The Blue Sword (28 page)

T
he next morning they left the Madamer Gate, to go back down the mountain as they had come. The little troop was less than half what it had been the morning before, and it moved more slowly, from weariness, wounds and … a slight feeling of anticlimax, Harry thought. She had a foul headache. Every step Sungold took struck like a mallet behind her eyes, and her vision sparkled with it. “Does one always feel a bit lost, the day after a battle?” she asked Jack, who was riding somewhat stiffly at her side. Draco had suffered a cut over his poll, and the headpiece of the bridle was paddled with a bit of blue cloth.

“Yes,” he said. “Even when you win.”

They rode gently but steadily all that day. That evening Harry said to Kentarre: “You may leave now, if you wish, to go home. I—we’re all grateful for your help. It’s very likely we would not have held them off even long enough for—for Gonturan to drop the mountains on them, without you. And,” Harry said more hesitantly, “it is also good to find another friend and ally.”

Kentarre smiled. She smiled much more easily now than she had when she and her archers first stepped out of the trees to pledge to Harimad-sol; and Harry didn’t think it was only because the threat of the Northerners had been halted. “It is good to find a friend, lady, as you say, and it is ill to lose one too soon. We would follow you still, and see your king, and give you a little more glory at your return. I think perhaps we filanon have held alone in our woods too long; and without you, Harimad-sol, we would have no homes now to go back to. We were Damarians not so very long ago, and our fathers called Corlath’s fathers king. We would go with you.” Four of her archers had materialized out of the firelight to stand beside her when she began to speak, and they nodded. One wore a white rag around his forehead, and it covered one eyebrow, which gave him a puzzled uncertain look; but there was no uncertainty in his sharp nod.

Harry looked unhappily at her hands. “I—I’m not sure it would be wise of you to come to Corlath on my heels, calling me sol. I came here—left him and his army and his battle plans—expressly against his wishes, and I think it more than likely that I’m riding into trouble, as I choose to go back. I—er—applaud the idea that you should declare yourselves as Damarians again, but I—well—highly recommend that you make your own path to Corlath, without me.”

Kentarre did not seem surprised by Harry’s words; but then Terim or Senay must have told her the story. “Your Corlath I think is not a fool, and it would be foolish to treat with less than great honor the one who buried Thurra and thousands of his army. We will come with you, and if he turns you away, we will still come with you. You are welcome here,” Kentarre said with a wave of her hand and a faint musical clatter of the blue beads around her wrist. “You need not go into exile homeless.”

Harry said nothing. She found that she was too tired to argue, and too grateful for their loyalty, for she was simply afraid of what she was returning to—afraid mainly because she realized how desperately she wanted to be able to go back. It was true, Corlath would be forced to honor her as the cause of Thurra’s downfall, for he was no fool and he was a very honorable king; but she did not want him forced. “Very well,” she said at last; “let it be as you wish.” Kentarre bowed, a brief graceful sweep. “Thank you,” said Harry.

“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.”

Harry protested, “But I know more about it!”

“Ignorance is bliss,” replied Jack.

They had no difficulty finding their way to the camp of the Hill-king. Harry never thought about it, beyond the simple word “east.” But although “east” covers a great deal of territory, she had pointed Sungold’s nose as surely as if she were a route-rider, covering the same path she had traveled for years. She wished now she weren’t quite so accurate. She could see the king’s tent looming in the twilight before them, the sunset fading behind them, and their long shadows beginning to dissolve in the ripples of the grey sand underfoot. She knew that they were marked by the king’s guard, but no one hailed them. She could well believe that she and Sungold and Gonturan were immediately recognizable, but she was surprised that even if she were not to be taken prisoner on sight the very obvious presence of twelve armed Outlanders in her train was exciting no comment.

Since she did not know what else to do, she rode reluctantly but directly to the king’s tent; it rose from the center of the other tents, the black-and-white banner flying from its peak. Still no one stopped or questioned her; but several offered her silent hand greeting, the kind a king’s Rider might expect, and this comforted her a little. But she wished she would see someone she knew well enough to talk to—Mathin or Innath by choice—to ask what sort of welcome she might expect.

There was little sign that this army had fought a desperate battle against the odds only days before; and she suddenly realized that it had never occurred to her that Corlath might lose. She was learning to believe what the backs of her eyelids told her. The tents were all neatly and precisely pitched, and the horses she saw were sleek and fit. There was a hum of tension about the camp, though, which she could feel; the silence had a stretched quality to it, and those people she saw hurrying from tent to tent looked as though their errands might be about life and death.

Sungold’s steps fell too quickly. She saw no other Rider, and at the door to the king’s tent she paused, and her company came up behind her, and fanned out into a little court around their captain. The gold-sashed guard saluted her, just as he had done half a year ago; she thought it was even the same man, although he looked much older, almost as old as she felt. She stayed in the saddle; she wanted to stay there forever; at very least it made her taller than a man on foot—even Corlath. What was she to say? “The prodigal has returned? The mutineer wishes to be reinstated? The subordinate, having gone to a great deal of trouble to prove her commander wrong, has come back and promises to be a good little subordinate hereafter, or at least until the next time?”

Then Corlath put back his golden silk door and stood before her, and she stared down at him, and she could not have gotten out of the saddle then even if she had wanted to. She realized why, when her
kelar
had shown him to her in battle some days ago, she had not at first recognized him, that his sash was the wrong color. He was wearing her sash.

“Hari,” he said; then “Harimad-sol,” as he walked to Sungold’s side; stiffly he moved, she thought, and her heart failed her at the thought that he might have been wounded. She stared down at him still, and could not move, and then, shyly, he put his hand around her dusty leather ankle and said, carefully, “
Harry
.”

She pulled her leg over the withers and slid down Sungold’s shoulder as she had once slid down Fireheart’s, and put her arms around her king and hugged him fiercely; and his arms closed around her and he murmured something, but her blood was ringing in her ears, and she could not hear what it was.

It is not very comfortable, holding someone close who is wearing a sword and various unyielding bits of leather armor, and it is less comfortable yet if both parties are so accoutered. Harry and Corlath dropped their arms after a short time and looked at each other, and each distantly thought that the other one was wearing a rather silly smile, and Harry noticed that Corlath’s eyes were the color of gold.

“You are unhurt?” she said; her voice sounded tinny in her hot ears.

“I am unhurt,” he said. “And you?”

“Yes,” said Harry, still looking at his golden eyes. “Or no. I am not hurt.”

“I am glad,” her king said, and his voice was still low and shy, “to see you—here—and still—” he hesitated—“still of the Hills?”

Harry took a deep breath. “I will be of the Hills till I die, but what are you going to do to me for going off like that? And it’s not their fault,” she went on hurriedly, gesturing behind her, “but they would come with me even though I warned them how it was with me. Whatever you say, I will obey, but—what is it?” She stopped, for as she tried to make her apologies, or her amends, or whatever they were, she remembered that she and Corlath were not alone, and that she was a deserter. She looked up and around, but her company were only dark figures to her, dim in the fading light.

“I will return to you your sash,” Corlath said, but his hands did not move to untie it from around his waist. “You should not have lost it—for I assume you lost it. If you had not, but flung it away deliberately, it would be a sign that you denied me, and Damar, and were making yourself an exile forever.”

“Oh
no
,” said Harry, horrified; and the slightly foolish and uncertain smile on Corlath’s face grew into a real smile, one unlike any Harry had ever seen on the Hill-king’s face before.