Harry looked around. She saw doors so well hung on their hinges that they were opened and closed by a child's touch, yet made of stone slabs so heavy she wondered how they had been wrestled into their places to begin with. Free-standing walls, she saw, were often as wide as the reach of her two arms; yet often too the inner wall facing on a courtyard encircled by tall houses was so fine and delicate, cut into filigree work so complex, it looked as though it must tremble in the lightest breeze; as if one might roll it up like a bolt of silk and store it on a shelf.

"To be either a stonemason or a carpenter is to be respected," Mathin said. "The best of them are greatly honored."

"Hear the horse-breaker," said Innath.

Mathin smiled.

The children began calling: "The lapruni are here! And the Riders—and the laprun-minta!"

"Harimad-sol," Innath called to them, and Harry blushed.

"Harimad-sol," agreed the children; and people came out from the houses and down the narrower ways off the wide central way to look. Harry tried to look around her without catching anyone's eye, but many of the onlookers sought hers; and when one succeeded, he—or she—would touch right wrist to forehead and then hold the flat empty palm out toward her. "Harimad-sol," she heard, and eagerly they added, "Damalur-sol." The children danced in front of Tsornin's feet to make her look at them, and clapped their hands; and she smiled and waved shyly at them, and Tsornin was very careful with his hooves.

They rode on. At first the Hills rose up behind the low buildings, but as they went farther in, the buildings grew taller and taller and seemed part of the Hills themselves; and the trees that lined the way grew larger, till the shade of them could be felt as one passed beneath. Then another gate rose up before them, the wall around it running into the flanks of the mountains as if wall and gate had been formed with the mountains at the beginning of time. They went through this gate too, and entered a wide flat courtyard of polished stone. This stone was mirror-white, and it blazed up fiercely in the morning sunlight, and Harry felt as if she had emerged from underground. She blinked.

Before her stood Corlath's castle; no one had to explain to her what this huge stone edifice must be. She tipped her head back to see the sharp points of the turrets, brilliant as diamonds. It was itself a mountain, proudly peaked, seated among its brothers; its faces glittered dangerously. The shadows it threw were abrupt and absolute; one wall reflected white, another black. The central mass was taller than the Hill crests here; the road they had climbed had reached near the summit of the dark Hills, and like an island in the crater lake of an extinct volcano, the castle stood in its stone yard that shone as bright as water in the sun.

Harry sighed.

Men of the horse were approaching them in the swift but unhurried way she remembered from the days on the desert in the traveling camp; and she felt a sudden sharp stab of memory, as if that were a time many years past, and the present were sad and weary. She slipped down from Tsornin's back and he suffered himself to be led away when one of the brown men spoke to him gently by name and laid a hand in front of his withers. Narknon sat down neatly at Harry's feet; Harry could feel her tail twitching at her ankles.

Those who had ridden with her began now to go purposefully in their own individual directions. Mathin said to her, '"It is here I am to leave you. Perhaps it may be permitted that we ride against each other again and you may practice your skills upon me, Daughter of the Riders." He smiled. "We will meet again at the king's table, here in the City."

Harry looked up toward the castle when Mathin left her, feeling a little forlorn; and it was Corlath himself who walked to meet her. She swallowed rather hard, and blessed the sunburn that would prevent her fierce blush from showing as clearly as it would on an Outlander's pale skin.

"We meet again, Harimad-sol," Corlath said. There was a tiny scab at one corner of his mouth; he looked down at her with a cold dignity, she thought; he is the master of this place, and what am I? Even Daughter of the Riders could not comfort her as Corlath stood before her with his castle shining savagely behind him.

But then he spoiled the effect—or perhaps the effect was all in Harry's eyes to begin with—by saying, "So that's where the thrice-blasted cat disappeared to. I should have guessed it."

He did not look very majestic while glaring at a cat; so Harry said crossly, "I wish I knew what was going on."

Corlath looked at her thoughtfully, and Narknon, with customary feline charm, stood up and went to twine herself around Corlath's legs. Corlath's face softened and he rubbed her ears. Harry could hear her purr; she could almost feel it through the soles of her boots on the white stone. Narknon was a champion purrer. "And don't tell me that no one knows what is going on and that it is for the gods to decide, either."

Corlath's face wavered and then broke into a smile, although whether at Harry or the big cat, Harry didn't know. "Very well," he said. "I won't. I will tell you that you are the First of the laprun trials, laprun-minta, which you already know, and as such the most important of the lapruni, the untried." Corlath's hand lay motionless on Narknon's head. "The army marches, to do what it can, in less than a fortnight's time. You and the best of the lapruni will ride with us." Narknon bumped Corlath's hand violently and the fingers stirred and began scratching again.

In a lighter tone Corlath continued, "In other years that the laprun trials are held, there is a week's celebration at their end, and a great many songs are sung, and lies about one's own prowess told, and all the minta of past years claim that their year was the best, and much wine and beer is drunk, and it is all very cheerful. This year we have not the time, and many of those who would be part of it are far away, and those who are here are busy, and the work they do is melancholy." He paused as if hoping she would say something, or at least raise her eyes from Narknon's sleepy face and look at him; but when she did finally look up, he immediately squinted up at the sky. "But tonight there will be a feast in your honor. You are not the least of those who have been laprun Firsts. There are many who will come tonight merely to look at you."

Harry stopped smiling at the cat. "Oh," she said.

"Come. I will show you where you will stay till we leave the City."

She followed him across the smooth courtyard and around one wing of the castle; as they rounded the tip, set back from the edge and guarded by the castle's great bulk was a wall that at first seemed low; but it was fully ten feet high as they approached. It curved back on itself as if it protected something within that was very precious. In the wall was a door, the height of a tall man. Corlath opened it, and looked around for her. She stepped in first, Narknon crowding at her heels, with the odd feeling that he was watching her anxiously for her reaction.

It was very beautiful. Here the courtyard was not stone, but green grass, and a stream ran through it from one end to the other, with a fountain at the center, and a stone horse reared in the midst of the falling spray. On either side of the stream was a path of paving-stones, grey and blue, that went all the way around the fountain. There were curved stone seats on either side of the fountain, with the stream running between them. Beyond all this was what Harry thought of instantly as a palace, for all its diminutive size; it was no bigger than the gateman's cottage on her father's—now Richard's—estate, back Home. But this cottage had slender peaked towers at each of its five corners, and a cupola at the center of the slanting roof, with a delicate fence surrounding it. But for the cupola, it was only one story high, and the windows were tall and thin. The walls and roof were a mosaic of thousands of small flat blue stones, with colors from aquamarine to turquoise to sapphire, but Harry had no idea what these stones might be, for they were opaque, and yet they gleamed like mother of pearl. She sighed, and then to her horror she felt her eyes filling with tears; so she ran forward. It seemed as though even her leather riding-boots made no sound on the stone here, and she plunged her hands into the water of the fountain, and put her face under the spray. The coldness of it quieted her, and the drops danced around her. Narknon climbed up on one of the benches and lay down.