The Protector's War by S. M. Stirling

but perhaps touched by a Power more mischievous than kind.
    Juniper’s hands went on: But she’ll have to stay a few weeks, maybe a month. Rangers or no, they can’t come back across the Valley alone. It’ll have to wait until we drive that horse herd over, and it’s not in from the Bend country yet.
    Eilir grinned. No problemo, Supremely Autocratic Clan Chieftain Mom. She wants to be there for the Circle on Ostara too. And then we could go up to Mithrilwood for a while, get in some hunting and Rangering around.
    Juniper nodded, and gave a final wave to the Larsdalen folk. Then she made the Invoking sign—a pentagram, drawn in the air from the top point down—before she chanted:
    â€œLord and Lady, bless this journey
    Keep it safe to wandering’s end;
    Yours in parting and in meeting—
    Guard loves and hearth as home we wend.”
    The rest of her riders and a fair number of the bystanders joined in with the final “Blessed be.” The youth beside her had the pole of the Mackenzie banner socketed into a cup welded on his left stirrup, proudly holding the ashwood flagstaff as the green-and-silver horns-and-moon flag snapped in the cool spring breeze. He unslung his cow-horn trumpet from the saddlebow with the other hand and blew into the silver mouthpiece: Huuuu-huuuu-huuuuu!
    Folk shouted farewells as the horses’ hooves beat out a grinding clop on the old crushed shell and new gravel of the long driveway. Juniper looked over her shoulder for a moment; Mike raised his hand in salute and turned.
    Looking that way, the big yellow-brick house with its white pillars didn’t seem very different from the time before the Change when it had been a Portland industrialist’s toy—set at the head of a long east-facing valley in the Eola Hills, gracious with a century’s mellowing amid gardens and lawns and giant trees.
    It was when you turned and looked down the broad V of the valley that you returned to the Changed world with a vengeance. The Bearkillers hadn’t been idle since they got here towards the end of the first Change Year, nor the folk they gathered around them. There were buildings flanking the roadway; the original manager’s house and sheds and barns, and others ranging from the rawly new to seven or eight years old. Some were log-cabin style, in squared timber; if there was one thing you weren’t going to run short of in western Oregon, it was logs . Others were frame, disassembled and reerected here. Digging an earth dam and berms turned part of the creek into a pond; below it a waterwheel turned to power sawmill and gristmill. Next were the big storage warehouses and grain elevator, the rows of workshops, then the cottages, and the low-slung barracks, last, closest to the fortifications.
    A steep-sided earthwork thirty feet high and twenty thick spanned the valley’s cut. The Bearkillers were pushing it up the hills on either side and along the summit of the steep scarp in back of the house, and now a thick stone curtain wall stood atop it—big rocks set in concrete mortar hiding a framework of steel I-beams, with more cement plastered over the surface until it was fairly smooth, albeit patchy where the sides of the bigger boulders showed. A massive stone blockhouse sat over the cleft where the roadway went though the middle of the berm. Four round towers of the same construction flanked the gatehouse, crenellations showing at their tops like teeth bared at heaven; nothing else broke their exteriors except narrow arrow slits, and more towers walked down the wall to either side at hundred-yard intervals. A tall flagpole on one of the gate towers flaunted the brown-and-red banner of the Bearkillers. A militia squad guarded the open gates, farmers and laborers and craftsfolk in kettle helmets and tunics of boiled leather or chain mail doing their obligatory service, polearms or crossbows in hand.
    Their mounted leader was in the more