The Blue Sword (Damar #2)(86)

"It is my honor to follow Harimad-sol," said Kentarre.

Jack smiled at Harry as she knelt down again by their fire, and was swarmed over by Narknon, who seemed in her own way to be as shaken by the mountains' falling as the human beings had been. "We cling to you like leeches," he said, and she looked at him in surprise. "Or so I believe was the gist of your conversation just now."

Harry nodded.

"So perhaps this is a good time to warn you that Richard and I and our lot are planning to come too - throw ourselves at the mercy of your Hill-king. There's nothing at home for us. And um - " he turned his hands over to warm the backs of them by the fire, and stared at his callused palms - "we'd like to."

"But - "

"You'll only be able to talk us out of it with an extraordinary amount of effort, because any reason you may come up with we will immediately assume has to do with your praiseworthy desire to spare us pain or trouble, and we are quite selfishly set on riding east on your heels. And we none of us have the strength for protracted arguing anyway, yourself included. And I may be old and stiff and sore, but I'm wonderfully stubborn."

There was a pause. "Very well," said Harry.

Richard, at Jack's left hand, poked the fire with a stick. "That was easier than I was expecting," he said. Jack smiled mysteriously.

They came to Senay's village the next day, and they were met with a feast. Senay's father explained: "We felt the mountain fall three days ago, for the earth shook under us and ash blew over us. The air felt brighter afterward, and so we knew it had gone well for you."

"The dust was blue," said Rilly.

"And it is a three days' ride to the Gate from here, so we expected you," the young woman, Rilly's mother and Senay's father's second wife, explained; and Senay's father, Nandam, said: "Hail to Harimad-sol, Wizard-Tamer, Hurler of Mountains."

"Oh dear," said Harry in Homelander, and Jack snorted and coughed, and Richard demanded to be let in on the joke. But when the platters, heavy and steaming, were passed, she decided that fame had its advantages. She had not eaten so well since she had sat at the banquet that made her a Rider ... with Corlath ...

The next morning, to her dismay, Nandam appeared with a tall black horse with one white foot. "I will come with you," he said. "This leg has made me useless in battle, but I am not without honor, and Corlath knew me of old, for Senay is not the first to ride to the king of the City from my family and my mountain. I will ride in your train too, Wizard-Tamer."

Harry winced. "But - " It was her favorite word of late.

"I know," said Nandam. "Senay told me. It is why I will come."

They avoided the fort of the Outlander town, lying peacefully in the sun, untroubled by the tiresome tribal matters of the old Damarians. The Outlanders had known all along there were too few of the Hillfolk to make serious trouble; and if the earth had shivered slightly underfoot a few days ago, it must be that the mountains were not so old as they thought, and were still shifting and straining against their place upon the earth. Perhaps a little volcanic activity would crack a new vein of wealth, and the Aeel Mines would no longer be the only reason the Outlanders went into the Ramid Mountains.

Jack looked rather broodingly toward the iron-bound wall inside which he had spent most of the last eighteen years. He caught Harry looking at him and said: "Anything there waiting for me is something on the order of 'Confine yourself to quarters while we decide what to do with you - poor man, the desert was too much for him and he finally went bonkers.' I'm not going back."

Harry smiled faintly. "I botched it, you know. If I'd known what I was doing, I could have gone alone, quietly dropped half a mountain range where it would do the most good - "

"And ridden off into a cloud, never to be heard of again," said Jack. "I sometimes think the blind devotion - or the press of numbers - of your loyal followers is all that is sending you back to your king at all."

Harry stared unseeingly at the horizon of her beloved Hills, and she remembered Aerin's words, and that Dickie had called her back to this world just a little too soon.

"Is he really such an ogre?" Jack went on. "Don't you want to go back?"

Harry turned and looked back at the smudge on the golden-grey sands that was Istan. "No, he is not an ogre. And, yes, I want to go back - very much. That is why I am afraid."

Jack looked at her; she could feel his gaze on her, but she would not meet his eyes.

The trip back, Harry thought unhappily less than three days later, seemed a lot shorter than the trip away; and this in spite of the fact that they were moving slowly for the sake of their wounded, who had resisted staying in Nandam's village to be healed and demanded to come with them. "They don't want to miss out on any of the fun," Jack said apologetically, as if it were all his fault.

"Fun?" she said, exasperated.

"Your attitude is perhaps a little unnecessarily rigorous," suggested Jack.

Harry muttered something that was better not said aloud, and added, "They take honor and loyalty very seriously here, you know, you Damarian-mad Homelander."

Jack shrugged. "And if they throw us out on our collective ear - even that is fun of a sort, I believe." He paused, and looked at her out of the corner of his eye. "But I'm afraid I have the same optimistic outlook as the rest of Harry's bandits."