She'd spent much of her girlhood training for eventual court service, and Wilhelmina knew her grandmother would have been distantly proud to find her in the Third Circle of a Territory Queen. Though she suspected most Fourth Circle witches reported to their Queens in drawing rooms or over cups of tea, and not in a horse barn. Even in a sunny one that smelled sweetly of hay, with only the faintest whiff of the other unavoidable horse smells.
"You're sure you don't want any help in the stables? I have a couple of young males who desperately need some manure to shovel."
"My stables, thank you." Elenor - Lady Elenor,Queen of Chaillot no matter how much she complained - leaned her pitchfork against the stable wall, patting the shoulder of the young mare who craned her neck over the stall door. "I've only just gotten my First Circle believing that I actually mean it when I tell them I need some time to work alone; boys are much more thickheaded, and I don't have time to get it through their heads as well." She frowned in thought. "But we're starting to rebuild some of the buildings that burned after the Purge, so I'll have a word with my Steward and see if he can help you find something suitably difficult."
"If not, I have an annoyed hearthwitch just waiting to explain matters to them." She suspected Mairin of working some obscure bit of hearth-Craft on the compost bin, just in case she could assign gardening duties to the two errant males who'd crashed through her kitchen. At least, when Jhaliir had gotten downwind of it, he'd flattened his ears, bolted toward the house, and not gone near the kitchen gardens for three days afterward. "I also needed to mention these three to you..." She handed the Queen a thin sheaf of papers; Elenor took it and scanned the letters of introduction Wilhelmina had written for her Steward.
"Two Warlords and a witch?"
Wilhelmina nodded. "She spends most of the time with her nose in the nearest book. I think she might train to be a Priestess, given some encouragement and the chance to see how Protocol works in practice and not on paper. And the males...are good boys, but they need someone to swat some sense into them, and Diccan's overworked as it is."
Elenor snorted, sounding more than a little like her own horses.
These informal meetings had been going on since shortly after Wilhelmina reclaimed her childhood home, when Elenor had negotiated an agreement to pasture some of her beloved horses on unused Angelline land. The Queen's heart was with her farm and her husband, but she was the only one the lesser Queens and Warlord Princes trusted enough to accept as ruler. The same sense of duty that made her acceptable as Queen kept her from abandoning her post for the life she preferred; if stabling a few horses made it easier for her, Wilhelmina would gladly help.
At least Elenor didn't want her to muck out stalls.
Wilhelmina set down the bucket of sweet feed she'd been carrying. "Those three are the last I'll need to find places for at the moment, but several of the adolescents I first took on are coming close to their Offerings. By Winsol I'm going to have a whole new set of problems nipping at my heels."
Elenor chuckled. "You make them sound like a pack of wolves."
"They're not that organized, thank the Darkness," Wilhelmina said. "But I've got witches who are mad for flirtation, and witches who are terrified of anything in trousers, and males who don't know what to trust, much less what to serve...and while I can give them a safe place to grow up, they have to be grown up sometime. And I can't keep sending them to your Court for training."
Elenor looked somber, but didn't disagree. Territory Queen or not, her resources were strained to the breaking point. "There are a few District Queens who I'm coming to trust. Next time I write them, I'll see if any of them can make places in a lower Circle. If not - we'll think of something. The males especially need the experience of serving somewhere..." She searched for diplomatic words for a moment, before giving up and saying "decent. In the meantime, how will it work if I send my Master of the Guard to conduct some training exercises in the old gardens?"
Exercises that Diccan, as the dominant male here, would be assisting in...and giving the fractious young males a chance to appreciate his uniquely dirty style of combat. The two witches shared a slow grin of mutual understanding.
"I'll see to it, then, and contact you when things are ready," Elenor said briskly. "In the meantime, I'll see you in ten days or so."
Wilhelmina nodded. "Just don't make me shovel up after your horses."
"Of course not. As long as you don't find more traumatized adolescents needing a contract between now and then."
She came back to the manor to find Jhaliir stretched on the front lawn, lying beside a very, very badly dug flowerbed where no flowerbed had ever been intended to be.
The little she-cubs wanted to dig a den. I helped, he explained, displaying massive forepaws now stained a deep earth-brown. Human witches do not know how to dig a good den.
Well, that explained the...shape. Five hundred pounds of cat digging straight down, plus a gaggle of girl-children digging to the sides, might produce something that looked like a tornado gone horribly wrong, or one of Mairin's more ambitious experiments before it started going right. "I don't think they wanted a den-" though you couldn't ever be quite sure- "Just a place to plant flowers."
Flowers are pretty. Dens are safe. I should show them how to dig good dens.
"Pretty is more important than you might think." She wound her fingers into his ruff and scratched idly. "If there's time to make things pretty, it means you're in a safe place already."
Mostly safe. I will protect the little she-cubs from the strange male until you and Diccan catch him.
"He's strange, but I doubt he's a threat. And if you chase him away before I can talk to him, I'll-" She broke off with a sudden frown, following the idea that had first manifested as idle speculation about Jhaliir and hunting. "Hm. Bait," she said thoughtfully, patted Jhaliir, and went to find Mairin.