Faran laughed shortly and without mirth and said that what he saw was no use to anybody; Hantil saw his own folk riding grimly toward the City bearing a message he did not know. Hantil came from a village in the mountains that were the northern border of Damar. "I do not like it," said Hantil; "I have never seen my father look so stern."
Innath sighed over his Sight. "I see the Lake of Dreams," he said, "as if it is early spring, for the trees are in bud. The Riders ride along its edge, but our number is only fifteen."
Mathin tipped a swallow of the Water into his mouth, and stared into the distance; and it was as though he were turned to stone, a statue in the stone City; but his face broke into a sweat, and the drops rolled from his forehead. Then he moved, became human again, but the sweat still ran. His voice was rough when he spoke: "I am on fire. I know no more."
As soon as Harry's hands closed around the neck of the flask, a picture swam before her; in the brown leather of the bag, among the fine tooling, there was another image placed there by no leather worker. She saw Tsornin standing on the desert, and his rider carried a white flag, or a bit of white cloth tied to the end of a stick. "What do you see?" asked Corlath gently, and she told him. She could not see the rider's face, for there was a white cloth pulled over nose and chin; but she shivered at the thought of seeing her own face so eerily: and worse yet, what if it were not her face? Tsornin broke into a canter and then a gallop, and Harry saw what he approached: the eastern gate of the General Mundy. Then the picture faded, and she was looking at the curiously tooled leather of the Water bag again. She raised it to her lips.
Something like an explosion occurred in her head as she tasted the Water. She shuddered with the shock. Her right arm was numb to the shoulder, and it was her left hand's grasp on the neck of the bag that prevented her from dropping it. Then she felt another shock like the first, and realized that Tsornin was between her legs, and he screamed with rage and fear. The sky seemed to be black, and there were shouts and shrieks all around her, and they echoed as in a high-walled valley. One more of those shocks and she would be out of the saddle. She felt it poised to fall on her—and her vision cleared, and there was the table again. She looked at her right hand; it was still there. She looked up. "I don't—I don't know exactly what I saw. I think I was in a battle and—I seemed to be losing." She smiled weakly. Her right arm was still not working properly, and Corlath lifted the bag out of her left hand.
He took a sip in his turn; and Harry, watching, saw his eyes change color till they were as yellow as they had been the first time she had seen him in the Residency's courtyard. Then he closed them, and she saw the muscles in his face and neck and the backs of his hands tense till she thought they would burst through the skin; and then it was all over, and he opened his eyes, and they were brown. They moved to meet hers, and she thought she saw something of his vision still lingering there, and it was something like her own.
"I have seen our enemy's face," Corlath said calmly. "It is not pretty."
Then the man came to carry the Water away, and the wine was brought back, and the shadows were chased away for a little. The Riders began looking expectantly toward Corlath, but this was a happier expectancy than that which had predicted the Meeldtar, and Harry caught the eagerness herself, though she knew not what it was for, and looked around for clues.
They had eaten their meal alone in the vast hall, and their few voices ran up into the ceiling like live things with wills of their own. But after the Water bag had been taken away, people had begun to appear around the small dais where the king and his Riders sat; they entered from all directions and settled on cushions or chairs. Some of them mounted the lower dais and sat around the great table that surrounded the Riders. More of the folk of the household appeared, some bearing trays and some low tables, and set out more food, or passed it among the increasing audience. There was a murmur of talk, low but excited. Harry rubbed her fingers up and down the length of the gold pin in her sash till it was no longer cold.
One of the men brought Corlath his sword, and he stood up and slung the belt of it around him. Harry wondered sourly how many years it took to learn to sling oneself into a sword as easily as yawn; and then wondered if she wanted to spend so many years that way. Or if she would have the choice. She had not liked waking up to find herself clutching her sword hilt as a child might clutch a favorite toy. Perhaps it was as well to have to think of shoulder and waist, belt and buckle. Another man came in, carrying another sword. Corlath took this one too, and held the scabbard in his left hand, letting the belt dangle; and he pulled it free and waved it, gleaming, under the light of the candles in the great chandelier. There was a blue stone set in its hilt, and it glared defiantly in the light. This was a shorter lighter sword than Corlath's, but the suppleness of it, and the way it hung, waiting, in the air, gave it a look of infinite age, and sentience, as if it looked out at those who looked at it. "This is Gonturan," said Corlath, and a murmur of assent and of recognition went around the hall; the Riders were silent. "She is the greatest treasure of my family. For a few years in his youth each son has carried her; but she was not meant for a man's hands, and legend has it that she will betray the man who dares bear her after his twentieth year. This is the Lady Aerin's sword; and it has been many a long year since there has been a woman to carry it."
Harry was staring at the blade, and barely heard Corlath's words; she was watching a flame-haired woman riding in a forest that seemed to grow against the flat of the shining sword; in her hand was another sword, and the hilt sparkled blue.
All the other Riders were standing up, and Corlath reached down and seized her wrist. "Stand up, disi," he said. "I'm about to make you a Rider." She stood, dazed. A disi was a silly child. There was another who rode with the woman who carried the Blue Sword; he rode a few paces behind her.
"A Rider?" Harry said.
"A Rider," Corlath replied firmly.
She dragged her eyes away from the winking sword edge and looked at him. Another man of the household set a small flat pot of yellow salve at Corlath's right hand. The king dipped the fingers of that hand in it, then drew them to smear the ointment across his palm. He had shifted Gonturan to his left hand; now he seized the blade near the tip with his right, and gave it a quick twist. "Damn," he said, as the blood welled between his fingers and dripped to the floor. He picked up a napkin and squeezed it. "Take my sword, Harimad-sol," he said, "and do the same—but not so enthusiastically. I think, though, that Katuchim has not the sense of humor that Gonturan does, so do not fear him."
She dipped her fingers in the salve, and touched them gently to her palm; reached out and, as awkwardly as if she had never learned one lesson from Mathin, dragged Corlath's sword from its scabbard. It was so long she had to brace the hilt against the table to get a reasonable angle on the edge. She closed her fingers around it, thought about something else, and felt the skin of her palm just part. She opened her hand, and three drops of blood only sprang from the thinnest of red lines across her skin. "Well done!" said Mathin over her shoulder, and the Riders cheered; and the whole hall picked it up, shouting.
Corlath grinned down at her, and she could not help smiling back. "There have been more graceful kings and Riders since the world began, but we'll do," said Corlath to her, quietly, below the roar around them. "Take your sword, and mind you treat her well. You will have Aerin's shade to answer to, else."