Within a hundred yards, Dar realized that the spring travel of the sidecar was no match for the rutted road leading back down the mountain. Particularly not with the giant bag sharing the compartment with him. He clamped his jaw to keep from biting his tongue off, grabbed onto the sides of the car and held on. He’d broken the odd horse or two for his father — he could hang on to this thing.

The ride down the mountain was an exercise in terror. Av piloted the giant motorcycle like a demented jockey, crouched over the handlebars, his feet on the sturdy floorboards, heels in the air, using his entire body to absorb the flailing of the vehicle. He ignored the seat entirely.

Dar had no such option, bouncing around within the sidecar as it hammered into the cradle frame like a jackhammer, hurling the destruction-filled bag around like a misshapen missile to beat at his legs and thighs. There were times that only a single wheel of the three touched the ground. There were times when that single point of contact was no more than a pleasant memory as Av sailed the Indian over hummocks or narrow ravines like a diminutive airship. And during all of this, the sidecar fought its spring tethers, striving to detach itself from the rest of the assemblage and roam free with its unwilling passenger.

Dar’s lip was bleeding and he was sure that the bruise below his knee had been joined by an army of others by the time Av lined out on the flats outside of the Palanna stead and really lit a fire. The ground was smoother down here, but they were going at least sixty miles an hour.

By this time, Dar had taken to crouching in the seat, heels bouncing into his rump as he clutched the rails around the opening in a death grip. His nose was running and his eyes were blurred — whether by tears or sweat, he couldn’t really be sure.

The blue and red Indian rolled around the south-east corner of the stead’s outer wall and in through the gates at a more sedate pace, Av finally planted in the wide seat. Dar was still trying to get his various organs back to where they belonged, taking deep breaths, still crouching atop the seat.

The old man pulled up before the porch where the elder Palin waited and killed the engine.

Dar simply stood up on the seat, stretching his legs painfully, trying to get some circulation back into them. He twisted back and forth at the waist a couple of times, and turned toward the porch. And caught his father gaping open-mouthed at him.

“Does sorta favor him, don’t he?” Av commented laconically. “Give him some time to grow one o’ them soup catchers on his lip and you’d not be able to tell the one from t’other, I reckon, ‘cept for the age.”

Dar turned to him quizzically, then back to his father, taking in his father’s new appearance as well as his expression. “Pop? What’s wrong, Pop?”

Martin worked his mouth a couple of times like an air-starved carp before he could get words out. “You — you look just like your grandfather,” he said disbelievingly. “I never saw it until now. You—”

“Where in hell did you get that coat?” he demanded suddenly. “And that flight cap?” Then he turned angrily on Av. “Why, you old canker sore!” he spat. “This is your doing! What have you been—?”

“My job!” Av rode him down. “You really think I moved up here inta the ass crack o’ nowhere because I got tired of roamin’ the whole of two worlds like I owned ‘em?”

“We’d hoped,” the voice came from outside of Av’s line of vision and he winced, ducking his shoulders.

“Lissenne,” he said softly, turning his head to regard Dar’s mother, just coming from the milk house, as yet unaware of the morning’s goings on. “How’ve you been?”

“Happy enough, until now,” she returned icily. “Don’t I recall a promise, Old Man?” she asked mock sweetly. “You were to stay far away from me? From me and from my family?”

He ducked his head further, seemingly utterly cowed by the small woman before him. “A forced promise, Lissenne,” he admitted. “Coerced.”

“But a promise nonetheless?”

“Compared to what?” he asked, face flushing. “You gave me no choice! You wouldn’t let up...”

“Liss,” Martin broke into the private battle before it could get worse. “Liss, I called for him.”

She turned on her husband. “Why on earth would you do that?” Then she noticed how he was dressed. For that matter, how Av and her son were dressed. “What’s going on here Martal?” she demanded, her voice going strident.

“There’s been some trouble,” he started.

“That is no longer your concern,” she hissed, her face tight. “You aren’t the one who addresses trouble anymore,” she pressed. “You’re a rancher and a freighter and a father. And a husband.” the last with more emphasis, as though he might have forgotten.

“Liss,” Entigh addressed her from beside the old truck.

She turned on him, connecting his presence instinctively to the horror of the men of her family in military raiment. Her eyes narrowed dangerously. “And what is your part in this Hendrel Entigh?”

“I begged Martin to help me,” he told her.

Her eyes widened and her face paled. As her husband had, she understood immediately what the use of that name entailed. “How dare you!” she hissed.

“Pirates!” he said. “Liss, my daughter’s stead was attacked by pirates last night!”

She clamped her mouth shut on a retort, putting hand to throat. He was serious! “The constables—?”

“Dead.”

“The militia!”

He shook his head sadly. “Lizbet,” he invoked her true name, watching her eyes go white at the corners from it. “They’ve got an airship. A very large and expensive airship. That marks them as professionals. These aren’t just a bunch of drunken bullies wandering around in a pilfered freighter popping away with rusty guns.

