The Blue Sword (5 page)

Harry took a deep breath. He didn’t look insane or inhuman. He did look uncooperative. He shook his head and frowned at something someone said, and Sir Charles looked very unhappy. Corlath shrugged, and made a sweeping movement with his arms, like a man coming out of a forest gratefully into the sunlight. He took a long step forward to the edge of the verandah. Then Dedham took two quick steps toward him and spoke to him, a few words only, urgently; and Corlath turned again, as it seemed unwillingly, and looked back. Dedham held out his hand, palm down and fingers spread; and so they stood for a long minute. Corlath dropped his eyes to the hand stretched toward him, then looked into the face of its owner. Harry, watching, held her breath without knowing why.

With a nasty feeling in the pit of her stomach she saw a look of terrible strain cross Dedham’s face as the Hill-king held his gaze; and the outstretched hand trembled very slightly. Corlath slowly reached out his own hand and touched the back of Dedham’s wrist with two fingers; the hand dropped to Dedham’s side once more, but as if it were heavy as stone, and the man slumped in relief like a murderer reprieved at the scaffold. The look of strain slid off his face to be replaced by one of great weariness.

Corlath swung around again, and set his foot on the top stair, and no one moved to stop him. Five men in the loose robes of the Hillfolk separated themselves from the verandah shadows and made to follow. Harry found she could not take her eyes off the king, but from the corners of her eyes she noticed that the other men too wore vivid sashes: gold and orange and green and blue and purple. There was nothing to indicate the king but the glitter of his presence.

Harry stood only a few feet from the bottom step, holding her pony’s bridle. Cassie and Beth were somewhere behind her, and the stable boy stood frozen a few steps from her elbow. Corlath still had not noticed them, and Harry stared, fascinated, as he came nearer. There seemed a roaring in the air that beat on her eardrums and pressed against her eyeballs till she blinked. Then he looked up abruptly, as if from some unfathomable depth of thought, and saw her: their eyes met.

The man’s eyes were yellow as gold, the hot liquid gold in a smelter’s furnace. Harry found it suddenly difficult to breathe, and understood the expression on Dedham’s face; she almost staggered. Her hand tightened on the bridle, and the pony dropped its head and mouthed the bit uncomfortably. The heat was incredible. It was as though a thousand desert suns beat down on her. Magic? she thought from inside the thunder. Is this what magic is? I come from a cold country, where the witches live in cool green forests. What am I doing here? She saw the anger the man was holding in check; the anger stared at her through the yellow eyes, and swept through the glistening white robes. Then it was over. He looked away; he came down the last steps and past her as if she did not exist; and she cowered out of his way so that no corner of his white sleeve should touch her. The man with the horses emerged from the shade, riding one of the chestnuts; and the six others went up to their riders and nuzzled them. The blood bay reached the king first, and greeted him with a low whinny. Corlath mounted with an easy leap Harry could not even follow with her eyes, although she could see anger informing the set of his legs against the great stallion’s sides. The horse felt it too; without moving, all its muscles were suddenly taut, and its stillness was the quiet before battle. The other men mounted. Corlath never looked at them, but the red stallion plunged forward at a gallop, and the other men followed; and the sound the horses’ hooves made on the hard earth suddenly reminded Harry how unnaturally silent everyone had been since Dedham’s last words. The inaudible thunder faded with the sight of the colored sashes and the bright flanks of the Hill horses. Harry woke up to who she was, and where; Sir Charles and Jack and Mr. Peterson looked their normal size again, and she had a raging headache.

C
orlath stared at his horse’s black-tipped ears. The Hillfolk passed through the gate of the Residency and Corlath lifted his gaze to rake angrily across the dusty station street, the little dun-colored houses and shops, the small straggly trees. At a slight shift in his rider’s weight the red horse turned off the road. The harsh clatter of hooves on the packed-dirt road changed to the duller sound of struck sand. He could hear his men turning off the road behind him; he shook his head in a futile attempt to clear a little space for thought amid the anger, and leaned back in his saddle, and the horse’s pace slowed. There was no sense in charging across the desert at midday; it was hard on the horses.

The six riders closed up behind him; the two who came forward to ride at his side stole quick looks at him as they came near, and looked away again as quickly.

Outlanders! Involuntarily his hands, resting lightly on his thighs, curled into fists. He should have known better than even to try to talk to them. His father had warned him, years ago. But that was before the Northerners had come so near. Corlath blinked. The heat of his own anger was hard to contain when there wasn’t some use he could put it to; anger was splendidly useful on the battlefield, but he was not facing any regiments just now that could be tangled in their own feet and knocked over in companies. Much as he would like, for example, to set fire to the big stupid house—an absurd building for the desert: it must be the sort of thing they lived in in their own country—and watch it crash down around the ears of the big soft creature who called himself commissioner … but spite was for children, and he had been king for thirteen years, and he bit down on his anger and held it.

