The Blue Sword (22 page)

Harry’s fingers combed through her Hill horse’s mane, and she said, “There never was a choice. I ride the only way open to me, and yet often and again it seems to me I am dangerously unfit for it.” She laughed a little and shakily. “It seems to me further that it is very odd that fate should lay so careful a trail and spend so little time preparing the one that must follow it.”

Jack nodded. “It is not the sort of thing that is recorded in official histories, but I believe that such thoughts have come not infrequently to others—” he smiled faintly—“ensnared as you are.”

Harry’s hand dropped back to her side and she smiled again. “Colonel, I shall
try
not to take myself too seriously.”

“And I shall
try
not to talk too much.” They grinned at each other, and knew that they were friends, and the knowledge was a relief and a pleasure and a hope to each of them, but for different reasons. Then Jack looked her over again, as if noticing the travel stains for the first time and said in a deliberately bright tone: “You look like you could use a bath … My God, that sword: you’re carrying a king’s ransom casually across your pommel.”

“Not casually,” said Harry somberly.

“Questions later,” Jack said, “but I will hope that you will answer them. First food and rest, and then you will tell me a very long story, and it has to be the true one, although I don’t promise to believe it.”

“I am not quite alone, ” said Harry, smiling again. “Will you let two friends of mine past your formidable gate as well?”

“Not so formidable,” said Colonel Dedham. “I wish I’d arrived a minute earlier and seen that jump. I don’t believe it.”

“It’s true, sir,” said Tom.

“I believe it’s true, I just don’t believe
it
,” said Jack. “No doubt all of your story will be just as impossible. And just to start with, what is that?” he said, pointing at Narknon, who still had not moved.

“She’s a hunting-cat, a folstza. She adopted me soon after … I left here.”

Narknon, deeming the moment right, stood up slowly, and opened her big green eyes to their fullest extent, batted the long golden lashes once or twice at Jack, and began to pace toward him, while he gamely held his ground. Narknon paused a step away and started to purr, and Jack laughed uncertainly; whereupon the cat took the last step and rubbed her cheek against the back of his hand. Jack, with the look of a man who throws dice with the devil, petted her and Narknon redoubled the purr. “I think I’m being courted,” said Jack.

“Narknon has an excellent sense of whose side it is most expedient to be on,” said Harry. “But—”

“Yes, we will let your companions come in in the traditional fashion. Unbar the gate, there, Shipson, and be quick about it, before anything else comes over it. I don’t like the new standing orders, and they obviously aren’t much good besides.” Jack looked up from Narknon, who was now leaning her full weight against his legs and tapping her tail against the backs of his thighs, to gaze again at Sungold. “A real Hill horse. Can they all leap over Outlander forts before breakfast?”

“No. Or they may, but most of their riders have more sense than to try it. Particularly after a journey such as we’ve had.” The excitement of seeing Jack again, and the reassurance of the warmth of his welcome, drained away from her, and she remembered that she was exhausted, and the sense of coming home to a place that was no longer home oppressed her further. “I’d like the bath and the food, and we all have to have sleep. But most of the story will have to wait; I’ll tell you what I must, but … we don’t have much time.”

“You are here for a purpose, and I can guess some of it. I’ll try not to be stupid.”

The gate opened, and Terim and Senay rode quietly through and stopped by Sungold’s flank and dismounted. Harry introduced them, and they bowed, touching their fingers respectfully to their foreheads, but without the last flick outward of the fingers that indicates that the one addressed is of superior rank. When she said in Hill-speech, “And this is Colonel Dedham, whose aid we are here to seek,” she was pleased with the way her Outlander friend in his turn bowed and touched his fingers to his forehead, only glancing at her with mild inquiry.

“I am sorry,” said Jack as he led the way to his quarters, “but I speak only a little of your Hill tongue. I must ask you to tell me what I need to hear in my own language, and apologize to your friends for the necessary rudeness of excluding them.” This was spoken in heavily accented but perfectly adequate Hill-speech, and Terim and Senay both smiled.

“We understand the need for speed and clarity, and it would not have occurred to us to take offense,” said Terim, who had a king’s son’s swiftness for turning a diplomatic phrase; and Senay simply nodded.

