The Blue Sword (Damar #2)(47)

Innath made a dismissive gesture. "The grand receiving-rooms here have wooden paneling - you'll see some of them at the castle - and parlors, where people really live, often have wooden screens as ornaments."

"There are wooden chairs and tables and cupboards," said Mathin.

"There are more stone chairs and tables and cupboards," said Innath. "They don't often rearrange the furniture here."

Harry looked around. She saw doors so well hung on their hinges that they were opened and closed by a child's touch, yet made of stone slabs so heavy she wondered how they had been wrestled into their places to begin with. Free-standing walls, she saw, were often as wide as the reach of her two arms; yet often too the inner wall facing on a courtyard encircled by tall houses was so fine and delicate, cut into filigree work so complex, it looked as though it must tremble in the lightest breeze; as if one might roll it up like a bolt of silk and store it on a shelf.

"To be either a stonemason or a carpenter is to be respected," Mathin said. "The best of them are greatly honored."

"Hear the horse-breaker," said Innath.

Mathin smiled.

The children began calling: "The lapruni are here! And the Riders - and the laprun-minta!"

"Harimad-sol," Innath called to them, and Harry blushed.

"Harimad-sol," agreed the children; and people came out from the houses and down the narrower ways off the wide central way to look. Harry tried to look around her without catching anyone's eye, but many of the onlookers sought hers; and when one succeeded, he - or she - would touch right wrist to forehead and then hold the flat empty palm out toward her. "Harimad-sol," she heard, and eagerly they added, "Damalur-sol." The children danced in front of Tsornin's feet to make her look at them, and clapped their hands; and she smiled and waved shyly at them, and Tsornin was very careful with his hooves.

They rode on. At first the Hills rose up behind the low buildings, but as they went farther in, the buildings grew taller and taller and seemed part of the Hills themselves; and the trees that lined the way grew larger, till the shade of them could be felt as one passed beneath. Then another gate rose up before them, the wall around it running into the flanks of the mountains as if wall and gate had been formed with the mountains at the beginning of time. They went through this gate too, and entered a wide flat courtyard of polished stone. This stone was mirror-white, and it blazed up fiercely in the morning sunlight, and Harry felt as if she had emerged from underground. She blinked.

Before her stood Corlath's castle; no one had to explain to her what this huge stone edifice must be. She tipped her head back to see the sharp points of the turrets, brilliant as diamonds. It was itself a mountain, proudly peaked, seated among its brothers; its faces glittered dangerously. The shadows it threw were abrupt and absolute; one wall reflected white, another black. The central mass was taller than the Hill crests here; the road they had climbed had reached near the summit of the dark Hills, and like an island in the crater lake of an extinct volcano, the castle stood in its stone yard that shone as bright as water in the sun.

Harry sighed.

Men of the horse were approaching them in the swift but unhurried way she remembered from the days on the desert in the traveling camp; and she felt a sudden sharp stab of memory, as if that were a time many years past, and the present were sad and weary. She slipped down from Tsornin's back and he suffered himself to be led away when one of the brown men spoke to him gently by name and laid a hand in front of his withers. Narknon sat down neatly at Harry's feet; Harry could feel her tail twitching at her ankles.

Those who had ridden with her began now to go purposefully in their own individual directions. Mathin said to her, '"It is here I am to leave you. Perhaps it may be permitted that we ride against each other again and you may practice your skills upon me, Daughter of the Riders." He smiled. "We will meet again at the king's table, here in the City."

Harry looked up toward the castle when Mathin left her, feeling a little forlorn; and it was Corlath himself who walked to meet her. She swallowed rather hard, and blessed the sunburn that would prevent her fierce blush from showing as clearly as it would on an Outlander's pale skin.

"We meet again, Harimad-sol," Corlath said. There was a tiny scab at one corner of his mouth; he looked down at her with a cold dignity, she thought; he is the master of this place, and what am I? Even Daughter of the Riders could not comfort her as Corlath stood before her with his castle shining savagely behind him.

But then he spoiled the effect - or perhaps the effect was all in Harry's eyes to begin with - by saying, "So that's where the thrice-blasted cat disappeared to. I should have guessed it."

He did not look very majestic while glaring at a cat; so Harry said crossly, "I wish I knew what was going on."

Corlath looked at her thoughtfully, and Narknon, with customary feline charm, stood up and went to twine herself around Corlath's legs. Corlath's face softened and he rubbed her ears. Harry could hear her purr; she could almost feel it through the soles of her boots on the white stone. Narknon was a champion purrer. "And don't tell me that no one knows what is going on and that it is for the gods to decide, either."

Corlath's face wavered and then broke into a smile, although whether at Harry or the big cat, Harry didn't know. "Very well," he said. "I won't. I will tell you that you are the First of the laprun trials, laprun-minta, which you already know, and as such the most important of the lapruni, the untried." Corlath's hand lay motionless on Narknon's head. "The army marches, to do what it can, in less than a fortnight's time. You and the best of the lapruni will ride with us." Narknon bumped Corlath's hand violently and the fingers stirred and began scratching again.