The Blue Sword (Damar #2)(35)

He came a step or two closer to her as she stood with the point of the sword unhandily dug into the heaped carpets, and her arm out, as if to keep the undesired object as far from her as she could; and he looked, thoughtfully, into her eyes.

"It is because of what you have seen," he replied. "When you tasted the Water of Sight you saw a war-party coming to battle; I and all my Riders heard you cry out what you saw - in the ancient tongue of our forebears here, the tongue that was spoken when Damar was one land, a great and green land, before ... "

Before my people came, she thought, but she was not going to say it aloud if he was not. "And several days past the entire camp saw the Lady Aerin come out of the fire to greet you, carrying the Blue Sword, Gonturan, with which she won back the Hero's Crown and defeated the armies of the North." He hesitated. "Aerin had not been seen since my father's father's day; and yet she has always looked after her country well, since she first rode out to face the Black Dragon, before Gonturan had come to her hand; and our dearest legends speak of her."

The bright bubbles of anger in her eyes burst and disappeared. She bowed her head; then bent her elbow and brought the sword under her eyes. The long wicked edge of it winked at her. It had a silver handle, nearly plain, with a few faint graceful scrolls on the underpart of the hand-guard, where it met the hilt. She stared at them unhappily: the sweep and arch of them seemed to her a more likely ornament for a church pew than a sword. Her wrist began to quiver with the unaccustomed weight.

He said, as gently as he could: "Here, anyone who is granted the Gift of Seeing is given to what they see; it is thought to be a guide, a direction, a help sent by the gods; or by the heroes of our past greatness, who still care what happens to their children's children. Children now sip the Water when they meet their tenth birthday, in the hope that they may be told what apprenticeship they are most fit for. Many see nothing, for, as I have told you, the Water does not work for many people; and then the simpler considerations of parentage and availability are allowed to decide. But all our priests were given Sight of the priesthood on their tenth birthday; each of my Riders saw himself carrying a sword ... many of them will only choose a war-horse the color they saw themselves riding in the vision."

She broke out frantically: "But this is nothing to do with me. I am an Outlander, not of your Hills at all. If it is war I have seen, my people have feared war too; it is not strange that even I should feel it. This thing you have done to me, I - " She choked off, for she had heard herself speaking: Outlander she had instinctively said, and she was speaking swiftly in the Hill tongue that she had only - or so she had thought and now desperately was not sure - begun to learn, haltingly, a few days before. She heaved a breath that had she been a year younger might have been a sob; but it was not. She stood, trembling, holding the sword, waiting for it to speak to her too, to tell her her awful destiny.

Corlath took her right wrist in his hand and then turned her around till she was standing next to him; he rearranged her fingers on the hilt, curled her thumb under it for her. She felt at once, wearily, that this was the way it was supposed to be held; and wondered if swordsmanship, like riding a war-stallion and speaking a language strange to her, was suddenly going to awaken in her blood like a disease.

"Lady," Corlath said over her shoulder, his right hand still supporting her wrist, "I know it is difficult for you. Perhaps this may make it easier: you have given my people hope by your presence, by your visions, by your very foreignness. It is the first hope we have had since we knew that the Northerners would come. We need that hope, my lady. It is so nearly the only thing we have." She pulled away from his hand on her arm so that she could turn and look up at him. She stared, appalled, and he looked gently down at her. A frown collected slowly on his brow. "What is it they call you - Hari? That cannot be your name."

She grimaced. "No. it's a - " She did not know the Hill term for nickname and her mysterious sixth sense didn't seem to want to provide it for her. "It's a short-name. I don't like my real name."

"And it is?"

There was a pause. "Angharad," she said finally. He turned this over on his tongue a few times. "We will call you Harimad," he said. "Harimad-sol, for you are of high rank. Few See so clearly that others too may see, as all saw Aerin-sol come out of the fire.

"Try to have faith: even in these things that are strange to you. My kelar told me to bring you here, and your kelar speaks through you now. Lady, I know no more of your fate than that; but I believe, as do all the people in this camp, that your fate is important to us. And Aerin, who has long been the friend of her people, has given you her protection." That does not make Aerin my friend, she thought sourly, but when she remembered the elder-sister grin Aerin had given her, she could not believe ill of her. And Corlath's kelar told him to bring me here. Oh dear. I suppose that explains something. Harimad. Mad Harry. I wish Aerin would stay long enough to talk to me - tell me what is going on. She looked up at him and tried to smile. It was a gallant effort; it was even almost a smile. But Corlath's gold-flecked brown eyes saw more than just the gallantry, and his heart went out to her; and he turned away from her and clapped his hands, and a man of the household brought the hot brown drink Harry had first tasted behind a scrubby small sand hill, barefoot and in her Homelander dressing-gown, and that she had learned since to call malak.