So Jack Dedham cleared off the table in the second of the two small rooms that were his, the table in question accustomed to duty as a dining-table and writing-desk, as well as a convenient surface to set any indeterminate object down on; and his batman brought breakfast for three. The three ate their way through it with enthusiasm, and the man, grinning, brought second breakfasts for three. “Make it four, Ted,” said Dedham. “I’m getting hungry again.”

When they were finished, and Harry was staring into her teacup and realizing with uneasy chagrin that she’d rather be drinking malak, Jack filled his pipe and began to produce thick heavy clouds of smoke that crawled around the room and nosed into the corners. “Well?” he said. “Tell me in what fashion you have come to seek my aid.”

Harry said, staring at the worn tips of her Hill boots, “The Northern army will be coming through the mountains … soon. Very soon. Corlath’s army is camped on the plain before the wide gap—the Bledfi Gap, we call it—the Gate of the North, you know, in the Horfel Mountains—”

Jack said from a cloud of smoke: “The Gambor Pass, in the Ossander range. Yes.”

“We want to plug the northwest leak, the little way through the mountains above Ihistan—where an undesirable trickle of Northern soldiers could come through and—”

“And raze Istan, and go on to harass Corlath.”

Harry nodded. “Not just harass; there are not many Hillfolk to fight.”

“That explains, no doubt,” said Jack, “why there are only three of you—and a cat with long teeth—for the northwest leak, as you call it.”

Harry smiled faintly. “It was almost one of me, alone.”

“I would hazard, then, that you are not precisely here under Corlath’s orders.”

“Not exactly.”

“Does he know where you are?”

Harry thought about it, and said carefully, “I did not tell him where I was going before I left.” Her ribs missed the pressure of a sash.

Dedham blinked a few times, slowly, and said, “I assume I am to conclude that he will be able to guess where you’ve gone. And these two poor fools decided to throw their lots in with an outlaw? I am impressed.”

Harry was silent for a minute. For all her brave words to Jack at the fort gate, she felt that the path she had thought she was following had blurred and then lurched underfoot as soon as Sungold had jumped the wall. It was difficult for her now to remember who she was—damalur-sol and sashless—and why she was here, and where she was going; her thoughts ambled around in her head, tired and patternless. She remembered Luthe saying to her: “It is not an enviable position, being a bridge, especially a bridge with visions”; and she thought that in fact a nice clear vivid vision would be a great boon. She sighed and rubbed her eyes. “Corlath did not take at all kindly to Sir Charles that day, did he?”

Jack smiled without humor. “Not at all kindly, no.”

Harry scowled. “He’s still cutting off his nose to spite his face, ignoring the northwest pass.”

“Ritger’s Gap,” said Jack. “He probably doesn’t look at it that way, though. He came to us offering an alliance of mutual support, true, but he was doing us a favor by giving us the benefit of his spies’ work in the north—which Sir Charles, in his less than infinite wisdom, chose to disbelieve. I would assume that your Corlath will now simply wipe out as many Northerners as he can, and what’s left of his Hillfolk in the end will retreat to those eastern mountains of his. Whether or not the western plains are overrun with unchecked Northerners is not, finally, of great interest to him one way or another. Our decision not to help only means a few more divisions of the Northern army to harry them in their Hills: unfortunate but not of the first importance.”

“If the Homeland got behind the attempt to throw back the Northerners—”

“There was never any chance of that, my dear, believe me,” replied Jack. “You are attempting to be logical, I suspect, and logic has little to do with government, and nothing at all to do with military administration.

“You are also still thinking like a Homelander—an Outlander, if you wish—for all you’ve learned to ride like a Hillman,” and his eyes settled on Gonturan, hanging by her belt over the back of Harry’s chair. “You know Istan is here, and it seems like a waste to you that we should be obliterated without a chance; and you were also fortunately absent that day, and did not hear Sir Charles being insufferable. Sir Charles is a good man in many ways, but new things disconcert him. The idea of an alliance between Hill and Outlander is blasphemously new.”

You are also still thinking like a Homelander
—
an Outlander, if you wish
—
for all you’ve learned to ride like a Hillman
. The words hung before Harry’s eyes as if sewn on a banner and then thrust into the ground at her feet as her standard. She looked at nothing as she said, “You are working up to telling me that there is nothing that can be done.”

