The Tears of the Sun

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Rudi Mackenzie-Artos the First, High King of Montival though yet to be formally crowned-finished the last crusty bite of the ham sandwich, savoring the smoky taste of the cured meat and sharp cheese, and washed it down with the last swallow in the clay crock of beer. Then he leaned back against the smooth-worn roots of the gnarled wild apple tree and sighed, listening to the soft sough of wind in branches, the hum of bees. A sharp tup-tup came from a flock of little yellow-faced warblers diving through a cloud of mayflies, and then a buzzing zee-zee-zee-bzzzee as they swarmed off like swooping dots of sunlight into the Douglas firs above.

“Now this,” he said, “is something on the order of a homecoming, so it is. Or close enough for government work, until the war is over. Which is appropriate, since now we are the government.”

His newly handfasted bride Mathilda Arminger snuggled into the curve of his shoulder, a pleasant solid burden, her brown hair smelling of summer like the sun-warmed grass in which they rested, and her strong not-quitepretty features relaxed as she turned her face towards the sun. The weight didn’t bother him, though Mathilda was a rangy five-nine and had the leanly solid build of someone who’d trained to fight in armor most of her life. He was a tall man, born late in the first year of the Change-which made him a few months older than his bride-long-limbed, broad in the shoulders and narrow in the waist, with a regular high-cheeked face just on the edge of beauty, a shoulder-length mane of hair a color just halfway between gold and molten copper, and light eyes of a changeable blue-green-gray.

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