She was clean at last and wrapped in towels, and sat quite patiently while the young woman who had washed her hair now tried to work the tangles out of it. It was long and thick and hadn't been combed properly smooth for weeks. Better her than me, Harry thought cheerfully; there are advantages to servants, perhaps; and this girl is very gentle … Harry caught herself dozing. I'm going to be less than a success at my own banquet if I can't even stay awake, she thought. I suppose the last six weeks are all catching up with me now, and Mathin's grey dust.
She tumbled off her stool at last, the towels removed, and a heavy white shift dropped over her head. They put velvet slippers on her feet and a red robe around her shoulders, and twisted a gold cord around her hair but let it hang down behind her so she had to flick the end of it aside when she sat down. At Home, one never wore one's hair loose when one was no longer a child; at night it was braided, during the day it was tied up. Harry shook her hair; it felt funny. These last weeks she had tied and pinned it fiercely under her helmet, where it couldn't get caught in anything, like the branch of a tree, or Mathin's sword, or under her own saddle. The young woman who had awakened her had rubbed salve into her shoulder and leg before they dressed her, and Harry found that she could move more freely, and the weight of the robe didn't bow her down, nor the sleek surface of the shift rub her like sandpaper.
The three girls ushered her across the anteroom to the room with the chairs, and they all three bowed, and looked shyly at her with smiles hovering in their eyes, so she grinned at them and flapped the edges of her clean scarlet robe at them, and they smiled happily and left.
Harry sat down tentatively in one of the queer crook-legged chairs, and leaned back luxuriously. Rugs and cushions and stools can be very comfortable, but they are inevitably backless, and it was apparently not done to lean against a tent wall; no one else did it, at least, so she hadn't tried. The shift billowed around her as she shrugged farther into the chair: No sash, she thought.
There was a long hall she could see through an open door; and after a few minutes Mathin appeared through another door at the far end of it and came toward her. In his hand was a bit of maroon cloth; and when he came through the door, the air that swept in with him smelled of flowers. Harry smiled.
"Well met, Daughter of the Riders," said Mathin, and unrolled what he had in his hand. It was her old sash, washed clean. The smile left Harry's face, and when Mathin held the sash out to her, still in its two pieces, as if he would tuck it around her waist, she backed up a step.
He stopped, surprised, and looked at her face, white under the tan. "I think," he said slowly, "that you do not understand." He held his arms out to his sides, and the hand indicated a line on his own dark green sash. "Look here."
Harry looked and saw a similar tear, but carefully mended, with tiny exact stitches of yellow thread. "All the Riders wear them so. Many of us won the slash at the hand of the king after being First at the laprun trials—as I did, many years ago. It was Corlath's father gave me this cut. Two or three of us have won them at other times. Any one lucky enough to have a sash cut off by a sol or sola will wear the mended sash ever after."
Harry, faintly in the back of her mind, heard Beth saying: "They come in those long robes they always wear—over their faces too, so you can't see if they're smiling or frowning; and some of them with those funny patched sashes around their waists."
Mathin said: "I will teach you to mend yours; you must do it yourself, as you clean your own sword and pay your own homage." He looked at her slyly and added: "All those sashes you lopped off their owners you may be sure will be saved and mended; and the cuts will be bragged of, given by the damalur-sol whose prowess was first seen when she was First at the laprun trials."
Harry suffered Mathin to put the maroon sash around her waist again. He did not tuck it together, as she had, so that the slash did not show; instead it went in front, proudly—Harry gritted her teeth—and was fixed by a long golden pin. Then she silently followed him down the corridor.
There were pillars reaching up three stories to meet the arched ceilings; the floors were laid out in great squares, two strides' length, but within each black-and-white border were scenes drawn in tiny mosaic tiles. Harry tried to look at them as she walked over them, and saw a great many horses, and some swords, and some sunrises and sunsets over Hills and deserts. She had her eyes so busily on the floor that when Mathin stopped she ran into him.
They stood under one of the three-story arches the pillars made, but on either side of them the spaces between the tall columns were filled in, and tapestries hung on these walls, and they stood in the doorway to an immense room. It too was three stories high, and a chandelier was let down from the ceiling on a chain that seemed hundreds of feet long. Mathin and she went down six steps, across a dozen strides of floor, and up nine steps to a vast square dais; around three sides of the square was a white-laid table. At the one edge of this dais where there was no table were three more steps up to a long rectangular table on a smaller dais; and around this table sat Corlath and seventeen Riders. There were two empty seats at Corlath's right. Chairs, Harry thought happily. Chairs seem quite commonplace in the City, even if they don't understand beds.
They sat, and the men and women of the household brought food, and they ate. Harry cast a sharp eye over those bearing the dishes; it seemed that those of the household here in the City were about equally divided, men and women. Harry turned impulsively to Mathin and said, quietly so that Corlath would not hear, "Why were there no women of the household with us in the traveling camp?"
Mathin smiled at his leg of fowl. "Because there were so few women riding with us."
Corlath said, "There will be some to go with us in ten days' time, if you wish it; for even an army on its way to war needs some tending."
Harry said stiffly, "If this wish of mine is not a foolish one, it would please me to see women of the household come with us."
Corlath nodded gravely; and Harry thought of that first banquet she had attended, still dizzy and frightened from her ride across the desert, bumping on Corlath's saddlebow. She was still dizzy and frightened, she thought sadly, and touched the gold pin in her sash; it was cold to her fingers..
There was talk over the food of the laprun trials just past and of how so-and-so's son had ridden well or poorly; all the Riders had been watching the trials with an attention made more acute by the nearness of the Northerners. Mathin mentioned that a young woman named Senay had done well; a place should be offered to her when the army was ready to march. The kysin had ranked her high, and so she was still in the City, hoping for such a summons.
"Where is her home?" Corlath asked.
Mathin frowned, trying to remember.
"Shpardith," Harry said.
"Shpardith?" Mathin said, surprised. "She must be old Nandam's daughter. He always said she'd grow into a soldier. Good for her."
"Mathin's growing into a billitu, do you think?" said Innath, and a ripple of laughter went around the table. Harry turned to look at Mathin, and thought he was looking even more stolid than usual. "I choose only the best," said Mathin firmly, and everyone laughed again. A billitu is a lady-lover. Harry smiled involuntarily.
No one mentioned the brilliant performance of the youngster on the big chestnut Tsornin who had had the luck to carry off the honors, and Harry began to relax as the meal progressed, although, she thought, staring into her goblet, the wine was probably helping.
All was cleared away at last, and then came a pause so measured and expectant that Harry knew before she saw the man bearing the leather sack that they would bring out the Water of Seeing. This time she could understand when the Riders spoke of what they saw: war was in almost everyone's eyes, war with the Northerners, who were led by someone who was more than a man, whose sword flickered with a light that was the color of madness, and terror filled the heart of anyone who rode against him.