He remembered when he was young and before the full flowering of his
kelar
, of the terrible strength known ironically as the “Gift,” his father had told him that it would often be like this: “We aren’t really much good, except as battle machines, and even there our usefulness is limited. You’ll curse it, often enough, far more often than you’ll be glad of it, but there you are.” He sighed, and looked wryly at his son. “They say that back in the Great Days it was different, that men were made big enough to hold it—and had wit enough to understand it. It was Lady Aerin, the story goes, that first knew her Gift and broke it to her will, but that was long ago, and we’re smaller now.”

Corlath had said, hesitantly: “They say also that the Gift was once good for other things: healing and calming and taming.”

His father nodded sadly. “Yes; perhaps it once was; but no more. Luthe knows, if he will tell you, for he has the old
kelar
, and who his parents are even he has forgotten; but Luthe is himself. You and I are of duller blood.

“And it is duller blood that has brought us to what we are, what we remain—what remains to us. Avoid the Outlanders, if you can. They can’t, or won’t, understand us; they don’t recognize horses from oxen, and will try to put the yoke on you that they have hung on the rest of our land. But their strength is the strength of numbers and of stubbornness and persistence; do not underestimate it.”

He could see his father standing in one of the inner courtyards of the City in the mountains, staring at one of the fountains, water running shining over the colored stones of the Hills, talking half to himself. Then the picture faded, blotted out in another swift sweep of anger; and he found himself looking at the girl again, the girl he had seen standing in front of the Outlander house. What had she to do with anything?

He frowned, and his horse’s ears and black mane reappeared before him. He looked up; it was still a long ride to their camp. He had not, somehow, wished to sleep too near the Outlanders; it was not that he suspected deliberate treachery, but that the air that hung over an Outlander station sent bad dreams to Hillfolk.

His anger kicked him again like a spurred heel; he flinched. It had a life of its own, the Gift, damn it. What indecipherable object did it desire of him this time? He knew by now that the idiosyncrasies of kings, and others whose blood carried much
kelar
, were viewed with more alarm by the victims themselves than by their friends and subjects. Not that the alarm did any good. If one was king, one could not explain away one’s more impenetrable actions by saying that one just couldn’t help it.

Woven into his anger there was a pattern. Occasionally he understood it. He waited, gritting his teeth; and he saw the girl again. This time, as long as she was there, he looked at her.

When he had seen her first, at the foot of the steps, just a few minutes ago, he had been surprised into looking at her. He knew what his glance could do when he was angry, and tried to be careful about whom it rested on, and for how long. But this girl had, unfortunately for her, somehow caught his attention, and he had looked longer than he meant.

She was tall, as tall as most men, tall even by Outlander standards. Her hair was yellow, the color of sun on sand, and almost as bright. His people, the Hillfolk, were usually smaller than the Outlanders, and dark of skin and hair. But it wasn’t her size or her coloring that held him beyond the first startled flick of notice; nor was it her beauty. There was too much strength in that face and in the long bones of the body for beauty. Something about the quietness of her, perhaps? Or her self-contained straightness; something about the way her eyes met his, with more thought behind them than the usual half-hypnotized, half-fearful look he had learned to expect if he held anyone’s gaze too long—even when his
kelar
was quiet. Something, he thought suddenly, like the controlled straightness he himself had learned, knowing well what could happen if he relaxed. But that was nonsense. She was an Outlander. While there were still wild sports among his own people, where a few drops of royal blood from many generations past would suddenly burst into full
kelar
in the veins of some quiet family’s child, there had never yet been an Outlander with any Gift to contain.

This train of thought took him far enough from the center of anger that he had begun to relax a little; his hands uncurled, and the black mane swept against his fingers. He looked ahead; he knew, although he could not yet see it, that his camp lay just beyond this next bit of what looked like flat bare impartial desert and was in fact a little rise in the land, enough of a buffer from sand and storm to allow a small well of sweet water, with a little grass and low scrub, to live behind a protecting shoulder.

As he looked out across his desert, almost calm again, or at least finding the beginnings of calm, the
kelar
suddenly produced a picture of Sir Charles’ foolish white face anxiously saying, “My dear sir—hmm—Your Majesty” and explaining why he could not help him. The picture was thrust before his eyes, and he took his breath in sharply between his teeth. Having caught his attention, the single-minded
kelar
snatched Sir Charles away and presented him with the girl again.

What
about
her? he shouted silently, but there was no answer. It was rare that the Gift ever made it easy for him by explaining what it wanted. Sometimes he never did find out, and was left to muddle through like any other mortal—with the added disadvantage of inscrutable messages banging inside his skull.

His patience gave way; he leaned forward in the saddle, and the big stallion leaped into a gallop. The six riders, who knew their king’s moods, and hadn’t been very happy at their reception at the Outlanders’ hands themselves, let him go. He swerved away from the line that would take him directly to the camp.

The man on the golden dun, who had been riding on the king’s right, soothed his mount with one hand. “Nay, we do not follow him this time.”

The man at his left glanced across at him and nodded briefly. “May the Just and Glorious be with him.”

The youngest of the riders snorted with laughter, although it was not pleasant laughter. “May the Just and Glorious be with all of us. Damn the Outlanders!”

The man on the dun frowned and said, “Innath, watch your tongue.”

“I am watching it, my friend,” replied Innath. “You may be glad you cannot hear what I am thinking.”

