But most of all, she slept. Mathin had been right about the sorgunal. For several days she was content to sleep, and waken to do nothing in particular, and sleep again. Narknon enjoyed it as much as she did. "I'm sure Mathin did not put any of that stuff in the porridge," Harry said to the cat; "there's no excuse for you."

On the fourth morning Mathin came to her, and found her pacing from fountain to fountain and from wall to wall. "This is not a cage to enclose you, Hari," he said.

She turned, startled, for she had been deep in her thoughts and had not heard his approach. She smiled. "I have not felt caged. I have … slept a great deal, as you warned me. It is only today I have begun to … think again."

Mathin smiled in return. "Is it so ill, this thinking?"

"Why am I a Rider?" she replied. "There is no reason for Corlath to make an Outlander girl, even the laprun minta, a Rider. Riders are his best. Why?"

Mathin's smile twisted. "I told you, long ago—long ago, more than a week since. It is a good thing for us to have a damalur-sol. It is a good thing for us to have something to look to, for hope. Perhaps you do yourself too little honor."

Harry snorted. "Has a laprun ever been made a Rider before?"

Mathin took a long time to answer. "No. You are the first to bear that burden."

"And an Outlander at that."

"You Outlanders are human, for all of that—as the Northerners are not. It is not impossible that some Outlander might have … a Gift, kelar, like ours, as you do—for you do. There is something in you we recognize, and we know it is there, for Lady Aerin has chosen you herself. Corlath makes you a Rider to … to take advantage of whatever it is you carry in your Outlander blood that has made you Damarian, even against your will."

Harry slowly shook her head. "Not against my will. At least not any more. But I do not understand."

"No; nor do I. Nor even does Corlath. He—" Mathin stopped.

Harry looked sharply at him. "Corlath what?"

The faint smile drifted across Mathin's face again. "Corlath did not steal you of his own free will. His kelar demanded it."

Harry grinned. "Yes; I had guessed, and once he told me—something of the sort. I saw dismay on his face often enough, those early days."

Mathin's face was expressionless when she raised her eyes again to his. "You have not seen dismay there for a long day since."

"No," she agreed, and her eyes went involuntarily to the mosaic walls around her.

Mathin said, "You are a token, a charm, to us, Daughter of the Riders and Rider and Damalur-sol."

"A mascot, you mean," Harry said, but without bitterness; and still she looked at the mosaic walls. She asked timidly, not certain of her own motives, "Does Corlath have no family? I see here, in the castle, the people of the household, and the—us—Riders, but no one else. Is it only that they are cloistered—or that I am?"

Mathin shook his head. "You see all there is to see. In Aerin's day the king's family filled this place; some had to live in the City, or chose to, for privacy. But kings in the latter days … Corlath's father married late, and Corlath is his queen's only surviving child, for she was a frail lady. Corlath himself has not married." Mathin smiled bleakly. "Kings should marry young and get heirs early, that their people may have one thing less to worry about. There has been no one in generations whose kelar is as strong as Corlath's; it is why the scattered folk along our borders and in the secret hearts of our Hills, who have acknowledged no Damarian king for many years, rally now to Corlath. Even where he does not go himself his messengers are alight with it."

After Mathin left her, Harry thought of taking another nap, but decided against it. Instead she rode out on Sungold, Narknon deigning to accompany them. She found at the back of the stone castle and beyond the stone stables a practice ground, stepped into the sides of the Hill, for those wishing to practice horsemanship and war. It was deserted, as though the menace of the Northerners was too near to permit of practice. But she jogged slowly around the empty field, Sungold stepping up or down as they came to each edge, and decided to practice anyway: she who was laprun victor, who had never held a sword till a few weeks ago, who was suddenly a Rider: she felt, a little wildly, that she needed all the practice she could get.

She was wearing Gonturan, a little self-consciously, but she had felt somehow that it would be impolite to leave her behind. She unsheathed her and wondered if the ancient sword had ever been used to hack at straw figures and charge at dangling wooden tiles. She galloped Tsornin over poles laid on the ground, piles of stone and wooden logs, and up and down turfed banks, and over ditches. She felt a little silly; but Tsornin made it plain that he enjoyed it all, whatever it was and however humble, and Gonturan always struck true.

Harry took Tsornin back to his stable and put him away with her own hands, studiously ignoring the brown-clad groom who hovered near her. Hers was the first human face she had seen since she rode out. The stables were on the same scale as the castle: large and grand, the loose-boxes the size of small fields. There were over a hundred stalls—Harry lost count when she tried to multiply them out in her head—in the barn Sungold was quartered in, and two other barns as big stood on either side of it. Sungold's stable was nearly full; sleek curious noses were thrust out at them as they left and returned. Harry saw no other men or women of the horse; they must reappear at some point, she thought, to tend the horses. Unless Hill horses can be trained to take care of themselves—it wouldn't surprise me. The silence was uncanny. Tsornin's hoofs had echoed around the practice field; and when she thanked the brown woman and said no, she needed nothing, her voice sounded strange in her ears.

Over the next few days she rode out again and again, and spent some hours slaying straw men with the Dragon-Killer's sword, and then some hours riding out from the stone ring of the castle, and into the stone City, down the smooth roads. She saw mostly women and young children, but even of them there were rarely more than a few. The women watched her timidly, and smiled eagerly if she smiled at them first; and the children wanted to pet Sungold, which he was good enough to permit, and Narknon, who usually eluded them; and sometimes they brought her flowers. But the City was as empty as the castle was; there were people, but far fewer than its walls might hold. Some of this, she knew, was because the army was massing elsewhere—on the laprun fields, before the City; messengers came and went swiftly, and the gathering of forces hung heavily in the air. But most of it was because, as the king's family had dwindled, so had the king's people; there were few Damarians left.

She thought again of the mounting strangenesses of her recent life; and she wished, if she was to be given to Damar, as apparently she was, that she would be given no more long pauses of inaction in which to brood about it all.

One of the young women who had assisted her at her bath brought her food, in the blue front room with the fountain, or outside in the sunshine where the other fountain played; and she managed to convince her and the other women sent to wait upon her that, at least as long as there were no more banquets requiring special preparations, she might bathe herself. For three more days she slept and watched the shimmering of the air and rode Tsornin and played with Narknon. There was a friendship between the horse and the hunting-cat now, and they would chase one another around the obstacles of the practice field, Narknon's tail lashing and Sungold with his ears back in mock fury. Once the big cat had hidden behind one of the grassy banks, where Harry and Sungold could not see her; and as they rode by she leaped out at them, sailing clean over Sungold and Harry on his back. Harry ducked and Sungold swerved; and Narknon circled and came back to them with her ears back and her whiskers trembling in what was obviously a cat laugh.