“They took the constables’ armored car out before it got anywhere near them. If I sent the militia in there, I’d be sending them in to be killed to no purpose.”

“So you’ll instead send my husband, my father, and my son,” her voice harsh.

Dar, still standing in the sidecar, mesmerized by the unfolding scene and still working his mind around the notion that even his mother seemed to have multiple identities, gasped, casting his eyes again to the old man who, it seemed, had no end of apocryphal secrets to his credit.

Entigh said nothing.

Lissenne Palanna, for she had long ago vowed to herself that she would never think of herself as Lizbet Palin ever again, turned back to her husband. “So you would go forth and be killed to preserve the militia?” she demanded. “Or simply to live again as the scourge of the battlefield?”

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

He didn’t blink. “You think I wanted this?” he asked.

She tilted her head and regarded the uniform that was supposed to have been rotting at the bottom of a deep hole somewhere on the far end of the stead, cocking an eyebrow mockingly.

He shook his head. “You’re wrong, Liss,” he said. “It’s Henry’s daughter. What would you say if it were Lissa? Or Maygda?”

“But it’s not Lissa or Maygda, is it?” she asked. “You are not defending your own, are you?. You’re going out again to fight the battles of others. Despite your promise. Despite your vow.”

She spun on Entigh. “Why don’t you go?” she demanded.

“I did,” he sighed miserably. I didn’t just send the militia, Liz,” he told her. “I led them. I’ve seen the airship myself. If I thought there was a chance in hell that they could—”

“And why couldn’t they?”

“Gottdamnit, Liz,” he shouted. “They’re farmers and clerks and drovers! They drill and drink beer two days a month and call themselves a military force!

“They aren’t really soldiers or warriors. They’ll go in there and everybody’ll end up dead — them and my daughter too, and my grandchildren!”

“Farmers!” she spat angrily back. “And Martal is a rancher!”

Hendrel cocked his head and looked over to Martin, making a show of taking in the whole of him. The Ranger uniform with its khaki pants and olive jacket, Montana peak campaign hat tilted forward, fore brim curled up the way they’d used to do. Even after almost twenty years, it still fit like it had the last time he’d worn it.

“The pistols that lay along his hips looked like they’d been grown there. The hilts of the deadly knives poking up out of his boot tops looked as much a part of him as his fingers.

His whole stance was completely unselfconscious and entirely natural. Relaxed for the first time since he’d shown up on the passenger sloop from Eastmarch back in ‘28. He looked like exactly what he was.

He turned back to Lissenne, mouth quirked. “Well,” he admitted. “He ranches.”

Lissenne’s eyes flared murder at him. She turned back to her husband, eyes pleading. She’d lived through far too much war both as an unwilling participant and as the anxious woman, constantly awaiting the awful message — never knowing which of her family would be the subject. Surely he could see that she could not go through that horror again. He’d promised her.

But all she could see in him was that damnable sense of duty that had so colored his life in the early days. That damnable eagerness for battle, so like his father’s. Yes, and her father’s too. And she too saw what Hendrel could see.

The long, crushing burden was gone. The pretense that had so weighed upon his every moment since putting aside his old self and donning the trappings of Martal Palanna as though they were an ill-fitting and painful suit five sizes too small. He was himself again. He was Marty again. But even as her heart soared at his return, she also remembered what it meant. She sagged, tears beginning to flow.

Martin saw the emotions play through his wife’s body —saw the surrender— and reached out for her. But she’d already turned away from him. “Lissenne,” he called, but she ignored him. She didn’t even slam the front door as she entered their home. It closed with barely a sound.

“Marty?” Av caught his attention.

“Wha—?” he turned

Av tapped his wrist. “We don’t know what’s happinin’ over to Northridge, Marty,” the old man reminded him. “Time’s a’wastin’.”

“Right!” he said, all business again. “Dar, get down out of there.”

“Sir?” Dar stuttered. He was still working his head through the unfolding revelations he’d been machine gunned with this morning, and remained more than a little confused.

“Down out of that sidecar. Avery and I have to get going and we’ve already wasted enough time.”

“But—”

“No buts. You aren’t going.”

“But Av said—”

“I don’t give a good gottdamn what Av said!” Palin snapped. “This is far and away too—”

“He’ll do fine,” Av said calmly. Then to Dar, “go fetch that other pistol from your sock drawer, Son. Your daddy and I have some palaverin’ to do.”

Dar looked from him to his father and back before leaping from the sidecar and racing for the house.

Martin was looking fit to start smoking from the ears, but Av had seen him worse. “You think the whole world stopped because you got off, boy?” he demanded of the younger man the instant Dar was out of earshot.

Martin’s eyes narrowed.

“I’m here to tell you, it didn’t,” Av went on. “The same old crap, the same old fools, the same old victims. They didn’t pay no mind when you ran off to hide up here in th’ clouds,” he waved an arm airily around. “They just all kept on a’goin’, gettin’ better at their parts in the grand play.”