The king had disappeared in the heat glaze rising from the sand by the time the little group topped the rise and saw the pale tents of their camp before them, and resigned themselves to telling those who awaited them what had occurred during the meeting with the Outlanders.

Harry blinked and recognized the boy at her elbow. “Thank you,” she said absently, and he led the pony away, looking anxiously over his shoulder at the way the desert men had gone, and evidently grateful to be leaving himself. She shaded her eyes with her hand a moment, which only served to throw the fire of her headache into greater relief. She looked up at the men on the verandah and saw them moving uncertainly, as if they were waking up, still half under the influence of unpleasant dreams. She felt the same way. Her shoulder creaked when she dropped her arm again. At least it will be a little cooler inside, she thought, and made her way up the steps. Cassie and Beth, their mounts led away after Harry’s, followed her.

Luncheon was a quiet meal. All those who had played a part in the morning’s performance were there. Rather, Harry thought, as if we can’t quite bring ourselves to separate yet, not because we have any particular reason to cling to one another’s company. As if we’d just been through … something … together, and are afraid of the dark. Her headache began to subside with the second glass of lemonade and she thought suddenly: I don’t even remember what the man looks like. I stared at him the entire time, and I can’t remember—except the height of him, and the scarlet sash, and those yellow eyes. The yellow eyes reminded her of her headache, and she focused her thoughts on the food on her plate, and her gaze on the glacial paleness of the lemonade pitcher.

It was after the meal had been cleared away—and still no one made any move to go—that Jack Dedham cleared his throat in a businesslike manner and said: “We didn’t know what to expect, but by the way we’re all sitting around and avoiding one another’s eyes—” Harry raised hers, and Jack smiled at her briefly—“we don’t have any idea what to do with what we’ve got.”

Sir Charles, still without looking up, said, as if speaking his thoughts aloud: “What was it, Jack, that you said to him—just at the end?”

Harry still had her eyes on Dedham, and while his voice as he answered carried just the right inflection, his face did not match it: “It’s an old catch-phrase of sorts, on the let-us-be-friends-and-not-part-in-anger -even-though-we-feel-like-it order. It dates from the days of the civil war, I think—before we arrived, anyway.”

“It’s in the Old Tongue,” said Sir Charles. “I didn’t realize you knew it.”

Again Dedham’s eyes suggested something other than what he said: “I don’t. As I said, it’s a catch-phrase. A lot of ritual greetings are in the Old Tongue, although almost nobody knows what they mean any more.”

Peterson said: “Good for you, Jack. My brain wasn’t functioning at all after the morning we’d spent. Perhaps you just deflected him from writing off the Outlanders altogether.” Harry, watching, saw the same something in Peterson’s face that she had wondered at in Dedham’s.

Sir Charles shrugged and the tension was broken. “I hope so. I will clutch at any straw.” He paused. “It did not go well at all.”

The slow headshakes Dedham and Peterson gave this comment said much louder than words could how great an understatement this was.

“He won’t be back,” continued Sir Charles.

There was the grim silence of agreement, and then Peterson added: “But I don’t think he is going to run to the Northerners to make an alliance, either.”

Sir Charles looked up at last. “You think not?”

Peterson shook his head: a quick decided jerk. “No. He would not have listened to Jack at the end, then, if he had meant to go to our enemies.”

Jack said, with what Harry recognized as well-controlled impatience, “The Hillfolk will never ally with the Northerners. They consider them inimical by blood, by heritage—by everything they believe in. They would be declaring themselves not of the Hills if they went to the North.”

Sir Charles ran his hand through his white hair, sighed, and said: “You know these people better than I, and I will take your word for it, since I can do nothing else.” He paused. “I will have to write a report of this meeting, of course; and I do not at all know what I will say.”

Beth and Cassie and Harry were all biting their tongues to keep from asking any questions that might call attention to their interested presence and cause the conversation to be adjourned till the men retired to some official inner sanctum where the fascinating subject could be pursued in private. Therefore they were both delighted and alarmed when Lady Amelia asked: “But, Charles, what happened?”

Sir Charles seemed to focus his gaze with some difficulty on the apprehensive face of his wife; then his eyes moved over the table and the girls knew that they had been noticed again. They held their breaths.

“Mmm,” said Sir Charles, and there was a silence while the tips of Beth’s ears turned pink with not breathing.

“It hurts nothing but our pride to tell you,” Dedham said at last. “He was here less than two hours; rode up out of nowhere, as far as we could tell—we thought we were keeping watch so we’d have some warning of his arrival.”

The girls’ eyes were riveted on Dedham’s face, or they might have exchanged glances.

“He strode up to the front door as if he were walking through his own courtyard; fortunately, we had seen them when they entered the gates in front here and were more or less collected to greet him; and your man, Charles, had the sense to throw open the door before we found out whether or not he would have walked right through it.

“I suppose the first calamity was that we understood each other’s languages so poorly. Corlath spoke no Homelander at all—although, frankly, I don’t guarantee that that means he couldn’t.”

Peterson grunted.

“You noticed it too, did you? One of the men he had with him did the translating, such as it was; and Peterson and I tried to talk Darian—”