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Once they were out of earshot, Frat said, "Heart's in the right place but the kid doesn't know much about setting up a battery. If anything goes down, he's making it easy for the Moondaggers. They're not all cross-eyed and stigmatic, I don't suppose."
"Not hardly," Valentine said, remembering the sniper's bullet that had sprayed Rand's brains all over headquarters.
Valentine spotted Tikka emerging from a knot of hilltop woods, walking the ridgeline. Corporal Rockaway limped up to her, and they spoke for a few minutes. Tikka pointed as she spoke, both toward the ridge on the other side of the river where the Coonskins and the Moondaggers were encamped, and behind, where the rest of her train was presumably approaching and deploying.
Once again, she made a show of strength, putting some of her vehicles and horse wagons in plain view on the hill.
She was kind enough to invite Valentine to accompany her to the peace conference. All she asked was that he wear one of the A-o-K field jackets and a hat, and keep to the back with his mouth shut.
Duvalier managed to work her way into the party too. Boelnitz tried to get permission to come along, but Tikka insisted that he stay back on the riverbank.
"Remember what happened the last time we were invited to a conference?" Valentine said.
Tikka grinned fiercely. "As a matter of fact, we're very much hoping for an encore."
"Without legworms? Won't you be at a disadvantage?"
"They'll be assuming that, yeah."
VIPs arrived in cars and passenger trucks; the Gunslingers and Bulletproof and a smattering of other old Alliance soldiers on horseback or in wagon trains. Many arrived via old-fashioned shoe leather.
They met out on the small lake, a widening in the Kentucky River separating Coonskin land from the Gunslingers.
Valentine felt like he'd read about a peace meeting like this before, but he couldn't place the exact circumstances.
The two sides rowed out to a pontoon houseboat anchored midlake. There, on the sundeck atop the houseboat (after both sides verified that neither had filled the living quarters with gunmen), they met.
Their forces lined the tree-filled banks to either side of the river. Valentine didn't understand the fascination. There was little enough to watch.
He wasn't important enough to go up on the top deck with the Kentucky or Coonskin principals. But he could listen from the base of the ladder facing the west side of the river.
There were introductions, neither side being particularly gracious beyond the grace required of opponents who were used to shooting each other on sight. If the Gunslingers were colder in their formalities, it was because they'd suffered more outrage at the hands of the Moondaggers.
In many more words than the Reaper's avatar used, they offered the representatives of the Kentucky Assembly essentially the same status as Jack in the Box had spoken of: a neutral Kentucky, running its own domestic affairs but leaving the outside world to the Kurians. The Agenda and Tikka were no more inclined to welcome the proposal from some Moonskin mouthpiece and a few traitors than they were through Valentine's birdlike Reaper.
"Glad to see you admit we whupped you out of Kentucky," Tikka said.
"We stayed only long enough to chase Southern Command out," a Moondagger responded. "Then we returned to our allies."
"Formerly our allies," Tikka said. "They turned on us; they'll turn on you someday. Remember that."
"You are the traitors," an educated Kentucky accent said. "The Kurians indulged you, and you paid them back by aiding terrorists and wreckers and murderers-"
"There is a reckoning coming!" one of the Moondaggers began to shout thickly. Valentine recognized the voice at once, their old blustering friend Last Chance. "A reckoning! This land, long peaceful-"
Ha! Valentine thought. Last Chance wasn't at the battle between the Bulletproof and the Wildcats a few years back.
"-needs to be cleansed of the filth that has washed into it. Intruders! Interlopers! Troublemakers! Trouble they brought, and death will be their reward-or something worse than death."
Duvalier made a fist and flicked out two fingers toward Last Chance with her thumb slightly up-the American Sign Language version of "asshole."
"That's not how you go about negotiating in Kentucky, beardy," the new Agenda for the Assembly said-the previous one was too sick to make the journey to the river. "You want to deal with us, you tell us what you offer and you let us make up our minds. You don't threaten."
Valentine liked the new Agenda already. Later he learned he was a man named Zettel, though most called him Mr. Zee. Formerly the clan chief of the Gunslingers and a friend of Karas, Mr. Zee, Valentine had been told, came from a family who'd once owned quarries and he'd grown up covered in limestone dust.
"We'll consider your offer and give you an answer tomorrow. Here, on the boat again. Shall we say noon?" Agenda Zettel said.
"There can be only one answer," the educated voice said. "The other doesn't bear thinking about. We both love Kentucky too much to see it turned into a graveyard."
