The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series) by S. M. Stirling Page B

NobleSpeech when you’re telling someone to shut the fuck up in Sindarin. Particularly when they
really need
to shut the fuck up.”
    “Oh, shut the fuck up, Morfind,” Faramir said, but this time he used the true term as she did, and smiled.
    It was more authentic, but somehow . . . and it was the word the Sword of the Lady had given the High King when he returned from the Quest, before any of them had been born. There was a reason they were all feeling prickly today; it was an alternative to being depressed, and you couldn’t spend time on watch weeping and mourning.
    The High King was dead, murdered by a prisoner right over in Napa.
    And I sort of feel . . . numb about it,
he thought.
Like when you’ve just broken a bone and you’re looking at it and thinking, uh-oh, damn but that’s going to hurt in a second.
    That had happened to him a few times. Falls as a child, since Rangers learned to climb like squirrels, and fractures in two ribs once in a fight in the ruins, from an Eater’s flung stone when they’d snuck around to attack the apprentices serving as horse-holders for the Ranger
ohtar
and
roquen
. There he hadn’t had time to feel anything but terror at how helpless he was with the maneaters near until a shower of arrows drove the savages off and friendly hands pulled him out of the hole where he’d been pinned, trying to hold a knife ready despite every breath feeling like blades in his body.
    And after that it hurt
a lot
, but I
almost
didn’t mind even when they threw me across a saddle. Not at first.
    He knew the pain from this loss was going to be even worse; it wasn’t just the death of a lord, however much respected and revered for his great deeds and firm hand and fair justice, but of an elder kinsman who he’d always liked. Though Stath Ingolf was a long way from the center of things, his parents had gone on visits to wherever the Court was, or to Stardell Hall in Mithrilwood in the Willamette where the founding lords of the Dúnedain dwelt, and the High King’s kin were always welcome at Dun Juniper too. They’d seen one or the other every second year or so, and the High King and his family had visited here about as often.Sometimes just to see his half-sisters and his other old comrades from the Quest and their families rather than any reason of State.
    I think part of that was getting away from the crowds and the pomp, here where there’s room to breathe and he could let the man out of the King, with people who knew him when he was a kid.
    So High King Artos was also Uncle Rudi, his mother’s elder half-brother. A man he could remember telling stories that kept them all silently enthralled while the youngsters crowded around his feet at the hearth in
Tham en-Araf
—Wolf Hall in the Common Tongue—over in the Valley of the Moon. Or throwing ten-year-old Faramir Kovalevsky into the hill-pool reservoir there on a hot summer’s afternoon, and jumping from the Leaping Rock himself and sputtering and roaring with laughter and mock-growls as his nieces and nephews swarmed on and gleefully tried to drown him in the cold spring water.
    Or once giving Faramir a quick wordless slap on the back after he’d done something needful and risky and just at the margins of his fifteen-year-old strength on a boar hunt, when a massive projectile of bone and gristle and goring tusks nobody had noticed had exploded foaming and squealing murder-rage out of a thicket.
    And
that
man had died by treachery not a day’s travel from Stath Ingolf and none of the Rangers had realized it until a frigidly-polite messenger in the tartan of the Clan Mackenzie had delivered the tidings from Dun Barstow. He’d found everyone still getting ready for the Royal visit. That made it a matter of honor, too. Under the Great Charter the Dúnedain were direct vassals of the High King wherever they lived, holding from his hand and charged with the burden and proud duty of keeping the High King’s peace and borders.
    His own