“What has that got to do with my son?” Martin demanded.

“I swore a blood oath,” Av told him flatly. “With your father, and with a whole lot more blood than either of us could really spare at the time.

“I promised him that I’d never let any of his kin turn into the fools we were trying to protect at such great cost. I promised him that you lot would be the protectors you was meant to be, not the ones who cry for help when the truck they’ve been watching roll up for years starts in grindin’ their bones under its tires.”

“How long?” Martin asked, knowing.

“Since just after I got here,” Av told him. “Since he was old enough to know which end of a rifle is the dangerous one.”

Martin nodded once, his head barely moving. Trick question — one his father had used to ask. The dangerous end was the one with the rifleman attached to it. “He never said anything.”

Av laughed at him. “And why would he?” he demanded. “When you bit his head off every time he asked you about it?”

He shook his head. “You had him convinced that you hated soldiers and anything they stood for. The greatest fear he ever had was that you’d find out and be disappointed in him for wanting something he’s just naturally inclined to do.

“Also,” he added, eyes narrow. “How stupid do you really think I am?”

Martin Palin’s world was still busily crashing down around his shoulders. It wouldn’t be done for some time, if he were any judge. “What? I don’t—?”

“The only way for you to have missed what I’ve been making that boy into would have been poking your own eyes out,” Av said flatly.

Martin muttered self-consciously. What did the old man know about blindness — self-induced or otherwise? How much it cost a man to maintain it? How much he lost? How dangerous it could be to see the world as it was?

Poke his eyes out? Yes, he’d done that. And plugged his ears with mud, too. He’d been all of the three monkeys for all of these years, seeing no evil, hearing no evil, and speaking no evil. Or anything else.

But that was over now, and he could not force himself back into ignorance regardless of effort. Later there’d be time to go over the old newsreels of his life and see what he’d made himself miss. Now, though....

“How much does he know?” he asked with some resignation.

“Not as much as I’d have liked,” Av admitted. “I was kinda hopin’ for a few more years to sort of hone the fine points. I mean, I didn’t have him full time like I’d have wanted. But he’s good enough. Hell, maybe more than good enough.”

Martin suppressed a smile that Martel wouldn’t have needed to. “He’s good, then?”

“Good as you were at his age,” Av smiled. “Maybe better. Maybe as good as Finn was, though it’s hard to tell without we show him the elephant close up.

“He sure-hell knows more about actual fightin’ than any of the lot o’ you did comin’ out of those A-cademies with alla their fine book learnin’ didn’t amount to a pile o’ steamin’ cow flops when the bullets started flyin’.”

Martin raised his hand to his face, ostensibly to scratch at his lip beneath his thick mustache, but in actuality, to hide the smile that he could no longer suppress. “You didn’t teach him to fight like a gentleman, then?” his eyes sparkled.

The laugh was nearly a bark. “Gentleman? Every dirty trick I learned from my folk, your folk, the Limeys, the Huns, the Arabs, and those Chinamen we ran with down t’ Taipei an’ Hong Kong,” he bragged.

“There ain’t two bits worth of pie in the sky in that boy’s head. Not about fightin’. I seen to that.”

Dar was out on the porch with the old Colt in his hand, finger well away from the trigger in spite of its having been without ammunition throughout his entire life. Av fished a loaded magazine out of his coat pocket and flipped it to the boy as he came. Dar snatched it out of the air and slid it into the well, slipping the pistol into the holster beneath his coat.

“You know how it works, right?” Av asked. “And it’s cleaned and oiled?”

“Like your Browning,” Dar ventured. “Looks like the same controls, just fewer rounds in the mag. And it’s always cleaned and oiled!”

“Good lad,” Av said. “Now skin ‘em both out and carry ‘em proper.”

Dar blushed and pulled the pistols from their holsters one at a time, racking the slides to chamber rounds, slipping the thumb safeties up to lock the hammers back, and carefully replacing them.

“How many they hold?” Av prompted.

Dar hesitated. “Well, the P35 holds thirteen...”

“That’s right,” Av scolded. “You don’t know. Seven. I really shoulda had you using them already, but it was a can o’ worms I wasn’t ready for at the time,” glancing at Dar’s father as he said it.

“You keep them back unless you really, really need ‘em, and stick with what you’ve already gotten some time with. Comes the time you really need them, though, treat ‘em like the P35 and you should be fine. Damn, I wish we had some time to go ‘round the block with them!”

“Then do it,” Martin ordered. “I’d rather he didn’t go into the storm with completely unfamiliar backup. Just be quick about it. And get him out of those leathers. We aren’t going up in a biplane, we’re heading off into the woods.”

He turned back to regard Hendrel Entigh, already clearing his son and father-in-law from his mind. “While they’re doing that, Henry,” he said, voice clipped, “what can you tell me about Northridge and the area around it? You have any maps, or even a diagram of the layout?”