Dun Sutterdown's adults voting the two-thirds majority required to override the Chief was somewhere between nil and nothing. Even a simple majority would be vanishingly unlikely without Lady Juniper's agreement.

"Why?" the Corvallan said. "Lady Juniper, breaking and scutching flax and slubbing and carding raw wool by hand are a lot of work, but they're easy and simple to do with powered machinery. Granted there isn't the market or population to support a full-blown mechanized spinning and weaving industry yet, but we could make a start. Cloth's getting more and more expensive."

Juniper nodded, smiling sweetly. "Yes, both those are sort of labor-intensive. I've done both myself, on many a long winter's day. And everyone needs to make more cloth, now that we're finally running out of the last of what was left from before the Change."