“No; but I am working up to telling you that there is no possibility of there being done what ought to be done—I agree with you, our, or at any rate my, country should get serious about the threat from the North. It is a real threat.” He rubbed his face with his hand, and looked momentarily weary. “I am glad you have put this chance, little as it is, in my hand. My orders, of course, forbid me to go skylarking off to engage the Northerners at Ritger’s Gap or anywhere else—the official, illogical attitude is that this is a tribal matter, and if we stay quietly at home with our gates closed the wave will break and flow around us. I know this is nonsense, and so do a few of the men who’ve been here more than a few years. I’ve been brooding for months—off and on since Corlath’s unexpected visit; I believed what he told us that his spies had brought back from the North—whether or not it’s worth my pension to go try and do anything about it. I rather think it is, as we’re sure to be killed if we stay at home and I’d rather be killed out doing something than have my throat slit in bed. You’re just the excuse I’ve been looking for; it’s been a bit hard to determine which dragon a solitary St. George should take on, when there seem to be dragons everywhere.”

Harry looked at Jack, conscious of Terim and Senay at her elbow, and a furry shoulder pressed against her feet under the table. The sense of dislocation was almost a physical thing, like a stomachache or a sore throat; but Jack’s words now eased the sore place a little. The bridge could stretch to cross this chasm, perhaps, after all. She was still alone and still scared, but for the first time since she had ridden away from Corlath’s camp she felt that her errand was not necessarily a mad one; and so her conviction that she was doomed to it was therefore a little less terrifying. And perhaps it did not matter in what world she belonged if both worlds were marching in step.

And now that Jack believed her, she could depend on him; for Harimad-sol was still laprun, and while she was glad of Terim and Senay, they looked up to her, and she didn’t entirely like the sensation. The old friendship with Jack had taught her what kind of man he was, and he would not be embarrassingly awed by Harimad-sol and her legendary sword. The literal-minded pragmatism of the Outlander psyche had its uses.

But as the weight of solitude eased, his words laid a new weight on her: Were her perceptions so wrong then? Was she in fact thinking like a Homelander—and had she, then, betrayed her new allegiance? She opened the palm of her right hand, and looked at the small white scar that lay across it. What did Corlath think of her desertion? Had Luthe’s fears for her been correct, and had she not been able to see the right way when the ways divided before her?

“
Harry
.” Jack reached across the table and pulled her right hand toward him. “What is that?”

She closed her fingers till what she suddenly felt was her brand of Cain disappeared. “It’s a … ritual I went through. I’m a king’s Rider.”

“Good Lord. How the—excuse me—how did you manage that? Not that I ever doubted your sterling qualities, but I know something of that tradition—king’s Riders are the, um, the elite …”

“Yes,” said Harry. Jack only looked at her, but her mouth went dry. She swallowed and said, “They thought it would be … useful … to have a damalur-sol again.”

“Lady Hero,” said Jack.

“Yes.” She swallowed again. “Cor—Corlath said that this war had no hope, and something like—something like a damalur-sol was a little like hope. I—I have seen Lady Aerin—do you know about the Water of Sight?—and so they think I must be someone important too.”

Jack studied her as a botanist might study a new plant. “Blood calls to blood, evidently. Although Richard is the straightest arrow I’ve ever seen: maybe it only runs from mother to daughter.”

Harry brought her head up sharply and stared at her old friend. “
What
?”

“Surely you know,” Jack said, frowning. “Your great-grandmother—mother’s mother’s mother—was a Hillwoman; one of rank, I believe. That was before we’d gained a proper foothold here, or we were at least still struggling to keep what we’d got. It was a terrible scandal. I don’t know much about it; it makes Richard quite green even to think about it. Young Dick turns green rather easily about some things: but some curious sense of honor compelled him to tell me, as his commanding officer, so that I could make allowances if he went off screaming into the Hills of his ancestors, I suppose. The blood taint that Fate has seen fit to hand him seems to prey on his mind.” Jack had been watching her closely as he rattled on, and broke off abruptly. “My dear, you must have known of this?”