The Blue Sword (Damar #2)(57)

"We Riders," said Innath from her other side, "as you may have noticed, tend to be fourth sons or otherwise penniless - or incurable wanderers like Mathin here - but Murfoth now, when he comes to ride with his king, can bring eighty men with him." Innath's voice, for all its careless pride, sounded almost wistful. Harry found herself remembering her father's words to her - it seemed decades ago: "You haven't a penny, you know."

Terim was Harry's age, and when he and his father came to sit at the king's fireside he came to her and sank down beside her, folding up his long legs as all the Hillmen did. She looked at Terim and he looked at her; his look was eager and a little, to her embarrassment, reverent. "I was First at my laprun trials three years ago," he said; "but when I took my turn against Corlath my sash was on the ground before I had a good grip on my sword." He thumped the hilt of his sword, which jangled as it bit into the ground. "My father gave me Teksun here anyway, he said no one ever got a grip on a sword against Corlath. You did, though." His eyes shone in the firelight.

Harry ran a meditative finger over the careful seam in her sash, which she had put in under Mathin's promised tutelage. "I didn't know it was he - I never thought. And he allowed me to cross swords with him; and when I realized how much of it was allowing, I got ... mad." She paused. "I was surprised too." She frowned, remembering the awful headache she'd had for most of that day, and then the more awful sick lurch that seemed to start behind her eyes, where the headache was, and quiver all the way through her body, when she saw the face behind the scarf she had just removed. No one had called her baga for the cut at the corner of Corlath's mouth, though. She met the boy's eyes somewhat ruefully and said, "It wasn't as pleasant an experience as you might think."

Terim gave a little snort of laughter and said, "Yes, I believe you," and Harry looked across to where Corlath sat with Terim's father and found him watching her. She wondered if he had heard what she had just said.




In the hollow where they met Murfoth they set up their first proper camp. The hunting-beasts all went out that night, and everyone, not just a few Riders, had good fresh meat for dinner. The king's zotar was put up, and it was obvious that it was the king's, for it was the biggest, but this one was plain, a dull dun color, and the door was just a tent flap, and inside there were a few carpets, and hooks on side poles for lanterns, but that was all; although the black-and-white banner still flew bravely from the peak of the roof. She and the king and Murfoth and most of the Riders - Innath and Mathin among them - slept within it; but she lay awake a long time listening to the others breathe. You didn't hear the person next to you breathing if there wasn't a ceiling over you to keep the noise closed in. She missed the stars.

The next morning there was breakfast at a long table similar to the one where she had first met the Riders; they were all there again, with a few others of those who had joined them over the last few days. Corlath explained what was immediately ahead of them: how they would climb into the mountains again - the range was widest where the curve west was sharpest - to meet the high plateau where the Lake of Dreams lay, and where Luthe lived. Luthe? thought Harry. Most of the army would not climb all the way to the meeting-place, but fade into the forest in little groups and pretend to be invisible; for, so far at least, Corlath and the outriders believed they had not been sighted. Harry blinked and wondered if the morning mists that seemed to continue all day long every day as a kind of dull haze had after all been more than a curious local weather pattern. Luthe himself - Mathin told her this during an interval while the household folk brought in hot malak - had ways even Corlath did not understand of seeing things, and Corlath wished to see and speak to him. But Luthe never left his lands, and so it was necessary to seek him there. "Luthe claims that lowland air confuses him," Mathin said, and shrugged the uneven Hill shrug. "It is not for us to know." He picked up his cup.

"Yes, but who is Luthe?" said Harry.

Mathin regarded her with his inscrutable expression. "No one knows," he said. "Luthe is ... someone who lives in the mountains, who sees things - things something like what some of us see when we taste the Meeldtar. He has been there a very long time. No one can remember when Luthe came, or when he has not lived on his mountain."

"And the Lake of Dreams?"

Mathin stared into his cup. "There is a spring that runs into the Lake of Dreams, and it is where the Water of Sight is found; but sometimes the water from the spring is only water, and no one knows why; although it is believed that Luthe knows. Water drunk from the Lake of Dreams does not give the Sight, as the true Meeldtar does; but it is not quite like drinking ... water."

Harry sighed.

Corlath explained briefly for the newcomers what the army was proposing to do. The Northerners must, perforce, choose the one wide pass in the mountains that led into the great central plain and then the bare desert of Damar, for it was the only gap large enough to accommodate an army's numbers. The gap was a bit west of the midpoint of the length of the mountains from the curve where the north-south mountains, the Ildik range, became the east-west Horfel Mountains. When the last of Corlath's little army had collected in the hollow at the elbow of the two ranges, they would ride as quickly as horseflesh would allow to the mouth of that pass, and prepare to engage the enemy among the empty villages and deserted fields of Damar.